Militarism (MIMAC)

Some may remember way back when US President Obama said that the US had now isolated Iran. The only problem was that on the very same day, some 130 leaders from the Non-Aligned Movement, NAM, were meeting in Tehran. The more the US withdraws from international treaties, imposes sanctions, threatens wars and otherwise antagonizes the rest of the world, the more that rest will search – and find – new partners and create a future world order that is not Western- or US-dominated. That’s what Iran is now doing. After sanctions since 1979, verbal harassment, a broken JCPOA (nuclear deal), accusations of being the world’s leading supporter of terrorism, maximal pressure policies, threat of massive war, bombings, liquidation of a top government representative, infiltrations and much else – why on earth should the leaders in Tehran (no matter what you may think about them and their policies) continue to seek...

This post is a slightly modified version of an editorial contribution to TMS – Transcend Media Service – June 22-28, 2020 Sanctioning the International Criminal Court, ICC Even Orwell would be at a loss to make sense of some of the recent antics of leading governments. We would expect Orwell to be out-satirized by the American actions to impose penalties and sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court, not because they are accused of acting improperly or seem guilty of some kind of corruption or malfeasance, but because they were doing their appointed jobs carefully, yet fearlessly. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s personal blog on June 26, 2020 here Their supposed wrongdoing was to accept the request for an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by military personnel and intelligence experts of the U.S. armed forces, the Taliban, and the Afghan military. It seemed beyond reasonable...

June 16, 2020 The war in Syria, now in its sixth year, has been ferocious and deadly. In 2016, the death toll was estimated at 400,000. In Iraq, the fight against the Islamic State (IS) has destroyed cities and displaced around 3.3 million people. Yet beyond the immediate consequences of these conflicts, the environmental degradation in both countries could have a far-reaching impact. Originally posted on Fanack.com on December 16, 2017 In a country at war, preserving the environment is not usually a high priority. However, it is a key issue that must be addressed before rebuilding begins. According to Living under a black sky, a report published by the Dutch peace organization PAX in November 2017, Iraq was severely affected even before the [IS] attacks in 2014 by the legacy of three wars and climate change, resulting in weak environmental governance and more frequent droughts. ‘Since then, you can also add illegal oil refineries, spills and fires, as well as...

June 15, 2020 Nick Turse 27 Feb 2020 –Last month, about a dozen al-Shabab fighters infiltrated the perimeter of a military base in Manda Bay, Kenya. One of them took aim with a rocket-propelled grenade, firing at a U.S. surveillance plane and touching off an hourslong firefight. When it was all over, the two American pilots of that plane and a U.S. soldier were dead, two other U.S. military personnel were wounded, six surveillance aircraft and helicopters were destroyed, and parts of the airfield were in flames. Originally posted on Transcend Media Service on March 2, 2020 Where there are U.S. bases, there is the potential for such attacks, because bases are not just launching pads for offensive military operations, but targets for them too. Since 9/11, the U.S. military has built a sprawling network of outposts in more than a dozen African countries. The Intercept has obtained U.S. military documents...

June 10, 2020 Jan Oberg The horrific police murder of the black American George Floyd is, of course, not the first, neither will it be the last. Fortunately, it has set in motion significant protests not only in the United States but around the world – on top of the Corona Crisis. And it has created an opportunity for people to do symbolic acts such as taking a knee, criticising President Trump’s Bible Show after he had – classical dictatorship-style – used violence on peaceful demonstrators, etc. And people posted black images on Instagram. These are individual protests in response to an individual being killed in a single event. They are very human, noble and understandable, indeed, necessary – as markers that enough is enough. But where will it go from that first reaction? The comprehensive perspective To approach and answer, read carefully this statement by Martin Luther King, Jr.:...

“A shift must occur away from the focus on individual justice for Floyd back to a critique and opposition to the ongoing structural violence of the system.” June 8, 2020 Ajamu Baraka The justice for George Floyd mobilizations today reflected the state’s worst nightmare – a multi-national and multi-racial action initiated by Black people with Black leadership. “A shift must occur away from the focus on individual justice for Floyd back to a critique and opposition to the ongoing structural violence of the system.” So, we say: Justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland; for our political prisoners; for the super-exploited Black and Brown working class; for oppressed Indigenous nations; and for the millions subjected to U.S. warmongering, sanctions and criminality. We say this to shift the focus from the individualization of this week’s rebellion back to the objective structures of white supremacist, global colonial/capitalist...

May 25, 2020 Dr. Lawrence Wittner Decades ago, when I began teaching international history, I used to ask students if they thought it was possible for nations to end their fighting of wars against one another. Their responses varied. But the more pessimistic conclusions were sometimes tempered by the contention that, if the world’s nations faced a common foe, such as an invasion from another planet, this would finally pull them together. Originally published on Counterpunch on April 14, 2020 here I was reminded of this on March 23, when the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, called for “an immediate global ceasefire.” The time had come, he said, to “end the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world.” A UN summary noted that the Secretary-General had “urged warring parties across the world to lay down their weapons in support of the bigger battle against COVID-19: the...

May 19, 2020 Lawrence Wilkerson, US Army Colonel This is a stunning piece of documentary and a clear and sharp analysis of the moral and intellectual decay of the foreign interventionist policy of the United States. By a man who obviously knows. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, says the escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran today is a continuation of two decades of U.S. policy disasters in the Middle East, starting with the 2003 run-up to war with Iraq under the Bush administration. “America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It’s part of who we are. It’s part of what the American Empire is,” says Wilkerson. “We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is...

It might seem that the world is going to pot in a hand-basket. Not quite true. There are ways out. Asia has shown how to deal with the Coronavirus and how to stay politically stable. Europe, with the exception of wise Sweden, has muddled along, following belatedly the conventional wisdom of its scientific community. As for the United States, President Donald Trump has made a fool of himself and his country, ending up with the highest death rate in the world. No longer can the West rely on the US to be its leader. Even if Trump is deposed in the November election, the Europeans, the Canadians and Japanese should not let it return to being treated as the number one. It is too beholden to the military/legislative/industrial/academic complex. The consensus appears to be that confronting China and Russia is the right thing to do. The Coronavirus has shown up...

Joe Lauria April 15, 2020 In Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ science fiction fantasy, War of the Worlds, all the military spending and preparedness by the United States could not defend the American people from the invaders from Mars. In the end what killed the superior intruders was not arms, but a microscopic organism against which the Martians’ immune system had no defense. Originally posted on Consortium News website on March 23, 2020 “Suddenly, my eyes were attracted to the immense flock of black birds that hovered directly below me. They circled to the ground, and there before my eyes, stark and silent, lay the Martians, with the hungry birds pecking and tearing brown shreds of flesh from their dead bodies. Later when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were...

April 3, 2020 Robert Reuel Naiman Given the systematic distortion of the Syrian conflict that we have pointed out here on The Transnational many times before, we find it important to highlight the – always omitted – early role of the United States in fomenting what broke out in violence in early 2011. This is an essentially important documentation. In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing 251,287 classified State Department cables. Now, a new book collects in-depth analyses of what these cables tell us about the foreign policy of the United States, from authors including Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and our regular contributors Gareth Porter, Robert Naiman, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Zunes. “The essays that make up The WikiLeaks Files (2016) shed critical light on a once-secret history,” says Edward Snowden. The following is Chapter 10 of The WikiLeaks Files: On August 31, 2013, US president Barack...

Part 1 Governments have spent trillions on preparing for military threats created by their own policies. No one prioritised human and societal security. The unique over-reaction to COVID-19 should worry us much more than the virus itself. It can be seen as a panicky attempt to cover-up the failure of an outdated militarist security policy. #coronaissecuritypolitics Part 2 of this series • Part 3 • Part 4 Jan Oberg April 2, 2020 The Coronavirus is a comparatively small killer Over the last 3 months, about 40.000+ people have died worldwide because of (or with) the Coronavirus. No other phenomenon in contemporary history has caused so many drastic decisions in democratic and authoritarian governments alike as thi pandemic. Constitutions, a series of freedoms, including the freedom of movement, and much else have been suspended and new emergency laws passed fast enough to qualify for the Guinness World Records. Not to diminish...