Vietnam on TV. . .
Many of you are probably watching the PBS documentary on the Vietnam War, which is showing this week. Not surprisingly for a mainstream production, the series begins and continues to propagate the idea that the war – which killed 58,000 Americans and probably more than 2 million Vietnamese – was a “well-meaning mistake.” There is some useful commentary here: America's Amnesia and here: Ideology as History: a Critical Commentary on Burns and Novick’s “The Vietnam War” In our own neighborhood, the war lives on among Dorchester’s large Vietnamese community, including many former officers and government officials from South Vietnam; storefronts not infrequently display the flag – yellow with three red stripes – of the defunct US-supported Republic of Vietnam (the actual official Vietnamese flag is a yellow star on a red background).
In case you missed it in The Globe. . .
TRUMP PUSHES US CLOSER TO WAR
Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday moved the world closer to war. The speech was Hitlerian in tone and content, filled with vitriol and grievance. Germany, said Hitler, was stabbed in the back by its own leaders after World War I. The Obama administration, declared Trump, signed an agreement with Iran that was “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” Trump threatened, from the very podium of the UN General Assembly, to “totally destroy” North Korea, a country of 25 million people… In the case of Iran, Trump’s overheated rhetoric is even more bizarre. A nuclear agreement has already been reached and is being fulfilled. Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rohani has won re-election against hardliners. The country is fighting ISIS effectively. The real explanation in the case of Iran lies with the US administration acceding to the reckless lobbying by both Israel and Saudi Arabia to lure us into a war with Iran for the narrow interests of those two countries (at least “interests” as warmongers in the two countries perceive them). Have no complacency. Speak out against war. Demand democratic constraint over the US military and oversight by our hapless, so-far useless Congress. War typically seems impossible until it is too late. Then it is utterly disastrous and ruinous for all. More
"Totally destroy" North Korea? Attack Iran?
IT'S TIME TO STOP THE NEXT WAR!
The build up to a war is happening right now before our eyes. It’s more imperative than ever for those of us who oppose such rampant destruction to build our power to oppose war. The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw from the nuclear agreement are dangerous for the U.S. and the entire world. As a large group of retired Generals and Admirals wrote in a letter to Trump in July, the administration must “recognize the national security benefits of the nuclear agreement and appropriately weigh the risks to our troops of escalating tensions with Iran.”
Trump’s War on the North Korean People
Amid renewed talk by the Trump administration of a military option against North Korea, one salient fact goes unnoticed. The United States is already at war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the formal name for North Korea). It is doing so through non-military means, with the aim of inducing economic collapse… We are told that UN Security Council resolution 2375, passed on September 11, was “watered down” so as to obtain Chinese and Russian agreement. In relative terms, this is true, in that the original draft as submitted by the United States called for extreme measures such as a total oil embargo. However, Western media give the impression that the resolution as passed is mild or mainly symbolic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The resolution, in tandem with previous sanction votes and in particular resolution 2371 from August 5, is aimed squarely at inflicting economic misery. More
North Korea-The Deeper Issues
High level fulminations and fiery rhetoric notwithstanding, if a political solution can be achieved, Washington almost certainly will find it more distasteful than will any other country in the world. A political solution will inevitably end up “permitting” North Korea to maintain an element of nuclear weapons. It will almost surely require an end to US military exercises and presence in South Korea. Yet South Korea itself will almost certainly accede to any genuinely peaceful solution… . That is a net strategic loss to Washington—as long as the US remains determined to maintain a dominant military presence in East Asia. North Korean nationalism runs high— as does their domestic propaganda. Unlike Americans, North Koreans have not forgotten the sweeping devastation inflicted by the US on the North in the Korean War (1950-53) in which more bombs and napalm were dropped on the North by the US than on all other Asian targets in the Pacific during World War II; virtually nothing was left standing and the country was reduced to famine. More
In addition to the annual $3.8 billion in Aid to Israel. . .
Congress’ Military Spending Bill Forks Over Unprecedented Sums to Israel and Ukraine
Buried deep in the text of the mammoth National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a gargantuan money dump into the Israeli defense industry, with $705 million specifically earmarked for “US-Israel missile defense cooperation.” The funding represents a full 1/100th of the whopping $700 billion military spending package, and a staggering $558 million increase from what President Donald Trump had originally requested. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main arm of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, reacted with elation at news of the funding, hailing it as a powerful shot in the arm for the Israeli arms industry… Alongside funding for Israel, the NDAA budgeted unprecedented funding for supposedly defensive weapons for the Ukrainian military, which has been locked in a destabilizing conflict with Russian-backed separatists since a U.S.-backed coup toppled its democratically elected government in 2014… Raytheon also stands to benefit handsomely from the funding earmarked in the bill for Israeli missile systems. It has partnered with the state-backed Israeli arms firm Rafael, to produce the Iron Dome System, which has been deployed primarily to deter homemade rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave… A week before the NDAA vote, AIPAC announced it had sent 50 members of Congress from both parties on an all-expenses-paid junket to Israel. These lawmakers will soon vote on the House version of the titanic military spending bill.
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, AGAIN!
The 1966 Academy Award-winning film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, parodies the Cold War paranoia then pervading the United States… Half a century later, Americans are again being warned daily of the Russian menace, with persistent accusations of Russian aggression, lies, violations of international law, and cyberattacks on U.S. elections, as reported in leading liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post… Russia, not surprisingly, has watched these policies with alarm, itself putting five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service in 2016, and backing the Assad government in the Syrian civil war. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry is among those who believe that the danger of nuclear catastrophe arising from the renewed arms race is “greater today than during the Cold War.” As in the original Cold War, U.S. arms manufacturers have fueled the escalation by lobbying Washington and NATO to maintain high levels of military spending, aided by hired-gun think tanks and professional “experts.” More
The American Military’s Repetition-Compulsion Complex in Afghanistan
…the Taliban are not some invading army. (That would be us.) They are Afghan citizens, distinguished from their countrymen chiefly by their extreme religious conservatism, misogyny, and punitive approach to governance. Think of them as the Afghan equivalent of our own evangelical right-wing Republicans. You find some in almost every town. And the more you rile them up, the meaner they get and the more followers they gain. But in times of peace -- which Afghanistan has not known for 40 years -- many Taliban most likely would return to being farmers, shopkeepers, villagers, like their fathers before them, perhaps imposing local law and order but unlikely to seek control of Kabul and risk bringing the Americans down on them again. Few Afghans were Taliban sympathizers when the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001. Now there are a great many more and they control significant parts of the country, threatening various provincial capitals. They claim to be willing to negotiate with the Afghan government -- but only after all American forces have left the country. For the Trump administration, that’s not an option. More
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