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By Richard Falk

Part One: Reacting to Crime by Waging War(s)

20 Sep 2021 –  This is a somewhat edited post-publication version of Part One of my responses to questions posed by Daniel Falcone, published in CounterPunch, September 12, 2021, with the title of “9/11: Doctrines of Bush, Obama, Trump & Biden.” Although online the interview was schedule in response to the national attention understandably given to the 20^th annual observance of the 9/11 attacks. The focus of my response follows a different line of reasoning. In this sense, my response, as suggested by the title give to Part One, can be read as suggesting that greater transformative effects resulted from 9/12 than the tragic events of 9/11 due to the vengeful recklessness of the U.S. response, partly pushed to excess by a belligerent neoconservative pre-9/11 agenda, which became politically viable only after the provocation of the attacks. It is a reflection of the deficiencies of political pedagogy and journalistic priorities in the United States that despite all that has happened at home and abroad in the course of the last twenty years, virtually no distinct attention is given to 9/12.

9/12: Reacting to Crime by War(s)

Daniel Falcone: Can you comment on September 11, 2001 as a historical event and provide how this day continues to shape the way the United States sees itself in the world?

Richard Falk:The attack itself on 9/11 was a most momentous event from the perspective of international relations, with the salient initial effect of further undermining the dominating historic role of hard power under the control of national governments in explaining historical agency. That role was already eroded as a result of high-profile anti-colonial wars being won by the weaker side militarily, principally as a result of the mobilizing effect of the soft power stimulus of nationalist fervor and perseverance in achieving political self-determination by resisting foreign intervention and domination.

Dramatically, 9/11 revealed the vulnerability of the most powerful country, as measured by military capabilities and global security hegemony, in all of world history, to the violent tactics of non-state combatants with comparatively weak military capabilities in coercive interactions labeled by war planners as ‘asymmetric warfare.’

On the basis of minimal expenditures of lives and resources, al-Qaeda produced a traumatizing and disorienting shock on the United States and the American body politic from which it has yet to recover, generating responses in ways that are fundamentally dysfunctional with respect to achieving tolerable levels of global stability in a historical period when security threats were moving away from traditional geopolitical rivalries so as to respond to climate change, pandemics, and a series of systemic secondary effect. While not fulfilling its goals, the launching of a ‘war on terror’ produced great devastation and human suffering spread far and wide, distant from the American homeland, especially in the Middle East and Asia.

Such an efficient use of terrorist tactics by al-Qaeda, not only as an instrument of destruction, but as a mighty symbolic blow directed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, embodiments of American economic ascendancy and military hegemony. These material effects were further magnified by the spectacular nature of visual moment unforgettably inscribed on the political consciousness of worldwide TV audiences, above all conveying the universal vulnerability of the strong to the imaginative rage and dedicated sacrifice of the avenging weak who were induced to give the lives to make a point and serve a fanatical cause.

Of course, the ‘success’ of this attack was short-lived, producing an initial wave of global empathy for the innocent victims of such mayhem, heralding widespread support and sympathy to the United States, exhibiting an outburst of internationalist solidarity, including widespread support from governments around the world and at the UN for greatly augmented efforts at criminal enforcement of anti-terrorist policies and norms. Yet this early international reaction sympathetic to the U.S. has been erased in the American memory and international perceptions, as well as long overshadowed internationally by dual damaging effects of the American over-reaction that claimed during the next twenty years many times the number of innocent victims than were lost on 9/11, but also was on the losing end of prolonged, costly interventions and state-building undertakings that went along to show that the American imperial prowess was indeed a paper tiger. This over-reaction has also contributed to counterrevolutionary impacts worldwide that are still reverberating.

The seemingly highly impulsive and reactive responses to 9/11 by the American leadership was to herald the immediate launching of ‘the war on terror,’ which should be understood as a generalized forever war against a generic type of political behavior rather than declaring was on an adversary state. Before 9/11 terrorist tactics even if prolonged and threatening to the stability of the state, were regarded as a severe type of crime or anti-state criminal enterprise, with serious policing and paramilitary implications but not a matter of military engagement on conventional battlefields. Of course, on many prior historic occasions a political movement engaged in terrorist activity as a prelude to a sustained insurrectionary challenge to the prevailing government. This U.S. response by way of war, directed not only at the al-Qaeda perpetrators mainly situated in the mountains of Afghanistan, but potentially against all forms of non-state and foreign political extremism directed at the interests of Western states, made the historical effects of 9/12 far greater internally for America and externally for the world than the grim event of the prior day when the planes flew into the World Trade Center towers, killing 2,997. The ‘forever wars,’by comparison killed as estimated 900,000 (at a cost of $8 trillion) [conservative estimates of ‘The Costs of War Project’ at Brown University].

It is crucial to remember that 9/11 from the moment of the first explosion was politically much more than a mega-terrorist attack, however spectacular. It quickly provided a pretext for projecting American military power and political influence that the dominant wing of the political class then in control of the White House was awaiting with growing signs of impatience. It was no secret that the chief foreign policy advisors of George W. Bush wanted and needed a political mandate that would allow the U.S. to carry out a preexisting neoconservative agenda of U.S. intervention and aggression, focused on the Middle East that prior to 9/11 lacked sufficient political backing among the citizenry to become operative foreign policy. This earlier neocon foreign policy agenda was set forth in the reports of the Project for a New American Century (1997-2006), prepared and endorsed by leading foreign policy hawks with global hegemony, Israel, and oil uppermost in their thoughts. For those seeking even earlier antecedents “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Security of the Realm,” an Israeli policy report of 1996  prepared by influential American neocon foreign policy experts at the behest of Netanyahu is worthy of notice. The haunting reality that the 9/11 attack was masterminded and orchestrated from remote sites in Afghanistan reinforced the globalist ambitions of militarists to the effect that U.S. was significantly threatened by non-state enemies situated in geographically remote places on the planet, that deterrence and retaliation were irrelevant against such foes, and that preemptive styles of warfare were now necessary and fully justified against government that willingly gave safe havens to such violently disposed political extremism. New tactics seem needed and justified if the security of a country, however militarily capable, was in the future to be upheld against remotely situated non-state enemies. This post-9/11 strategic discourse produced a sequence of forever wars, most tellingly in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Syria and Libya, which were quite unrelated to al-Qaeda rationale for expanding prior notion of the right of self-defense, whether understood with reference to international law or geopolitics.

Another legacy of 9/11, although also evident in the outcome of the Vietnam War, is that the side that has the military superiority no longer has reason to believe that it will attain a political victory at an acceptable cost. “You have the watches, we have the time” vividly imparts the largely unreported news that perseverance, commitment, and patience, more than military hardware however sophisticated, shape political outcomes in characteristic conflicts for the control of sovereign political space in the 21st Century. Whether this trend will continue is, of course, uncertain as war planners in governments of geopolitical actors are devoting resources and energies to devising tactics and weapons that will restore hard power potency.

The message of a changed balance of power at least temporarily, despite the startling consistency of the evidence, is one that the political class in the West, especially in the U.S. refuses to heed. The militarization of the foreign policy establishment of Western states over the course of the Cold War, is also reflective of the ‘political realist’ ideological consensus led to a costly and futile process in which security challenges were predominantly seen through a reductionist lens that impoverished the political imagination by ignoring the shifting power balances that have favored the politics of post-colonial nationalism. The previously hidden weaknesses of external intervenors were exposed. These weaknesses included the onset of geopolitical fatigue in these combat zones distant from the homeland coupled with a lack of political success at all commensurate with the effort. The military prowess of the foreign intervenors being more than offset over time by nationalist perseverance, although at great costs for the resisters. The intervenors strain to justify these foreign missions to a domestic public that gradually comes to understand that the security claims used to ‘sell’ the war were all along a phony façade partly erected to hide the benefits to special interests within and outside the governmental bureaucracy, including the defense industry and private contracting firms that complemented the explicit military presence, and were economic winners even if the government was a political loser. Although brainwashed over the years, with the help of a corporatized media, there remained a remnant of accountability to the citizenry if American lives were sacrificed in a lost war that also revealed itself to be quite irrelevant from a security perspective. The victory of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam or of the Taliban this year is not likely to alter the regional status quo to any great extent further demonstrating that the war strategy was not only a failure but superfluous from a traditional security perspective, although consequential geopolitically.

It remains to be seen whether the withdrawal from ongoing forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere leads to a belated recognition of what I have in the past called ‘the unlearned lesson of the Vietnam War.’ So far, this is far from clear as the inflated level of the U.S. military budget, with its huge negative domestic opportunity costs, continues to enjoy overwhelming bipartisan support. Also telling is the tendency to meet the rise of China by bellicose posturing that may have already generated a second cold war that neither the country nor the world can afford or risk turning hot. Perhaps, the American political class has temporarily learned the lesson that state-building interventions do not work under current world conditions, but still harbor reckless beliefs that geopolitical ‘wars’ remain viable options, thereby providing continued validation of inflated military spending and consequent policy orientations toward conflict and rivalry rather than conciliation and compromise. China, admittedly bears some responsibility for escalating tensions due to its provocative militarist moves in the South China Seas and economistic provocations. The Biden foreign policy has clearly designated China as a credible geopolitical rival that threatens U.S. geopolitical primacy, and hence must be confronted as well as contained, even resisted by force of arms if necessary.

We should not overlook the lingering skepticism surrounding the official version of the 9/11 events. The official inquiry resulting in the report of the 9/11 Commission convinced few of the serious doubters as it put to convincing rest none of the reasons for doubt. As long as this, doubt remains embedded in a portion of the citizenry, no matter how castigated they may be as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and routinely maligned by mainstream media, a shadow of illegitimacy will be cast over the U.S. body politic. A truly independent second 9/11 investigation backed by the government is long overdue, but seems highly unlikely to happen. If given unrestricted access to FBI and CIA records and subpoena powers such an authentic processs could clear the air, and a crucial regenerative future for American democracy that might finally overcome the legacies of both 9/11 and 9/12.

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Part Two: 9/11 + 9/12: Compounding Tragedy

22 Sep 2021 – This is the second part of my interview with Daniel Falcone that was published by CounterPunch on September 12, 2021. It explores further the effects of the attacks and ongoing sequences of reactions, which were appropriately attributable to the events of 9/11 and those internal moves of surveillance and detention that were independently favored by the U.S. governmental leadership, but were too controversial to take until they were able to make to claim the cover of the War on Terror. A similar, even more pronounced dualism, is helpful in distinguishing the 9/12 developments that were plausible responses to the mega-terrorist transnational attacks and those escalated responses that reflected a preexisting disposition of the neoconservative foreign policy advisory circle around President George W. Bush to use American military capabilities against governments that were geopolitical outliers with respect to the neoliberal consensus on globalization or were hostile to American alignments in the Middle East and elsewhere.

International and Internal Impacts of 9/11, 9/12

Daniel Falcone: How has foreign policy and institutional approaches to global diplomacy changed over the past two decades in your estimation?

Richard Falk: The most notable change in American statecraft during this period is the abandonment of a core emphasis on economic globalization, with a corresponding swing in national security policy to counterterrorism, tactics and technological innovations that minimize visible U.S. warfighting and casualties on distant and dispersed combat zones situated within foreign sovereign states. While this counterterrorist impulse prevailed during the Bussh presidency, it placed heavy reliance on torture to obtain information relating to potential terrorist operations and the identity operatives. In the process, it turned official policy to ‘the dark side’ of counterterrorism, which meant a dismaying repudiation of international humanitarian law with respect to the belligerent conduct, and a total denial of human rights to those accused of a terrorist connection, however remote. It was contemptuous toward those who urged compliance with international law and human rights standards. The detention center at Guantanamo became a word of international opprobrium, dehumanizing conduct, shaming the nation, and forever tarnishing its liberal credentials.

As well, declaring a war on terror made the entire world into a potential battlefield featuring the targeting of individuals or their places of habitation as suspected of terrorist affiliation. It also foregrounded reliance on unmanned drones for attack and surveillance, the deployment of small special operations detachments with capture or kill missions in 85 countries, whose governments often were not consulted or asked for permission with respect to penetrations of their sovereign space to engage in non-accountable acts of political violence. The execution of Osama Bin Laden, given safe have in Pakistan, by such a mission was the most significant and publicized instance of this form of counterterrorism.

Other changes in warfare unrelated to 9/11 involve the use of features of digital networking to disrupt, steal industrial or state secrets, attack vital electric grids, disrupt nuclear facilities through computer viruses. In other words, cyber age conflict is characteristically carried on in mostly settings other than territorial battlefields.

During the Trump presidency these doctrinal and ideological tendencies were carried further as alliances were deemphasized and bilateral transactional relations and the search for ‘deals’ with adversaries were given high profiles. Multilateralism declined, and a chauvinistic, territorial nationalism was raucously promoted, and affected many countries, explained in part as protection against immigration by the forces of ‘radical Islam,’ but additionally as a reaction against the perceived failures of globalization, with its privileging of capital at the expense of people.

The Biden presidency commencing in January 2021 seemed to revert to the pre-9/11 and pre-globalization Cold War approach to foreign policy, reviving and initiating alliances, championing an emerging geopolitical rivalry with China, and configuring military capabilities toward more traditional forms of warfare, as well as continuing the non-territorial concerns addressed under the label of cyber security. Biden seems to view international relations through an ideological lens that seeks to align ‘democracies’ for a great struggle with ‘autocracies,’ above all with allegedly ‘socialist’ China, but secondarily with once socialist Russia. In this sense, there is a foreign policy transition under way from counterterrorism to geopolitical rivalry, although this shift could be reversed or modified by new mega-terrorist events that recalled the spectacle and trauma of 9/11. The stakes are high—global hegemony more politely described as ‘global leadership.’

What is lacking in the political scene, sadly, is any strong moves toward the demilitarization of foreign policy or related adjustment to the failures arising from the militarization of political challenges. There seems to be no discussion of what we can learn from the methods and results of China’s remarkable achievement of economic development, which overcame the extreme poverty of hundreds of millions of Chinese and spread its influence and achievements to many other countries by a win/win foreign economic policy that did not engage in intervention or state-building with respect to the internal politics of foreign countries. China’s Road and Belt Project that has brought many tangible developmental gains, especially in infrastructure, for countries throughout Africa and Asia, and virtually no military intrusions. The post-colonial West has developed nothing comparable, and is as reliant as ever on its military capabilities to hold its own geopolitically.

Daniel Falcone: What are your thoughts on how certain terminology has evolved in the context of the post 9/11 world? For example, “terrorism,” “extremism,” “state building,” “legitimacy,” and “international community” are all words that change meaning within the discourse, correct?

Richard Falk: Yes, language always reflects changing patterns of hegemonic politics, and this was certainly true in the aftermath of 9/11, more so than in 9/12 contexts. The overall effort was to stigmatize certain behaviors as beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior while legitimating other patterns of action as providing justifications for previously dubious claims to encroach upon the sovereign rights of others or ignore the human rights of adversaries. Not since the death camps of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union has there been comparable image of abusing prisoners held in captivity. As suggested, Guantanamo is a name that defames America throughout the world. In effect, the discourse of international relations tries to provide geopolitical actors with ethical and legal justifications for their policy agendas and to discredit behavior adverse to their interests. This is especially true when new challenges emerge that make frameworks of permissible response seem insufficient.

Of the words in your question that acquired new relevance after 9/11: ‘terrorism,’ ‘state-building,’ and ‘extremism’ are particularly salient, and seem to describe the U.S. counterterrorist long-range efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, although there were antecedents for each pre-9/11. The words ‘legitimacy’ and ‘international community’ were useful in evading the strict prohibitions of international law as with respect to ‘torture,’ further disguised as ‘enhanced interrogation.’ ‘International community’ was also helpful in suggesting that the political backing of the UN reflected an anti-terrorist consensus that created an almost unconditional mandate for pursuing counterterrorist tactics without questioning their impacts on innocent civilians, in effect, an implied license to kill on suspicion or to intervene to replace governments accused of being connected with 9/11 either by providing safe haven or material support.

The most radical idea accompanying counterterrorist intervention entailed replacing the former regime with a governing process thatth would fit the broader, longer range policy priorities, political ideals, and material interests of the intrusion on sovereign space.

Daniel Falcone: Can you comment on how Bush 43 through Biden have navigated the presidency while implementing select 9/11 narratives as a backdrop?

Richard Falk: Bush rallied the country primarily by demonizing the perpetrators of the 9/11 events, characterizing them as sub-human, to be ‘hunted’ as if wild animals. More than this he lent credence to the idea that non-state political violence was inherently extremist, wherever it occurred and regardless of justification, as posing a terrorist threat to all ‘civilized’ countries. Calling upon governments throughout the world to join with the US in this war on terror, or if unwilling to do so, be treated as siding with terrorism. In effect, Bush unilaterally by geopolitical fiat invalidated a neutral diplomacy as a legitimate policy option in the context of ‘the war on terror.’ Bush also, whether knowingly or not, allowed counterterrorist foreign policy to be converted into a vehicle for executing the pre-9/11 neoconservative agenda of regime change, state-building, and democracy promotion in the Middle East where the terrorist allegations or links to 9/11 were tenuous or non-existent, yet alleged. In Afghanistan the links to 9/11 seemed self-evident and rationalized a limited counterterrorist operation against al-Qaeda. It should have not surprised any close student of American foreign policy to take note of the speed with which the initial counterterrorist justification morphed into a failed twenty year politically, materially, and psychologically failed and expensive war against the Taliban.

Next Obama came to the White House as of 2009 with a pledge of a more restrained foreign policy approach, which meant operationally that Bush’s war on terror would go on but with more outward respect for international law and a less grandiose conception of an extended counterterrorist mission in the Middle East. Obama wanted to limit counterterrorism to al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. Manifesting geopolitical ambivalence, Obama favored a troop surge in Afghanistan, apparently believing that the state-building mission was on the verge of success. Obama also rejected the regime-changing, democracy-promotion neoconservative hijacking of the 9/11 provocation for its preoccupation with restructuring the politics of the Middle East in a manner that was particularly responsive to Israel’s goals, angering Netanyahu especially when extended to Iran. A highlight of the Obama presidency was the diplomacy that produced an agreement with Iran on its nuclear program in 2015, known as Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (or JCPOA) that was designed to give assurances that Iran would not cross the nuclear threshold and the United States would over time reduce the sanctions it had imposed.

Obama went along with stretching international law so as weaken some restraints on the use of force, especially by an increased reliance on attack drones in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda operatives were active. Obama supported the 2011 intervention in Libya, although demeaned by Republicans for ‘leading from behind’ when it came to the controversial NATO-led regime changing military operation that left the country at the mercy of prolonged violent ethnic strife. Qaddafi’s Libya although autocratic, had high ratings for social development, and is a further confirmation that intervention rarely achieves its purported goals.

When Trump’s turn came in 2015, there was a confusing mix of policies. Trump went further than any prior president in shaping American foreign policy in the Middle East to accord with the regional goals of Israel and the Gulf monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia. This led to Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and the adoption of a policy toward Iran of ‘maximum pressure.’ At the same time, Trump set the stage for withdrawal from Afghanistan, denouncing forever wars as a waste of money and lives that were costly as well as tarnishing the US reputation as a fearsome hegemon. Trump’s America first, anti-immigration, pro-military policies were less a security posture directed at would be terrorists than an effort to build a right-wing, autocratic political movement in the United States that was hostile to all forms of internationalism, including multilateral diplomacy. Trump and Trumpism intensified a nativist Islamophobia that blamed ‘radical Islam’ for terrorism and generated a related negative form of identity politics that gave aid and comfort to the white supremacy movement. This was exemplified by Trump’s comments on a neo-fascist march through Charlottesville that was resisted by protesters, contending that there were ‘good people on both sides.’ Despite the home scene, geopolitical concerns about a rising China began displacing counterterrorism at the top of the foreign policy agenda, a dynamic already started during the Obama presidency under the rubric of a ‘pivot to Asia.’

The Biden presidency is still new, and its record mixed. It has moved to correct the criminal failures of Trumpism in dealing with the COVID challenge and climate change but has irresponsibly intensified rivalry with China and has exhibited continuity with much of Trump’s policies toward the Middle East despite reaffirming the moribund two-state approach to peace between Israel and Palestine. Biden deserves credit for pushing ahead with steps to end the war in Afghanistan, despite the unnecessarily humiliating and reckless final act, and maybe finally bringing to an end the debilitating intervention/state-building cycle. One hopes he recollects and builds upon his opposition to Afghanistan troop surge and Libya policy while serving as Vice President in the Obama administration rather than recalls his enthusiasm for embarking upon the Iraq War in 2003/.

Daniel Falcone: Scholars and writers such as Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Davidson and Isabel Allende have written about 9/11 – and September 11, 1973 in Chile. Can you talk about this historical analogue?

Richard Falk: The most illuminating insight drawn from a comparison between 9/11 and the Pinochet coup against the elected Allende government in Chile 28 years earlier encouraged and then supported by Washington, relates to the humanitarian and political costs for the United States of intervention in foreign societies. The whole 9/11 impetus for the U.S. to engage in state-building overseas in the aftermath of regime-changing interventions led to an estimated 929,000 deaths, more than eight trillion dollars of wasted expenditures, counterterrorist operations in 85 countries, and an estimated 38 million displaced persons according to the Cost of War Project of the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. This background of post-9/11 war-making is a major explanation of the unmistakable imperial U.S. decline abroad and alienating polarization within America. These failed efforts to control adverse political and economic tendencies at their source, often as in Chile were motivated by the pressures mounted by large corporate investors. They involved assaults on the most fundamental of human rights, that of the right of self-determination acknowledged as constitutive of more specific rights by being highlighted as a common Article 1 in both human rights Covenants.

This ‘war’ waged against the exercise of the right of self-determination did not begin with 9/11 but was a feature and legacy of the Cold War, receiving a second life thanks to the response of neoconservative Republican leadership to 9/11 as abetted by a history of complicit bipartisan passivity on the part of the Democratic Party opposition. We should pause in our reckoning and thank Barbara Lee as the sole member of Congress to vote against the ‘Authorization for the Use of Military Force of 2001’ legislation that to this day gives executive leadership a green light to wage war at will without either domestic constitutional oversight or respect for international law and the authority of the UN.

The United States should have learned the blowback consequences of interfering with the internal dynamics of self-determination when it conspired back in 1953 to overthrow the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, supposedly to bolster the geopolitics of containment of the Soviet Union, but at least as much to satisfy the greed and ambition of ‘big oil.’ The whole political turn toward Islam, eventuating in the mass movement of 1978-79 led from exile by Ayatollah Khomeini, can be traced to the unifying impact on diverse strands of Iranian society due to the restored imposition of the Shah’s regime as a result of externally motivated and sustained intervention. The same lesson was made even plainer for detached observers to learn in the 1970s as a consequence of the Vietnam War where the intervention was overt and massive, and yet in the end led to a humiliating defeat.

Of course, the most relevant geopolitical pedagogy should have been absorbed as a result of the long experience of the West in Afghanistan stretching back to the time of ‘the great game’ of colonial competition to control the country. The recent post-colonial variation on the great game started with the effort to mobilize resistance to a Kabul government in the 1980s that was seen as leaning toward Moscow. With a cavalier disregard of consequences, the U.S. stimulated and supported the Islamic resistance to Afghanistan’s first secular modernizing elected government with training and weapons, including strengthening and emboldening the militia that evolved into al-Qaeda under the leadership of a charismatic religious ideologue, Osama Bin Laden! As hardly needs mention, it was this chain of imprudent moves that provided the proximate causes of 9/11 (together with the imprudent Western encroachments on the course of self-determination in the Middle East, including support for the colonizing project that produced decades of Israel/Palestine struggle with still no end in sight).

Why does this manifestly destructive and self-destructive cycle American foreign policy continue and repeat itself despite consistent failure? How can this cycle be disrupted? The political class in the United States and elsewhere in the NATO West, adheres to a worldview commonly identified as ‘political realism.’ Its central tenet is to link national interests to military superiority, with the tacit corollary that force and its threat is essential to uphold the global financial interests of neoliberal capitalism. Experience of the last 75 year increasingly demonstrates that political realism, while providing efficient geopolitical guidance during the colonial period, is dangerously out of touch with reality in the 21st century. Yet zombie-like obsolescent realism lingers because its worldview remains largely unchallenged by anti-imperial, anti-militarist, anti-capitalist ideas and oppositional politics. A new political realism, responsive to world conditions, would espouse a foreign policy that affirms the right of self-determination, shows respect for sovereign rights and international law, and recognizes the urgency of implementing human solidarity by establishing effective global problem-solving mechanisms, including the strengthening of international institutions, above all the United Nations. It would be equally important internationally, to restore trust in a humane democracy that serves the citizenry as a whole and moves to repudiate current plutocratic distortions of the social order as reflected by gross inequalities in the enjoyment and distribution of the benefits of growth and profits.

It is late in the day but let’s hope that seeds of transformative change have been planted both by the chaotic and discrediting withdrawal from Afghanistan and this anniversary occasion giving us one more opportunity to assess both the causes of and excessive 9/12 reactions to the 9/11 events. A step in the right direction would be the much belated willingness to engage in strategic self-criticism rather than to be distracted by partisan Republican accusations of tactical failures or a mind-numbing invocation of ‘American exceptionalism.’ More concretely, subjecting regime change and state-building to critique rather than focusing all attention on the bungled withdrawal dynamics might have a lasting impact on the political imagination. Such a willingness to learn from failure might actually rid the American political psyche of ‘American Exceptionalism,’ which has functioned as a huge dose of poisonous “kool-aid.” A benevolent 21st internationalism would instead give tangible expression to the imperatives of global solidarity, seeking governmental and civil society collaborators in meeting the tragic manifestations of such global challenges as climate change, pandemics, nuclearism. migration.

American democracy is under bipartisan threat due to its militarized state that orients the media propaganda machine to view internal and global security through a lens that magnifies international threats and confines the political and moral imagination to the realm of coercive responses. Those who dare leak ‘truths’ are criminalized and then face the vindictive choice of exile or prison (Snowden, Assange), as were those young Americans who fled to Canada and Sweden rather than fight in an immoral and unlawful war in Vietnam. A democracy that does not treat its heroes well, will not and should not endure. Daniel Ellsberg delivered a vital message 50 years ago–the citizens of a democracy deserve to be told the truth, and a government that refuses, deserves resistance not mute obedience–that continues to be unheeded by the enforcers of the political class.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Distinguished Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB, author, co-author or editor of 60 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs.

27 September 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Vijay Prashad

22 Sep 2021 – On 15 Sep 2021, the heads of government of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States announced the formation of AUKUS, “a new enhanced trilateral security partnership” between these three countries. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined U.S. President Joe Biden to “preserve security and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” as Johnson put it.

While China was not explicitly mentioned by these leaders at the AUKUS announcement, it is generally assumed that countering China is the unstated motivation for the new partnership. “The future of the Indo-Pacific,” said Morrison at the press conference, “will impact all our futures.” That was as far as they would go to address the elephant in the room.

Zhao Lijian of the Chinese Foreign Ministry associated the creation of AUKUS with “the outdated Cold War zero-sum mentality and narrow-minded geopolitical perception.” Beijing has made it clear that all talk of security in the Indo-Pacific region by the U.S. and its NATO allies is part of an attempt to build up military pressure against China. The BBC story on the pact made this clear in its headline: “Aukus: UK, US and Australia launch pact to counter China.”

What was the need for a new partnership when there are already several such security platforms in place? Prime Minister Morrison acknowledged this in his remarks at the press conference, mentioning the “growing network of partnerships” that include the Quad security pact (Australia, India, Japan and the United States) and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States).

A closer look at AUKUS suggests that this deal has less to do with military security and more to do with arms deals.

Nuclear Submarines

Prime Minister Morrison announced that “[t]he first major initiative of AUKUS will be to deliver a nuclear-powered submarine fleet for Australia.” Two red flags were immediately raised: first, what will happen to Australia’s preexisting order of diesel-powered submarines from France, and second, will this sale of nuclear-powered submarines violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

In 2016, the Australian government made a deal with France’s Naval Group (formerly known as Direction des Constructions Navales, or DCNS) to supply the country with 12 diesel-electric submarines. A press release from then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his minister of defense (who is the current minister of foreign affairs) Marise Payne said at the time that the future submarine project “is the largest and most complex defence acquisition Australia has ever undertaken. It will be a vital part of our Defence capability well into the middle of this century.”

Australia’s six Collins-class submarines are expected to be decommissioned in the 2030s, and the submarines that were supposed to be supplied by France were meant to replace them. The arms deal was slated to cost “about $90 billion to build and $145 billion to maintain over their life cycle,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Australia has now canceled its deal with the French to obtain the nuclear-powered submarines. These new submarines will likely be built either in the U.S. by Electric Boat, a subdivision of General Dynamics, and Newport News Shipbuilding, a subdivision of Huntington Ingalls Industries, or in the UK by BAE Systems; BAE Systems has already benefited from several major submarine deals. The AUKUS deal to provide submarines to Australia will be far more expensive, given that these are nuclear submarines, and it will draw Australia to rely more deeply upon the UK and U.S. arms manufacturers. France was furious about the submarine deal, with its Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian calling it a “regrettable decision” that should advance the cause of “European strategic autonomy” from the United States. Words like “betrayal” have flooded the French conversation about the deal.

Australia ratified the NPT in 1973, and it is also a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga (1985), or the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty. It does not have nuclear weapons and has pledged not to have nuclear material in the South Pacific. Australia is the second-largest producer of uranium after Kazakhstan, and most of this nuclear material is sold to the UK and the U.S. For the past several decades, Australia has been considered a “nuclear threshold” state, but it has opted not to escalate its nuclear weapons program. The three heads of government of Australia, the U.S. and the UK made it clear that the transfer of the nuclear-powered submarines is not the same as the transfer of nuclear weapons, although these new submarines will be capable of launching a nuclear strike. For that reason, not only China but also North Korea has warned about a new arms race in the region after the AUKUS submarine deal.

Costs

Morrison admitted during a September 16 press conference that his country has already spent $2.4 billion on the French submarine deal. He did not, however, answer a journalist’s question as to what the ultimate price tag would be for the UK-U.S. nuclear-powered submarines. He asked his Secretary of Defense Greg Moriarty to answer it, to which Moriarty spoke about task forces “that will set up a number of working groups” with the U.S. and UK to look into several issues relating to the deal; but Moriarty also did not touch on the topic about the price tag. One of the questions asked at the press conference with regard to the cost to Australian taxpayers was whether Australia would buy the Astute (UK) class submarines or the Virginia (U.S.) class, since this decision has a bearing on the cost. The Virginia class submarine, according to a recent U.S. Congressional Research Service study, costs $3.45 billion per vessel. To this must be added the cost of upgrading the naval bases in Australia and the cost of running and maintaining the submarines. The U.S. and the UK firms will make considerable profits from this deal.

Ever since the Australians signed the deal with the French, media houses associated with the U.S.-based Rupert Murdoch have attacked it. Any small delay was picked up to be clobbered, and any adjustment to the contract—including a change in contract proposed on March 23, 2021—became front-page news. Aware of the problems, France’s Foreign Minister Le Drian spoke to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Paris on June 25 about the deal. He told the French-speaking Blinken that the submarine contract is not only a French one but also a French-U.S. partnership since Lockheed Martin is party to the deal. French attempts to get U.S. buy-in to the deal came to nothing as the Biden administration was already in talks with the UK and Australia on their own regarding the AUKUS deal. That is why the language of “betrayal” is so pronounced in Paris.

Belligerence

On September 16, the Australian and U.S. governments released a joint statement that included a direct attack on China, with reference to the South China Sea, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Two days later, an article in Australia’s leading newspaper, the Australian, by Paul Monk, who is the head of the China Desk at Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organization, stated that his government should “facilitate a coup within China’s Communist Party.” This is a direct call for regime change in China by Australia.

The belligerent language from Australia should not be taken lightly. Even though China is Australia’s largest trading partner (both in terms of exports and imports), the creation of these new military pacts—with a nuclear edge to them—threatens security in the region. If this is merely an arms deal hidden behind a military pact, then it is a cynical use of war-making rhetoric for business purposes. This cynicism could eventually lead to a great deal of suffering.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist.

27 September 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By David Swanson

13 Sep 2021 – In 2002, U.S. women’s groups sent a joint letter to then-President George W. Bush in support of the war on Afghanistan to benefit women. Gloria Steinem (formerly of the CIA), Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, and many others signed. The National Organization for Women, Hillary Clinton, and Madeline Albright supported the war.

Many years into a catastrophic war that had demonstrably not benefited women, and had in fact killed, injured, traumatized, and made homeless huge numbers of women, even Amnesty International was still encouraging war for women.

Even these 20 years later, with sane, factual analyses readily available on dozens of wars “on terror,” the National Organization for Women and related groups and individuals are helping advance mandatory female draft registration through the U.S. Congress on the grounds that it is a feminist right to be equally forced against one’s will to kill and die for Lockheed Martin’s female CEO.

Rafia Zakaria’s new book, Against White Feminism, critiques past and present mainstream Western feminism for not only its racism but also its classism, its militarism, its exceptionalism, and its xenophobia. Any discourse, political or otherwise, will tend to be tinged with racism in a society afflicted with racism. But Zakaria shows us how supposedly feminist gains have sometimes been directly at the expense of non-“white” people. When Britain had an empire, some British women could find new liberties by traveling outside of the Homeland and helping to subjugate the natives. When the U.S. got an empire, it became possible for women to gain new power, respect, and prestige by promoting it.

As Zakaria recounts, in the CIA-backed Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, the female protagonist (based on a real person) gains respect from the other characters, applause from the audience in the theater where Zakaria watched it, and later a Best Actress Academy Award by out-sadism-ing the men, by showing a greater eagerness to torture. “If white American feminists of the 1960s and the Vietnam era advocated for an end to war,” writes Zakaria, “the new American feminists of the newborn twenty-first century were all about fighting in the war alongside the boys.”

Zakaria’s book opens with an autobiographical account of a scene at a wine bar with white feminists (or at least white women whom she strongly suspects of being white feminists — meaning, not just feminists who are white, but feminists who privilege the views of white women and perhaps of Western governments or at least militaries). Zakaria is asked about her background by these women and declines to respond with information that experience has taught her will not be well received.

Zakaria is clearly upset with the response she imagines these women would have made had she told them things she didn’t. Zakaria writes that she knows she has overcome more in her life than have any of these other women in the wine bar, despite apparently knowing as little about them as they about her. Much later in the book, on page 175, Zakaria suggests that asking someone how to properly pronounce their name is superficial pretense, but on page 176 she tells us that failing to use someone’s correct name is majorly offensive. Much of the book denounces the bigotry within feminism using examples from past centuries. I picture much of this seeming a bit unfair to a defensive reader — perhaps a reader suspecting herself of having been at that wine bar that evening.

But the book does not review the bigotry of past eras of feminism for its own sake. In doing so, it illuminates its analysis of the problems found in feminism today. Nor does it advocate listening to other voices simply for some vacuous notion of diversity, but because those other voices have other perspectives, knowledge, and wisdom. Women who have had to struggle through planned marriages and poverty and racism may have an understanding of feminism and of certain kinds of perseverance that can be valued as much as career rebellion or sexual liberation.

Zakaria’s book recounts her own experiences, which include being invited to events as a Pakistani-American woman more to be displayed than listened to, and being reprimaded for not wearing her “native clothes.” But her focus is on the thinking of feminists who view Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and upper-middle-class white feminism as leading the way. The practical outcomes of unwarranted notions of superiority are not hard to find. Zakaria offers various examples of aid programs that not only mostly fund corporations in wealthy countries but provide supplies and services that do not help the women who are supposed to be benefited, and who were never asked whether they wanted a stove or a chicken or some other get-righ-quick scheme that avoids political power, views whatever women are doing now as non-work, and operates out of total ignorance of what might economically or socially benefit a woman in the society she lives in.

Tacked onto the devastating war on Afghanistan right from the start was a USAID program called PROMOTE to help 75,000 Afghan women (while bombing them). The program ended up manipulating its statistics to claim that any woman they’d talked to had “benefitted” whether or not she had, you know, benefitted, and that 20 out of 3,000 women assisted finding a job would be a “success” — yet even that goal of 20 was not actually reached.

Corporate media reporting has carried forward longstanding traditions of letting white people speak for others, of displaying and violating the privacy interests of non-white women in ways that are not tolerated with white women, of naming white people and leaving others nameless, and of avoiding any notion of what those still thought of as the natives might want or might be doing to get it for themselves.

I highly recommend this book, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to be writing this book review. Men are virtually absent from the book and from any description within it of who feminists are. The feminism in this book is of, by, and for women — which is obviously a million miles preferable to men speaking for women. But I wonder if it doesn’t also feed into the practice of advocating for one’s own selfish rights, which some white feminists seem to interpret as advocating for the narrow interests of white women. It seems to me that men are largely to blame for unfair and cruel treatment of women and in at least as great a need of feminism as women are. But, I suppose, I’m a man, so I would think that, wouldn’t I?

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host.

20 September 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Dylan Matthews

11 Sep 2021 – On the evening of September 11, 2001, hours after two hijacked airliners had destroyed the World Trade Center towers and a third had hit the Pentagon building, President George W. Bush announced that the country was embarking on a new kind of war.

“America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism,”

Bush announced in a televised address to the nation.

It was Bush’s first use of the term that would come to define his presidency and deeply shape those of his three successors. The global war on terror, as the effort came to be known, was one of the most expansive and far-reaching policy initiatives in modern American history, and certainly the biggest of the 2000s.

It saw the US invade and depose the governments of two nations and engage in years- or decades-long occupations of each; the initiation of a new form of warfare via drones spanning thousands of miles of territory from Pakistan to Somalia to the Philippines; the formalization of a system of detention without charge and pervasive torture of accused militants; numerous smaller raids by special forces teams around the world; and major changes to air travel and border security in the US proper.

The “war on terror” is a purposely vague term. President Barack Obama famously rejected it in a 2013 speech — favoring instead “a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists.”

But 9/11 signaled the beginning of a distinct policy regime from the one that preceded it, and a regime that exists in many forms to the present day, even with the US exit from Afghanistan.

Over the past 20 years, the costs of this new policy regime — costs in terms of lives lost, money spent, people and whole communities displaced, bodies tortured — have become clear. It behooves us, then, to try to answer a simple yet vast question: Was it worth it?

A good-faith effort to answer this question — to tally the costs and benefits on the ledger and not just resort to one’s ideological priors — is more challenging than you’d think. That’s largely because it involves quantifying the inherently unquantifiable. If, as proponents argue, the war on terror kept America safe, how do you quantify the psychological value of not being in a state of constant fear of the next attack? What about the damage of increased Islamophobia and violent targeting of Muslims (and those erroneously believed to be Muslims) stoked by the war on terror? There are dozens more unquantifiable purported costs and benefits like these.

But some things can be measured. There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including about $2 trillion more needed in health care and disability coverage for veterans in decades to come.

When you lay it all out on paper, an honest accounting of the war on terror yields a dismal conclusion: Even with an incredibly generous view of the war on terror’s benefits, the costs have vastly exceeded them. The past 20 years of war represent a colossal failure by the US government, one it has not begun to reckon with or atone for.

We are now used to the fact that the US government routinely bombs foreign countries with which it is not formally or even informally at war, in the name of killing terrorists. We are used to the fact that the National Security Agency works with companies like Facebook and Google to collect our private information en masse. We are used to the fact that 39 men are sitting in Guantanamo Bay, almost all detained indefinitely without trial.

These realities were not inevitable. They were chosen as part of a policy regime that has done vastly more harm than good.

What America and the world might have gained from the war on terror

Before going further, it’s important to define our terms. By “war on terror,” I mean all policy initiatives undertaken by the US government from September 11, 2001, to the present with a goal of fighting Islamist — and particularly al-Qaeda/ISIS — terrorism.

This means that not all US policy initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa are counted here as part of the war on terror. The stated rationale behind the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, for instance, was to force a ceasefire in the country’s incipient civil war and to prevent Muammar Qaddafi’s army from committing atrocities against civilians — so it does not count for our purposes.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq, by contrast, does count as part of the war on terror, for the simple reason that the Bush administration considered it so. The administration argued for and justified the invasion as a necessary measure to prevent terrorist groups from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and striking the United States.

The costs of the war in Iraq, and indeed of every other front in the war on terror, are relatively easy to relate: hundreds of thousands of lost lives, trillions in dollars spent, incalculable damage to the US’s reputation in the world.

So let’s start with a harder question: What, if any, benefits accrued to the US and the world as a result of the war on terror?

The first, and most obvious, is the wrecking of al-Qaeda’s ability to carry out large attacks in the West. Before 9/11, al-Qaeda was able to operate fairly openly as an organization training and indoctrinating thousands of recruits in how to carry out attacks on the US and its allies.

“The very top leadership [was based] in Afghanistan and able to orchestrate things with a degree of impunity,” Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University, told me. “They were able to invite literally thousands of recruits there to train.” They could also indoctrinate recruits like future 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, who arrived planning to fight Russians in Chechnya but was persuaded by al-Qaeda leadership to target the US.

“Even with the US departing from Afghanistan, you don’t have the mass,” Byman continued. “You can’t invite thousands of people there without great risk. [Al-Qaeda] leaders are always vulnerable to drone strikes or special ops raids.”

This situation took some time to come about; even after the US invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was able to maintain an international network of members who went on to carry out massive attacks in Europe, like the March 11, 2004, subway strikes in Madrid and the July 7, 2005, plot in London. Upstart regional groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were able to operate with even greater impunity within those countries.

But between direct ground troop assaults (up to and including the assassination of Osama bin Laden), targeted drone strikes, and a greatly expanded system of intelligence sharing both among US intelligence agencies (like the CIA and FBI, which famously failed to share intelligence before 9/11) and with foreign intelligence agencies, al-Qaeda’s operational capabilities have been badly degraded, especially when it comes to attacking the US.

This is not merely because of successes in the US-led war on terror. ISIS, a group that emerged as a direct result of the war, became a more effective recruiter of young aspiring militants than al-Qaeda, especially in 2014 and 2015. But it seems fair to credit at least a good share of the group’s weakening to US actions.

How much the destruction of al-Qaeda is worth to the US is a matter of perspective. Let us then take an incredibly generous estimate of its value, to see if that would justify the war on terror’s costs.

In the aftermath of 9/11, fears of attacks of that scale recurring on a regular basis were pervasive. Those fears were not realized because of the decimation of al-Qaeda and because the group, even at its height, was probably not capable of carrying out an attack like that every year.

Let’s suppose for the sake of argument, though, that al-Qaeda was capable of more attacks on the scale of 9/11, and that absent the war on terror, the US would have lost 3,000 people (the approximate death toll on 9/11) annually due to al-Qaeda strikes. That amounts to some 60,000 lives saved to date. Whoa, if true.

But even with that degraded capability, global deaths from al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Taliban attacks have not fallen since 9/11. While al-Qaeda’s ability to attack America has been badly degraded, its operations in countries like Yemen, Syria, and Libya are still significant and deadly. ISIS’s attacks, and those of the pre-conquest Taliban in Afghanistan, were even deadlier.

More clearly relevant in an accounting of the war on terror are the potential benefits that accrued to some civilians.

Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq suffered horrifically as a result of America’s invasions and occupations. But the prior regimes in those countries were also horrific. Pre-war Iraq was suffering both from Saddam Hussein’s policies and from international sanctions, and Taliban-governed Afghanistan was a human rights disaster for ethnic minorities and women in particular.

The Taliban has now returned to power, but women in Afghanistan had 20 years free of a theocratic regime, with many able to attend school and university, hold political positions, and generally be more independent of their fathers and husbands. In a 2016-2017 survey, the Afghanistan Central Statistics Organization estimated the literacy rate among women ages 15 to 24 at 38.7 percent — far below the 68.2 percent rate reached among young men, but well above the 19.6 percent rate among women recorded in 2005.

That said, these gains tended to be concentrated in cities like Kabul; many women in more rural regions suffering under repeated American airstrikes, and enjoying fewer gains in liberties, were eager to see the US-backed regime gone.

Health conditions also improved for Afghans during the occupation, with mortality rates for children in particular falling. A study in The Lancet Global Health found that between 2003 and 2015, mortality for children under 5 in Afghanistan fell by 29 percent. Given current birth levels in Afghanistan, that could translate to roughly 44,500 lives saved annually due to reduced child mortality.

It would be a stretch, however, to give the war on terror sole credit for this; many neighboring countries saw child mortality gains in this period, too, at least in official statistics. Iraq, by contrast, did not see notable gains in child mortality post-invasion.

After the US destroyed Iraq’s relatively stable authoritarian regime and plunged the country into a sectarian civil war, the country eventually calmed somewhat, though factional violence continues at high levels. According to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, in 2019, Iraq had the second-highest level of terrorism in the world (behind only Afghanistan), but “only” 564 people died in those attacks, down from a peak of 9,929 in 2014.

It would be a stretch to call the current Iraqi regime a “democracy”: Freedom House, a US government-funded nonprofit, rates it as “not free,” citing pervasive Iranian influence on Iraqi politics, endemic corruption, and ongoing violence. The Varieties of Democracy data set classifies Iraq as an “electoral autocracy.” But an electoral autocracy is still likely a step up from Saddam’s brutal regime, and Iraq’s Shia majority and Kurdish minority enjoy much more access to political power than they did pre-invasion.

Of course, these benefits weren’t the only outcomes of 20 years of war.

The costs of the war on terror

Since 2010, the best quantitative source on the toll exacted by US operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere to combat terrorism has been the Costs of War Project, based at Brown University and co-directed by Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and Stephanie Savell.

The group’s mission is simple: to attempt a rigorous accounting of the human and financial cost of America’s post-9/11 wars and produce credible estimates of lives lost, people displaced, and dollars spent.

Their most recent estimates were released on September 1. The Costs of War Project estimates the total cost of America’s post-9/11 conflicts at roughly $8 trillion, of which $5.8 trillion has been spent or requested so far and $2.2 trillion represents estimated future obligations to care for veterans of these conflicts.

The biggest costs arose from actual war budgets for the Defense Department and associated increases in its base budget; these total around $3 trillion, with interest costs adding another $1.1 trillion. The homeland security part of the war’s cost amounted to roughly $1.1 trillion as well, with $465 billion spent on veteran care to date.

That $5.8 trillion spent over 20 years can be a bit hard to picture. It amounts to $290 billion per year — though very unevenly distributed, with the bulk of the costs coming at the apex of the Iraq War. For comparison, $290 billion is more than the US spent on traditional anti-poverty programs (SNAP, SSI, refundable tax credits) last year.

The Costs of War Project estimates that between 897,000 and 929,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other post-9/11 war zones. These are conservative figures; they exclude, for instance, civilian deaths in countries like the Philippines and Kenya that have seen drone or special ops engagements but for which reliable civilian death figures are not available. It uses only confirmed deaths that are directly due to the wars, rather than estimated deaths using mortality surveys; the latter method has produced much higher civilian death estimates of the war in Iraq, for instance.

We can take a narrower view and look only at US lives lost. Crawford and Lutz estimate that 15,262 American military members, Defense Department civilians, and contractors have died in these conflicts — a much lower toll.

But if we’re looking myopically at the US as a self-interested actor, we also cannot consider any benefits to the war outside prevented terrorist attacks on the US. Any civilian lives saved through better health care in Afghanistan would be rendered irrelevant, as would any gains to women’s rights. And given how often humanitarian rationales were invoked to defend aspects of the war on terror, it feels important to include the full humanitarian costs and the full humanitarian benefits in our accounting.

A little less than two-thirds of the war on terror’s deaths were of civilians or allied members of national armies, like the armies of Afghanistan and Iraq. About a third of deaths were of opposition fighters, like Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, and ISIS.

Some may object to including the latter deaths here on an equal footing with civilians and allied militaries. But failing to do so risks dramatically undercounting civilian deaths. “A lot of times, there are political incentives for governments to undercount civilians and put people in the category of ‘opposition fighters’ or ‘militants’ because politically that looks a lot less bad,” Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, told me.

As part of the US drone war under President Obama, the US government embraced a policy that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,” per reporting by the New York Times’s Jo Becker and Scott Shane. Obviously, not every adult male killed in the drone war was an opposition fighter.

Then there are the costs in terms of people not killed but displaced by war. A paper released by the Costs of War Project last month estimates that Iraq produced 9.2 million refugees, the Syrian theater of the ISIS battle produced 7.1 million, and Afghanistan produced 5.9 million. The authors estimate a total of 38 million displaced people, mostly in their own countries, as a result of US wars.

There are indirect costs as well. The war on terror and Iraq and the torture regime in particular caused a devastating blow to America’s standing in the world. “The U.S. image abroad is suffering almost everywhere,” the Pew Research Center reported in its assessment of global opinion of the US at the end of 2008.

The war created diplomatic catastrophes with America’s adversaries. Iran, which had been productively cooperating with the US in Afghanistan against their common enemy, the Taliban, cut off all cooperation when the Bush administration declared the country part of the “axis of evil” as part of its war-on-terror messaging. Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, reportedly produced the country’s first nuclear weapon in 2002 in part as a response to the “axis of evil” speech, believing it meant the country needed an ironclad deterrent against US attack.

America’s interventions also played a role in provoking further conflicts in the regions in question. Most notably, the invasion of Iraq led directly to the creation of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and that group’s eventual transformation into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The ISIS rising of 2014-’15 exacted a horrific humanitarian toll on the people of that region, and the group’s subsequent attacks like the November 13, 2015, strikes in Paris and attacks by individuals inspired by ISIS, like the June 12, 2016, Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, should be considered costs of America’s invasion of Iraq.

What sort of benefits would justify these costs?

The most comprehensive attempt I’ve seen of a cost-benefit analysis of counterterrorism policies is in the book Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security, a 2011 book by political scientist John Mueller and engineering professor Mark G. Stewart.

They estimate the cost of a 9/11-scale attack at roughly $200 billion, both in economic costs in rebuilding, health care for survivors, and reduced business activity in the wake of the attack, and, more important, in the lives of those lost. To calculate the latter, they use a measure known as the value of a statistical life. The idea is to use, for instance, the extra wages that workers in especially dangerous jobs demand to be paid to estimate how much the typical person is willing to pay to extend their life.

In Mueller and Stewart’s book, they put the value of a statistical life in the US at $6.5 million (that’s actually lower than the $7 million a recent review of studies found). Using that, the gross cost of the war on terror falls to “only” about $13.9 trillion.

That implies that for the war on terror to have been worth it, it had to have prevented more than 69 9/11-scale attacks over the past two decades, or about 3.5 attacks every single year.

More plausibly, the war on terror could be justified through, say, the far greater number of lives saved through aid to the Afghan health system.

Here, too, though, the necessary number of lives saved needs to be enormous to justify the costs. At a total cost of $13.9 trillion and a value of $6.5 million per life saved, the entire effort would have had to save at least 2.1 million lives to have been worthwhile.

There’s simply no evidence suggesting that the war on terror, or the public health programs launched as part of it, saved that many lives on net. The only estimate I’ve seen in that territory is the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon telling his colleague Jonathan Rauch that he “guesstimates that U.S. activities [in Afghanistan] saved a million or more lives.”

I emailed O’Hanlon to ask where that number came from. This was his reply:

Here’s a rough start on the problem: if deaths to children under 5 went down from 200 per 1,000 to 100 per 1,000 (illustratively), and there were more than half a million births a year, right there is a reduction of at least 25,000 deaths per year. Times 20 means at least 500,000 lives saved. That’s on the child survival front. There were also gains with life expectancy for adults, reductions in maternal mortality. I didn’t do a formal calculation; this is a ballpark estimate.

The figure of 25,000 deaths averted a year he cites is actually lower than the rough estimate of 44,500 I came to above on reduced child mortality. But even so, 500,000 total lives saved is likely an overestimate. The reduction in child mortality did not occur instantaneously between 2001 and 2002; it was gradual, meaning the gains, if they were the result of US actions, were only in effect for a fraction of the US occupation. And doubling the lives saved estimate to 1 million, without a specific reason to think an equivalent number of lives were saved through reductions in non-child mortality, seems foolish.

It is also important to think of the opportunity cost of the war. Coincident with the war’s launch was the initiation of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. That program, then and now, buys and distributes massive quantities of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV and AIDS in developing countries, and promotes condom distribution and other prevention measures.

One influential study of PEPFAR’s impact found that in its first four years, in 12 specific focus countries, the program reduced the death rate from HIV by 10.5 percent, resulting in 1.2 million lives saved, at a cost of $2,450 per death averted. It is truly one of George W. Bush’s great achievements.

That implies that the US, by expanding funding for HIV treatment and in other cost-effective areas like malaria prevention, could save 2 million lives at a cost of more like $5 billion, or less than one-thousandth the cost of the war on terror.

When you step back and think about the cost of the war on terror and all the possible benefits that could have come from it, you would be hard-pressed to arrive at a place where the benefits outstrip the costs. Indeed, the former never comes remotely close to the latter. The war on terror was as wasteful, and morally horrific, on the balance sheet as it was in the collective memory.

We need to remember the sheer magnitude of this disaster

At this juncture in history, perhaps the math above feels obvious, or even a non-story. Of course the war on terror, especially the war in Iraq, was a disaster. Of course the US wasted billions if not trillions of dollars, and ended hundreds of thousands of lives, when it did not need to. These are not original points, and many of us have internalized them so deeply that we no longer bat an eye.

It’s worth batting an eye, though. Jadedness has a tendency to cause us to glaze over outrages, to accept things that are not natural and to keep us from interrogating whether they are worthwhile parts of our world.

The war on terror has been naturalized to an astonishing degree over the past two decades. The drone war continues, usually off the news radar. Compare how much you heard about the ISIS strike on the Kabul airport to how much you heard about the 10 people — most or all of whom were reportedly civilians — the US killed in a reprisal drone strike.

As president, Donald Trump ramped up the effort by moving strikes outside a cumbersome interagency vetting process and toward faster-moving “country teams” responsible for strikes in their areas, and President Joe Biden is partially continuing that approach. The prison at Guantanamo Bay is still open and holding 39 people, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. All but two of them are being detained essentially without trial, and in the case of some, like Mohammed, after many excruciating rounds of torture.

These are policies that warrant evaluating in their own right. But they’re also worth considering as the remaining components of an outrageously wasteful policy disaster. It seems clear the war on terror was a bad idea. What are we going to do about it?

Dylan Matthews, Senior Correspondent: I joined Vox as one of our first three employees in February 2014, and have been here ever since, writing about everything from furries to foreign aid.

20 September 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Kai-Fu Lee

First there was gunpowder. Then nuclear weapons. Next: artificially intelligent weapons.

11 Sep 2021 – On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, against the backdrop of the rushed U.S.-allied Afghanistan withdrawal, the grisly reality of armed combat and the challenge posed by asymmetric suicide terror attacks grow harder to ignore.

But weapons technology has changed substantially over the past two decades. And thinking ahead to the not-so-distant future, we must ask: What if these assailants were able to remove human suicide bombers or attackers from the equation altogether? As someone who has studied and worked in artificial intelligence for the better part of four decades, I worry about such a technology threat, born from artificial intelligence and robotics.

Autonomous weaponry is the third revolution in warfare, following gunpowder and nuclear arms. The evolution from land mines to guided missiles was just a prelude to true AI-enabled autonomy—the full engagement of killing: searching for, deciding to engage, and obliterating another human life, completely without human involvement.

An example of an autonomous weapon in use today is the Israeli Harpy drone, which is programmed to fly to a particular area, hunt for specific targets, and then destroy them using a high-explosive warhead nicknamed “Fire and Forget.” But a far more provocative example is illustrated in the dystopian short film Slaughterbots, which tells the story of bird-sized drones that can actively seek out a particular person and shoot a small amount of dynamite point-blank through that person’s skull. These drones fly themselves and are too small and nimble to be easily caught, stopped, or destroyed.

These “slaughterbots” are not merely the stuff of fiction. One such drone nearly killed the president of Venezuela in 2018, and could be built today by an experienced hobbyist for less than $1,000. All of the parts are available for purchase online, and all open-source technologies are available for download. This is an unintended consequence of AI and robotics becoming more accessible and inexpensive. Imagine, a $1,000 political assassin! And this is not a far-fetched danger for the future but a clear and present danger.

We have witnessed how quickly AI has advanced, and these advancements will accelerate the near-term future of autonomous weapons. Not only will these killer robots become more intelligent, more precise, faster, and cheaper; they will also learn new capabilities, such as how to form swarms with teamwork and redundancy, making their missions virtually unstoppable. A swarm of 10,000 drones that could wipe out half a city could theoretically cost as little as $10 million.

Even so, autonomous weapons are not without benefits. Autonomous weapons can save soldiers’ lives if wars are fought by machines. Also, in the hands of a responsible military, they can help soldiers target only combatants and avoid inadvertently killing friendly forces, children, and civilians (similar to how an autonomous vehicle can brake for the driver when a collision is imminent). Autonomous weapons can also be used defensively against assassins and perpetrators.

But the downsides and liabilities far outweigh these benefits. The strongest such liability is moral—nearly all ethical and religious systems view the taking of a human life as a contentious act requiring strong justification and scrutiny. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has stated, “The prospect of machines with the discretion and power to take human life is morally repugnant.”

Autonomous weapons lower the cost to the killer. Giving one’s life for a cause—as suicide bombers do—is still a high hurdle for anyone. But with autonomous assassins, no lives would have to be given up for killing. Another major issue is having a clear line of accountability—knowing who is responsible in case of an error. This is well established for soldiers on the battlefield. But when the killing is assigned to an autonomous-weapon system, the accountability is unclear (similar to accountability ambiguity when an autonomous vehicle runs over a pedestrian).

Such ambiguity may ultimately absolve aggressors for injustices or violations of international humanitarian law. And this lowers the threshold of war and makes it accessible to anyone. A further related danger is that autonomous weapons can target individuals, using facial or gait recognition, and the tracing of phone or IoT signals. This enables not only the assassination of one person but a genocide of any group of people. One of the stories in my new “scientific fiction” book based on realistic possible-future scenarios, AI 2041, which I co-wrote with the sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan, describes a Unabomber-like scenario in which a terrorist carries out the targeted killing of business elites and high-profile individuals.

Greater autonomy without a deep understanding of meta issues will further boost the speed of war (and thus casualties) and will potentially lead to disastrous escalations, including nuclear war. AI is limited by its lack of common sense and human ability to reason across domains. No matter how much you train an autonomous-weapon system, the limitation on domain will keep it from fully understanding the consequences of its actions.

In 2015, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter on AI weapons, warning that “a global arms race is virtually inevitable.” Such an escalatory dynamic represents familiar terrain, whether the Anglo-German naval-arms race or the Soviet-American nuclear-arms race. Powerful countries have long fought for military supremacy. Autonomous weapons offer many more ways to “win” (the smallest, fastest, stealthiest, most lethal, and so on).

Pursuing military might through autonomous weaponry could also cost less, lowering the barrier of entry to such global-scale conflicts. Smaller countries with powerful technologies, such as Israel, have already entered the race with some of the most advanced military robots, including some as small as flies. With the near certainty that one’s adversaries will build up autonomous weapons, ambitious countries will feel compelled to compete.

Where will this arms race take us? Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at UC Berkeley, says, “The capabilities of autonomous weapons will be limited more by the laws of physics—for example, by constraints on range, speed, and payload—than by any deficiencies in the AI systems that control them. One can expect platforms deployed in the millions, the agility and lethality of which will leave humans utterly defenseless.” This multilateral arms race, if allowed to run its course, will eventually become a race toward oblivion.

Nuclear weapons are an existential threat, but they’ve been kept in check and have even helped reduce conventional warfare on account of the deterrence theory. Because a nuclear war leads to mutually assured destruction, any country initiating a nuclear first strike likely faces reciprocity and thus self-destruction.

But autonomous weapons are different. The deterrence theory does not apply, because a surprise first attack may be untraceable. As discussed earlier, autonomous-weapon attacks can quickly trigger a response, and escalations can be very fast, potentially leading to nuclear war. The first attack may not even be triggered by a country but by terrorists or other non-state actors. This exacerbates the level of danger of autonomous weapons.

There have been several proposed solutions for avoiding this existential disaster. One is the human-in-the-loop approach, or making sure that every lethal decision is made by a human. But the prowess of autonomous weapons largely comes from the speed and precision gained by not having a human in the loop. This debilitating concession may be unacceptable to any country that wants to win the arms race. Human inclusion is also hard to enforce and easy to avoid. And the protective quality of having a human involved depends very much on the moral character and judgment of that individual.

A second proposed solution is a ban, which has been supported by both the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and a letter signed by 3,000 people, including Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and thousands of AI experts. Similar efforts have been undertaken in the past by biologists, chemists, and physicists against biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. A ban will not be easy, but previous bans against blinding lasers and chemical and biological weapons appear to have been effective. The main roadblock today is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia all oppose banning autonomous weapons, stating that it is too early to do so.

A third approach is to regulate autonomous weapons. This will likewise be complex because of the difficulty of constructing effective technical specifications without being too broad. What defines an autonomous weapon? How do you audit for violations? These are all extraordinarily difficult short-term obstacles. In the very long term, creative solutions might be possible, though they are difficult to imagine—for example, can countries agree that all future wars will be fought only with robots (or better yet, only in software), resulting in no human casualties but delivering the classic spoils of war? Or perhaps there’s a future in which wars are fought with humans and robots, but the robots are permitted to use only weapons that will disable robot combatants and are harmless to human soldiers.

Autonomous weapons are already a clear and present danger, and will become more intelligent, nimble, lethal, and accessible at an alarming speed. The deployment of autonomous weapons will be accelerated by an inevitable arms race that will lack the natural deterrence of nuclear weapons. Autonomous weapons are the AI application that most clearly and deeply conflicts with our morals and threatens humanity.

Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO of Sinovation Ventures and a co-author of the new AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future.

20 September 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jonathan Cook

14 Sep 2021 – The United States has always been a bad loser. Whether it has viewed itself as an imperial power, a military superpower or, in today’s preferred terminology, the “world’s policeman”, the assumption is that everyone else must submit to its will.

All of which is the context for judging the outcry in western capitals over the US army’s hurried exit last month from Kabul, its final hold-out in Afghanistan.

There are lots of voices on both sides of the Atlantic lamenting that messy evacuation. And it is hard not to hear in them – even after a catastrophic and entirely futile two-decade military occupation of Afghanistan – a longing for some kind of re-engagement.

Politicians are describing the pull-out as a “defeat” and bewailing it as evidence that the US is a declining power. Others are warning that Afghanistan will become a sanctuary for Islamic extremism, leading to a rise in global terrorism.

Liberals, meanwhile, are anxious about a renewed assault on women’s rightsunder the Taliban, or they are demanding that more Afghans be helped to flee.

The subtext is that western powers need to meddle a little – or maybe a lot – more and longer in Afghanistan. The situation, it is implied, can still be fixed, or at the very least the Taliban can be punished as a warning to others not to follow in its footsteps.

All of this ignores the fact that the so-called “war for Afghanistan” was lost long ago. “Defeat” did not occur at Kabul airport. The evacuation was a very belated recognition that the US military had no reason, not even the purported one, to be in Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden evaded capture.

In fact, as experts on the region have pointed out, the US defeated itself. Once al-Qaeda had fled Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s chastened fighters had slunk back to their villages with no appetite to take on the US Robocop, each local warlord or tribal leader seized the moment. They settled scores with enemies by informing on them, identifying to the US their rivals as “terrorists” or Taliban.

US commanders blew ever bigger holes through the new Pax Americana as their indiscriminate drone strikes killed friend and foe alike. Soon most Afghans outside the corrupt Kabul elite had good reason to hate the US and want it gone. It was the Pentagon that brought the Taliban back from the dead.

Deceitful spin

But it was not just the Afghan elite that was corrupt. The country became a bottomless pit, with Kabul at its centre, into which US and British taxpayers poured endless money that enriched the war industries, from defence officials and arms manufacturers to mercenaries and private contractors.

Those 20 years produced a vigorous, powerful Afghanistan lobby in the heart of Washington that had every incentive to perpetuate the bogus narrative of a “winnable war”.

The lobby understood that their enrichment was best sold under the pretence – once again – of humanitarianism: that the caring West was obligated to bring democracy to Afghanistan.

That deceitful spin, currently being given full throat by politicians, is not just there to rationalise the past. It will shape the future, too, in yet more disastrous ways for Afghanistan.

With American boots no longer officially on the ground, pressure is already building for war by other means.

It should not be a difficult sell. After all, that was the faulty lesson learned by the Washington foreign policy elite after US troops found themselves greeted in Iraq, not by rice and rose petals, but by roadside bombs.

In subsequent Middle East wars, in Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US has preferred to fight more covertly, from a greater distance or through proxies. The advantage is no American body bags and no democratic oversight. Everything happens in the shadows.

There is already a clamour in the Pentagon, in think tanks, among arms manufacturers and defence contractors, and in the US media, too, to do exactly the same now in Afghanistan.

Nothing could be more foolhardy.

Brink of collapse

Indeed, the US has already begun waging war on the Taliban and – because the group is now Afghanistan’s effective government – on an entire country under Taliban rule. The war is being conducted through global financial institutions, and may soon be given a formal makeover as a “sanctions regime”.

The US did exactly the same to Vietnam for 20 years following its defeat there in 1975. And more recently Washington has used that same blueprint on states that refuse to live under its thumb, from Iran to Venezuela.

Washington has frozen at least $9.5bn of Afghanistan’s assets in what amounts to an act of international piracy. Donors from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to the European Union, Britain and the US are withholding development funds and assistance. Most Afghan banks are shuttered. Money is in very short supply.

Afghanistan is already in the grip of drought, and existing food shortages are likely to intensify during the winter into famine. Last week a UN report warnedthat, without urgent financial help, 97 percent of Afghans could soon be plunged into poverty.

All of this compounds Afghanistan’s troubles under the US occupation, when the number of Afghans in poverty doubled and child malnutrition became rampant. According to Ashok Swain, Unesco’s chair on international water cooperation, “more than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-thirds no electricity”.

That is an indictment of US misrule over the past two decades when, it might have been assumed, at least some of the $2tn spent on Afghanistan had gone towards Washington’s much-vaunted “nation-building” project rather than guns and gunships.

Now Afghans’ dire plight can be used as a launchpad for the US to cripple the Taliban as it struggles to rebuild a hollowed-out country.

The real aspiration of sanctions will be to engineer Afghanistan’s economic collapse – as an exemplar to others of US power and reach, and vindictiveness, and in the hope that the Afghan people can be starved to the point at which they rise up against their leaders.

Deepen existing splits

All of this can easily be framed in humanitarian terms, as it has been elsewhere. Late last month, the US drove through the United Nations Security Council a resolution calling for free travel through Kabul airport, guarantees on human rights, and assurances that the country will not become a shelter for terrorism.

Any of those demands can be turned into a pretext to extend sanctions to the Afghan government itself. Governments, including Britain’s, are already reported to be struggling to find ways to approve charities directing aid to Afghanistan.

But it is the sanctions themselves that will cause humanitarian suffering. Unpaid teachers mean no school for children, especially girls. No funds for rural clinics will result in more women dying in childbirth and higher infant mortality rates. Closed banks end in those with guns – men – terrorising everyone else over limited resources.

Isolating the Taliban with sanctions will have two entirely predictable outcomes.

First, it will push the country into the arms of China, which will be well-positioned to assist Afghanistan in return for access to its mineral wealth. Beijing has already announced plans to do business with the Taliban that include reopening the Mes Aynak copper mine.

As US President Joe Biden’s administration is already well-advanced in crafting China as the new global menace, trying to curtail its influence on neighbours, any alliance between the Taliban and China could easily provide further grounds for the US intensifying sanctions.

Secondly, sanctions are also certain to deepen existing splits within the Taliban, between the hardliners in the north and east opposed to engagement with the West, and those in the south keen to win over the international community in a bid to legitimise Taliban rule.

At the moment, the Taliban doves are probably in the ascendant, ready to help the US root out internal enemies such as the ISKP, Islamic State group’s offshoot in Afghanistan. But that could quickly change if Washington reverts to type.

A combination of sanctions, clumsy covert operations and Washington overplaying its hand could quickly drive the hardliners into power, or into an alliance with the local IS faction.

That scenario may have already been given a boost by a US drone strike on Kabul in late August, in retaliation for an ISKP attack on the airport that killed 13 US soldiers. New witness testimonies suggest the strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, not Islamic militants.

Familiar gameplan

If that weren’t bad enough, Washington hawks are calling for the Taliban to be officially designated a “foreign terrorist organisation”, and the new Afghan government a state sponsor of terrorism, which would make it all but impossible for the Biden administration to engage with it. Others such as Lindsey Graham, an influential US politician, are trying to pile on the pressure by calling for troops to return.

How readily this mindset could become the Washington consensus is highlighted by US media reports of plans by the CIA to operate covertly within Afghanistan. As if nothing has been learned, the agency appears to be hoping to cultivate opponents of the Taliban, including once again the warlords whose lawlessness brought the Taliban to power more than two decades ago.

This is a gameplan the US and Britain know well from their training and arming of the mujahideen to oust the Soviet army from Afghanistan in the 1980s and overthrow a few years later Afghanistan’s secular communist government.

Biden will have an added incentive to keep meddling in Afghanistan to prevent any attacks originating from there that could be exploited by his political opponents and blamed on his pulling out troops.

According to the New York Times, the CIA believes it must be ready to “counter threats” likely to emerge from a “chaos” the Taliban will supposedly unleash.

But Afghanistan will be far less chaotic if the Taliban are strong, not if – as is being proposed – the US undermines Taliban cohesion by operating spies in its midst, subverts the Taliban’s authority by launching drone strikes from neighbouring countries, and recruits warlords or sponsors rival Islamic groups to keep the Taliban under pressure.

William J Burns, the CIA’s director, has said the agency is ready to run operations “over the horizon” – at arm’s length. The New York Times has reported that US officials predict “Afghan opponents of the Taliban will most likely emerge who will want to help and provide information to the United States”.

This strategy will lead to a failed state, one immiserated by US sanctions and divided between warlords feuding over the few resources left. That is precisely the soil in which the worst kind of Islamic extremism will flourish.

Destabilising Afghanistan is what got the US into this mess in the first place. Washington seems only too ready to begin that process all over again.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

20 September 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Chris Hedges

The hijackers who carried out the attacks on 9/11, like all radical jihadist groups in the Middle East, spoke to us in the murderous language we taught them.

I was in Times Square in New York City shortly after the second plane banked and plowed into the South Tower. The crowd looking up at the Jumbotron gasped in dismay at the billowing black smoke and the fireball that erupted from the tower. There was no question now that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were acts of terrorism. The earlier supposition, that perhaps the pilot had a heart attack or lost control of the plane when it struck the North Tower seventeen minutes earlier, vanished with the second attack. The city fell into a collective state of shock. Fear palpitated throughout the streets. Would they strike again? Where? Was my family safe? Should I go to work? Should I go home? What did it mean? Who would do this? Why?

The explosions and collapse of the towers, however, were, to me, intimately familiar. I had seen it before. This was the familiar language of empire. I had watched these incendiary messages dropped on southern Kuwait and Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War and descend with thundering concussions in Gaza and Bosnia. The calling card of empire, as was true in Vietnam, is tons of lethal ordnance dropped from the sky. The hijackers spoke to America in the idiom we taught them.

The ignorance, masquerading as innocence, of Americans, mostly white Americans, was nauseating. It was the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. It was the greatest act of terrorism in American history. It was an incomprehensible act of barbarity. The stunningly naive rhetoric, which saturated the media, saw the blues artist Willie King sit up all night and write his song “Terrorized”.

“Now you talk ‘bout terror,” he sang. “I been terrorized all my days.”

But it was not only Black Americans who were familiar with the endemic terror built into the machinery of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire, but those overseas who the empire for decades sought to subdue, dominate, and destroy. They knew there is no moral difference between those who fire Hellfire and cruise missiles or pilot militarized drones, obliterating wedding parties, village gatherings or families, and suicide bombers.

They knew there is no moral difference between those who carpet-bomb North Vietnam or southern Iraq and those who fly planes into buildings. In short, they knew the evil that spawned evil. America was not attacked because the hijackers hated us for our values. America was not attacked because the hijackers followed the Quran – which forbids suicide and the murder of women and children. America was not attacked because of a clash of civilizations.

America was attacked because the virtues we espouse are a lie. We were attacked for our hypocrisy. We were attacked for the campaigns of industrial slaughter that are our primary way of speaking with the rest of the planet. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in the summer of 1965, called the bombing raids, which would eventually kill hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon, a form of communication with the communist government in Hanoi.

The lives of Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Libyans, and Yemenis are as precious as the lives of those killed in the Twin Towers. But this understanding, this ability to see the world as the world saw us, eluded Americans who, refusing to acknowledge the blood on their own hands, instantly bifurcated the world into good and evil, us and them, the blessed and the damned. The country drank deep of the dark elixir of nationalism, the heady elevation of us as a noble and wronged people. The flip side of nationalism is always racism. And the poisons of racism and hate infected the American nation to propel it into the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one from which it will never recover.

We did not, and do not, grasp that we are the mirror image of those we seek to destroy. We too kill with an inchoate fury. Over the past two decades, we have extinguished the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who never sought to harm the United States or were involved in the attacks on American soil. We too use religion, in our case the Christian faith, to mount a jihad or crusade. We too go to war to fight phantoms of our own creation.

I walked down the West Side Highway that morning to the moonscape the Twin Towers had become after they collapsed. Climbing over the rubble, hacking and coughing because of the toxic fumes from the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose, and construction debris, I saw the tiny bits of human flesh and body parts that were all that remained from the towers’ nearly 3,000 victims. It was obvious no one in the towers when they collapsed survived.

The manipulation of the images, however, had already begun. The scores of “jumpers,” those who leapt to their deaths before the collapses, were censored from the live broadcasts. They seemed to wait for turns. They often fell singly or in pairs, sometimes with improvised parachutes made from drapes, sometimes replicating the motions of swimmers. They reached speeds of 150 miles an hour during the 10 seconds it took before they hit the pavement. The bodies made a sickening thud on impact. All who saw them fall spoke of this sound.

The mass suicide was one of the pivotal events of 9/11. But it was immediately expunged from public consciousness. The jumpers did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The hopelessness and despair were too disturbing. It exposed our smallness and fragility. It illustrated that there are levels of suffering and fear that lead us to willingly embrace death. The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live.

The story being fabricated out of the ashes of the Twin Towers was a story of resilience, heroism, courage and self-sacrifice, not collective suicide. So, the mass murder and mass suicide were replaced with an encomium to the virtues and prowess of the American spirit.

The nation, fed this narrative, soon parroted back the clichés about terror. We became what we abhorred. The 9/11 deaths were used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan, “Shock and Awe”, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, airstrikes, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The corpses piled up in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, justified by our beatified dead. Twenty years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.

The intoxication of violence, the anodyne of war, is a poison. It condemns critical thought as treason. Its call to patriotism is little more than collective self-worship. It imparts a god-like power and license to destroy, not only things, but other human beings. But war is, ultimately, about betrayal, as the defeat in Afghanistan elucidates. Betrayal of the young by the old. Betrayal of idealists by cynics. Betrayal of soldiers and marines by war profiteers and politicians.

War, like all idols, begins by demanding the sacrifice of others but ends with the demand for self-sacrifice. The Greeks, like Sigmund Freud, grasped that war is the purist expression of the death instinct, the desire to exterminate all systems of life, including, ultimately, our own. Ares, the Greek god of war, was frequently drunk, quarrelsome, impetuous, and a lover of violence for its own sake. He was hated by nearly all the other gods, except the god of the underworld, Hades, to whom he delivered a steady stream of new souls. Ares’s sister, Eris, the goddess of chaos and strife, spread rumor and jealousy to fan the flames of war.

The defeat in Afghanistan has not forced a reckoning. The media coverage does not acknowledge the defeat, replacing it with the absurd idea that, by withdrawing, we defeated ourselves. The plight of women under Taliban rule and the frantic effort of the elites and those who collaborated with the foreign occupation forces to flee are myopically used to ignore the two decades of unmitigated terror and death we perpetrated on the Afghan people.

This moral fragmentation, where we define ourselves by tangential and often fictitious acts of goodness, is a psychological escape hatch. It allows us to avoid looking at who we are and what we have done. This willful blindness is what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “doubling,” the “division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that the part-self acts as an entire self.” This doubling, Lifton noted, is often done “outside of awareness.” And it is an essential ingredient to carrying out evil. If we refuse to see ourselves as we are, if we cannot shatter the lie perpetuated by our moral fragmentation, there is no hope of redemption. The gravest danger we face is the danger of alienation, not only from the world around us, but from ourselves.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of RT’s On Contact, a weekly interview series on US foreign policy, economic realities and civil liberties in American society.

11 September 2021

Source: www.rt.com

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

“The rising power of American Muslims” is the title of special issue of The Newsweek on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.  It published an article by Steve Friess under the title: Since 9/11, US Muslims have gained unprecedented political, cultural influence.

It’s been an impressive 2021 so far for Muslim Americans. The U.S. Senate, that bastion of partisan gridlock, overwhelmingly confirmed, Judge Zaidi Quraishi, the nation’s first Muslims as a federal district court judge and Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission. Legislatures in five states swore in their first Muslim members, including a non-binary, queer hijab-wearing representative in, of all places, Oklahoma. Three Detroit suburbs are poised this fall to elect their first Muslim mayors, according to the Newsweek.

The recent rise of many Muslim Americans to positions of power and influence—in Washington and in statehouses, on big screens and small ones, across playing fields and news desks—is a development that few in the U.S. would have predicted two decades ago, Muslims included.

It is the experience of coming of age in this post-9/11 environment, experts say, that drew a new generation of young Muslims to activism, and motivated them to use their voices in political and cultural arenas to debunk misinformation. That they’ve found a receptive audience beyond the Muslim community suggests to some observers that many Americans now understand that the anti-Islamic rhetoric they’ve been served in recent years is based on myths and untrue. As Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who in 2007 became the first Muslim sworn in as a member of Congress, tells Newsweek, “The haters have been proven to be liars.”

9/11 set off a wave of Islamophobia that has endured to this day

The September 11 attacks stirred a crescendo of Islamophobia that for the next two decades challenged their beliefs about what it means to be American, according to Dallas News.

Muslims were not the only victims of post-9/11 Islamophobia. The hate against the community also plagued others, such as Sikhs and other non-Muslims of South Asian descent, who were targeted solely for their appearance.

Harbhajan Singh, 65, director of the Gurdwara Nishkam Seva religious and community center in Irving,Texas, said Sikhs around the country were harassed and assaulted because of their religious practice of having beards and wearing turbans.

But rather than reject or distance themselves from the Muslim community, Singh said, many Sikhs, including those in Dallas-Fort Worth, chose to show solidarity.

“We made connections to show them that we support them in their time of need. The Muslim community is as affected by these extremists as perhaps other communities are,” he said. “We felt that the Muslim community was being wrongfully, collectively aligned with these extreme views and they need the support of other people to come around to fight against those types of sentiments together.”

Muslims growing up post-9/11 still can’t escape the long shadow of that day

Muslims who grew up post-9/11 are unable to escape the long shadow of that day, forever pushed to be on the defensive, to justify our place in this country, according to Boston Globe.

What followed the attacks was a war on terror that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives overseas, stripped our civil rights here at home, and caused enormous spikes in anti-Muslim violence.

One of the terrifying anti-Muslim violence happened in 2015 when three Muslim college students were shot to death in Chapel Hill, N.C., by a man who prosecutors said had made hateful comments to them in the past. In 2017, a shooter killed six people at a Quebec City mosque. Two years later, 51 Muslim worshipers were killed in attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Islamophobia does not just hurt Muslims. On Sept. 15, 2001, in what is believed to be the first hate-motivated murder in response to 9/11, a Sikh gas station owner was fatally shot in Mesa, Arizona and in 2012, a gunman killed six people at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, before shooting himself. Experts suspected he believed he was targeting a mosque.

The reverberations from 9/11 are far from history

Twenty years may have passed, but for Muslims, the reverberations from 9/11 are far from history.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, in July 2021 released a mid-year report highlighting serious cases of anti-Muslim incidents that occurred in the United States during the first seven months of 2021.

CAIR  typically publishes an annual report tracking hate crimes and bias incidents. The organization decided to release a mid-year “snapshot report” because of a spike in May and June, Robert McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs director, told CNN.

The hundreds of anti-Muslim incidents include hate crimes, harassment, school bullying, discrimination and hate speech.

CAIR documented a spike in anti-Muslim incidents in May and June, including four at mosques in May alone. Those cases involved vandalism, harassment towards women who wear hijab or headscarf and an attempted stabbing.

Remembrance and Resilience

Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has released a survey report to mark the twentieth anniversary. Titled “Remembrance and Resilience: American Muslims Twenty Years After 9/11,” this educational report reviews and analyzes the ways 9/11 has impacted the Muslim community in the United States.

Key research findings of the Survey are:

1. 63% of American Muslims believe that American media coverage of Muslims has not become more accurate in the years since 9/11.
2. 40% of respondents said that they are frequently stopped for extra screening or questioning at airports [strongly agree (20%) and agree (20%)]. This number is on par with the amount of complaints CAIR receives concerning immigration and travel related issues.
3. 95% of Muslims said that when they hear negative comments about Islam and Muslims, they always (45%) or sometimes (50%) speak out.
4. 69% of our respondents said that they have personally experienced one or more incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination since 9/11. Moreover, 83% said that they know a Muslim who has personally experienced anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination since 9/11.
5. 79% of our respondents said that they witnessed or experienced increased anti-Muslim bigotry after the 9/11 attacks. 69% said that they witnessed or experienced it after President Trump’s Muslim Ban and 51% stated that they witnessed or experienced it after the invasion of Iraq. [Note: Respondents were asked to check all that apply].
6. 34% of those surveyed said that anti-Muslim rhetoric in the years since 9/11 has had an impact on their mental health [strongly agree (14%) and agree (20%)].
7. 47% of Muslims reported feeling comfortable requesting a religious accommodation at school or work. 19% said that they feel somewhat comfortable while 19% do not feel comfortable.
8. African American Muslims are more likely to be comfortable requesting a religious accommodation at school or work (58% strongly agree or agree) and more likely to always feel comfortable wearing Islamic religious attire in public (52%) than other ethnic groups in the American Muslim community, including respondents who identify as White, African, Arab, South Asian, etc.
9. 72% of Muslim women have personally experienced one or more incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination since 9/11, compared to 67% of Muslim men. Muslim women also reported feeling less accepted in American society (56%) compared to Muslim men (65%).
10. 63% of Muslims report that their mosques have engaged in increased interfaith work since 9/11.

The CAIR survey was based on 1,338 responses from different walks of life in the Muslim community.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)

14 September 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By M K Bhadrakumar

The regional states will be shell-shocked by the brazen way Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), coerced the Taliban to announce an interim government that is guaranteed to preserve Rawalpindi’s control over the levers of power in Kabul.

There are several things to be noted about the so-called interim government announced by the Taliban on September 7. The “moderate” Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, supposedly number 2 in the Taliban hierarchy, has been designated to serve as First Deputy to Mullah Hasan Akhund who will be the acting prime minister.

Baradar who led the Taliban delegation at the Doha talks and was earlier mentioned widely as the likely head of the new Taliban government, has been pigeonholed — assigned to a titular post which will be, typically, an overly restrictive one.

Mullah Akhund will wield the baton. Now, he is one of the most enigmatic figures in the Taliban movement, rarest of rare exceptions of a shadowy figure who did not participate in the “jihad” against the Soviets in the 1980s but only to emerge as the powerful “ideologue” of the movement to serve on the shura councils.

He is singularly credited with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 and had a pivotal role in the development of the Taliban’s religious identity rooted in the brand of strict Islamist ideology, known as Deobandism.

Akhund dictated the ideological justification for the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan governments. Significantly, he operated almost entirely in exile from Pakistan through the past 20-year period.

Akhund’s impeccable Pashtun lineage is drawn from the powerful Durrani tribe from Kandahar, which, historically, anointed the Afghan rulers. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime (where he had served as foreign minister), Akhund landed with the powerful position as the head of the Rahbari Shura council of leaders, often called the “Quetta Shura”, which the ISI put together to plot the Taliban’s second coming to power.

The sidelining of Baradar is to be attributed to the political tension between him and the Haqqani Network. The ISI has had the final say in the matter. Baradar’s conciliatory politics with Karzai had earlier cost him 8 years’ incarceration in an ISI jail — until President Trump wanted him in Doha. The ISI never trusted him.

The most startling thing about Akhund is that his entrenched beliefs include treating women as mere chattels of men to bear children and treating ethnic and religious minorities as a lower form of life. He has been hard as rock on issues of civil rights. His edicts in the 1990s, adopted by the Taliban, included the banning of women’s education, enforcing gender segregation and the adoption of strict religious garb.

In retrospect, Baradar served merely as the facade of reason before the international community in Doha. With Akhund on one side and Sirajuddin Haqqani, Interior Minister-designate on the other side, he finds himself between the rock and a hard place.

Sirajuddin is unquestionably the blue-eyed boy of the ISI. His appointment is horrible news for New Delhi. But the big question for the future is about the US’ equation with the Haqqani Network. The mythology harps on the FBI notification of a “reward of up to $10 million for information leading directly to the arrest of Sirajuddin Haqqani” and its clarion call, “If you have any information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.”

The FBI calls Sirajuddin “a specially designated global terrorist” with close ties to the al-Qaeda but the charges against him are unsubstantiated and remain vaguely worded. Thus, Sirajuddin is “wanted for questioning in connection with the January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed six people, including an American citizen. He is believed to have coordinated and participated in cross-border attacks against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Haqqani also allegedly was involved in the planning of the assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2008.”

At the same time, the farcical FBI notice also says, “Haqqani is thought to stay in Pakistan, specifically the Miram Shah, North Waziristan, Pakistan, area.” read more

If the US could nab Osama bin Laden from a Pakistani cantonment town, why should it have outsourced the task as in the Wild West — posting a notice in every bar and brothel?

The point is, State Department’s archival materials also show that the US and the Haqqanis go back a long way. The Mujahideen group of Jalaluddin Haqqani was actually the only group in the 1980s jihad, which was trusted by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq to be allowed to have direct dealings with the CIA. The CIA of course described him as a “unilateral” asset who in turn received tens of millions of dollars in cash directly.

Indeed, when the time came for the CIA to transfer Osama bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan, it was to the safe custody of none other than Jalaluddin that the fugitive was left. Such was the bonding!

True, Jalaluddin subsequently refused to betray bin Laden and, possibly, helped him to evade the American net in the fastness of the Tora Bora mountain caves in December 2001. But, apparently, the two sides since moved on.

In fact, Lieutenant General John Nicholson, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during hearings when he was picked to lead the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan in January 2016 that the US counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan were not targeting the Haqqani network of militants. To quote the general, “They are not part of that designation right now…The Haqqanis are principally a focus of the Afghan security forces.”

Nicholson gave a laboured explanation that the US counterterrorism actions focused on al-Qaida and Islamic State. The US expected Pakistan to put enough pressure on the Haqqanis to prevent cross-border attacks! read more

The four star general indulged in this sophistry full 8 years after the Haqqani Network’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. It is a matter of shame and disgust, nothing less, that India’s Afghan policies all along toed the US strategies in Afghanistan — right up to this day so much so that Prime Minister Modi is reportedly looking forward to discussing with President Biden on the sidelines of the Quad summit in DC how the coordination can be strengthened in the current circumstances.

By the way, who is Maulawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, the foreign minister-designate in the interim government?

Ambassador Peter Tomsen, US Special Envoy on Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, has written in his classic work The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf personally called US President George W Bush on or about November 2001 for a VIP airlift out of Kunduz which was besieged by the Northern Alliance militia under Rashid Dostum (with support of US Special Forces) in the downstream of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney expressly approved Musharraf’s personal request. The well-known investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later wrote based on briefing from ex-CIA sources that US Central Command set up a special air corridor out of Kunduz to ensure the safety of the Pakistani military flights.

Close to a thousand people were evacuated, including al-Qaeda members, in the Kunduz airlift (known famously as the “Airlift of Evil”) to remote bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. And the grapevine is that one of the VIPs so evacuated was Maulawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, apart from senior Pakistani military officials. The ISI saw greater destiny for Muttaqi!

Can Pakistan get away with all this? This interim government won’t fly easily, but it won’t wither away either, although it can be recast. The regional capitals will react — Tehran and Moscow (and possibly even Beijing.) They have been taken for a ride by the Pakistani narrative of “inclusive government”.

Pakistan dared to push the envelope with the cool assessment that the US and its Western allies will engage with the Taliban once the dust settled down. The visit by the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb on 3rd September to Islamabad was the clincher. read more

On September 5, Gen. Hameed took off for Kabul. By September 7, we already saw the Taliban’s response to his dog whistle.

Originally posted in , indianpunchline

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years.

9 September 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rosa Miriam Elizalde

Cubans living abroad have been unable to send remittances to their loved ones on the island due to the unilateral coercive measure imposed by Donald Trump just before leaving office

With the money she earns cleaning houses in the morning and an office at night, Virgen Elena Pupo, a 47-year-old Cuban migrant, has managed to raise her family in Washington, D.C., but has not been able to help her parents in Holguín, Cuba. She is separated from her parents by more than 1,246 miles. In Cuba’s eastern region, Holguín has been hit hard by an increase in COVID-19 cases, but Pupo cannot visit or send money to her parents due to the restrictions on flights and remittances from the United States as a result of former US President Donald Trump’s policies that President Joe Biden has continued.

On October 27, 2020, a week before the US presidential elections took place on November 3, Trump issued his final sanction against the island. Trump included Cuban financial company Fincimex, Western Union’s main partner in the country, in the Cuban Restricted List. The pretext was that it belongs to the Cuban business corporation, Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.

This measure cut off the channels for sending remittances to Cuba, and Pupo’s elderly parents have not been able to receive any help amid the pandemic as a result of this move.

Fincimex issued a statement on August 27, 2021, announcing delays in the delivery of remittances that arrive in Cuba from third countries due to the difficulty of finding financial institutions willing to authorize operations. The inclusion of this company in the list of restricted entities by the US Treasury Department “continues to generate fears in the international banking sector about accepting operations directed to… [Fincimex] and tendencies to limit the scope of these transactions,” said the Fincimex statement.

The US policy relating to remittances goes against all logic. Remittances have come to the rescue of families affected by the coronavirus all over the world. According to the World Bank, money sent by migrants to their families in “low- and middle-income countries surpassed the sum of FDI [foreign direct investment] ($259 billion) and overseas development assistance ($179 billion) in 2020.” For example, remittances grew historically in Mexico in the first six months of 2021, as La Jornada recently reported. They reached $23.6 million, which is 22 percent more than the remittances received during the same period in 2020.

“As COVID-19 still devastates families around the world, remittances continue to provide a critical lifeline for the poor and vulnerable,” said Michal Rutkowski, global director of the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice at the World Bank. The regular remittances that poor Latin American migrants send to their families have become vital to many of the region’s economies. Generally, it’s the working poor who send small sums of money, sometimes up to eight times a year, usually sending more money than they earn during the year. For years, remittances have been one of Mexico’s main sources of foreign exchange, and remittances form close to or more than 20 percent of the gross domestic product of Honduras, El Salvador and other countries in Central America. They protect millions of people. But why do migrants do it? Why do they make sacrifices and send money back to their home countries? Surveys say that the explanation for this grand gesture of solidarity, with enormous macroeconomic impact, lies above all in supporting the institution of family. Migrants send money out of moral inspiration and loyalty to their parents, siblings, children, and nieces and nephews.

In a 2006 study on remittances and their imprint on the Cuban family, researcher Edel Fresneda Camacho recognized that this type of aid is not intended for productive investment. “It constitutes an important source of income for the recipient families, [for] their consumption and saving capacity, and implies an improvement in living conditions,” which in the case of Cuba includes the possibility of investing in a small private business.

Camacho and other researchers have given an account of the manipulative forays of the US government on this front. In the 1990s, during the crisis known in Cuba as the “Special Period,” the United States reinforced the economic siege. The former US President Bill Clinton prohibited remittances from August 1994 to 1998 except under strictly humanitarian conditions: illness or in cases of people with official immigration permission. Bush imposed even more cruel restrictions, allowing only visits to the island once every three years if the person visiting had very close relatives in Cuba—aunts, uncles, and cousins ​​were not considered “family.”

Even then, remittances managed to continue reaching the island. That is, until now. Without Western Union offices, without the possibility of shipments by DHL, with banks being intimidated and flights being suspended to all provinces, except for those very limited to Havana, Pupo can only hope that her elderly parents can survive the pandemic without any help from her. And she prays every day for common sense to prevail among those making policies in the White House, which is located just two blocks away from the office she cleans at night with the stubborn will to keep her loved ones afloat.

Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist and founder of the site Cubadebate.

9 September 2021

Source: countercurrents.org