Sunday, March 31, 2019

A country of monopolies - Axios

CLEAR LAKE, Iowa — Chris Petersen, a third-generation hog farmer who says "I bleed rural" and tears up at the fate of family and friends, has found a way to keep his small holding going, and avoid the exodus that so many are making. His grown son and daughter have, too.
But meanwhile, Petersen is at war with the big companies that he says are destroying the culture of smaller places like Clear Lake.
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  • "We are going down the same road as the Russians with the collective farm system," he told me yesterday. "There, the government controlled it. Here, it's the corporations."
The big picture: While his is a dramatic rendering of the state of American agriculture, Petersen has a point: across industries, the U.S. has become a country of monopolies.
  • Three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms. Three have 95% of credit cards. Four have 70% of airline flights within the U.S. Google handles 60% of search. The list goes on. (h/t The Economist)
  • In agriculture, four companies control 66% of U.S. hogs slaughtered in 2015, 85% of the steer, and half the chickens, according to the Department of Agriculture. (h/t Open Markets Institute)
  • Simlarly, just four companies control 85% of U.S. corn seed sales, up from 60% in 2000, and 75% of soy bean seed, a jump from about half, the Agriculture Department says. Far larger than anyone — the American companies DowDuPont and Monsanto.
As we have reported, some economists say this concentration of market power is gumming up the economy, and is largely to blame for decades of flat wages and weak productivity growth.
  • The issue has become a higher-profile plank of both political parties — and could move to the center of the 2020 debate.
Farmers like Petersen are on the receiving end of all this concentration. Just in the five years from 2007 to 2012, the number of U.S. hog farms declined by 25%, the Agriculture Department says.
Joe Peiffer, a bankruptcy lawyer in the Iowa city of Hiawatha, told me that the current wave of consolidation shows no sign of reversing.
  • The culprit he sees is cheap food: In 1960, Americans spent 17% of their disposable income on food; the figure now is just 6.4%, according to U.S. government figures. The tight margins ran out everyone but the big dogs.
  • Whatever the reason, you can see the outcome outside of Des Moines. "A lot of towns are ghost towns because the farmers are gone. Schools are consolidating. My high school graduated 86 kids in 1974. It was 50 last year."
The heyday, in Petersen's memory, was the 1970s, when "rural America was ungodly vibrant." Sixty cents per pound of hog gave farmers a healthy profit, he said.
  • The nearby city of Swaledale had just 220 people, yet when you added in everyone in the surrounding, smaller towns, there was sufficient business for a bank, grocery and hardware stores, a gas station, and two bars with restaurants.
  • Now, Swaledale is about 150, and the businesses have shuttered: "It's all gone. That's what they've done to rural America."
When Petersen says "they," he means Big Ag, which in his view is plain greedy. It is trying "to run us out," he says, banging the table with his fist.
  • In a statement, Bayer, which owns Monsanto, said“Agriculture is a complex and highly competitive industry, and there are hundreds of companies driving innovation and competing for farmers’ business. After a robust global regulatory review process, we brought together two talented teams and a robust portfolio to offer more choices for farmers. Working with our customers and partners around the world, we are focused on developing smarter ways to grow healthy crops that are more environmentally and economically sustainable.”
  • DowDuPont did not respond to an email.
In 2001, Petersen went bankrupt. After that, he changed his business model and began to raise a premium hog known as a Berkshire, a breed whose meat he compares with Kobe beef. They fetch twice the price of the standard hog.
  • The whole sequence is outside the packers system. He said he earns more from the 500 Berkshires he raises every year than from the 2,500 ordinary hogs he used to produce.
  • "It's capitalism at its best. You get a price, not a fee," Petersen said.
Petersen's daughter Becky and son Matt live nearby. How have they managed to stay? Becky's husband Curtis and Matt both work as conductors for Union Pacific Railroad, he says.
  • Petersen doesn't want to say what they earn but says it's "ungodly wages." Both have acreage and raise cattle and chickens.
"In this wicked world," he says, "they're adjusted and are doing well."
https://www.axios.com/iowa-country-of-monopolies-7de113b7-2860-4fa2-83ea-32c5b6766c15.html

Midwest Apocalypse: Satellite Data Show "At Least 1 Million Acres Of US Farmland" Devastated By Floods | by Michael Snyder


We have never seen anything like this before.  According to satellite data that was just released by Reuters, “at least 1 million acres of U.S. farmland” were covered by water for at least seven days this month.  That is an agricultural disaster without equal in modern American history, and yet the mainstream media is treating this like it is some sort of second class story.  It isn’t.  This is the biggest news story of 2019 so far, and people want to know what is going on.  A few days ago, I posted a story entitled ‘“As Many As A Million Calves Lost In Nebraska” – Beef Prices In The U.S. To Escalate Dramatically In The Coming Months’, and it has already been shared on social media more than 145,000 times.  Farming communities all over the central part of the nation now look like war zones as a result of all this flooding, but the media elites on the east and west coasts don’t want to write about it.  And with more flooding on the way for the next two months, this crisis is only going to get worse.
This is the time of year when farmers are gearing up to plant wheat, corn and soybeans, and now a substantial portion of our farmland will not be able to be used at all this year.  According to Reuters, at least a million acres of farmland were covered by floodwaters for at least seven days this month, and that “will likely reduce corn, wheat and soy production this year”…
At least 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of U.S. farmland were flooded after the “bomb cyclone” storm left wide swaths of nine major grain producing states under water this month, satellite data analyzed by Gro Intelligence for Reuters showed.
Farms from the Dakotas to Missouri and beyond have been under water for a week or more, possibly impeding planting and damaging soil. The floods, which came just weeks before planting season starts in the Midwest, will likely reduce corn, wheat and soy production this year.
And with “as many as a million calves” lost to the flooding, a lot less food than anticipated is going to be produced in the United States for the foreseeable future.
Between March 8th and March 21st, almost 1.1 million acres of cropland and over 84,000 acres of pastureland were covered by water for at least a week.  With more rain on the way, it is essentially going to be impossible for most of those acres to be usable this year.
In Iowa, 474,271 acres were covered by floodwaters for at least seven days in March, and Iowa farmers are facing some very tough deadlines.  Corn must be planted by May 31st and soybeans must be planted by June 15th in order to qualify for flood insurance.  For most Iowa farms that were covered by floodwaters, that is going to be impossible.
Overall, the recent flooding caused “at least $3 billion” in economic damage according to authorities, but many believe that the final number will be far higher.
Thousands upon thousands of farms have been completely destroyed, and thousands upon thousands of farmers will not plant any crops at all this year.
In addition to the vast agricultural devastation that we have witnessed, thousands upon thousands of homes have been destroyed as well, and now the National Ground Water Association is warning that “the safety of more than a million private water wells” could be compromised…
Record flooding in the Midwest is now threatening the safety of more than a million private water wells. The National Ground Water Association estimates that people living in more than 300 counties across 10 states have their groundwater threatened from bacterial and industrial contamination carried by flood waters.
If you live in the middle of the country and there is a chance that your well may have been compromised, please don’t take any unnecessary chances.  Contaminated water can be really, really bad news.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.  According to the NOAA, we are entering an “unprecedented flood season” that could potentially “impact an even bigger area of cropland”
Spring floods could yet impact an even bigger area of cropland. The U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned of what could be an “unprecedented flood season” as it forecasts heavy spring rains. Rivers may swell further as a deep snow pack in northern growing areas melts.
In my previous article entitled ‘”200 Million People At Risk: National Weather Service Warns Apocalyptic Midwest Floods Are “A Preview Of What We Expect Throughout The Rest Of The Spring”’, I included a map from the NOAA which shows which areas of the central part of the country are projected to receive unusually high levels of rainfall over the next few months.
Unfortunately, there is a tremendous amount of overlap with areas that have already been devastated by flooding.
On Friday and Saturday, there will be “more heavy rains” in the Midwest, and Nebraska is in “the direct path” of the center of the storm…
From the Central Plains to the Midwest, it has been a disastrous spring for river flooding. A weather system slated to bring more heavy rains Friday into Saturday could aggravate the situation along and near the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.
It’s a one-two punch that combines additional rainwater with fresh runoff from snowmelt. Perhaps worst off is Nebraska, in the direct path of Friday’s quick burst of moisture. Barely a week has passed since Gov. Pete Ricketts estimated the cost of ongoing flooding in that state at more than $1 billion.
This is it.  America is being hammered by one storm after another, and I very much encourage you to get prepared for a very rough ride ahead.
There is going to be a lot more flooding.  Prices for beef, dairy, wheat, corn and soy products are going to rise significantly, and just when you think they are way too high they are going to keep on rising.
This is already the worst agricultural disaster in modern American history, and federal authorities are telling us that we should expect things to continue to get worse for at least two more months.
Perhaps the mainstream media will eventually decide to take this story seriously, but until they do those of us in the alternative media will do our best to keep you updated.
About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared NowThe Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.


Saturday, March 30, 2019

Vox Popoli: Redefining Western Civilization


Having seen how his forefathers successfully redefined America out of existence to suit themselves with their ahistorical Melting Pot mythology, Ben Shapiro is now attempting to redefine Western Civilization in order to better suit his Neo-Palestinian perspective. That's what it means for him to be on "the right side of history". From a comment on the Darkstream:
Madhatter
I mentioned his Tweet about his recent book and listed him the three cores ofWestern Civilization. It was a real mention, not a comment over a screenshot

Western Civilization:

European etnichities 


Greco-roman heritage


Christianity
( the most important)

Who is rewriting it Ben?

Ben Shapiro @benshapiro
"So, if you'd like to both join the fight against the alt-right and their racist rewriting of "Western civilization," and fight the horrific media bias of people who lump together conservatism and alt-right racism, buy a copy of my book"


The amount of projection in that tweet is simply astonishing. It is Ben Shapiro who is the racist advocate of global imperialism. As you should be able to see by now, Shapiro, Peterson, Prager, and others of their Fake Right camouflage are every bit as evil and anti-Western as the SJWs, but they are considerably more dangerous due to their proven ability to disguise their intentions and to fool so many self-styled conservatives into blithely supporting the ongoing destruction of America and the West.


Must the West Beg the World for Forgiveness? - by Patrick J. Buchanan


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Are all civilizations and cultures equal, or are some more equal than others?

As the Democratic Party quarrels over reparations for slavery, a new and related issue has arisen, raised by the president of Mexico.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has written Pope Francis I and King Felipe VI to demand their apologies for the Spanish conquest of Mexico that began 500 years ago with the “invasion” of Hernando Cortez.
Arriving on the Gulf Coast in 1519, Cortes marched in two years to what is today’s Mexico City to impose Spanish rule, the Spanish language and culture, and the Catholic faith upon the indigenous peoples.
“One culture, one civilization was imposed upon another,” wrote President Lopez Obrador: “There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the temples.”
He demanded that the king and the pope ask for “forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on the indigenous peoples of Mexico.”
Now no one denies that great sins and crimes were committed in that conquest. But are not the Mexican people, 130 million of them, far better off because the Spanish came and overthrew the Aztec Empire?
Did not 300 years of Spanish rule and replacement of Mexico’s pagan cults with the Catholic faith lead to enormous advances for its civilization and human rights?
Or is there never a justification for one nation to invade another, conquer its people, impose its rule, and uproot and replace its culture and civilization? Is “cultural genocide” always a crime against humanity, even if the uprooted culture countenanced human sacrifice?
Did the Aztecs have a right to be left alone by the European world?
If so, whence came that right?
Which leads to another question: Are all civilizations and cultures equal, or are some more equal than others? Are some superior?
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Before recent decades, most Americans were taught to believe the West stood above all other civilizations, and America was its supreme manifestation. And much of the world seemed to agree.
As for the assertion that all civilizations and cultures are equal, that is an ideological statement. But where is the historic, scientific or empirical evidence to support that proposition? How many people really believe that?
Spain’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said it was “weird to receive now this request for an apology for events that occurred 500 years ago.”
He wondered if Spain should seek an apology from France for the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and crimes committed by the armies of Napoleon, or if France could demand an apology from Italy for the invasion of Gaul by Julius Caesar?
Unlikely to get an apology from the king, Lopez Obrador may do better with Pope Francis who is into begging for forgiveness for crimes committed in the Spanish-Portuguese conquest and rule of South America.
In Bolivia in 2015, the pope declared:
“I say this to you with regret. Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God. … I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native people during the so-called conquest of America.”
As The New York Times related in its story on the “chilly response” in Madrid to Mexico’s demand, other Western leaders — not only Barack Obama — are very much into this apology fad.
Justin Trudeau has apologized for Canada’s mistreatment of its indigenous peoples. France’s Emmanuel Macron has apologized for the torture of rebels in Algeria’s war for independence.
The Spanish right, however, is not with the program.
Alberto Rivera, leader of the Ciudadanos, called Lopez Obrador’s demand “an intolerable offense to the Spanish people.”
Rafael Hernando of the Popular Party dismissed it with contempt: “We Spaniards went there (to Mexico) and ended the power of tribes that assassinated their neighbors with cruelty and fury.”
Behind this demand for an apology from Spain and the Church is a view of history familiar to Americans, and rooted in clashing concepts about who we are, and were.
Have the Western peoples who conquered and changed much of the world been, on balance, a blessing to mankind or a curse? Is the history of the West, though replete with the failings of all civilizations, not unique in the greatness of what it produced?
Or are the West’s crimes of imperialism, colonialism, genocide, racism, slavery and maltreatment of minorities of color so sweeping, hateful and shameful they cancel out the good done?
Is the white race, as Susan Sontag wrote, “the cancer of human history”?
As we see the monuments and memorials to the great men of our past desecrated and dragged down, the verdict among a slice of our intellectual and cultural elites is already in. Thumbs down. They agree with the moral shakedown artist of Mexico City.
Query: Can peoples who are ashamed of their nation’s past do great things in its future? Or is a deep-seated national guilt, such as that which afflicts many Germans today, a permanent incapacitating feature of a nation’s existence?

Friday, March 29, 2019

Whose Blood, Whose Treasure?, by William J. Astore - The Unz Review


America's Senior Generals Find No Exits From Endless War

Veni, Vidi, Vici,” boasted Julius Caesar, one of history’s great military captains. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that famed saying when summing up the Obama administration’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 — with a small alteration. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said with a laugh about the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s autocratic leader. Note what she left out, though: the “vici” or victory part. And how right she was to do so, since Washington’s invasions, occupations, and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere in this century have never produced anything faintly like a single decisive and lasting victory.
“Failure is not an option” was the stirring 1995 movie catchphrase for the dramatic 1970 rescue of the Apollo 13 moon mission and crew, but were such a movie to be made about America’s wars and their less-than-vici-esque results today, the phrase would have to be corrected in Clintonian fashion to read “We came, we saw, we failed.”
Wars are risky, destructive, unpredictable endeavors, so it would hardly be surprising if America’s military and civilian leaders failed occasionally in their endless martial endeavors, despite the overwhelming superiority in firepower of “the world’s greatest military.” Here’s the question, though: Why have all the American wars of this century gone down in flames and what in the world have those leaders learned from such repetitive failures?
The evidence before our eyes suggests that, when it comes to our senior military leaders at least, the answer would be: nothing at all.
Let’s begin with General David Petraeus, he of “the surge” fame in the Iraq War. Of course, he would briefly fall from grace in 2012, while director of the CIA, thanks to an affair with his biographer with whom he inappropriately shared highly classified information. When riding high in Iraq in 2007, however, “King David” (as he was then dubbed) was widely considered an example of America’s best and brightest. He was a soldier-scholar with a doctorate from Princeton, an “insurgent” general with the perfect way — a revival of Vietnam-era counterinsurgency techniques — to stabilize invaded and occupied Iraq. He was the man to snatch victory from the jaws of looming defeat. (Talk about a fable not worthy of Aesop!)
Though retired from the military since 2011, Petraeus somehow remains a bellwether for conventional thinking about America’s wars at the Pentagon, as well as inside the Washington Beltway. And despite the quagmire in Afghanistan (that he had a significant hand in deepening), despite the widespread destruction in Iraq (for which he would hold some responsibility), despite the failed-state chaos in Libya, he continues to relentlessly plug the idea of pursuing a “sustainable” forever war against global terrorism; in other words, yet more of the same.
Here’s how he typically put it in a recent interview:
“I would contend that the fight against Islamist extremists is not one that we’re going to see the end of in our lifetimes probably. I think this is a generational struggle, which requires you to have a sustained commitment. But of course you can only sustain it if it’s sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.”
His comment brings to mind a World War II quip about General George S. Patton, also known as “old blood and guts.” Some of his troops responded to that nickname this way: yes, his guts, but our blood. When men like Petraeus measure the supposed sustainability of their wars in terms of blood and treasure, the first question should be: Whose blood, whose treasure?
When it comes to Washington’s Afghan War, now in its 18th year and looking ever more like a demoralizing defeat, Petraeus admits that U.S. forces “never had an exit strategy.” What they did have, he claims, “was a strategy to allow us to continue to achieve our objectives… with the reduced expenditure in blood and treasure.”
Think of this formulation as an upside-down version of the notorious “body count” of the Vietnam War. Instead of attempting to maximize enemy dead, as General William Westmoreland sought to do from 1965 to 1968, Petraeus is suggesting that the U.S. seek to keep the American body count to a minimum (translating into minimal attention back home), while minimizing the “treasure” spent. By keeping American bucks and body bags down (Afghans be damned), the war, he insists, can be sustained not just for a few more years but generationally. (He cites 70-year troop commitments to NATO and South Korea as reasonable models.)
Talk about lacking an exit strategy! And he also speaks of a persistent “industrial-strength” Afghan insurgency without noting that U.S. military actions, including drone strikes and an increasing reliance on air power, result in ever more dead civilians, which only feed that same insurgency. For him, Afghanistan is little more than a “platform” for regional counterterror operations and so anything must be done to prevent the greatest horror of all: withdrawing American troops too quickly.
In fact, he suggests that American-trained and supplied Iraqi forces collapsed in 2014, when attacked by relatively small groups of ISIS militants, exactly because U.S. troops had been withdrawn too quickly. The same, he has no doubt, will happen if President Trump repeats this “mistake” in Afghanistan. (Poor showings by U.S.-trained forces are never, of course, evidence of a bankrupt approach in Washington, but of the need to “stay the course.”)
Petraeus’s critique is, in fact, a subtle version of the stab-in-the-back myth. Its underlying premise: that the U.S. military is always on the generational cusp of success, whether in Vietnam in 1971, Iraq in 2011, or Afghanistan in 2019, if only the rug weren’t pulled out from under the U.S. military by irresolute commanders-in-chief.
Of course, this is all nonsense. Commanded by none other than General David Petraeus, the Afghan surge of 2009-2010 proved a dismal failure as, in the end, had his Iraq surge of 2007. U.S. efforts to train reliable indigenous forces (no matter where in the embattled Greater Middle East and Africa) have also consistently failed. Yet Petraeus’s answer is always more of the same: more U.S. troops and advisers, training, bombing, and killing, all to be repeated at “sustainable” levels for generations to come.
The alternative, he suggests, is too awful to contemplate:
“You have to do something about [Islamic extremism] because otherwise they’re going to spew violence, extremism, instability, and a tsunami of refugees not just into neighboring countries but… into our western European allies, undermining their domestic political situations.”
No mention here of how the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq spread destruction and, in the end, a “tsunami of refugees” throughout the region. No mention of how U.S. interventions and bombing in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere help “spew” violence and generate a series of failed states.
And amazingly enough, despite his lack of “vici” moments, the American media still sees King David as the go-to guy for advice on how to fight and win the wars he’s had such a hand in losing. And just in case you want to start worrying a little, he’s now offering such advice on even more dangerous matters. He’s started to comment on the new “cold war” that now has Washington abuzz, a coming era — as he puts it — of “renewed great power rivalries” with China and Russia, an era, in fact, of “multi-domain warfare” that could prove far more challenging than “the asymmetric abilities of the terrorists and extremists and insurgents that we’ve countered in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and a variety of other places, particularly since 9/11.”
For Petraeus, even if Islamic terrorism disappeared tomorrow and not generations from now, the U.S. military would still be engaged with the supercharged threat of China and Russia. I can already hear Pentagon cash registers going ka-ching!
And here, in the end, is what’s most striking about Petraeus’s war lessons: no concept of peace even exists in his version of the future. Instead, whether via Islamic terrorism or rival great powers, America faces intractable threats into a distant future. Give him credit for one thing: if adopted, his vision could keep the national security state funded in the staggering fashion it’s come to expect for generations, or at least until the money runs out and the U.S. empire collapses.
Two Senior Generals Draw Lessons from the Iraq War
David Petraeus remains America’s best-known general of this century. His thinking, though, is anything but unique. Take two other senior U.S. Army generals, Mark Milley and Ray Odierno, both of whom recently contributed forewords to the Army’s official history of the Iraq War that tell you what you need to know about Pentagon thinking these days.
Published this January, the Army’s history of Operation Iraqi Freedom is detailed and controversial. Completed in June 2016, its publication was pushed back due to internal disagreements. As the Wall Street Journal put it in October 2018: “Senior [Army] brass fretted over the impact the study’s criticisms might have on prominent officers’ reputations and on congressional support for the service.” With those worries apparently resolved, the study is now available at the Army War College website.
The Iraq War witnessed the overthrow of autocrat (and former U.S. ally) Saddam Hussein, a speedy declaration of “mission accomplished” by President George W. Bush, and that country’s subsequent descent into occupation, insurgency, civil war, and chaos. What should the Army have learned from all this? General Milley, now Army chief of staff and President Trump’s nominee to serve as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is explicit on its lessons:
“OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] is a sober reminder that technological advantages and standoff weapons alone cannot render a decision; that the promise of short wars is often elusive; that the ends, ways, and means must be in balance; that our Army must understand the type of war we are engaged with in order to adapt as necessary; that decisions in war occur on the ground in the mud and dirt; and that timeless factors such as human agency, chance, and an enemy’s conviction, all shape a war’s outcome.”
These aren’t, in fact, lessons. They’re military banalities. The side with the best weapons doesn’t always win. Short wars can turn into long ones. The enemy has a say in how the war is fought. What they lack is any sense of Army responsibility for mismanaging the Iraq War so spectacularly. In other words, mission accomplished for General Milley.
General Odierno, who commissioned the study and served in Iraq for 55 months, spills yet more ink in arguing, like Milley, that the Army has learned from its mistakes and adapted, becoming even more agile and lethal. Here’s my summary of his “lessons”:
* Superior technology doesn’t guarantee victory. Skill and warcraft remain vital.
* To win a war of occupation, soldiers need to know the environment, including “the local political and social consequences of our actions… When conditions on the ground change, we must be willing to reexamine the assumptions that underpin our strategy and plans and change course if necessary, no matter how painful it may be,” while developing better “strategic leaders.”
* The Army needs to be enlarged further because “landpower” is so vital and America’s troops were “overtaxed by the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the decision to limit our troop levels in both theaters had severe operational consequences.”
* The Iraq War showcased an Army with an “astonishing” capacity “to learn and adapt in the midst of a war that the United States was well on its way to losing.”
The gist of Odierno’s “lessons”: the Army learned, adapted, and overcame. Therefore, it deserves America’s thanks and yet more of everything, including the money and resources to pursue future wars even more successfully. There would, however, be another way to read those lessons of his: that the Army overvalued technology, that combat skills were lacking, that efforts to work with allies and Iraqi forces regularly failed, that Army leadership lacked the skills needed to win, and that it was folly to get into a global war on terror in the first place.
On those failings, neither Milley nor Odierno has anything of value to say, since their focus is purely on how to make the Army prevail in future versions of just such wars. Their limited critique, in short, does little to prevent future disasters. Much like Petraeus’s reflections, they cannot envision an end point to the process — no victory to be celebrated, no return to America being “a normal country in a normal time.” There is only war and more war in their (and so our) future.
The Undiscovered Country
Talk of such future wars — of, that is, more of the same — reminded me of the sixth Star Trek movie, The Undiscovered Country. In that space opera, which appeared in 1991 just as the Soviet Union was imploding, peace finally breaks out between the quasi-democratic Federation (think: the USA) and the warmongering Klingon Empire (think: the USSR). Even the Federation’s implacable warrior-captain, James T. Kirk, grudgingly learns to bury the phaser with the Klingon “bastards” who murdered his son.
Back then, I was a young captain in the U.S. Air Force and, with the apparent end of the Cold War, my colleagues and I dared talk about, if not eternal peace, at least “peace” as our own — and not just Star Trek’s — undiscovered country. Like many at the time, even we in the military were looking forward to what was then called a “peace dividend.”
But that unknown land, which Americans then glimpsed ever so briefly, remains unexplored to this day. The reason why is simple enough. As Andrew Bacevich put it in his book Breach of Trust, “For the Pentagon [in 1991], peace posed a concrete and imminent threat” — which meant that new threats, “rogue states” of every sort, had to be found. And found they were.
It comes as no surprise, then, that America’s generals have learned so little of real value from their twenty-first-century losses. They continue to see a state of “infinite war” as necessary and are blind to the ways in which endless war and the ever-developing war state in Washington are the enemies of democracy.
The question isn’t why they think the way they do. The question is why so many Americans share their vision. The future is now. Isn’t it time that the U.S. sought to invade and occupy a different “land” entirely: an undiscovered country — a future — defined by peace?
A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, Astore is a TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
(Republished from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative)