War
Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace – review
In Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace, Michael Cox brings together scholars to analyse the failure of Afghan state-building, the Taliban’s resurgence and the country’s future. Anil Kaan Yildirim finds the book a valuable resource for understanding challenges the country faces, including women’s rights, the drugs economies and human trafficking and exploitation. However, he objects to the inclusion of a chapter which makes a geographically deterministic appraisal of Afghanistan’s governance.
Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace. Michael Cox (ed.). LSE Press. 2022.
This book is available Open Access here.
In Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace, Michael Cox gathers scholars, policymakers, and public intellectuals to shed light on the factors contributing to the failure of Afghan state-building, the successful takeover by the Taliban, and to share some insights on the country’s future. The chapters in the collection impart valuable insights on international law, human trafficking, women’s rights, NATO, and the international drug trade, with the exception of one essay that uses a problematic framework in its analysis of Afghan statehood and seems out of place within the book.
One of the main tasks of any state-building process is to create a political sphere that includes all parties to decide on policies and strategies shaping the future of the country.
One of the main tasks of any state-building process is to create a political sphere that includes all parties to decide on policies and strategies shaping the future of the country. However, in the case of Afghanistan, as argued by Michael Callen and Shahim Kabuli in Chapter Three, the de facto power structure did not align with the de jure systems of institutions. Excluding the Taliban from political discussions, adopting a fundamentally flawed and exclusionary electoral system, and employing a centralised presidential system which did not correspond to Afghan “diversity and reality” have been the “three sins” of the Afghanistan project. Along with these mistakes, the authors also identify the issues that created a “dysfunctional” state-building, including the lack of complete Afghan sovereignty within regional power dynamics, the diversion of the US’s focus to Iraq, and other foreign influences such as Russia and China that tried to attract the power-holders of the country. This powerful essay points out the three sins in the creation of the structure and other dynamics that destabilised the country. Thus, the state-building project collapsed not because Afghanistan was unsuited to democracy, but because of a combination of many different mistakes.
The authors also identify the issues that created a “dysfunctional” state-building, including the lack of complete Afghan sovereignty within regional power dynamics, the diversion of the US’s focus to Iraq, and other foreign influences such as Russia and China
The role of women in the Afghan state-building effort is highly contested among different power holders, the international community, and the Taliban. Writing in this context in Chapter Six, Nargis Nehan explores the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan before and after 9/11, positioning the matter within the spectrum of extremists, fundamentalists, and modernists. The highly masculinised country following many years of different wars created a challenging political and social area for women. Therefore, all changes in the political sphere resulted in a change in the lives of women.
Nargis Nehan explores the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan before and after 9/11, positioning the matter within the spectrum of extremists, fundamentalists, and modernists.
As an internationalised state-building project, Afghanistan has challenged international institutions and norms. Devika Hovell and Michelle Hughes examine the US and its allies’ interpretation and application of international law in military intervention in Afghanistan. With discussion of several steps and actors of the intervention, they demonstrate how this operation stretched the definitions of self-defence, credibility, legal justification, and authority within international realm.
The book explores several other key problems in the country. These include Thi Hoang’s chapter on human trafficking problems such as forced labour, organ trafficking and sexual exploitation; John Collins, Shehryar Fazli and Ian Tennant’s chapter on the past and future of the international drug trade in Afghanistan; Leslie Vinjamuri on the future of the US’s global politics after its withdrawal from the state; and Feng Zhang on the Chinese government’s policy on Afghanistan.
The essays mentioned above demonstrate what happened, what could have been evaded and what the future holds for Afghanistan. However, the essay, “Afghanistan: Learning from History?” by Rodric Braithwaite is a questionable inclusion in the volume. By emphasising geographical determinism, this piece a problematic perspective on Afghanistan. The essay argues that the failure of the West’s state-building project was down to the “wild” character of Afghan governance historically, which he deems “… a combination of bribery, ruthlessness towards the weak, compromise with the powerful, keeping the key factions in balance and leaving well alone … (17)” or “… nepotism, compromise, bribery, and occasional threat” (26-27). This perspective paints a false image of how Afghan history is characterised by unethical, even brutal methods of governance. Also in this essay are many problematic cultural claims such as “… Afghans are good at dying for their country … (18).”
The limitation of the entire Afghan agency, history and political culture to a ruthless character and geography that always produces “terrible results” for state-building is a false narrative
The limitation of the entire Afghan agency, history and political culture to a ruthless character and geography that always produces “terrible results” for state-building is a false narrative, which is reflected in and supported by the postcolonial term for Afghanistan: the “graveyard of empires”. While many different tribes, states, and empires have successfully existed in the country, Western colonial armies’ defeats and recent state-building failures should not misrepresent the country as a savage place in need of taming. Rather, as the other essays in the book argue, research on these failures should examine the West’s role in precipitating them.
Not only does this piece disrespect the scholarship (including other authors of the book) by asserting the ontological ungovernability of the country, but its deterministic stance also disregards the thousands of lives lost in the struggle to contribute to Afghan life those who believed that the future is not destined by the past but can be built today. Additionally, using only three references (with one being the author’s own book), referring to the US as “America”, random usage of different terms and not providing the source of a quotation are all quite problematic for a lessons-learned-from-history essay.
Beyond the limitations of the essay in terms of how it frames the past, what is more damaging is the creation of a false image of Afghanistan for future researchers and policymakers. For the points mentioned above, including the false narrative of ‘graveyard of empires’, Nivi Manchanda’s Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (2020) is worth consulting for in-depth insight into the colonial knowledge production system and its problematic portrayal of Afghanistan.
Braithwaite’s essay excepted, this book, exploring different political and historical issues from various perspectives, provides significant insights into what happened in Afghanistan and what the future holds for the nation
Braithwaite’s essay excepted, this book, exploring different political and historical issues from various perspectives, provides significant insights into what happened in Afghanistan and what the future holds for the nation. For practitioners, policymakers, and scholars seeking a broad perspective on state-building problems, policy limitations and relevant research areas in Afghanistan, this collection is a useful resource.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Trent Inness on Shutterstock.
Moral Philosophy as War Propaganda (guest post)
“The hellish reality of this war is transfigured by philosophers into abstract thought experiments and technical prose.”
The following is a guest post by Tena Thau, a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford.
This post is part of the ongoing series, “Philosophers On the Israel-Hamas Conflict“.
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Moral Philosophy as War Propaganda
by Tena Thau
Over 25,000 people in Gaza have been killed so far in this horrific war. Of those killed, 70% are women and children. Some children have been rescued from under the rubble—only to discover that all of their family members are dead. Children are having their limbs amputated without anaesthesia, because the last functioning hospitals have run out of supplies. Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are currently starving. If this war continues on its current course, close to a quarter of Gaza’s population—nearly half a million people—may die by the end of this year.
Israel is killing Palestinian journalists in what appear to be targeted attacks, and blocking international journalists from entering Gaza, in an effort to conceal the horrors of this war from our view. But day after day, more harrowing reports are coming out: news of yet another mass killing at a refugee camp or hospital, images of yet more children wrapped in body bags, and their grieving parents’ arms. Journalists in Gaza are making the most powerful moral argument for a ceasefire—by simply showing the world this war as it is.
I am not sure what there is for philosophy to teach us about the ethics of Israel’s assault on Gaza that the facts above do not already make clear. I also think that philosophical work on this war can sometimes function (however unwittingly) as a kind of pro-war propaganda, even in cases where the author adopts an anti-war stance.
The main problem with philosophical writing is that it is devoid of images, video, or graphic description of its subject matter. The hellish reality of this war is transfigured by philosophers into abstract thought experiments and technical prose. In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argue that the most powerful form of propaganda is not falsehood but omission. And by omitting any visual depiction, or vivid description, of the war’s consequences, philosophers invite us to think about the war in Gaza the way that Israel wants us to: as a sanitized abstraction, rather than the bloody horror that it is.
The second problem I’ve noticed is that is that philosophers tend to concede too readily (and thereby give credence to and amplify) the empirical premises of this war’s proponents, even when there are compelling reasons to reject them.
For example, many philosophers have argued that this war is unjustified on the grounds of proportionality. In making this argument, they generally do not challenge, and sometimes take as fact, the premise that this war benefits Israelis.
It is of course understandable why philosophers do this. The conclusion that the war in Gaza is unjustified is not contingent on overturning the premise, and it is standard practice for philosophers to avoid wading into empirical debates. And there is also nothing philosophically interesting for us to discuss, if the war in front of us is just a senseless bloodbath that benefits no one.
But I think it is important to unsettle and push back on the assumption that this war benefits people in Israel. First, there are very good reasons to think that the assumption is false: because the war is likely to make more people want to use violence against Israel in the long run (as Muhammad Ali Khalidi has argued on this site); because it is now becoming a wider regional war that poses arguably a much greater danger to Israel than Hamas (as Jason Stanley has pointed out); because it imperils the lives of the hostages in Gaza (as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has discussed); and because Israelis degrade themselves morally by participating in mass killing. Second, this line of argument (and the hostages argument in particular) is what is most likely to increase support for a ceasefire among Israelis—who are unfortunately not particularly moved, at the moment, by appeals to compassion for Palestinians.
I’ve also noticed that philosophers will often take at face value, and repeat, the IDF’s claim that Israeli airstrikes always target Hamas, and that the civilians killed in them are unintended collateral damage that the IDF very deeply regrets. Sometimes this is offered up as a (depraved) moral justification for the airstrikes, though in other cases philosophers will go on to argue that the strikes are disproportionate. Either way, they are amplifying a piece of misinformation: According to an investigative report by the Israeli magazine +972, Israel routinely bombs targets for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population of Gaza. A tenuous link between the targeted site and Hamas is often just a fig leaf used to justify these terror attacks.
As much as I hated David Enoch’s essay (and support the letter he criticized), I agree with him about one thing: I do not think moral philosophers have any particularly strong claim to expertise on the ethics of this war.
I think that most people outside Gaza, philosophers included, will simply not come anywhere close to grasping the magnitude of the horror that the people of Gaza are currently experiencing—so far removed, as it is, from our own experience and sight. (The best way to try to rectify this, I think, is to follow the reporting of Palestinian journalists. Please look at the horrors that they are documenting.)
If you do not grasp, and severely underestimate, the hell that is currently being inflicted on the people of Gaza, then it doesn’t matter how well you know the ‘just war theory’ literature, or how great at deductive reasoning you are; you are liable to arrive at the wrong answer to the question of whether this war is justified. This is especially so if you are also insufficiently critical of the empirical claims asserted by this war’s proponents, such as the assumption that this war promotes Israelis’ safety. (Such assumptions pervade political discourse in the US and UK, the two biggest enablers of Israel’s onslaught, and also the countries where most academic philosophers happen to be.)
For people in Gaza, the question of whether or not Israel should continue to slaughter them is not the head-scratching conundrum that some philosophers here consider it to be. Any random child in Gaza is able to see the moral reality of this war with more clarity, and speak about it with more sense, than most of us are able to muster. As one 12-year old girl, badly wounded in an airstrike that killed both her parents and two of her siblings, said to a journalist: “I only want one thing: for the war to end.”[1]
Moral philosophy is not just superfluous in this case, it can overcomplicate and sanitize what should be morally unthinkable.
[top photo via Eye on Palestine]
[1] Several weeks after being interviewed, this child, Dunia Abu Mohsen, was killed by Israeli tank fire during an attack on the hospital in which she was recuperating.
[Dunia Abu Mohsen. Photo via Defense for Children International.]
The post Moral Philosophy as War Propaganda (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/4fe1209c0e74405598fbfaf752705243/href
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Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny.
If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice.
Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want.
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https://medium.com/media/4bfb89a7b4af6069bd15e7c36273ee27/href
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Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?”
This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.
If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.
Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.
Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.
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Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race.
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Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated.
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The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide.
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Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion.
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https://medium.com/media/037719196eab2174a70cddc852edd7b6/href
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Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state.
Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be.
How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims.
It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state.
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People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.
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There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.”
This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly.
But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end.
As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/d500826c1b49426aef17780535093ec3/href
On Monday the US launched its eighth wave of airstrikes in its new war against Yemeni forces, which it has now formally titled “Operation Poseidon Archer”. The strikes are aimed at breaking a Red Sea shipping blockade which the de facto authorities in Yemen have implemented to pressure Israel and its allies into ceasing the genocidal onslaught in Gaza.
At a press briefing on Monday, Principal Deputy State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel uttered a now-familiar Biden administration line when asked if the war would escalate to involve US boots on the ground.
“First, as it relates to the Houthis, the United States is not interested in any escalation, but it is never acceptable for malign actors to target international vessels, to target legitimate commerce that is flowing through the Red Sea,” Patel said. “We’re talking about international waters that allow 30 percent of global container shipping to flow through those waters — 15 percent of seaborne trade. This is a waterway that is vital. And we will always take appropriate steps to hold those accountable that put things like legitimate commerce, civilians, U.S. personnel, in harm’s way.”
https://medium.com/media/d76d4b09d7eff5ac5eb50b43158a706b/href
Ever since the Biden administration began bombing Yemen, its official spinmeisters have been babbling about commerce and global container shipping to justify it. The unspoken premise behind this justification is that an active genocide should be permitted to continue with zero economic repercussions of any kind, for Israel or anyone else.
It’s just taken as a given by empire managers and their defenders that the money must keep flowing and the gears of capitalism must keep turning at the same rate they were turning before Israel began massacring tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, if not faster. That the horrors being unleashed in Gaza should have no material impact on the rest of the world whatsoever.
The empire will permit you to think thoughts and feel feelings about the butchery in Gaza quietly in the privacy of your own head, and under the right circumstances it will even permit you to attend pro-Palestine demonstrations and share your opinions on social media. But as soon as it comes to physically interfering with the gears of the imperial machine, they’ll blow your guts out.
This is of course absurd. The horrors in Gaza should be affecting the whole world. Our lives should not be proceeding normally, and it’s freakish and obscene that they do. It’s a sign of a profoundly sick civilization that so many of us in the west are able to lose ourselves in idle entertainment and laugh and stuff our faces with snacks and go out on the town while the nightmare in Gaza continues to unfold.
Gaza should be stopping us in our tracks. Hell we should be disrupting the economy ourselves — we shouldn’t have to wait for impoverished Yemenis to do it for us. We should be holding general strikes and stopping ships and disrupting everything we can possibly disrupt in order to force western civilization to look at what it’s supporting in Gaza and bring this mass atrocity to a screeching halt. Instead we’re just sleepwalking through life like we always do while people in the poorest nation in the middle east bravely fight our battle for us.
Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen's critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them. pic.twitter.com/kL3fYDqJlY / Twitter"
When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen's critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them. pic.twitter.com/kL3fYDqJlY
The empire is not entitled to expect that all commerce keep flowing normally during an active genocide. Israel is not entitled to have zero consequences for its actions, and its trading partners are not entitled to be unaffected by those consequences. The idea that it’s normal and appropriate to use any and all measures to prevent Israel’s atrocities from having any material impact on commerce — up to and including starting a new American war — is self-evidently ridiculous.
It’s been an incredibly draining past 100 days for those of us who’ve been following events in Gaza. There’ve been days when I couldn’t believe the sun dared to shine. The premise that there shouldn’t even be a slight economic downturn as a result of this madness, and that it’s fine to start a war to make sure there isn’t, deserves to be dismissed with extreme disdain.
We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.
Don’t ever let these sick freaks convince you that this is normal.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Biden Has Started Another US War
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/1dd58e6a7ebaaebf0a09eff35542d316/href
The Washington Post has an article out titled “As Houthis vow to fight on, U.S. prepares for sustained campaign,” with “sustained campaign” being empire-speak for a new American war.
“The Biden administration is crafting plans for a sustained military campaign targeting the Houthis in Yemen after 10 days of strikes failed to halt the group’s attacks on maritime commerce, stoking concern among some officials that an open-ended operation could derail the war-ravaged country’s fragile peace and pull Washington into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict,” the Post reports.
The Post acknowledges that “sustained military campaign” means “war” in the ninth paragraph of the article, saying the anonymous US officials cited in the report “don’t expect that the operation will stretch on for years like previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.” Which is about as reassuring as a pyromaniac saying he doesn’t expect he’ll be burning down any more houses like all those other houses he’s burned down.
The Washington Post on Twitter: "The Biden administration is crafting plans for a sustained military campaign targeting the Houthis in Yemen, stoking concern about derailing the war-ravaged country's fragile peace and pulling Washington into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict. https://t.co/DCggoOphXJ / Twitter"
The Biden administration is crafting plans for a sustained military campaign targeting the Houthis in Yemen, stoking concern about derailing the war-ravaged country's fragile peace and pulling Washington into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict. https://t.co/DCggoOphXJ
This bizarre refusal to just call a war a war also appeared in a recent press conference with Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, who acted shocked and aghast that reporters would even ask if repeatedly bombing a country would qualify as being at war with them.
“Is it now fair to say that the U.S. is at war in Yemen?” Singh was asked by a Reuters reporter on Thursday.
“No, we don’t seek war,” Singh replied. “We don’t think that we are at war. We don’t want to see a regional war. The Houthis are the ones that continue to launch cruise missiles, antiship missiles at innocent mariners, at commercial vessels that are just transiting an area that sees, you know, 10 to 15 percent of world’s commerce.”
In a follow-up several questions later, Singh was asked by a reporter from Politico, “You said that we are not at war with the Houthis, but if — you know, this tit-for-tat bombing — we’ve bombed them five times now. So if this isn’t war, can you just explain this a little — a little bit more to us? If this isn’t war, what is war?”
“Sure, Lara, sure, great question, I just wasn’t expecting it phrased exactly that way,” Singh replied with a laugh and a smirk. “Look, we are — we do not seek war. We are — we do not — we are not at war with the Houthis. In terms of a definition, I think that would be more of a clear declaration from the United States. But again, what we are doing and the actions that we are taking are defensive in nature.”
https://medium.com/media/c4aef7ad5c35562f41c93da3bfa6d8dd/href
It is worth noting that since that Thursday press conference the number of US strikes on Yemen has increased from five to seven as of this writing.
It is also worth noting here that, per Singh’s absurd definition, the US has not been at war since the end of WWII, as there has not been a “clear declaration of war” since June 5, 1942. The only wars the US has officially declared through congress in accordance with its own constitution have been the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the two world wars.
If you go by this definition the US is among the more peaceful nations in the world, since it hasn’t been at war in eight decades. In reality the US is the single most warlike and murderous nation of modern times with wars of aggression that have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just in the 21st century alone, and plays some role in most of the world’s major international conflicts.
Singh’s claim that the US attacks on Yemen are “defensive in nature” is also self-evidently absurd; Yemeni forces weren’t even attacking American commercial vessels until the US began attacking them. Only the US could launch unprovoked attacks on a foreign nation on the other side of the planet and call it self-defense.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:
“Before the US began bombing the Houthis, Ansar Allah officials made clear they would only stop attacking Israeli-linked commercial shipping if the onslaught on Gaza ended. Instead of pressuring Israel to end the slaughter in Gaza, President Biden chose escalation, and now the Houthis are targeting US commercial shipping, and several US merchant vessels have been hit with missiles.”
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "US Prepares for Open-Ended War Against the Houthis in YemenBiden has bombed Yemen seven times in just over a week and the Houthis are not backing down as they welcome confrontation with the USby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Yemen #Houthis #Biden #Gaza https://t.co/5ZSMVHuueD pic.twitter.com/sBHQ787FkO / Twitter"
US Prepares for Open-Ended War Against the Houthis in YemenBiden has bombed Yemen seven times in just over a week and the Houthis are not backing down as they welcome confrontation with the USby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Yemen #Houthis #Biden #Gaza https://t.co/5ZSMVHuueD pic.twitter.com/sBHQ787FkO
Indeed, the only reason Houthi forces began attacking ships in the Red Sea was to pressure Israel and its allies into ceasing the ongoing massacre that has been taking place in Gaza since October 7. As usual the world’s most murderous and powerful government is framing its horrifying acts of extreme aggression as innocent defensive responses to unprovoked attacks, when in reality the US empire is bombing Yemen in order to facilitate the genocide of Palestinians.
And while we’re on the subject of Gaza and Yemen it’s probably worth pointing out that according to US empire managers the stated goals of both campaigns have been completely unsuccessful. A new report by The Wall Street Journal says that according to US intelligence Israel is nowhere remotely close to eliminating Hamas, with only 20 to 30 percent of the group having been killed since October. Asked by the press on Thursday if the strikes against the Houthis are working, Biden replied “Well, when you say ‘working’ — are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
So they’re raining military explosives on impoverished middle easterners to maintain their status quo domination, under the pretense of goals which they themselves admit are not being achieved. Just another day in the empire, I guess.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Welcome To The Empire
Listen to a reading by Tim Foley:
https://medium.com/media/8f8260307141b80626897c59af28d0c2/href
Welcome to the empire
Where genocide is self-defense and peace rallies are genocide
Where war criminals are the victims and the hospitals are Hamas
Where calls for freedom are hateful and ceasefires are anti-semitic
Where civilians get called terrorists and real terrorists get Nobel Peace Prizes
Where the propaganda is journalism and the journalism is propaganda
Where the democracy is real and the apartheid is imaginary
Where the corporations are people and the people are corporate resources
Welcome to the empire
Whose bombs are humanitarian and whose provocations are invisible
Whose veterans are heroes and whose victims are forgotten
Whose wars are always just and whose enemies are always Hitler
Whose cause is always righteous and whose critics are always Russian
Whose sufferings are unforgivable and whose crimes are erased from history
Whose atrocities are always an unfortunate accident and whose enemies kill civilians for fun
Whose disastrous interventions are always innocent mistakes no matter how often they happen
Welcome to the empire
Ever the victim of unprovoked attacks from the people it has been strangling
Ever the shining city on a hill of human corpses
Ever the defender of the poor helpless plutocrats of Wall Street
Ever the savior of the families incinerated by missiles made by Raytheon
Ever the protector of natural resources in the soil of foreign nations
Ever the upholder of the rules-based order of a world with a boot on its throat
The empire loves you with a heart made of dollars and oil
The empire watches over you through your smartphone and your computer
The empire is your only friend
The empire is the only one who will ever love you
You can’t leave
You can’t get rid of the empire
If you get rid of the empire, this world could be taken over by tyrants
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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The “Rules-Based International Order”
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/a58659088be82cb95bcee4fdcedaf3b7/href
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the incineration of Gaza, and the bombing of Yemeni forces who are trying to stop it.
The “rules-based international order” allowed hundreds of thousands of people to be killed by western-backed Saudi atrocities in Yemen.
The “rules-based international order” allowed NATO powers to knowingly provoke a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine.
The “rules-based international order” allowed western powers and their regional partners to plunge Syria into a horrific civil war by flooding the nation with heavily armed fascistic extremist factions.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to invade and occupy a vast stretch of Syrian territory in order to control the nation’s natural resources and prevent reconstruction.
The “rules-based international order” allowed Libya to be turned into a chaotic hellscape after western-backed forces killed Gaddafi following a long-desired western regime change operation disguised as “humanitarian intervention”.
The “rules-based international order” allowed the invasion of Iraq to destabilize an entire region resulting in millions of deaths following a campaign of deliberate lies and propaganda.
The “rules-based international order” allowed the invasion of Afghanistan and a decades-long occupation sustained by lies and corruption.
The “rules-based international order” allowed the imprisonment of Julian Assange for journalistic activities exposing US war crimes.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the planet to be circled by hundreds of US military bases, including in places where the people who live there vehemently oppose their presence like Okinawa, Iraq and Syria.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US and its allies to kill huge numbers of civilians with siege warfare tactics in nations like Yemen, Iraq and Venezuela.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to interfere in scores of elections around the world at will and forcibly topple inconvenient governments whenever it wants to.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed China to be surrounded by a rapidly increasing amount of US military bases and war machinery in preparation for a future conflict of unimaginable horror.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to plunge the world into a new cold war with rapidly-escalating brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed our civilization to be controlled by the most powerful propaganda system ever devised, creating a mind-controlled dystopia of brainwashed gear-turners who are deceived into believing they are free.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed unfathomable amounts of government malfeasance to be hidden behind an increasingly opaque wall of government secrecy.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the interests of ordinary human beings to be subordinated and subjected to the interests of billionaire corporations and sociopathic government agencies.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the destruction of our ecosystem for the enrichment of powerful plutocrats.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed our planet to be dominated by an empire of extreme murderousness and depravity at the cost of nonstop bloodshed and ever-increasing tyranny.
If the “rules-based international order” has allowed all these things to happen, what kind of “rules” are we talking about exactly? And what kind of “order” do they sustain?
If this is what the “rules-based international order” looks like, would we not, perhaps, be better off without it?
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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If You’ve Just Started Paying Attention To US Foreign Policy
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/0a36cdbeb89dfdc1773a34bb40cd9b58/href
If you’re among those who have only just begun paying attention to US foreign policy and western media bias in light of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Biden’s act of war against Yemen, it’s important to understand that none of the depravity you’re seeing is new. The lies. The insane double standards. The murderousness. The western political/media class always does this.
Every war the US involves itself in is always facilitated by lies promulgated in one voice by the official government in Washington and by the “independent” “free” press (actually propaganda services) of the western world. They deceived the world about Ukraine. They deceived the world about Yemen. They deceived the world about Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are always, always lies, obfuscations and manipulations involved in marketing a new war to the public, or in hiding its involvement in foreign wars from public attention.
All of this manipulation and deceit is necessary to hide the fact that the US-centralized empire is the most tyrannical power structure on this planet. And make no mistake, it is an empire. Washington serves as the hub of an undeclared empire comprised of alliances, partnerships, assets, public deals and secret agreements which knit a large number of nations together into what functions as a single power structure with regard to international affairs.
Most of the beneficiaries of this power structure reside in the west, or global north, while the most exploited and abused victims of this power structure tend to reside in the east, or global south. There are all sorts of rules and regulations and narratives and justifications for why this all happens the way it happens, but if you mentally “mute” the soundtrack on the verbal overlay and just look at what’s actually happening, what you will see is the lion’s share of the world’s wealth and resources moving northward and westward from populations of a darker average skin tone toward populations of a paler average skin tone. Wherever that movement is hindered, diverted, threatened or inconvenienced, you will see western war machinery moving southward and eastward to get it back on the desired track.
Most major international conflicts can be understood as either direct or indirect efforts by the US empire to shore up planetary domination, which are often met with resistance by populations who wish to retain their sovereignty. Much of this conflict happens in the middle east because that’s where the world gets a lot of its oil from, with US-aligned nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia frequently serving as the frontline for hostilities with non-US-aligned nations like Iran and Syria as well as non-US-aligned forces like Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Hamas.
This struggle for US planetary hegemony is disguised by the western political/media class as something other than what it is, because you can’t allow the public in a democratic nation to understand clearly that their government is on the side of evil. They’ll frame it as a US-led international coalition to liberate a nation from a tyrannical dictator. As a humanitarian intervention to protect human rights. As support for Israel’s right to defend itself. As protection of freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. But what’s actually happening is the world’s most powerful and murderous power structure killing human beings in western Asia in order to secure control over a crucial resource.
You see this all over the world against nations which refuse to allow themselves to be absorbed into the US-centralized power structure like North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, with China being by far the strongest of these and Russia a distant second. And you will notice that you have heard every nation I just mentioned cast in a very negative light by the western press over the years. This is not a coincidence.
You don’t need to believe anything I’m saying on faith. If you just keep in mind what I said and start watching the patterns for yourself while seeking out the truth day by day, you will see it for yourself. You will see the same patterns emerging over and over again, year after year. Over and over again you will see the US and the states that are aligned with it acting with extreme aggression toward non-US-aligned powers in ways that benefit the US-centralized power structure, and you will see the western press deceiving the world about what’s happening. The next Official Bad Guy you see dominating western press coverage on international affairs will be a non-US-aligned power, and if you apply diligent research and critical thinking you will find that they are not presenting an accurate picture of what’s happening.
Just keep learning and studying the patterns with open curiosity and self-honesty, and the picture will inevitably become clear to you. And then you will clearly see who’s really driving the bulk of the violence and disorder in our world.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
Acts Harmful to the Enemy
Civilians are innocent, they have done nothing to make themselves liable to be killed. That war entails their killing, in vastly greater proportion to the killing of combatants, often under the color of law, means that our primary concern should always be on evaluating the justness of the cause of war—whether a given war can be justified at all in the face of the manifest immorality of civilian death—not the legality of the inevitable slaughter that follows.