Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld,
John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and the other neo-con wild boys who came to power
with George W. Bush in 2001 all shared a vision. In their minds, they saw a
cowed, conquered Iraq as the stepping stone to a wider conflict that would, in
the righteous fullness of Republican time, lead to broad regional
transformation and the enforced peace of empire, all of it lubricated by
“liberated” Middle Eastern petroleum.
Using Iraq as a jump-off
point, they would knock off regime after regime, running up the stars and
stripes as they went, and then watch as peace and prosperity unfolded like a
desert blossom. That cauldron of seemingly endless conflict would soon become a
happy democratic paradise filled to bursting with McDonald’s customers tying
the laces of their new Nike sneakers with fingers stained purple from voting.
All the wild boys needed was a catalyst, a “new Pearl Harbor,” to get the ball
rolling. When the Towers came down, they took their shot, and we were off to
the races.
It has not worked out exactly
as planned.
Sure, they got their endless
wars, and their friends all got rich profiteering off them, and the folks back
home think conservative Democrats are socialists and anarchists (or terrorists,
or bomb-throwers, depending on who you talk to) because the political “debate”
has been dragged so far to the right. Sure, the culture in general — after all
these blood-drenched years – is entrenched in a war-worshipping, racist siege
mentality, so detached from reality that Donald Trump actually became president
… but the peace/freedom/democracy/free oil bit pretty much comprehensively
failed to pan out.
Fifteen years after Bush
widened the war his father started 27 years ago, Iraq is a
shattered state. Neighboring Syria, which collapsed into chaos and violence
after absorbing millions of refugees from Iraq, is an equally brutalized
graveyard. Egypt and Libya are in varying states of social and economic
disrepair. Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war in Yemen, waged with direct US assistance
that began during the Obama administration, has
turned that country into an abattoir where tens of thousands have died
And then, of course, there is
Afghanistan, the war almost everybody seems to have forgotten we are still
fighting. That war — the longest ever fought in US history — will
be old enough to vote next year, or it could enlist and get deployed to
Afghanistan. It has taken the lives of nearly 4,000 coalition soldiers, roughly
half of whom were US troops. Three US troops were killed on Tuesday, and two others the week
before. More than 20,000 US troops have been wounded in combat.
More than 100,000 Afghan
people have been killed, some 30,000 of them civilians. Within the last 10 days in Afghanistan, 55 civilians
were killed and 94 wounded in a suicide bombing at a religious gathering. Two
soldiers and three police officers were killed in separate incidents on the
same day. On November 22, Taliban fighters summarily executed 11 local police
officers and militia members. In the US, the rare headlines about Afghanistan
range from grim (“17 Years In, Afghan War at a ‘Stalemate’”) to
downright Orwellian (“Rise in US Deaths in Afghanistan Clouds Outlook for Peace”).
To date, the war in
Afghanistan has cost more than $2 trillion, but that number does not account
for the interest on the loans the US took out to pay for the thing in the first
place. The conservative estimate for the cost of all the wars stands today at
around $6 trillion, but even that figure is largely guesswork because these
wars were financed off the books, and the Pentagon hasn’t been
able to do simple math for a couple of
generations.
Iraq, Afghanistan and now
Yemen. The country is discouraged from talking about these wars. They’re
generally left off the script by the TV news shows, because the right people —
those wealthy bullet-mongers you’ll never meet — are still making money off the
meat grinder hand over fist. That $6 trillion did not disappear; it moved to a
few upscale addresses and then got shipped offshore, far away from the eyes of
the IRS, because that’s The American Way, too.
It is virtually impossible to
avoid becoming deeply cynical in the face of all this, but there are shards of
light still piercing the smoke. On Wednesday, the US Senate threw a big brick
through the White House windows by overwhelmingly approving debate on a bill
that would end US military support for Saudi Arabia’s vicious war in Yemen.
Some 14 Republicans –
including Lindsey Graham, Bob Corker and co-sponsor Mike Lee – joined Bernie
Sanders and every Senate Democrat in voting to open debate, allowing it to pass
by a margin of 63-37. This dramatic sea change on the part of the GOP was made
possible by Donald Trump’s gruesome support for Saudi Arabia in the aftermath
of that nation’s assassination of Washington Post journalist and fierce Yemen
war critic Jamal Khashoggi. For Trump, the war money is more important than the murder, and that isn’t
sitting well even within the cretin brigade that is the Senate’s Republican
majority.
Voting to open debate on
ending US support for the Yemen war is not nearly the same as actually voting
to end it, and the bill to end it might seem to have small hope of passage
given how little time this Congress will be in session. However, although a
great many things will be changing in January, this needs to happen
immediately. US involvement in one gruesome corner of the wider war we started
must be brought to a close.
“Let us look each other in
the eye,” writes Truthout’s Robert Naiman, “and
commit that we will push by any and all legal and nonviolent means necessary to
force as many votes as necessary in the Senate and the House before Congress
adjourns for the year, in order to end the Yemen war and stop the famine. The
United Nations and aid groups have said forcefully that there must be a
sustained cease-fire right now, in order to get the people and resources into
Yemen that are necessary to stop the famine. Not in January. Right now.”
Right now, before another 17
years pass and Yemen is forgotten along with Afghanistan, Iraq and so much
else.