A View From The Left-WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

Trump signs nearly $700B defense policy bill

President Trump signed a nearly $700 billion annual defense policy bill on Tuesday, touting it as a step toward delivering on his promise to build up the military.  “Today with the signing of this defense bill, we accelerate the process of fully restoring America’s military might,” Trump said at a signing ceremony in the White House's Roosevelt Room.  But though National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorizes the military to add troops, ships, planes and other equipment, Congress has yet to pass a spending bill to make the buildup a reality…  The bill authorizes $626.4 billion for the base defense budget and $65.7 billion for a war fund known as Overseas Contingency Operations.  The money would go toward adding 7,500 active-duty soldiers to the Army, 4,000 active-duty sailors to the Navy, 1,000 active-duty Marines and 4,100 active-duty airmen to the Air Force. The Army, Navy and Air Force would also see increases in the reserves and National Guard.    More

LAVISHING MONEY ON THE PENTAGON

Wise parents who celebrate Christmas advise theiryoung children not to make unreasonably grandiose requests of Santa. After all, he has to squeeze down a rather narrow chimney to deliver their presents.  But as Christmas approaches this year, leaders of Congress, the Pentagon, and the Trump White House seem to have forgotten that lesson. Their wish list for the U.S. military, if taken seriously, will bust the federal budget at the very time Republicans are ramming through tax legislation that will shrink Uncle Sam’s savings account by more than a trillion dollars over the next decade…  The bill also earmarks $350 million for military aid to Ukraine, including lethal weaponry — a highly provocative measure that Arizona Senator John McCain has long promoted. Independent analysts, including prominent conservative foreign policy experts, warn that such lethal aid would be destabilizing, provocative, and “extraordinarily foolish.”     More

The US Military Is the Biggest "Big Government" Entitlement Program on the Planet

The US economy is caught in a trap. That trap is the Department of Defense: an increasingly sticky wicket that relies on an annual, trillion-dollar redistribution of government-collected wealth. In fact, it's the biggest "big government" program on the planet, easily beating out China's People's Liberation Army in both size and cost. It is not only the "nation's largest employer," with 2.867 million people currently on the payroll, but it also provides government benefits to 2 million retirees and their family members. And it actively picks private sector winners by targeting billions of dollars to an elite group of profit-seeking contractors…  But this belligerent cash machine doesn't just produce haphazard interventions and shady partnerships with a motley assortment of strongmen, proxies and frenemies. It also has Uncle Sam caught in a strange cycle of taxpayer-funded dependence that may ultimately be the most expensive -- and least productive -- jobs program in human history.     More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

WHY IS AMERICA ADDICTED TO FOREIGN INTERVENTIONS?

If we look at the distribution of the 392 U.S. military interventions since 1800 reported by the Congressional Research Service in October 2017 by fifty-year increments, the data show a dramatic increase: from 1800–1849 there were thirty-nine interventions; forty-seven from 1850–1899; sixty-nine from 1900–1949; 111 from 1950–1999; and 126 from 2000–2017—a period of only seventeen years as compared to fifty years in the other periods.  As these data reveal, the rate of intervention across time is not monotonic, but jumps during the two world war periods (1917–18), as well as the Cold War (1948–91)…   If we further refine the data to compare Cold War and post–Cold War intervention rates, something truly striking emerges: while the United States engaged in forty-six military interventions from 1948–1991, from 1992–2017 that number increased fourfold to 188…   The U.S. military currently counts over 1.3 million personnel on active duty, with over 450,000 of these currently stationed overseas.   More

Critics Say Nikki Haley 'Laying Groundwork' for War With Iran

In a presentation critics characterized as remarkably similar to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's case for the Iraq War, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stood before a missile fragment that she claimed bears Iran's "fingerprints" and asserted that the Iranian regime poses "a threat to the peace and security of the entire world."  …Experts and some members of the international community also expressed doubts that Haley's "evidence" for Iran's connection to Houthi rebels in Yemen was as strong as she claimed. "Info I have is less clear," Olof Skoog, Sweden's ambassador to the U.N., saidwhen asked about Haley's assertions…  "Make no mistake: What Nikki Haley is doing right now is laying the groundwork for a U.S.-Iran war on behalf of Saudi Arabia," concluded Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.    More

TRUMP WILLING TO STRIKE FIRST AGAINST N. KOREA

Senator Lindsey Graham said on Thursday that President Trump isn’t just lobbing empty threats against North Korea. The South Carolina hawk said that he had spoken with Trump about the possibility of a preemptive strike against the country, and described the president as “deadly serious. Very curious.”   “I think he’s made a decision long ago, quite frankly, to try to negotiate the threat with North Korea … But if negotiations fail, he is willing to abandon strategic patience and use preemption,” Graham said. “I think he’s there mentally. He has told me this.”  Graham also said that such a strike would not require congressional approval.    More

NORTH KOREA: THE COSTS OF WAR, CALCULATED

Even a limited war with North Korea would kill millions, devastate the environment, and bankrupt the U.S. Preventing it should be the peace movement's highest priority…  A warning about the costs of war may not convince people who want Kim Jong Un and his regime out regardless of consequences (and nearly half of Republicans already support a preemptive strike). But a preliminary estimate of the human, economic, and environmental costs of a war should make enough people think twice, lobby hard against military actions by all sides, and support legislative efforts to prevent Trump from launching a preemptive strike without congressional approval.  Such an estimate of the various impacts can also serve as a basis for three movements — anti-war, economic justice, and environmental — to come together in opposition to what would set back our causes, and the world at large, for generations to come.    More

Pundits were wrong about Assad and the Islamic State and they're not willing to admit it

Prominent Syria analysts also claimed that Assad supported, even sponsored Islamic State. CNN’s Michael Weiss pushed the line that Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin would not fight Islamic State and that Syria and Russia were the group’s“unacknowledged air force.” His co-author, Hassan Hassan, contended that the Syrian regime must go because “Assad has never fought [Islamic State] before.”  … But these popular arguments were, to put it mildly, empirically challenged…  The notion that Assad “won’t fight” Islamic State was always wrong. The notion that “defeating Islamic State also requires defeating Bashar Assad” was, likewise, always wrong. By now it should be obvious that the Syrian Arab Army has played a role in degrading Islamic State in Syria — not alone, of course, but with Russian and Iranian partners, not to mention the impressive U.S.-led coalition. In marked contrast to pundit expectations, the group’s demise was inversely related to Assad’s power. Islamic State’s fortunes decreased as his influence in the country increased.    More

WHEN WASHINGTON CHEERED THE JIHADISTS

When a Department of Defense intelligence report about the Syrian rebel movement became public in May 2015, lots of people didn’t know what to make of it. After all, what the report said was unthinkable – not only that Al Qaeda had dominated the so-called democratic revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for years, but that the West continued to support the jihadis regardless, even to the point of backing their goal of creating a Sunni Salafist principality in the eastern deserts.  The United States lining up behind Sunni terrorism – how could this be? How could a nice liberal like Barack Obama team up with the same people who had brought down the World Trade Center?  It was impossible, which perhaps explains why the report remained a non-story long after it was released courtesy of a Judicial Watch freedom-of-information lawsuit.    More

Tracing ISIS’ Weapons Supply Chain—Back to the US

In October 2014, Romania sold 9,252 rocket-propelled grenades, known as PG-9s, with lot number 12-14-451 to the US military. When it purchased the weapons, the US signed an end-use certificate, a document stating that the munitions would be used by US forces and not sold to anyone else. The Romanian government confirmed this sale by providing CAR with the end-user certificate and delivery verification document…  So how exactly did American weapons end up with ISIS? Spleeters can’t yet say for sure. According to a July 19, 2017, report in The Washington Post, the US government secretly trained and armed Syrian rebels from 2013 until mid-2017, at which point the Trump administration discontinued the program—in part over fears that US weapons were ending up in the wrong hands. The US government did not reply to multiple requests for comment on how these weapons wound up in the hands of Syrian rebels or in an ISIS munitions factory. The government also declined to comment on whether the US violated the terms of its end-user certificate and, by extension, failed to comply with the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, of which it is one of 130 signatories.    More

ISIS Got A Powerful Missile The CIA Secretly Bought In Bulgaria

A guided anti-tank missile ended up in the hands of ISIS terrorists less than two months after the US government purchased it in late 2015 — highlighting weaknesses in the oversight and regulation of America’s covert arms programs, according to information published Thursday by an arms monitoring group called Conflict Armament Research (CAR)…  The missile is one piece of a critical puzzle that is being solved only now, with ISIS on the run: How did the vast terror group arm its war machine? CAR spent three years tracking ISIS weapons as they were recovered by Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish forces — and found that what happened to the missile was no aberration. Indeed, the terror group managed to divert “substantial quantities of anti-armour ammunition” from weapons provided to Syrian opposition forces by the US or Saudi Arabia…  The report lists 12 cases where Eastern European weapons originally sent to the US military or US contractors appear to have been diverted, somehow, to ISIS.    More

Donald Trump's First Year Sets Record for U.S. Special Ops

In 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, deployed to 149 countries around the world, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command.  That’s about 75% of the nations on the planet and represents a jump from the 138 countries that saw such deployments in 2016 under the Obama administration.  It’s also a jump of nearly 150% from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House.  This record-setting number of deployments comes as American commandos are battling a plethora of terror groups in quasi-wars that stretch from Africa and the Middle East to Asia.  “Most Americans would be amazed to learn that U.S. Special Operations Forces have been deployed to three quarters of the nations on the planet,” observes William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.  “There is little or no transparency as to what they are doing in these countries and whether their efforts are promoting security or provoking further tension and conflict.”     More