graeme
Speaking of scumbags....
Posted on: 01/08/2012 22:04
There's been a surprising lack of discussion of immense changes in American foreign, domestic and military policy in recent weeks.
1. Obama signs a bill enabling the army to arrest and detain people with no charge and no trial. That's stunning development in a country that calls itself a democracy.
2. He announces big cuts in the defence budget even as he also announces a switch in strategy to confront rising powers in Asia. He seems to be making the cuts by
a) cutting down on the numbers of people in the mlitary.
b) cutting back on benefits (like health care) for veterans. This will provide a huge saving since the cost of benefits for veterans since Iraq has been estimated over the years to come to a total of 3 trillion dollars - some three times what the Iraq war, itself, cost.
c) the slack will be taken up by increased use of robot weapons - like drones. Also by special ops troops, few in number but effective to create disorder in countries. Good value for "unofficial" wars.
d)Switching the focus of strategy to the Pacific. This, alone, is a stunning move. It amounts to an admission that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were blunders. He is trying to abandon the Bush/Obama policies of the last 12 years, replacing them with an even worse one.
I would guess that we will see a growth in the US Pacific flleet, using ships heavily armed with drones and other remote weapons. Initially, the main purpose will be to keep China out of Africa, which is a major source of cheap labour and cheap resources for the US.
However, i would also expect it cannot be done. Even with NATO chipping in for a bigger share of the dirty work, the US probably cannot extricate itself from Africa and the middle east. It also has to face rising defiance in Latin America - and the possibility of disorder in the US, itself.
Only two things are certain.
The use of robot weapons will mean even higher civilian casualties than we have seen.
The obvious and direct confrontation with China will be very dangerous.
Oh - and we'll be in it all the way. Listen to Harper's most recent statements about how Iran is the greatest threat to world peace. The statement is absurd. But there is no shortage of fools who will believe it. Harper has made Ottawa a branch office of the US.
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sighsnootles
Posted on: 01/10/2012 07:54
geez, i've been talking about this quite a bit on other threads....
LBmuskoka
Posted on: 01/11/2012 07:01
Here is an interesting perspective that shares Graeme's ...
Why Do We Ignore the Civilians Killed in American Wars?
By John Tirman, The Washington Post Jan 6 2012
[excerpt...click title above for full article...]
Why the American silence on our wars' main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls "the frontier myth" - in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we're trying to conquer - plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America's sturdiest national narratives.
When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as the Indians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplan wrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, "The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century."
Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military's code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound? It was Geronimo.
The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture's derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put these foreigners at risk of violence. President George W. Bush, to his credit, disavowed these wars as being against Islam, as has President Obama.
Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the "just world" theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that "just world" is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.
This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.
These attitudes have consequences. Perhaps the most important one - apart from the tensions created with the host governments, which have been quite vocal in protesting civilian casualties - is that indifference provides permission to our military and political leaders to pursue more interventions.
There are costs to our global reputation as well: The United States, which should be regarded as a principal advocate of human rights, undermines its credibility when it is so dismissive of civilian casualties in its wars. Appealing for international action on Sudan, Syria and other countries may sound hypocritical when our own attitudes about civilians are so cold. Korean War historian Bruce Cumings calls this neglect the "hegemony of forgetting, in which almost everything to do with the war is buried history."
Will we ever stop burying memories of war's destruction? More attention to the human costs may jolt the American public into a more compassionate understanding. When we build the memorial for Operation Iraqi Freedom, let's mention that Iraqi civilians were part of the carnage. Count them, and maybe we can start to recognize and remember the larger tolls of the wars we wage.
graeme
Posted on: 01/11/2012 18:43
watch for more civilian dead. Drones are now something like 30 to 40 percent of the entire US air force. And they are commonly used against countries with which the US is not at war (Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iran...)