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US SenateJoe Manchin insists he ‘can’t vote for’ $3.5tn spending billModerate Democrat who is the Senate swing vote says cost is too high and efforts to speed bill’s passage too hasty Richard Luscombe@ More
US Capitol attackSix US Capitol police officers could face discipline for 6 January actionsInternal investigation recommends disciplinary measures against officers but none will face criminal charges Richard Luscombe@ More
US politicsTop security officials to reinstall Capitol fence ahead of far-right rallyJustice for J6 rally organized by pro-Trump supportersFence to protect people but no request for national guard Hugo Lowell in WashingtonSun 12 Sep 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 12 Sep 2021 05.39 EDTTop security officials in Congress are expected to reinstall fencing around the Capitol and authorize the use of deadly force ahead of a planned rally by far-right Trump supporters next weekend demanding the release of rioters arrested in connection with the 6 January insurrection.How 9/11 led the US to forever wars, eroded rights – and insurrectionRead moreThe officials, however, had no plans so far to request the national guard, and were not pushing for such a request, principally because the threat assessment did not warrant their deployment, according to sources familiar with the matter.The Justice for J6 rally on 18 September is being organized by the Trump operative Matt Braynard and his organization Look Ahead America. It is being held to demand that the justice department drop charges against nearly 600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack which the group calls “non-violent protesters”, despite widespread violence and five deaths during the insurrection.The Senate sergeant-at-arms, Lt Gen Karen Gibson, House sergeant-at-arms, Maj Gen William Walker, and US Capitol police chief, Thomas Manger, are expectedto approve fencing to form the backbone of their security response, the sources said.The reinstallation of the 7ft fence as part of a perimeter that could extend to the Capitol reflecting pool will be supplemented by the authorization of US Capitol police officers to use deadly force to protect members of Congress and staff, the sources said.Both measures were characterized to the Guardian as a move to warn against anyone attempting a repeat of the 6 January attack on the Capitol. The final recommendations are slated to be unveiled at a briefing to congressional leaders on Monday.“We intend to have the integrity of the Capitol be intact,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Wednesday of measures being considered. “What happened on January 6 was such an assault on this beautiful Capitol, under the dome that Lincoln built during the civil war.”The approval for the fence is almost certain to be granted as security officials believe it remains the most efficient method to secure the Capitol – and can serve as a dry-run for a new quick-reaction fencing contract funded in a $2.1bn security bill passed by Congress in July.Members of the US Capitol police board weighed whether to request the national guard but the threat assessment for the 18 September rally reviewed at a series of meetings in recent days did not warrant the backstop, the sources said.That appears to have come after allies of Donald Trump largely distanced themselves from the protest while no lawmakers – including House Republicans under scrutiny for their roles in the Capitol attack – have said they will attend.The Capitol attack ultimately left nearly 140 police officers injured, including 15 who were hospitalized after battling to retake control of Congress from rioters who sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden‘s election victory.One officer lost the tip of his right index finger. Others were smashed in the head with baseball hats, flag poles and pipes, while another officer lost consciousness after rioters pushed her backwards into stairs as they tried to reach the Capitol steps.According to the union representing US Capitol police, one officer had two cracked ribs and two shattered spinal discs, while his colleague was stabbed with a metal fence stake. Four police officers who responded to the Capitol attacks have since died by suicide.The event, for which Braynard filed a permit predicting 700 people to attend, comes as the Capitol has seen a series of troubling one-off incidents, including a man who parked a pickup truck next to the Library of Congress and said he had a bomb and detonator.TopicsUS politicsUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More
Politics booksTwenty years on from 9/11, is US democracy working? From 9/11 to the storming of the Capitol, a new book by Biden biographer Evan Osnos covers a tumultuous period of US history. He talks to David Smith about Trump, Afghanistan and the beginning of a new eraDavid Smith in Washington@ More
Joe BidenBiden’s hard line on vaccine mandates draws praise and pushbackSome experts say Biden’s move comes at critical moment in pandemic but lawsuits from Republican leaders are also expected M More
Joe Biden‘Have at it’: Joe Biden dares vaccine mandate opponents to take him onPartisan pushback comes as CDC releases study finding those who were not fully vaccinated recently were 11 times more likely to die of Covid Joan E Greve in Washington and Richard Luscombe in MiamiFri 10 Sep 2021 15.13 EDTFirst published on Fri 10 Sep 2021 14.08 EDTJoe Biden has dared political opponents plotting legal challenges to his large-scale workforce vaccine mandates to “have at it” – as one Republican governor promised to fight the White House “to the gates of hell” over the new coronavirus rules.A growing number of senior Republicans, including US senators, state governors and leading party officials, announced on Friday they would support or pursue legal avenues to try to block the president’s edict.Biden tells Republicans threatening to sue over vaccine mandate: ‘Have at it’ – live Read moreIn an address at the White House on Thursday, Biden said his new orders would affect 100 million workers and help “turn the tide of Covid-19” in the US.Among the most vocal was the South Carolina governor, Henry McMaster, who, in a tweet, painted the tussle over compulsory vaccination as a battle for personal freedoms.“Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian,” he wrote.But on Friday, Biden did not appear to be flummoxed by the promised, largely partisan, resistance to his adminitration’s new workplace requirements.The new rules are part of his six-pronged strategy to tackle the Delta-variant fueled resurgence of the pandemic.“Have at it,” he said during a morning visit to a middle school in Washington on Friday, when a reporter asked for his response to Republicans threatening lawsuits.“We’re playing for real here, this isn’t a game. And I don’t know of any scientist out there in this field that doesn’t think it makes considerable sense to do the six things I’ve suggested,” the president said.Referring to Republicans such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, currently embroiled in a lengthy legal fight over the right to ban mask mandates in schools, Biden added: “I am so disappointed that, particularly some Republican governors, have been so cavalier with the health of these kids, so cavalier with the health of their communities.”Republicans began seething over the new regulations almost as soon as the president finished delivering his remarks on Thursday afternoon, with some calling a vaccine mandate on private businesses with more than 100 workers “unconstitutional”.Others, such as Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey, insisted it would not survive legal scrutiny.“This is exactly the kind of big government overreach we have tried so hard to prevent in Arizona – now the Biden-Harris administration is hammering down on private businesses and individual freedoms in an unprecedented and dangerous way,” Ducey said in a tweet.“This will never stand up in court,” he added. “The vaccine is and should be a choice. We must and will push back.”The partisan pushback came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out studies on Friday one of which found that those who were not fully vaccinated in recent months were 11 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than the fully vaccinated. It was one of three major studies published by the federal agency that focus on the sustained high efficacy of the three Covid vaccines available in the US, against the highly infecious Delta variant.Meanwhile, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said the party’s executive intended to file a lawsuit as soon as the mandate was enacted.“Joe Biden told Americans when he was elected that he would not impose vaccine mandates. He lied,” she said in a statement.“Like many Americans, I am pro-vaccine and anti-mandate. Many small businesses and workers do not have the money or legal resources to fight Biden’s unconstitutional actions and authoritarian decrees, but when his decree goes into effect, the RNC will sue the administration to protect Americans and their liberties.”This is a reversal from Biden’s stance in July, when White House press secretary Jen Psaki said such mandates were “not the role of the federal government”.In Texas, US senator Ted Cruz, who refused to certify Biden’s election victory on the night of the 6 January Capitol insurrection, seized on a retweet by Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, that he insisted was an acknowledgement that the administration knew its actions were illegal.The original message that Klain retweeted, by NBC journalist Stephanie Ruhle, referred to the emergency workplace safety rule by the occupational and safety and health administration (Osha) as “the ultimate work-around for the federal government to require vaccinations.”The use of the phrase “work-around”, and Klain’s subsequent retweet of it, is a damaging admission, in Cruz’s view, because courts are allowed to evaluate the intention and purpose of policies.“He said the quiet part out loud,” the senator tweeted. “Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care.”In a subsequent post, Cruz said: “The feds have no authority to force employers make their employees get vaccinated.”Not all Republicans, however, are opposed to Biden’s move. Governor Phil Scott of Vermont retweeted the White House announcement of the new strategy and added: “I appreciate the president’s continued prioritization of vaccination and the country’s recovery as we move forward.“As Vermont’s experience shows, vaccines work and save lives. They are the best and fastest way to move past this pandemic.”Prominent health experts supported Biden.One, Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, told the New York Times: “It’s going to fundamentally shift the arc of the current surge. It’s exactly what’s needed at this moment.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationnewsReuse this content More
A little more than a month ago, the most newsworthy controversy surrounding the imminent and highly symbolic 20th anniversary of 9/11 concerned the message by families of the victims that Joe Biden would not be welcome at the planned commemoration. They reproached the US president for failing to make good on last year’s campaign promise to declassify the documents they believe will reveal Saudi Arabia’s implication in the attacks.
That was the story that grabbed headlines at the beginning of August. Hardly a week later, everything had changed. Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban and soon the 20-year war would be declared over.
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Though few paid attention to the phenomenon, this also meant that the significance of a commemoration of the attacks, would be radically different. For 19 years, the commemoration served to reinforce the will and resolution of the nation to overcome the humiliation of the fallen twin towers and a damaged wing of the Pentagon.
Redefining the Meaning of the Historical Trauma
In the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, politicians quickly learned to exploit the date as a painful reminder of a tragedy that had unified an otherwise chaotically disputatious nation in shared horror and mourning. Ever since that fatal day, politicians have invoked it to reinforce the belief in American exceptionalism.
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The nation is so exceptional in generously providing its people with what President George W. Bush called “our freedoms” — and which he identified as the target of the terrorists — that it was logical to suppose that evil people who didn’t possess those freedoms or were prevented from emigrating to the land of the free would do everything in their power to destroy those freedoms. To the degree that Americans are deeply thankful for possessing such an exceptional status, other ill-intentioned people will take exception to that exceptionality and in their unjustified jealousy will threaten to destroy it.
On a less philosophical and far more pragmatic note, the remembrance of the 9/11 attacks has conveniently and consistently served to justify an ever-expanding military budget that no patriotic American, interested in preserving through the force of arms the nation’s exceptional status, should ever oppose. It went without saying, through the three previous presidencies, that the annual commemoration provided an obvious explanation of why the forever war in Afghanistan was lasting forever.
The fall of Kabul on August 15, followed by the panicked retreat of all remaining Americans, caught everyone by surprise. It unexpectedly brought an official end to the war whose unforgettable beginning is traced back to that bright September day in 2001. Though no one has yet had the time to put it all in perspective, the debate in the media has shifted away from glossing the issues surrounding an ongoing war on terror to assessing the blame for its ignominious end. Some may have privately begun to wonder whether the theme being commemorated on this September 11 now concerns the martyrdom of its victims or the humiliation of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. The pace of events since mid-August has meant that the media have been largely silent on this quandary.
So, What About Saudi Arabia?
With the American retreat, the controversy around Biden’s unkept campaign promise concerning Saudi Arabia’s implication in 9/11 provisionally took a backseat to a much more consequent quarrel, one that will have an impact on next year’s midterm elections. Nearly every commentator has been eager to join the fray focusing on the assessment of the wisdom or folly of both Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and his seemingly improvised management of the final chaotic phase.
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The human tragedy visible in the nightly news as throngs of people at Kabul airport desperately sought to flee the country easily eclipsed the genteel but politically significant showdown between a group of American citizens demanding the truth and a government committed to protecting the reputations of friends and allies, especially ones from oil-rich nations.
The official excuse turns around the criterion that has become a magic formula: national security. But the relatives of victims are justified in wondering which nation’s security is being prioritized. They have a sneaking suspicion that some people in Washington have confused their own nation’s security with Saudi Arabia’s. Just as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt not long ago revealed that plenty of people within the Beltway continue to confuse US foreign policy with Israel’s, the families may be justified in suspecting that Saudi Arabia’s interest in hiding the truth trumps American citizens’ right to know the truth.
To appease the families of 9/11 victims and permit his unimpeded participation in the commemorations, Biden offered to release some of the classified documents. It was a clever move, since the new, less-redacted version will only become available well after the commemoration. This gesture seems to have accomplished its goal of preventing an embarrassing showdown at the commemoration ceremonies. But it certainly will not be enough to satisfy the demands of the families, who apparently remain focused on obtaining that staple of the US criminal justice system: “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, may have shown the way concerning the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Like MBS, the White House prefers finding a way to release some of the truth rather than the whole truth — just the amount that doesn’t violate national security or tarnish the reputations of any key people. Those two goals have increasingly become synonymous. If the people knew what actual political personalities were doing, the nation’s security might be endangered, as the people might begin to lose faith in a government that insists on retaining the essential power of deciding how the truth should be told.
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Here is how the White House officially formulates the legal principle behind its commitment to unveiling a little more truth than is currently available. “Although the indiscriminate release of classified information could jeopardize the national security — including the United States Government’s efforts to protect against future acts of terrorism — information should not remain classified when the public interest in disclosure outweighs any damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.”
The White House has thus formulated an innovative legal principle brilliantly designed to justify concealing enough of the naked truth to avoid offending public morals by revealing its stark nakedness. Legal scholars of the future may refer to it as the “indiscriminate release” principle. Its logical content is worth exploring. It plays on the auxiliary verbs “could” and “should.” “Could” is invoked in such a way as to suggest that, though it is possible, no reasonable person would take the risk of an “indiscriminate release of classified information.” Later in the same sentence, the auxiliary verb “should” serves to speculatively establish the moral character of the principle. It tells us what “should” be the case — that is, what is morally ideal — even if inevitably the final result will be quite different. This allows the White House to display its good intentions while preparing for an outcome that will surely disappoint.
To justify its merely partial exposure of the truth, the White House offers another original moral concept when it promises the maximization of transparency. The full sentence reads: “It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency.”
There is of course an easy way to maximize transparency if that is truly the government’s intention. It can be done simply by revealing everything and hiding nothing within the limits of its physical capability. No one doubts that the government is physically capable of removing all the redactions. But the public should know by now that the value cited as overriding all others — national security — implicitly requires hiding a determined amount of the truth. In other words, it is framed as a trade-off between maximum transparency and minimum concealment. Biden has consistently compared himself to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Perhaps that trade-off between transparency and concealment is what historians will call Biden’s New Deal.
But the White House’s reasoning is not yet complete. The document offers yet another guiding principle to explain why not everything will become visible. “Thus, information collected and generated in the United States Government’s investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks should now be disclosed,” it affirms, “except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.” Those reasons, the document tells us, will be defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during its “declassification reviews.” This invocation of the “strongest possible reasons” appears to empower the FBI to define or at least apply not only what is “strongest,” but also what is “possible.” That constitutes a pretty broad power.
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The document states very clearly what the government sees as the ultimate criterion for declassification: “Information may remain classified only if it still requires protection in the interest of the national security and disclosure of the information reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security. Information shall not remain classified if there is significant doubt about the need to maintain its classified status.” The families of the victims can simply hope that there will not be too much “significant doubt.” They might be forgiven for doubting that that will be the case.
One September Morning vs. 20 Years of Subsequent Mornings
Twenty years ago, a spectacular crime occurred on the East Coast of the United States that set off two decades of crimes, blunders and judgment errors that, now compounded by COVID-19 and aggravated climate change, have brought the world to a crisis point unique in human history.
The Bush administration, in office for less than eight months at the time of the event, with no certain knowledge of who the perpetrator might have been, chose to classify the attack not as a crime, but as an act of war. When the facts eventually did become clearer after a moment of hesitation in which the administration attempted even to implicate Iraq, the crime became unambiguously attributable, not to a nation but to a politically motivated criminal organization: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda that back then was operating out of Afghanistan, which was ruled by the Taliban.
The administration’s choice of treating the attack as an act of war not only stands as a crime in itself, but, as history has shown, as the trigger for a series of even more shameless and far more destructive — if not quite as spectacular — crimes that would roll out for the next two decades and even gain momentum over time. Had the 9/11 attacks been treated as crimes rather than acts of war, the question of national security would have had less importance in the investigation. By going to war with Afghanistan, the Bush administration made it more difficult to investigate all the possible complicities. Could this partially explain its precipitation to start a war?
Bin Laden, a Saudi, did not act alone. But he did not act in the name of a state either, which is the fundamental criterion for identifying an act of war. He acted within a state, in the territory of Afghanistan. Though his motive was political and the chosen targets were evocatively symbolic of political power, the act itself was in no way political. No more so, in any case, than the January 6 insurrection this year on Capitol Hill.
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Though the facts are still being obscured and the text describing them remains redacted in the report of the 9/11 Commission, reading between the redacted lines reveals that bin Laden did have significant support from powerful personalities in Saudi Arabia, many of them with a direct connection to the government. This foreknowledge would seem to indicate complicity at some level of the state.
On this 20th anniversary of a moment of horror, the families of the victims quite logically continue to suspect that if a state was involved that might eventually justify a declaration of war by Congress (as required by the US Constitution), the name of that state should not have been Afghanistan, but Saudi Arabia. It is equally clear that the Afghan government at the time was in no way directly complicit.
When the new version of the 9/11 Commission’s report appears with its “maximum transparency,” meaning a bare minimum of redaction, the objections of the victims’ families will no longer be news, and the truth about the deeper complicities around 9/11 will most probably remain obscured. Other dramas, concerning the state of the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasingly obvious consequences of climate change and an upcoming midterm election will probably mean that next year’s 21st commemoration will be low-keyed and possibly considered unworthy of significant mention in the news.
In 2021, the world has become a decidedly different place than it has been over the past two decades. The end of a forever war simply promises a host of new forever problems to emerge for increasingly unstable democracies to deal with.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA — the Transportation Security Administration — to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a US phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion, compared with over $28 trillion today.
We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the US government’s disastrous response to them. That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.
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Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the US response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”
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“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”
“Insurgent Math”
Even the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the US created 10 new enemies. Thus, the so-called global war on terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.
By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the first place. In Libya and Syria, only 10 years after 9/11, US leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11 by recruiting and arming al-Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.
The US response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. Lincoln Chafee, the only Republican senator who voted against the war on Iraq, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”
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But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted in 2002 for the US to invade Iraq paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.
Failure in Afghanistan
Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the US defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the 9/11 attacks. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.
Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against the war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut US military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every US taxpayer $20,000, one would think that Representative Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.
Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for health care, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.
These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proved worthless, as President Biden has acknowledged.
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Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by the US and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.
But the different paths chosen by American and Chinese leaders are not predestined. Despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the US corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than their country’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in US foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the people.
Weapons and More Weapons
The perennial handicap that has dogged US diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.
The rote declarations of US leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the US development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.
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By contrast, US leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain US “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.
A “new American century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Adolf Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.
America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s US war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.
Time to Get Serious
But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.
First, we must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues.
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Second, we must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the US war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Third, we must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending” US vital interests, humanitarian intervention, the war on terror and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” — whose rules only apply to others but never to the United States.
Finally, we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including US weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes, and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.
Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
