The Russian aggression against Ukraine shows that we have not learned the lessons of history and are paying a high price for it. Future generations will also pay a significant price for our generation’s sins: fractured and destroyed families; poor social and health services; and a polluted environment. Children with mental and developmental problems are the clearest examples of the intergenerational effects of war.

The tremendous stress of war increases the chances of interpersonal violence, particularly against women. When the victims of violence are pregnant women, the intergenerational effect manifests as the increase of still births and premature births among them. Mothers who were the children of Holocaust survivors were shown to have higher levels of psychological stress and less positive parenting skills. During the siege of Sarajevo, perinatal mortality and morbidity almost doubled, and there was a significant increase in the number of children born with malformations.

By analyzing the number of people killed indirectly by the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, a report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the war in those countries resulted in 3.6 to 3.7 million indirect deaths, while the total death toll in those same countries could reach at least 4.5 to 4.6 million, and counting.

“Wars often kill far more people indirectly than in direct combat, particularly young children.”

Stephanie Savell, the Costs of War’s co-director and author of the report states, “wars often kill far more people indirectly than in direct combat, particularly young children.” Almost all the victims, says Savell, are from the most impoverished and marginalized populations. Most indirect war deaths are due to malnutrition, pregnancy, and birth-related problems, and infectious and chronic diseases.

According to the report, more than 7.6 million children under five in post-9/11 war zones are suffering from acute malnutrition. Malnutrition has serious long-time effects on children’s health. Among those effects are increased vulnerability to diseases, developmental delays, stunted growth, and even blindness, reports UNICEF. Those children affected with malnutrition are also prevented from achieving success in school or having meaningful work as adults.

Although using doctors, patients, and civilians as a human shield is a war crime, they are frequent targets of uncontrolled violence. Now in Sudan, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports that their staff in multiple locations have been repeatedly confronted by fighters entering health facilities and stealing medicines, supplies, and vehicles. It is estimated that 70% of health facilities in areas in conflict are out of service, and 30 among them are targets of attacks.

In U.N.-sponsored health missions, I was able to see the consequences of war in countries such as Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, a sobering experience that left painful memories. The sadness and feeling of helplessness I saw in the eyes of women and children still haunt me.

Repeated violence has numbed us to its consequences, our senses overwhelmed by cruelty. Faced with the tragic complexity of life, we are unable to savor its sweet moments of care and tenderness. Eager to escape brutal reality, we watch the latest TV news and then mindlessly change the channel to a baking show.

But does war only produce negative effects? What we see now in Ukraine is that the Russian aggression against people of all ages—both soldiers and civilians—has produced millions of displaced people, but it has also given rise to the solidarity of Ukraine’s neighbors, who at high personal and social cost have provided refuge to tens of thousands of families fleeing the war.

Ukrainian women of all ages have also taken up arms to defend their country from Russian aggression. Currently, more than 60,000 Ukrainian women serve in the military, while tens of thousands more are helping their country as journalists, paramedics, teachers, and politicians. At the same time they continue being the center of support for their families. Because men are on the front lines, women must keep hospitals, schools and even villages themselves in operation, often without basic supplies.

Although these actions are an example of the best of the human spirit, they do not erase the harrowing cruelty of war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

The 19th century origins of Mother’s Day differ vastly in spirit and purpose from celebrations of it in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Mother’s Day was first inspired by two women with diverse but compatible social and political purposes. Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to teach women the basics of sanitation in food preparation and drinking water in a time of high infant and child mortality.

After the war, she organized “Mothers Friendship Day,” bringing mothers of sons who fought on both sides of the Civil War “to promote reconciliation.” Her daughter Anna Jarvis carried her mother’s legacy forward and convinced President Woodrow Wilson to establish the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. Jarvis became so disillusioned eventually with what she saw as the commercial sentimentalizing of and profiteering from Mother’s Day by the card, food, and floral industries that she disowned it.

Jarvis became so disillusioned eventually with what she saw as the commercial sentimentalizing of and profiteering from Mother’s Day by the card, food, and floral industries that she disowned it.

The first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally was held in New York City on June 2, 1872 at the inspiration of Julia Ward Howe, an ardent anti-war activist and promoter of world peace. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation passionately lamented the futile deaths in war and heralded action to stop future wars:

Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts…

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy, and patience…

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”…

Her Proclamation concluded calling for a congress of women all of nationalities to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions and the great and general interests of peace.”

This theme of engaging women across the world for peace has only grown more urgent. Try Googling “photos of negotiating to end war in Ukraine,” recommends Margot Wallström, Sweden’s former minister of foreign affairs: Women are largely absent. Despite a more than 20-year-old U.N. Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security that promotes including women “in all efforts for the promotion of peace and security, less that 10% of peace agreements have female signatories,” she states. Yet, research shows that with “more women involved in peace processes, more proposals are put on the table and agreements reached last longer.”

In my 2018 interview with Nigerian lawyer, mediator, peace activist, and member of WILPFAyo Ayoola-Amale, she underscored the critical impact of women in peace negotiations. “The Liberian 2011 Nobel Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, together with Christian and Muslim women, pressured warring parties into the 2003 negotiations that eventually ended years of horrific war in Liberia. Research has shown,” she added, “that where women’s inclusion is prioritized, peace is more probable, especially when women are in a position to influence decision making… Women take an inclusive approach whether it is stopping conflict, contributing to peace processes, or rebuilding their societies after conflict or war.”

Restoring Political Roots to Mother’s Day

For the eighth consecutive year, the Black Mama’s Bail Out initiative is posting bond on and near Mother’s Day for Black mothers in jail, women languishing in “cages” without a trial because they are too poor to post bail. Their action has highlighted the profiteering of the bail bonds industry and inspired nationwide community action. The U.S. puts more women in jails and prisons than any other country in the world. And while comprising roughly 6% of the U.S. population, Black women make up 22% of women’s imprisoned population. Most are arrested for low-level drug use, some on false charges; and most are mothers. Support Black Mama’s Bail Out fund this Mother’s Day.

Postscript

I learned recently that “More phone calls are made on Mother’s Day than on any other day of the year.” And I understand why. As a child, I loved giving my mother a card and a present on Mother’s Day as an expression of my love and respect for her, and, after leaving home, I always called her on Mother’s Day. Now I look forward to honoring my sisters, cousins, and nieces as the wonderful mothers they are. But even more urgent is restoring the spirit of our original Mother’s Day—calling for World Peace, a call that is loud, persistent, insistent, public, and passionate.

Let us also remember that mothers wake up the morning after Mother’s Day to their social, economic, and political realities: poverty and food insecurity for almost 25% of single mothers, doing most of the unpaid domestic and caregiving work at home, pay discrimination, sexual violence for one in four women, and widespread sexual harassment. Rampant injustice that our society and the world must undo if we are ever to achieve peace.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by H. Patricia Hynes.

More mass killings. More bloody “normal”—not just in Texas, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Eerily, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott inadvertently reminded us of the international nature of this scourge when he referred to five recent murder victims, in a tweet announcing a $50,000 reward for the killer, as “illegal immigrants.”

Hey, this is a divided world! Were you aware of that?

There’s “us” and there’s “them”—which apparently is a viewpoint that a mass shooter shares with the governor of Texas. Abbott, of course, was inundated with flak and wound up apologizing for his careless tweet, but the reality of it won’t go away. A private belief—that someone’s immigration status matters more than life itself—suddenly went public.

Those on both sides of a divide—be it national, ethnic, racial, political or whatever—are united in their dismissal of each other’s humanity.

And a door of awareness opens. This is about dehumanization. And it’s not an individual flaw. It’s part of our collective psychology. Ironically so. Those on both sides of a divide—be it national, ethnic, racial, political or whatever—are united in their dismissal of each other’s humanity.

Recent mass shootings include the two in Texas: In Allen, a gunman walked into an outdoor shopping mall on May 6, carrying three weapons, and opened fire at the shoppers; he killed eight people, including three children. And in the Dallas suburb of Cleveland, a gunman killed five of his neighbors on April 28, who had asked him to stop shooting his rifle in his backyard because the noise was disturbing their baby.

And, in a trans-Atlantic link, there were two recent mass shootings in the gun-saturated nation of Serbia: On May 3, a 13-year-old boy, armed with two of his father’s handguns, opened fire at his school in Belgrade, killing eight classmates and a security guard and wounding seven others. The next day, a 20-year-old wielding an assault rifle and a pistol killed eight people and wounded fourteen in a rural area south of Belgrade.

Serbia immediately erupted in protests and even, apparently, political action. People possessing weapons illegally were given 30 days of amnesty, in which they could turn in their weapons with no questions asked. According to Serbian police, some 1,500 guns were turned in on the first day.

But that’s hardly all the transnational killings of the past few weeks. Mostly they’re committed not by armed loners but by various states. It’s called self-defense. It’s called war. For example, Israel conducted an aerial bombardment of Gaza on May 9, killing thirteen people and wounding twenty. Three of those killed were members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement. The rest were, well, collateral damage, which, of course, is just a word meant to turn a victim into an abstraction. This is how we play war.

Transcending war can only start by turning victims back into human beings, for instance: Two sisters, Dania Adass, age 21, and Iman Alaa Adass, age 17, were killed when their home was hit by one of the Israeli bombs. A cousin told Al Jazeera: “Dania was getting ready for her wedding in a few days, and Iman was sad because her sister was about to leave the family home.” He pointed out Dania’s fiancé, who stood next to her body, weeping and speechless.

The process of not knowing, not caring about, such humanity, at least long enough to kill someone, is known as “othering.” It’s the opposite of connecting and cooperating. It’s the opposite of empathy. When it comes to the mass-killing phenomenon, analysts—not to mention politicians and, oh yeah, pro-gun lobbyists—mostly focus on the mental health of the individuals who commit the crime. Something’s wrong with them. They’ve shut down their empathy.

The serious mistake in this analysis, as far as I’m concerned, is the assumption that people act alone. In a sense, yes, they do: There’s only one person pulling that trigger. But acting alone doesn’t necessarily mean thinking alone. Indeed, lonely, angry, disconnected people are not alone. They’ve merely claimed, as their own, the belief that a given enemy is the cause of their trouble, and there’s only one solution: Eliminate the enemy. Where would such a belief come from?

“Without the creation of abstract images of the enemy, and without the depersonalization of the enemy during training, battle would be impossible to sustain.”

These are the words of Richard Holmes, in his book Acts of War (as quoted by Dave Grossman in On Killing). Holmes also writes:

“... the road to My Lai was paved, first and foremost, by the dehumanization of the Vietnamese and the ‘mere gook rule’ which declared that killing a Vietnamese civilian does not really count.”

OK, so what? How does an attitude like this escape from boot camp into the general public? Lots of ways, as war is glorified by both the news and (especially) entertainment media. War preparation—the endless presence of some enemy or other—contributes, as I say, to our collective psychology.

And it’s not just the unquestioned, ever-expanding, multi-trillion-dollar global military budget. It’s the presence, for God’s sake, of 12,700 nuclear warheads on this planet, 9,400 of which, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, are in active military stockpiles. Nine countries possess nukes; five more “host” them (for the USA, of course). And a total of thirty-four countries, not counting the nine—all of them so-called first-world countries—“endorse” the use of nuclear weapons.

There’s a hostage situation at work here! Our collective psychology is trapped in a cage. Humanity, having divided itself into “us” and “them,” is under its own threat to commit suicide, rather than attempt to understand itself. Lost souls with guns are just doing their part to help out.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

Just last week, a few representatives in Congress introduced a bill that would require Israel to disclose its operations in the West Bank, along with the intention of U.S. taxpayers' money not being used for assistance in war crimes.

It is absurd that we are still at this stage. It is absurd that this is considered progressive in any way.

Just like every American president since John F. Kennedy declared that Israel had a "special relationship" with the United States, Joe Biden is responsible for the suffering of Palestinians. This is because the U.S. has been committed to, for lack of a better word, the well-being of Israel's military.

By refusing to condemn Israel's war crimes, Biden supports the continuation of Israeli oppression.

No one, not even supporters of the U.S. policy of insisting on intervening in foreign lands, can deny that Israel wouldn't be in the place it is today without the significant help of the Americans.

Of course, a special relationship could very well mean an array of different things. Over the decades that the U.S. has helped Israel, it has done a whole lot of lurking around, for example, the constant vetoes in the U.N. and mandated minimum military aid to the country each year while millions of Americans live well under the poverty line and struggle to make it until the arrival of the next paycheck, if there is a paycheck in the first place.

American intervention has been something of a constant over the last 200 years, but, as with every other type of colonialism, U.S. foreign policy has struggled to make the world a better place. Everywhere it spreads, U.S. foreign policy is followed by suffering.

For someone on the more progressive side of the political axis, or someone who lives in another place in the world, this could seem obvious, but for someone raised on the ideas of Manifest Destiny, the infallibility of the American system, or the American dream, this could come as a shock.

Even if an American president tries to be sympathetic toward Palestinians while actively causing them harm, it doesn't come off as being supportive. This is best exemplified by Biden declaring his support for a two-state solution. When he does that, he isn't backing Palestinians; he does quite the opposite. By refusing to condemn Israel's war crimes, he supports the continuation of Israeli oppression.

I'd compare it to racism and anti-racism. If someone thinks that police shouldn't kill Black people, but refrains from supporting a grand reform of the way the U.S. manages policing, they aren't being impartial. Instead, they are taking a stand on the side of the oppressor, the police.

When Biden is trying to have it both ways, both receiving the support of the progressive vote by supporting a two-state solution and helping Israel continue its despicable treatment of Palestinians, he is simply standing on the side of the tyrant, just like the "anti-racist" who abstains from calling for revolutionary changes to the criminal justice system.

Activists advocating for solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfortunately aren't making progress. The way things stand as of now, the situation on the ground disallows a solution.

A resolution is currently out of sight.

The most basic favor a Palestinian child could ask for from a superpower like the U.S. is that it maybe not help to cleanse them from their land. But that's too much to ask for.

Because Israel and the United States have a special relationship.

Still. After decades of pain and death.

The history of U.S. intervention in foreign lands is a disgusting one. A short-sided, ill-advised policy filled with malicious intentions. The difference between a hundred years ago and today is the optics. Nowadays, the U.S. insists on looking like the good guy. That's what makes it so horrible that it goes on and on and on and on, supporting some of the worst acts being committed.

By now, Biden should've picked a side. He's had more than enough time.

But, at the end of the day, as everyone for whom it matters knows, by not picking a side he's doing quite the opposite. He's taking the side of the oppressor.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Fred Hidvegi.

World military spending has reached a new record high of $2.24 trillion in 2022, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That’s up 3.7% since the previous year, including the steepest increase among European nations since the end of the Cold War over 30 years ago.

The United States remains the world’s largest military spender by far, with its $877 billion representing 39% of global military spending. That’s three times as much as the second largest spender, China, which spent $292 billion in 2022. And it’s about ten times as much as the next largest spender, Russia, which spent about $86 billion in the same year.

U.S. spending is more than the next ten countries combined, more than last year when it was larger than the next nine. Many of these next ten countries are geopolitically aligned with the U.S. — including Ukraine, which had the highest single-year increase in military spending SIPRI has ever recorded, rising 640% to $44 billion since Russia invaded.

U.S. military aid to Ukraine amounted to $19.9 billion in 2022, but this was only 2.3% of total U.S. military spending. Military spending by NATO members, including the U.S., totalled $1.232 trillion in 2022, up 0.9% since 2021. Many analysts have predicted a long-term war of attrition, with no victory in sight for either side – it remains unclear how continuously increasing militarization can end this war.

Meanwhile, basic needs continue to go unmet for hundreds of millions of people around the world. The climate crisis continues to wreak havoc, and the U.S. has barely begun to address its historical responsibility in contributing to global fossil fuel emissions. The nations of the world are dangerously unprepared to secure our collective planetary future.

The full U.S. military budget is much more than the $514 billion spent by the rest of the world’s 144 nations combined. That’s a difference of $363 billion, which would be enough to fund solar power for nearly every household in the U.S. for 10 years.

$363 billion would be enough to fund 43 million public housing units – more than the 38 million people displaced as refugees in the post-9/11 wars waged by the U.S. over the past two decades.

Just 10% of the U.S. military budget would go a long way toward meeting any number of societal needs.

It’s worth noting that it’s not inevitable for countries to keep perpetually increasing their military budgets – a number of large nations, like Nigeria and Turkey, have significantly decreased military spending in the past year.

Over-investment in the military is a major cause of the crises we face today. But it’s possible to reinvest in real solutions and begin to repair the harm caused by many decades of war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ashik Siddique.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official business agent in the United States for the British government and the main contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.

When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive loans to Europe which would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war. Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the international bankers made a profit of $10,000. As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in 1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”

When the war concluded and the dead and wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter. Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.

In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht called The Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death lobbied both Congress and the President for war.

The American public was incensed. In 1934 almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for peace. And Marine Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.

The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations, including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.

The committee conducted an extensive investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

“The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.

The Senate Nye Committee recommended price controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”

The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars, American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oaths swearing they would never fight in a foreign war.

Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers, people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a war fought to increase the profits of corporations.

And then, business fought back. They lobbied those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon did. A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The committees’ days were numbered.

In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.” With World War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate American economic and political life.

Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

We need glimmers of imagination about the worldwide potential for accomplishing good results by choosing the “works of mercy” over “the works of war.” Why not brainstorm about how resources devoted to military goals of domination and destruction could be put to use defending people against the greatest threats we all face—the looming terror of ecological collapse, the ongoing potential for new pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and threats to use them?

But a crucial first step entails fact-based education about the global infrastructure of the American military empire. What is the cost of maintaining each base, how much environmental damage does each base cause (consider depleted uranium poison, water contamination, noise pollution, and risks of nuclear weapon storage). We also need analysis about ways the bases exacerbate the likelihood of war and prolong the vicious spirals of violence attendant on all wars. How does the U.S. military justify the base, and what is the human rights record of the government the U.S. negotiated with to build the base?

The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one database that is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying toll of U.S. militarism, and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tom Dispatch, notes the paucity of discussion about the expanse of U.S. military bases, some of which he calls MIA because the U.S. military manipulates information and neglects to even name various forwarding operating bases. With very little oversight or discussion on the subject domestically, Engelhardt warns that the “massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains firmly in place.”

Thanks to the tenacious work of researchers who formed the No Bases campaign, World Beyond War (WBW) now presents the many-faced hydra of U.S. militarism, worldwide, in a visual database.

Researchers, scholars, journalists, students, and activists can consult this tool for help in exploring vital questions about the cost and impact of the bases.

It’s a unique and challenging resource.

At the helm of daily exploration enabling the mapping project’s growth is Mohammad Abunahel.

On almost any given day in Abunahel’s busy life, he sets aside time, far more than he is compensated for, to work on the mapping project. He and his wife are both Ph.D. students in Mysore, India. They share caring for their infant son, Munir. He takes care of the baby while she studies, and then they trade roles. For years, Abunahel has devoted skill and energy to create a map which now draws the most “hits” of any section on the WBW website. He considers the map as a step in addressing wider problems of militarism. The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one database that is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying toll of U.S. militarism, and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Abunahel has good reason to resist military dominance and the threats of destroying cities and towns with overwhelming weaponry. He grew up in Gaza. Throughout his young life, before he finally managed to obtain visas and scholarships to study in India, he experienced constant violence and deprivation. As one of ten children in an impoverished family, he readily applied himself in classroom studies, hoping to improve his chances for a normal life, but, along with the constant threats of Israeli military violence, Abunahel faced closed doors, dwindling options, and rising anger, his own and that of most other people he knew. He wanted out. Having lived through successive Israeli Occupation Force onslaughts that killed and maimed hundreds of innocent people of Gaza, including children, and destroyed homes, schools, roadways, electrical infrastructure, fisheries, and farms, Abunahel grew certain that no country has a right to destroy another.

He's also adamant about our collective responsibility to question justifications for the U.S. network of military bases. Abunahel rejects the notion that the bases are necessary to protect U.S. people. He sees clear patterns showing the base network being used to impose U.S. national interests on people in other countries. The threat is clear: If you do not submit yourselves to fulfill U.S. national interests, the United States could eliminate you. And if you don’t believe this, look at other countries that were surrounded by U.S. bases. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan.

David Swanson, the executive director of World Beyond War, reviewing David Vine’s book, The United States of War, notes that “since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence has correlated with the U.S. military starting conflicts. Vine modifies a line from Field of Dreams to refer not to a baseball field but to bases: ‘If you build them, wars will come.’ Vine also chronicles countless examples of wars begetting bases begetting wars begetting bases that not only beget yet more wars but also serve to justify the expense of more weapons and troops to fill the bases, while simultaneously producing blowback—all of which factors build momentum toward more wars.”

Illustrating the extent of the USA’s network of military outposts deserves support. Calling attention to the WBW website and using it to help resist all wars are vital ways to expand the potential for expanding and organizing resistance to U.S. militarism. WBW will also welcome financial contributions to assist Mohammad Abunahel and his wife who are, by the way, excitedly awaiting the birth of their second child. WBW would like to increase the small income he earns. It will be a way to support his growing family as he raises our awareness of warmaking and our resolve to build a world beyond war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

In Canada today, the war hawks are circling overhead in swiftly scudding skies while on the ground, the drum majors of militarism are leading the call for an arms race with the tenacity of a snare drummer performing “The Downfall of Paris.”

With the war in Ukraine as the impetus, a recent editorial in the Globe and Mail encouraged the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau to raise its commitment to NATO by spending fully 2 per cent of GDP on defence by enlarging the armed forces. Although the editorial admits “That’s a large number,” it concludes by stating, with great disappointment, that the “The government simply isn’t prepared to sacrifice other priorities over spending on defence.” (4/25/23, Globe editorial: “Canada needs to honour its pledge to NATO”)

Other priorities? Is the Globe and Mail referring to areas such as improved health care and pandemic responses, access to higher education, daycare, infrastructure maintenance and renewal, job training and other pursuits within the public sphere of interest? Are those the priorities the Globe and Mail is suggesting should be sacrificed?

Developing a strategy for peace may not be as difficult as it sounds. Canada has a long and honourable tradition in advocating for peace in the world.

Not to be outdone, Globe and Mail columnist, Andrew Coyne, reminded his readers that Canada is a founding member of NATO and that other members including the U.S., Germany and Turkey are “fed up with our chronic malingering.” (“The world is growing tired of Canada’s freeloading on defence: Our refusal to pay our way is leading to us being increasingly shunned by our allies” G&M 4/29/23).

Coyne continues to speak on behalf of “the world” in a most remarkable display of hubris by going on to assert: “But the world has grown all too familiar, not only with Canada’s record as an international freeloader, but with our habit of reneging on such commitments as we do make.” Who all in the world is disappointed with Canada you might ask? Without naming any more names, Coyne states flatly: “It is everyone.”

Presently, the silence from mainstream media outlets in Canada with regard to the need to implement a timetable toward conflict resolution and the need to aggressively pursue a cease fire is very disturbing for many people who fully embrace the resistance of the Ukrainians against Russian aggression. Why this “malingering” when it comes to pursuing the peace?

Even during the height of the Vietnam War, perhaps the defining military conflict of my own generation, as the bombs fell daily and heavily upon the Vietnamese people, peace talks were occurring in Paris that brought both sides of the conflict to the negotiating table.

The Vietnam War never had a formal beginning and it never had a formal conclusion that marked the cessation of hostilities. The U.S. never declared war against the Vietnamese nor did it sign a peace treaty at the end of the war. But the war ended, that is the important thing. During this period, Canada sent a clear signal to the U.S. that draft resisters and deserters opposed to the war were welcome and would not face extradition back to the U.S.

The war against the people of Iraq was never declared because the U.S. was never attacked by Iraq. Surely one of the greatest misadventures in the history of modern warfare, the Iraq War still stands as a clear demarcation between the foreign policy aims of the United States and Canada. Many believe it was Canada’s finest hour when Prime Minister Jean Chretien declared thumbs down to George Bush’s invitation to join the fight. Had it been Stephen Harper leading a Conservative government at the time, Canada would certainly have committed substantial blood and treasure to this disastrous encounter.

It is clearly time for Canada to return to the world stage as an honest broker for peace. In an article for the Financial Post, editor Kevin Carmichael called Canada’s participation in the G7 economic bloc “an anachronistic club in which Canada’s main purpose is to help Washington argue with Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy (Japan is the other member).” (“The Great Rethink: Why Canada Needs to Return to its ‘honest broker’ role in world affairs. 10/23/20 Financial Post).

Why not also throw in NATO for good measure? Is there no role for Canadian diplomacy to play other than as a subaltern to U.S. foreign policy and NATO’s military interests abroad?

There is a reason that we do not have the daily responsibility to monitor and maintain hyper-sonic nuclear warheads, chemical or biological weapons buried in missile silos throughout the country. It is because Canada refused pressures from the United States to install these weapons systems during the governments of John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson (Conservative and Liberal, respectively) in the late 1950s and early 60s even as they were under pressure to do so by both presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Kennedy (Republican and Democrat, respectively).

But make no mistake about it, at the time, Canadian governments of the day were divided on the question of nuclear weapons and—in the absence of a strong peace movement—any government today could easily begin to backslide on these issues.

How might Canada begin to advocate for peace in Ukraine? First of all, by taking a firm political stance against those who would be pushing us into an arms race that is unwinnable. With each new wave of advanced military and information technology there is simply no zero-sum game at play. There is only zero-sum loss for millions in the event of nuclear war.

Developing a strategy for peace may not be as difficult as it sounds. Canada has a long and honourable tradition in advocating for peace in the world. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 1957); the scientist, Joseph Rotblat, and the Pugwash movement (who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995); and the scientist, peace activist and feminist Ursula Franklin (awarded the Pearson Medal of Peace in 2001) are names that spring immediately to mind who have much to say about the role of peace movements, peace negotiations and compromise that can lead us away from armed conflict and toward the peace.

Where there is political will, there is a way. The readiness is all.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robin Breon.

On a freezing cold day, February 15th, 2003, Harry Belafonte, the legendary singer, actor, and activist strode onto a stage outside the United Nations in New York City. Rallies against the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq were taking place around the globe that day, in what is believed to be the largest mass protest in human history. Belafonte then did what he had been doing for over half a century–he spoke truth to power:

"We stand for peace. We stand for the truth of what is at the heart of the American people."

Harry Belafonte died this week at the age of 96. Throughout his life, he fought for justice, using his celebrity to support causes from civil rights to anti-colonialist and anti-war movements and Black Lives Matter.

Harry Belafonte never relented. He intensified his fight against South African apartheid and the ravages of U.S. imperialism abroad. He challenged those in power regardless of political party, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

Belafonte continued in that 2003 speech, delivered to several hundred thousand anti-war marchers in New York:

"We were misled by those who created the falseness of the Bay of Tonkin, which falsely led us into a war with Vietnam, a war that we could not and did not win. We lied to the American people about Grenada…about Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, and many places in the world. We stand here today to let those people know that America is a vast and diverse country, and we are part of the greater truth of what makes our nation. Dr. King once said that if mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind."

Harry Belafonte was one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s closest advisors and confidants. He first met King in 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. Their initial meeting, slated for 20 minutes, lasted four hours.

"At the end of that meeting, I knew that I would be in his service and focus on the cause of the desegregation movement, the right to vote, and all that he stood for," Belafonte said at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, on the Democracy Now! news hour. "Although we understood how perilous the journey would be, we were not quite prepared for all that we had to confront. I think that it was the most important time in my life."

Thus began a historic friendship that shaped the struggle for desegregation and racial equality. Belafonte knew King like few others. He was loyal to him until the end, when many had abandoned King as his agenda broadened to include fierce opposition to the Vietnam War.

In his memoir, My Song, Belafonte recounts a conversation with King one week before his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King was organizing The Poor People's Campaign, to link and overcome the three evils he saw in our society: racism, militarism, and materialism. As King described the campaign's strategy, he was challenged by Andrew Young, an advisor who would later become the Mayor of Atlanta and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Belafonte recounted King's reply:

"'The trouble,' Martin went on, 'is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level…That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we're going to have to change the system.'"

Dr. King frequently spoke out against capitalism, but this private moment shared by Belafonte shows the depth of his critique. "At heart, Martin was a socialist and a revolutionary thinker," Belafonte wrote. One week later, King was dead, shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Harry Belafonte never relented. He intensified his fight against South African apartheid and the ravages of U.S. imperialism abroad. He challenged those in power regardless of political party, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

In 2006, as President George W. Bush's disastrous war in Iraq was still raging, Belafonte traveled to Venezuela and spoke at a mass rally, standing alongside President Hugo Chavez:

"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush, says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people—millions—support your revolution, support your ideas, and, yes, expressing our solidarity with you."

Not long after, Belafonte was disinvited from speaking at the funeral of his dear friend, Coretta Scott King, as President Bush was going to attend.

Belafonte often told the story of his mentor, the singer and activist Paul Robeson, who told him, "Get them to sing your song and they will want to know you." As Harry Belafonte is laid to rest, his message still sings out: We cannot rest.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Denis Moynihan.

The current Daniel Ellsberg Week celebrates the achievements and inspirational spirit of the most significant whistleblower of the 20th century. Daniel Ellsberg's recent announcement of a terminal diagnosis broke my heart, but his remarkable response gave me great hope. To quote Ellsberg: "As I just told my son Robert: He's long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!"

Daniel Ellsberg has done just that; an avalanche of interviews and webinars have followed his announcement. And now the RootsAction Education Fund has teamed up with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy to co-sponsor Daniel Ellsberg Week, April 24-30, to celebrate his life's work and "to honor peacemaking and whistleblowing."

Known as the insider who blew the whistle on U.S. government lying about the Vietnam War, Ellsberg's high level military planning experience began earlier. Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and '60s. For decades he has put himself on the line to oppose those evil plans—writing, speaking, standing up, and sitting-in against the threat of nuclear annihilation. Ellsberg has been hauled off to jail for civil disobedience against war over 80 times. Here he offers chilling clarity about "the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill billions of people," calling it "a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near omnicide, the death of everyone." He asks us, "Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don't know. I choose to act as if we have a chance."

"Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don't know. I choose to act as if we have a chance."

This quote is from one of several eye-opening podcasts being released this week (which I directed in partnership with the RootsAction Education Fund), enabling people to hear Ellsberg directly. In these half dozen two-to-three-minute animated musings, Daniel Ellsberg offers up a succinct analysis of the calamity posed by nuclear weapons and a possible way to reduce their risk. You can watch and listen here.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Henry Kissinger (then President Nixon's national security advisor) called him "the most dangerous man in America." But those closely held secrets of the war in Vietnam were less explosive than the nuclear secrets that Ellsberg held in his safe. Then a top strategist for the Defense Department, he had been party to plans for a nuclear holocaust. After being buried for safekeeping, those documents disappeared in a hurricane that literally blew away his secrets, but that didn't dampen Ellsberg's desire to share what he knew.

At 92, with mind sharp as ever, Ellsberg remains an undisputed expert on "national security." In this unusual illustrated podcast, he shares his unvarnished thoughts about the threat of nuclear annihilation and how it might be defused.

Can we simply ignore the reality of the world's largest nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert—amid escalation of a new cold war with heightened nuclear dangers? Indeed, the U.S. just enacted its biggest military budget in history, with unprecedented investment in weapons of mass destruction and their deployment.

We ignore this impending disaster and its impassioned opponent, Daniel Ellsberg, at our own peril.

Here's a chance to honor him by listening and heeding his words.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Judith Ehrlich.

I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than "Mama" or "Dada," in some strange fashion, I grew up at war.

Living in New York City, I was near no conflict in those years or in any since. My dad, however, had volunteered for the Army Air Corps at age 35 on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent about his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. He was the operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos, and his war, in some strange sense, came home with him.

Like so many vets, then and now, he was never willing to talk to his son about what he had experienced, though in my early years he still liked his friends to call him "Major," his rank on leaving the military. When his war did come up in our house, it was usually in the form of anger—because my mother had shopped at a nearby grocery store whose owners, he claimed, had been "war profiteers" while he was overseas, or because my first car, shared with a friend, was a used Volkswagen (German!), or my mom was curious to go—god save us!—to a Japanese restaurant!

If war was hell, in my childhood at the movies, killing them wasn't, whether it was the Indians of the American West or the Japanese in World War II.

The strange thing, though, was that, in those same years, for reasons we never discussed, he allowed me briefly to have a Japanese pen pal and, though my dad and I never talked about the letters that boy and I exchanged, we did soak the stamps off the envelopes he sent and paste them into our latest Scott stamp album.

As for evidence of my father's wartime experience, I had two sources. In the guest room closet in our apartment, he had an old green duffle bag, which he'd go through now and then. It was filled to the brim with everything from Army Air Corps documents to his portable mess kit and even—though I didn't know it then—his pistol and bullets from the war. (I would turn them over to the police upon his death a quarter-century later.)

Though he wouldn't talk with me about his wartime experience, I lived it in a very specific way (or at least so it felt to me then). After all, he regularly took me to the movies where I saw seemingly endless versions of war, American-style, from the Indian wars through World War II. And when we watched movies of his own conflict (or, in my early years, replays of Victory at Sea on our TV at home) and he said nothing, that only seemed to confirm that I was seeing his experience in all its glory, as the Marines inevitably advanced at film's end and the "Japs" died in a spectacle of slaughter without a comment from him.

From those Indian wars on, as I wrote long ago in my book The End of Victory Culture, war was always a tale of their savagery and our goodness, one in which, in the end, there would be an expectable "spectacle of slaughter" as we advanced and "they" went down. From the placement of the camera flowed the pleasure of watching the killing of tens or hundreds of nonwhites in a scene that normally preceded the positive resolution of relationships among the whites. It was a way of ordering a wilderness of human horrors into a celebratory tale of progress through devastation, a victory culture that, sooner or later, became more complicated to portray because World War II ended with the atomic devastation of those two Japanese cities and, in the 1950s and 1960s, the growing possibility of a future global Armageddon.

If war was hell, in my childhood at the movies, killing them wasn't, whether it was the Indians of the American West or the Japanese in World War II.

So, yes, I grew up in a culture of victory, one I played out again and again on the floor of my room. In the 1950s, boys (and some girls) spent hours acting out tales of American battle triumph with generic fighting figures: a crew of cowboys to defeat the Indians and win the West, a bag or two of olive-green Marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.

If ours was a sanguinary tale of warfare against savages in which pleasure came out of the barrel of a gun, on floors nationwide we kids were left alone, without apparent instruction, to reinvent American history. Who was good and who bad, who could be killed and under what conditions were an accepted part of a collective culture of childhood that drew strength from post-World War II Hollywood.

What Would My Dad Think?

Today, 60-odd years later, having never been to war but having focused on it and written about it for so long, here's what I find eerily strange: Since 1945, the country with the greatest military on the planet that, in budgetary terms, now leaves the next nine countries combined in the dust, has never—and let me repeat that: never!—won a war that mattered (despite engaging in all too many spectacles of slaughter). Stranger yet, in terms of lessons learned in the world of adult culture, every lost war has, in the end, only led this country to invest more taxpayer dollars in building up that very military. If you needed a long-term formula for disaster in a country threatening to come apart at the seams, it would be hard to imagine a more striking one. So long after his death, I must admit that sometimes I wonder what my dad would think of it all.

Here's the thing: The American experience of war since 1945 should have offered an all-too-obvious lesson for us, as well as for the planet's other great powers, when it comes to the value of giant military establishments and the conflicts that go with them.

Since 1945, the country with the greatest military on the planet that, in budgetary terms, now leaves the next nine countries combined in the dust, has never—and let me repeat that: never!—won a war that mattered.

Just think about it a moment, historically speaking. That global victory of 1945, ending all too ominously with the dropping of those two atomic bombs and the slaughter of possibly 200,000 people, would be followed in 1950 by the start of the Korean War. The statistics of death and destruction in that conflict were, to say the least, staggering. It was a spectacle of slaughter, involving the armies of North Korea and its ally the newly communist China versus South Korea and its ally, the United States. Now, consider the figures: Out of a Korean population of 30 million, as many as three million may have died, along with an estimated 180,000 Chinese and about 36,000 Americans. The North's cities, bombed and battered, were left in utter ruin, while the devastation on that peninsula was almost beyond imagining. It was all too literally a spectacle of slaughter and yet, despite ours being the best-armed, best-funded military on the planet, that war ended in an all-too-literal draw, a 1953 armistice that has never—not to this day!—turned into an actual peace settlement.

After that, another decade-plus passed before this country's true disaster of the twentieth century, the war in Vietnam—the first American war I opposed—in which, once again, the U.S. Air Force and our military more generally proved destructive almost beyond imagining, while at least a couple of million Vietnamese civilians and more than a million fighters died, along with 58,000 Americans.

And yet, in 1975, with U.S. troops withdrawn, the southern regime we had supported collapsed and the North Vietnamese military and its rebel allies in the South took over the country. There was no tie as there had been in Korea, just utter defeat for the greatest military power on the planet.

The Rise of the Pentagon on a Fallen Planet

Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, had—and this should sound familiar to any American in 2023— sent its massive military, the Red Army, into… yes, Afghanistan in 1979. There, for almost a decade, it battled Afghan guerrilla forces backed and significantly financed by the CIA and Saudi Arabia (as well as by a specific Saudi named Osama bin Laden and the tiny group he set up late in the war called—yes, again!—al-Qaeda). In 1989, the Red Army limped out of that country, leaving behind perhaps two million dead Afghans and 15,000 of its own dead. Not so long after, the Soviet Union itself imploded and the U.S. became the only "great power" on planet Earth.

Washington's response would be anything but a promised "peace dividend." Pentagon funding barely dipped in those years. The U.S. military did manage to invade and occupy the tiny island of Grenada in the Caribbean in 1983 and, in 1991, in a highly publicized but relatively low-level and one-sided encounter, drove Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in what would later come to be known as the First Gulf War. It would be but a preview of a hell on Earth to come in this century.

Meanwhile, of course, the U.S. became a singular military power on this planet, having established at least 750 military bases on every continent but Antarctica. Then, in the new century, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush and his top officials, incapable of imagining a comparison between the long-gone Soviet Union and the United States, sent the American military into—right!—Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government there. A disastrous occupation and war followed, a prolonged spectacle of slaughter that would only end after 20 years of blood, gore, and massive expense, when President Biden pulled the last U.S. forces out amid chaotic destruction and disorder, leaving—yes, the Taliban!—to run that devastated country.

There may never, in fact, have been a more striking story of a great power, seemingly uncontested on Planet Earth, bringing itself down in quite such a fashion.

In 2003, with the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq (on the false grounds that Saddam Hussein was developing or had weapons of mass destruction and was somehow linked to Osama bin Laden), the Second Gulf War began. It would, of course, be a disaster, leaving several hundred thousand dead Iraqis in its wake and (as in Afghanistan) thousands of dead Americans as well. Another spectacle of slaughter, it would last for endless years and, once again, Americans would draw remarkably few lessons from it.

Oh, and then there's the war on terror more generally, which essentially helped spread terror around significant parts of the planet. Nick Turse recently caught this reality with a single statistic: In the years since the U.S. first began its counter-terror efforts in West Africa early in this century, terror incidents there have soared by 30,000%.

And the response to this? You know it all too well. Year after year, the Pentagon's budget has only grown and is now heading for the trillion-dollar mark. In the end, the U.S. military may have achieved just one success of any significance since 1945 by becoming the most valued and best-funded institution in this country. Unfortunately, in those same years, in a genuinely strange fashion, America's wars came home (as they had in the Soviet Union once upon a time), thanks in part to the spread of military-style assault rifles, now owned by one in 20 Americans, and other weaponry (and the barrage of mass killings that went with them). And there remains the distinctly unsettling possibility of some version of a new civil war with all its Trumpian implications developing in this country.

I doubt, in fact, that Donald Trump would ever have become president without the disastrous American wars of this century. Think of him, in his own terrorizing fashion, as "fallout" from the war on terror.

There may never, in fact, have been a more striking story of a great power, seemingly uncontested on Planet Earth, bringing itself down in quite such a fashion.

Last Words

Today, in Ukraine, we see but the latest grim example of how a vaunted military, strikingly funded in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union—and I'm talking, of course, about Russia's army—has once again been sent into battle against lesser forces with remarkably disastrous results. Mind you, Vladimir Putin and crew, like their American counterparts, should have learned a lesson from the Red Army's disastrous experience in Afghanistan in the previous century. But no such luck.

There should, of course, be a larger lesson here—not just that there's no glory in war in the twenty-first century but that, unlike in some past eras, great powers are no longer likely to experience success, no matter what happens on the battlefield.

[W]hen it comes to "great" powers and war these days, one lesson seems clear enough: There simply is nothing great about them, except their power to destroy not just the enemy, but themselves as well.

Let's hope that the rising power on this planet, China, takes note, even as it regularly organizes threatening military exercises around the island of Taiwan, while the Biden administration continues to ominously heighten the U.S. military presence in the region. If China's leaders truly want to be successful in this century, they should avoid either the American or Russian versions of war-making of our recent past. (And it would be nice if the Cold Warriors in Washington did the same before we end up in a conflict from hell between two nuclear powers.)

It's decades too late for me to ask my father what his war truly meant to him, but at least when it comes to "great" powers and war these days, one lesson seems clear enough: There simply is nothing great about them, except their power to destroy not just the enemy, but themselves as well.

I can't help wondering what my dad might think if he could look at this increasingly disturbed world of ours. I wonder if he wouldn't finally have something to say to me about war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Tom Engelhardt.

Today is Earth Day. “Invest in our Planet“ is this year’s theme. This week also includes our national Tax Day when we fund our nation's priorities. At this point in history our planet faces two existential threats: the threats of catastrophic climate change and of nuclear war. It is important to recognize their interconnectedness. Taking a closer look at our tax expenditures gives insight into our investment in our planet and all of its inhabitants.

A critical component of addressing climate change is moving to a carbon free economy. Yet, the United States spends approximately $20 billion annually on fossil fuel subsidies that are the principal cause of climate change. As the effects of climate change continue, precious natural resources become scarce. This promotes conflict as access to these resources diminishes. That conflict on an international level can result in climate wars. This is clearly recognized by military leaders who have long described climate change as a “threat multiplier,” further connecting these existential threats, which is ironic as the Pentagon remains the world’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses. This fear of impending conflict has resulted in the largest U.S. defense budget in history, including over $90 billion in funding of all U.S. nuclear weapons programs as noted in the release this week of the “US nuclear weapons community costs” program.

As we look towards our future and investing in our planet, we must realize the interconnectedness of our existential threats, and we must demand a redirection of our national priorities.

These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources necessary to address the most critical needs. What is needed is a rebuilding of their infrastructure and a just transition from a fossil fuel economy. Tragically, much of the impact of the fossil fuel, extractive economy, at every level exists in and around the most at-risk communities dramatically affecting their health and well-being. These communities that have been overlooked or left behind bear the brunt of our misplaced priorities.

Just how do these nuclear expenditures impact our communities? In Jackson, Mississippi, with its population of 148,761, recently in the news for water shortages and contamination, its residents earn a per capita income 62% of the national average. Their tax dollar contribution to nuclear weapons programs is ~ $25 million dollars. For Flint, Michigan, still recommending lead-removing filters for its water, with its 80,628 residents earning a per capita income of 50% of the national average, has a nuclear contribution of over $10.8 million dollars. The Navajo Nation, whose 143,435 residents have experienced the health legacy of having been victims of significant radiation exposure from nuclear weapons testing and development for decades, whose per capita income is 40% of the national average, will spend over $15.6 million on nuclear weapons programs. The nation’s poorest county of Buffalo County, South Dakota with its 1,923 largely indigenous Crow Creek Sioux Tribe residents, earning on average 32% of the national average, will spend ~$167 thousand dollars as their contribution to nuclear weapons programs.

Is this their priority? Does it add in any way to their security, health, or wellbeing? In reality, nuclear weapons are among the greatest threats to their security. In a participatory democracy is this how they would choose to spend their treasure and invest in our planet this Earth Day?

As we look towards our future and investing in our planet, we must realize the interconnectedness of our existential threats, and we must demand a redirection of our national priorities. Bold actions on each of these crises include the Green New Deal and fossil fuel transition, the abolition of nuclear weapons, supporting “Back from the Brink”, and the recently introduced H. Res 77, that supports the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the precautionary measures necessary during that process. Ask your Representative to Co-sponsor this resolution.

Ultimately to achieve peace with the planet we must have peace on the planet. Each of us has a role to play in achieving this reality.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert Dodge.

Can organizations sincerely say they are leading the climate justice fight without also being unapologetically antiwar? Short answer–no. Here's why.

We cannot end climate change without ending war. The United States military is the planet's largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses and consumer of oil. The U.S. military and its weapons, consistently deployed to secure economic dominance for the few while ensuring suffering for the many, have no place on a just and livable planet. The corporate interests and fascist, militarist tendencies that lead humanity into conflict are the very same that view our Earth, its atmosphere, and its abundant life as a resource to be exploited for profit. Ending war means ending the war economy–the colonial system of extraction and exploitation that got us into this mess in the first place.

That a more peaceful world could be a result of the broad system change climate activists are calling for is no coincidence. But the theoretical intersection alone isn't enough! Environmentalists and climate change activists must make a commitment to peace explicitly. Our planet depends on it.

Demilitarization is one of the most important things we can do for the climate, and for living beings inside and outside conflict zones.

There are already plenty of reasons to oppose war such as the threat of nuclear destruction, massive civilian casualties, violence against women, and the concentration of fascist imperialist powers into corporatized hands. But if that is not enough for folks doing important work in climate justice to also oppose all wars, then let's also consider—militarism and the war economy.

The Pentagon is already the planet's largest single institutional emitter of fossil fuels, and U.S.-backed conflicts around the world since WWII can always be tied back to economic gain dominance, especially via the private control of fuel and natural resources. A war with China, which the U.S. has gradually encircled with hundreds of military bases and weaponry, is being provoked for economic reasons as the government and media manufacture the consent of the American public. This will only result in the increase of Pentagon funding (already at $858 billion), siphoning off billions of dollars of taxpayer money to infrastructure and weaponry that is destroying our climate.

Many people don't realize that every solution to climate change already exists. The problem is the government simply will not fund them while its priority is war. Demilitarization is one of the most important things we can do for the climate, and for living beings inside and outside conflict zones.

Currently, our measure of success as a country is based on how much we can destroy and exploit. While the basic tenets of capitalism are taught in America as economic law, this is hardly the case. The economic system we operate under is a choice. There are other options. Our broken and optional system–in which income inequality is at an all-time high, the poor have little access to healthcare, and the climate is nearing deadly tipping points–is driven by capitalists and federal economists who love to talk about the profit-oriented metric Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. This metric, which is used as an indicator of our country's well-being, tells us the amount of financial profit produced by economic activity in a given time period. Which is pretty ridiculous when well-being is obviously a function of things that aren't liquid cash, like quality of education, healthcare, and biodiversity.

Essentially, under a GDP-oriented economy, half of a country's forest cover could be destroyed and the poverty rate in all major cities could double over the course of a year, but as long as billionaires continued to increase their profits, the illusion of progress would persist. But if we manage to change how we measure progress in this country, we may actually be able to achieve some. Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is a metric that places value on things like improving air quality and food security. With GPI in place, lawmakers and activists would have the most undeniable picture yet of the cost of war on people and planet.

And what is the cost of war to the environment? Take the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to massive death and displacement, as well as environmental damage with exponential increases in greenhouse gas emissions from rocket attacks and explosions. Attacks on infrastructure–railways, electrical grids, apartment buildings, oil depots–have led to hollowed-out cities blanketed by charred rubble and toxic munitions.

Additionally, the sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany led to the release of 300,000 tons of methane gas into the atmosphere, similar to the annual emissions of a million cars. According to the U.N. Environmental Programme, it was the largest release of methane gas emissions ever recorded.

The shelling of Ukraine's nuclear power plants, particularly the Zaporizhzhia plant, has increased fears of an explosion that would spread radiation throughout Ukraine and beyond.

As the fighting has now gone on for a year with no end in sight, Ukraine braces itself for further disruption of local ecosystems, forest fires, blackened trees, air pollution, sewage leaks, and chemical contamination of rivers and groundwater in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has mutated the global fuel market, with Russian cuts of fuel exports and Western sanctions leading many European countries to resume filthy coal-fired power generation. U.S. companies have also consolidated money and power as a result, dramatically increasing their exports of natural gas to Europe. These exorbitant profits will fuel the fossil fuel economy for years to come.

Funding endless war is an existential threat to human life and one of the leading causes of climate change. In order to achieve climate justice and secure a sustainable future, climate and environmental groups must adopt an antiwar position for people and the planet. To defend Earth, we must end wars.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Teddy Ogborn.

To be a leftist in the United States is a dispiriting experience, but in the last year one of the more dispiriting things has been to see the attitude of many leftists themselves on a subject of crucial importance: the war in Ukraine. The consensus of the Washington establishment remains that the U.S. must support Ukraine against Russian aggression, in the form of providing enormous amounts of military aid. Progressives in Congress largely share this consensus, having voted for military aid and even cravenly retracted their letter to Biden in October that suggested he pursue diplomacy. Outside the halls of power, too, many leftistseffectively support Washington's policies. To be sure, they add the qualification that one must also oppose American imperialism—but when they're supporting a U.S. proxy war that is providing pretexts to increase military spending and expand NATO (an instrument of U.S. power), this is an empty qualification. The sad fact is that there is little vocal advocacy in the U.S. today for the only moral position, namely to engage in immediate negotiations to end this horrific war.

Instead, most liberals, conservatives, and even leftists seem to support Antony Blinken's rejection of any ceasefire or negotiations that "would potentially have the effect of freezing in place the conflict, allowing Russia to consolidate the gains that it's made." In other words, negotiations have to be postponed until Russia is in a weaker position than it is now. In fact, the official U.S. war aim is "to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says. That means Russia has to be so devastatingly weakened—preferably defeated—that its capacity to wage war is destroyed. This, in turn, means that the war must go on for a very long time, perhaps "to the last Ukrainian," as John Quigley speculates. Zelensky, who seems "heroically" willing to countenance the ongoing destruction of his country, is now even insisting that Russia give up Crimea.

All this is madness, and ought to be seen as such by any clear-eyed opponent of the U.S. empire (which is vastly more global, hegemonic, and dangerous to the world's population than today's Russian "empire"). Before accepting complete defeat, Putin—whom, after all, we're supposed to view as a bloodthirsty monster—would likely wage total war on Ukraine, possibly including use of nuclear weapons. So anyone who defends the U.S. war aim (and Ukraine's current war aims, as stated by Zelensky) is advocating the destruction of Ukraine and, perhaps, nuclear war. Aggression should indeed be opposed, but not at the expense of human survival or the survival of millions of Ukrainians.

However strenuously it has been denied by Western supporters of this war, Russia has legitimate grievances (at least much more legitimate than those that have motivated U.S. wars since the 1960s) that must be addressed in order to end the killing. It isn't a simple matter of evil imperialism vs. a wonderful pacifist democracy. Scores of experts, including even Cold Warriors like George Kennan, have discussed the many provocations from the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine that brought on Putin's invasion, and we needn't rehash the whole history here. What is at stake is, in large part, a clash of rival imperialisms—a global one (the U.S.'s) and a relatively minor regional one (Russia's)—which means there is no morally pure outcome, as there rarely is in politics. A peace settlement will have to be a compromise, which, like most compromises, will doubtless leave all parties somewhat unhappy but at least will end the slaughter. Russia, for example, may well end up retaining Crimea (which it annexed in 1783—until 1954) and certain other small strips of territory it has gained. Leftists and left-liberals who wring their hands about how this would teach the lesson that aggression sometimes pays would do well to reflect on another fact: if, somehow, NATO and Ukraine manage to inflict a terrible defeat on Russia, this will teach America that unfettered military expansion—and incitement of war—is a great way to crush one's enemies, and it will apply the lesson to China.

It's worth noting, too, that it isn't only a confrontation of great powers that is at stake, or the survival of millions of Ukrainians and their country's physical infrastructure, or an atrocious empowerment of the U.S. military industry. The longer this war goes on, the more damage is done to the natural environment, including efforts to combat global warming. In just the first seven months of the war, the fighting released 100 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, as a report by Chatham House notes, "across the world, countries are building or reopening coal power stations and investing in oil and gas development." Soaring energy prices have led to a "gold rush" for new fossil fuel projects. Oil companies are making record profits. Are we supposed to care more about punishing Russia than leaving a livable world to our descendants?

This is to say nothing of the large-scale food insecurity the war has fostered, the cost-of-living crises that are impoverishing millions, and the displacement of refugees. These problems cannot be solved until the war ends. And it can end only with negotiations. One expects neocon vampires like Anne Applebaum, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan—not to mention Biden administration officials like Blinken and Victoria Nuland—to experience throes of ecstasy over any war that projects American power, but when even progressives and leftists are vehemently defending U.S. proxy wars and effectively dismissing the idea of negotiations, it is clear that America's moral and intellectual rot runs very deep indeed.

Liberals and leftists out to be embarrassed that the most vocal advocacy of the antiwar position today is from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and right-wing libertarians. It's time that the left reclaimed its antiwar traditions.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Chris Wright.

Denmark has in recent years made efforts to enhance its image as a champion of ESG and business ethics. In certain sectors this has been successful, not least in tech. But the country’s ongoing liaison with an Israeli arms dealer has brought into question its approach to ethics and human rights.

ESG doctrine has, over the last ten years, become a widely accepted benchmark for business practices and sustainable investment initiatives. Adhering to robust ESG criteria has generally been seen as a crucial component of domestic and foreign policy, procurement and diplomacy, not only in terms of public relations, but as a fundamental tool that governments can deploy to support the advancement of human rights around the world. Denmark (and the Scandinavian countries in general) boasts a long-standing reputation as bastions of social democratic business ethics. A recent deal, however, threatens to bring it all crashing down.

Ostensible transparency

For five years in a row, Denmark finished top of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, attesting to zero-tolerance approach to corruption, its commitment to business ethics, clean investments and social responsibility. “It’s genuinely a pleasure. To have our house in order is a fundamental aspect of our international ability to be competitive,”said Jesper Olsen, the head of Transparency International Denmark. One major flaw, however, in the CPI index, is that it deals uniquely with a corruption inside countries, and does not take into account a state’s dealings with foreign actors. Denmark, conscious of the unblemished image it seeks to maintain within the international community, has made real efforts to position itself as a leader in the Western world when it comes to the upholding of ethical doctrines in social and commercial policy. “The fight against corruption is important. Utmost respect to journalists and all others who are fighting corruption. Denmark is on your side,” said Lars Rasmussen, then Prime Minister, at the opening of the International Anti-Corruption Conference held in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, back in 2018.

Shady dealings with an Israeli firm

A recent procurement deal by the Danish Ministry of Defence has however brought into question Denmark’s cemented, irreproachable reputation in terms of business ethics. The deal with Israeli firm Elbit Systems for a delivery of ATMOS howitzers to replace the Ukraine-bound French-made CAESAR cannons throws many unanswered questions into the air, not least with regards to the revival of a deal so vehemently opposed back in 2015, when international geopolitical dynamics were somewhat different. According to the Danish media channel Altinget, there are plans to buy 19 ATMOS howitzers for 105 million euros [DKK 805.2 million] and eight PULS systems for 127 million euros [DKK 942.7 million].

According to United Nations principles, States have a responsibility to ensure that companies from which they purchase equipment do not contribute to human rights violations, a principle recognised under the name of "State duty to protect". The organisation Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (International Cooperation), believes that the Ministry of Defence should use a clause in the contract to investigate Elbit's human rights record. "If this answer does not comply with international guidelines, the Ministry of Defence has every right to cancel the contract and re-tender,"said Troels Borrild, policy advisor to the Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke, back in 2017, in referenced to the failed Elbit deal of 2015.

Elbit has emerged as one of the leading arms suppliers to the IDF in recent years, notably supplying 85% of the IDF’s drone fleet (its subsidiary UTCAS caused uproar in the United Kingdom for its links to the deadly drone attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in 2014 and 2021). It has been linked to a plethora of war crimes and crimes against humanity through its services to the IDF, including the provision of an electronic detection fence system to the Apartheid Wall in the occupied West Bank. Israeli media has reported that Elbit drones were in use and the company’s personnel were part of the operation room of a special drones unit deployed during Israel’s 11-day onslaught against Gaza in May 2021 which led to the deaths of 248 individuals and left over 1,900 injured.

Concerns surrounding the deal

In light of the above-mentioned commitment to business ethics in Denmark, the multi-million dollar deal with Elbit raises a number of questions for the Danish government. Although Mette Frederiksen’s government has decided to go ahead with the deal, this has not stopped a number of private actors voicing their opposition and refusing to deal with the Israeli firm. Danske Bank, for example, has decided not to invest in the Israeli company because it is "involved in the supply of electronic equipment that is used in conflict with human rights standards," the bank writes on its website… Admirable from its CEO, Carsten Rasch Egeriis. Denmark’s two biggest pension funds, FA Pension and Danica Pension, have refused to invest in the company due to its continued involvement in the supply of surveillance equipment in the West Bank.

Why is it the case, then, that the Danish MoD has apparently fast-tracked the procurement process for Elbit, when such acquisitions usually take years to pass through a robust system of checks and balances? Is the Danish government convinced that the ATMOS systems meet their specific requirements and will perform better than the CAESARs, on which Danish artillery units are already well trained, knowing that the Elbit-produced systems have been tested on Palestinians in the occupied territories? Martin Lidegaard, the spokesman for the Danish Social Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre), announced back in 2015, when the original deal was derailed by widespread public outcry, that “If the accusation is correct, I do not think that Elbit Systems can get the order. I have clearly told the other parties in the settlement circle that we do not want a company that breaks international law – or contributes to it – to supply the Danish [military].”

The success of the opposition back in 2015 was noteworthy for its unity, transparency and ability to rally the public by focusing on ethical concerns. "It is very worrying that Denmark is buying arms from the Israeli defence industry. Israel is a very brutal occupying power, accused of serious war cimes, and I just don't think Denmark should buy weapons from that country,”exclaimed Nikolaj Villumsen MEP, member of Enhedslisten and the European United Left/Nordic Green Left group at the time. Such dissenting voices in 2023 are few and far between, and one must question as to why this is the case. For a country so devoted to its clean international image, why has there been so little political debate regarding the deal in 2023? Why does the opposition remain so apathetic? The Danish government should be focusing on total transparency in the matter, and it would be to the credit of such the outspoken voices of 2015, who had distinguished themselves in such a positive way, and are still active in the Danish parliament, to bring such a debate back to the public square.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Andy Johnson.

After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50% of all new members of the Army, called the recruiting command’s task the hardest since the all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army’s leaders were alarmed enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and related initiatives.

Those incentives include enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000 and promotions for young enlistees who successfully bring in new candidates. Women recruits can now wear their hair in ponytails, and regulations have been updated to permit small, inconspicuous tattoos in places like the back of your ear.

The other branches of the military aren’t exactly doing well either. The Marines, for example, met their numbers largely through retention, not recruitment, and the Navy was forced to accept recruits who scored in the lowest-qualifying range on an entrance exam.

The tempo of recruitment has always swung back and forth, depending in part on whether the economy is bad or booming. Today, that economy may be a mess, but hiring is still remarkably robust, leaving high school graduates with more choices than just the Army or stocking shelves at Walmart (which, by the way, also offers college tuition assistance).

The labor market isn’t the only obstacle to filling the ranks. Covid not only kept recruiters largely out of schools — a traditional hunting ground — for a couple of years, but they also lowered the scores on military entrance exams. The Army has seen a 9% decrease in scores (already low when this round of measurement began) on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the all-important test that determines which branches of the military and which jobs you qualify for. An oft-cited statistic — and it’s alarming, no matter how you feel about the military — is that only about 23% of the Americans the Army aims to recruit qualify as physically, educationally, and mentally fit to enlist.

Then there’s what could be called the patriotic duty gap. The U.S. is no longer officially fighting any wars (though the global war on terror, even if no longer known by that name, never really ends). The lack of a rally-round-the-flag event like 9/11, along with the calamitous military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and 20th-anniversary reexaminations of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, have left Washington wary of starting a new conflict. Sure, tens of billions of dollars of weaponry are going to Ukraine and there are more than 900 U.S. troops still in fighting mode in Syria, where a drone strike recently killed an American contractor and injured U.S. troops, but we seldom hear much about such deployments, or similar ones in Iraq, Niger, Somalia, and other countries across much of Africa, until something goes wrong, so they’re hardly top-notch recruitment material.

Summing up the mood of the military’s present target generation, Major General Alex Fink, chief of Army enterprise marketing, observed, “They see us as revered, but not relevant in their lives.”

What’s a Recruiter To Do?

A year ago, an Army Career Center (aka a recruiting station) opened in my fairly affluent neighborhood. This was curious. After all, it’s an area surrounded by elite universities and not the most welcoming high schools when it comes to the military. I had walked by the station often, noting the posters in its windows advertising career training and the benefits of the Army Reserve. There was even one in Tagalog about an expedited path to U.S. citizenship. (And mind you, there isn’t a large Filipino population in this neighborhood either.)

Finally, as someone who’s worked for years with antiwar GIs and wrote the book War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, I decided to drop in for a chat, only to hesitate, anticipating suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Boy, was I wrong! The four noncommissioned officers stationed there, only one of whom had spent extended time in a war zone, couldn’t have been more eager to talk about the benefits of Army life. Their spiel was good, too: career training, college tuition, some control over the first duty station you’re likely to get, housing, health care, family benefits, competitive pay, even bonuses, not to speak of 30 days off each year and substantial responsibility at a young age. Admittedly, the tuition reimbursement offered wouldn’t faintly cover any of the universities near where I live and it takes a while for your salary to amount to much… still, it was an impressive pitch.

And they don’t take just anyone, either. Enlistment requirements are similar across the six branches of the military, except when it comes to age limits. (For the Army, you have to be between 17 and 35.) You must be a high school graduate or the equivalent, a citizen or Green Card holder, medically and physically fit, in good moral standing, and score high enough on the ASVAB entrance exam, which only about one-third of test-takers now pass. (Full disclosure: I couldn’t do the sample math questions.)

So, how’s recruiting going? The Army has about 9,000 recruiters at 1,508 locations nationwide whose pay and benefits are tied to their success. Each recruiter is responsible for signing up a minimum of one recruit for each of the 11 months they’re at work. If this had actually happened, the Army would have coasted to last year’s goal. (I can do that math.) My neighborhood recruiters, however, seem to be typical in coming in well under that quota.

A Necessary Revamp

Somewhere in our friendly chat, I pointed out that armies exist to go to war. They countered that, for every infantryman in the U.S. military, there are about 100 support personnel and pointed to wall posters advertising 130 Army career options. No one seemed inclined to delve any deeper into the subject of future battlefields.

Surely, anyone qualified to enlist in the Army should know that such forces exist for only one significant purpose: to fight wars. And the U.S. military — with its 750 bases around the world and its unending war on terror, while the pressures between China and this country only continue to escalate — might well find itself at war again any time. The Army’s website is clear enough on its mission: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force.” But curiously enough, on its recruiting website, the topic of fighting a war doesn’t show up under “reasons to join.” The system is clearly focused instead on all the remarkably peaceful opportunities the Army offers its soldiers.

That emphasis shines forth in the resurrection this spring of the oldie (but apparently goodie) ad campaign “Be All You Can Be,” which last appeared in 2001. It has now replaced the “What’s Your Warrior” ads, with their video-game visuals and bass-heavy soundtrack. The new campaign includes short YouTube videos, where likeably plain-spoken soldiers explain just what they appreciate about the Army. One features an Army rapper; in another, a woman talks about finding balance in her Army life, as images of soldiers with weapons and soldiers with families flash by.

Admittedly, there have been a few hiccups along the way to this gentler, hipper vision of that service. Take the two high-profile ads in the new recruitment campaign that featured actor Jonathan Majors (Antman, CreedIII) and were pulled shortly after their debut when he was arrested on charges of assault, harassment, and strangulation.

Get ‘Em Early, Get ‘Em Young

Army recruits tend to come from military families (83% of enlistees by one reckoning) and hometowns near military bases, where kids grow up around people in uniform and time in the military becomes part of their worldview. Elsewhere, the military works remarkably hard to introduce that worldview. High schools receiving certain kinds of federal funding, for instance, are required to give recruiters the same access as they do colleges or employers and provide the military with contact information for all students (unless their parents opt out).

While Covid-19 limited recruiters’ access to schools, there were always ways around that. Take Army J.R.O.T.C., which currently has programs in more than 1,700 high schools, a sizeable portion of them in low-income communities with large minority populations. (J.R.O.T.C. boasts about this, although a New York Times exposé on the subject revealed it to be more predatory than laudatory.) The literature emphasizes that it’s a citizenship and leadership program, not a recruitment one, and it’s true that only about 21% of Army enlistees attended a school with such a program. Still, it’s clearly another way that the service recruits the young. After all, its “cadets” wear their uniforms in school and are taught military history and marksmanship, among other things. “Co-curricular activities” include military drills and competitions.

And there have been problems there, too: among them, a report citing 58 documented instances of sexual abuse or harassment of students by instructors in all branches of J.R.O.T.C. between 2018 and 2022. (As with all statistics on sexual abuse, this is undoubtedly an undercount.)

J.R.O.T.C. is hardly the only program exposing young students to the military. Young Marines is a nonprofit education, service, and leadership program dating back to 1959, which promotes “a healthy, drug-free lifestyle” for kids eight years old through high school. Its website emphasizes that it isn’t a military recruitment tool and doesn’t teach combat skills. Nonetheless, “events that Young Marines may participate in may involve close connection with public relations aspects of the armed forces.”

Then there’s Starbase, a Defense Department educational program where students learn STEM subjects like science and math by interacting with military personnel. Its primary focus is socio-economically disadvantaged fifth graders. And yes, that would be 10- and 11-year-olds!

It’s good when extra resources are available to students and schools. In the end, though, programs like these conflate good citizenship with militarism.

Too Little — Or Too Much?

A recent student of mine, who joined Navy R.O.T.C. to help pay for the college education she wanted, told me her age group, Gen Z, a key military target, doesn’t view such future service as beneficial. Her classmates, typically enough, felt less than positive about her wearing a uniform. Only older people congratulated her for it.

Three senior Army leaders reached a similar conclusion when they visited high schools nationwide recently to learn why enlistment was so dismal. They came away repeating the usual litany of problems: tight job market, pandemic barriers, unfitness of America’s youth, resistance from schools, and especially a lack of public information about the benefits of an Army career.

But what if the problem isn’t too little information, but too much? Despite ever-decreasing reportage on military and veterans’ issues, young civilians seem all too aware of the downsides of enlisting. Gen Zers, who until recently never lived in a country not openly at war, have gobs of information at their fingertips: videos, memoirs, movies, novels, along with alarming statistics on sexual assault and racism in the military and the ongoing health problems of soldiers, including exposure to toxic waste, rising cancer rates, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And that’s not even to mention the disproportionate rates of suicide and homelessness among veterans, not to speak of the direct contact many young people have had with those who returned home ready to attest to the grim consequences of more than 20 years of remarkably pointless warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across all too much of the rest of the planet.

All of this probably helps explain what the Army found in surveys of 16- to 28-year-olds it conducted last spring and summer. That service described (but didn’t release) its report on those surveys. According to the Associated Press, the top three reasons cited for refusing to enlist were “fear of death, worries about post-traumatic stress disorder, and leaving friends and family.” Young Americans also made it clear that they didn’t want to put their lives on hold in the military, while 13% anticipated discrimination against women and minorities, 10% didn’t trust the military leadership, 57% anticipated emotional or psychological problems, and nearly half expected physical problems from a stint in the Army. Despite recent accusations from conservative members of Congress, only 5% listed the Army being too “woke” as a deterrent, which should put that issue to bed, but undoubtedly won’t.

Let me offer a little confession here: I find all of this heartening — not just that potential recruits don’t want to be killed in war, but that they’re aware of how dangerous joining the military can be to body and mind. And apparently the survey didn’t even explore feelings about the possibility that you could be called on to kill, too. In an op-doc for the New York Times that followed a group of American soldiers from their swaggering entry into the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in 2003 to their present-day lives, an off-screen voice asks, “So what does it do to a generation of young people during these deployments?” The answer: “They become old. They are old young men.”

If there’s one thing the Gen Zers I know don’t want, it’s to get old before their time. (Probably not at their time either, but that’s another story.) So, add that to the reasons not to enlist.

Early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I met Elaine Johnson, a Gold Star Mother from South Carolina, so outspoken in her opposition to the Iraq War after her son, Darius Jennings, was killed in Fallujah in 2003 that she reportedly came to be known in the George W. Bush White House as “the Elaine Johnson problem.” Antiwar as she was, she also proudly told me, “My baby was a mama’s boy, but the military turned him into a productive young man.”

So, yes, the Army can be a place to mature, master a trade, take on responsibility, and learn lasting lessons about yourself, while often forging lifelong friendships. All good. But that, of course, can also happen in other types of organizations that don’t feature weapons and killing, that don’t take you to hell and back. Just imagine, for a moment, that our government left the business of losing the wars from hell to history and instead spent, say, half of the $842 billion being requested for next year’s military budget on [fill in the blank here with your preferred institutions].

Count on one thing: we would be in a different world. Maybe this generation of potential soldiers has already figured that out and will someday make it happen.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Nan Levinson.

Once again . . . once again . . . once again . . .

I’m sure you know what I’m referring to. Yeah, another — the latest (?) — mass shooting in the United States, this one at Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 10, two days ago as I write. Five killed, eight injured. The shooter, an employee of the bank, was killed in a shootout with police. Three officers were injured, including a rookie officer (ten days on the job), who was shot in the head and is struggling to survive. The gunman’s weapon was a nice, reliable AR-15-style rifle, legally purchased at a local gun shop a week earlier.

That’s the basic data.

Loved ones cry in stunned grief. People demand saner gun laws. The mayor of Louisville, “noting the enormous amount of blood needed to treat gunshot wounds . . . urged residents of Louisville to donate blood.”

What will happen next, of course —in the larger context known as the United States of America —is nothing. Politics will harden, of course: voices will rise, protests will erupt, Republican legislators will stand tough against demands for gun control. And eventually another mass killing somewhere will grab the headlines.

And while yes, yes, yes, I believe that assault weapons should be banned and legislation should be enacted requiring background checks, I don’t think legislative —superficial —efforts will begin to address the country’s mass-shooting epidemic. The Louisville shooting was apparently number 146 in the country this year (“mass shooting” defined as at least four people killed), with each one seen and reported as an isolated action by a violent loner. Nothing can begin to change until we dig into the national soul and find the connecting context.

As I wrote two weeks ago, in the wake of the Nashville shooting: “This is not simply a loner’s psychological flaw: the denial of full, or any, humanity —any spiritual value —to chosen others. It’s a phenomenon embedded in the social norm. We have enemies. We need them. We kill them.

“We go to war!”

And going to war means one thing above all else: dehumanization. While a loner’s mass shooting spree means dehumanizing the victims at a personal level, war means dehumanization at the national level. Every American citizen is expected to acknowledge the need to kill the enemy du jour: via bombs, via tanks, via torture, via radioactivity and whatever poison our weaponry leaves behind. Strategy is what matters. Dead bystanders —dead children —are collateral damage.

As Peter Turchin wrote a decade ago, in the wake of the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School: “The reason we should be worried about rampages is because they are surface indicators of highly troubling negative trends working their way through deep levels of our society.”

He called the victims “canaries in a coal mine.” Their toll is rising. And not just at American schools and banks and churches and shopping malls, etc., etc., etc. The toll is rising around the planet. Humanity has organized itself politically in the context of us vs. them, and this context is expanding. As the world grows technologically more connected —oh, the irony —its need to “defend itself” from the other has grown more ferocious. As soon as it’s labeled “war,” the concept of defense has virtually nothing to do with understanding.

And the United States, the most militarized country on Planet Earth, is at the heart of it all, fighting its forever war against terror: continuing to bomb, torture and poison evil itself out of existence. The 2023 U.S. military budget is $816.7 billion, with the 2024 budget likely to expand well beyond that. Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University, puts it this way: “In fact, it now seems as if this country is moving at breakneck speed out of the era of Forever War and into what might be thought of as the era of Eternal War.”

And let there be no mistake. The era of Eternal War includes America’s mass shootings. What the lost souls who commit them have access to, before they can go around the corner and buy an assault rifle, is the concept of dehumanization. Mass murder would not be possible without it.

Yeah, I know, when we go to war, it’s all done bureaucratically. It’s all classified. The enemy is determined, dehumanized and killed at the highest level of national government, blah blah blah. American citizens get to read about it in the newspaper, watch it on television, cheer (allegedly) and even protest, but the decision to kill is impersonal and “democratic.”

Well, too bad. War creates war, not peace —especially when the “tools of war” are so readily available. One reason we are apparently entering an era of Eternal War is that it’s accessible not just to the commander in chief but to every lost soul in the country. Everyone wants to feel empowered. And the seduction of war is that it seems like such a simple obvious solution: Choose the enemy, dehumanize it and kill it. Problem solved.

I blame the media: for mostly going along with the sham at the governmental level and for failing to notice, let alone report on or analyze, the broken social context revealed by every individual mass shooting.

To paraphrase the mayor of Louisville, an enormous amount of understanding is needed to address, and ultimately prevent, gunshot wounds. We all need to donate what we can.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

In just a few words—"those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future"—George Orwell summed up why narratives about history can be crucial. And so, ever since the final helicopter liftoff from the U.S. Embassy's roof in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the retrospective meaning of the Vietnam War has been a matter of intense dispute.

The dominant spin has been dismal and bipartisan. "We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people," Jimmy Carter declared soon after entering the White House in early 1977. "We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese." During the next decade, presidents ordered direct American military interventions on a much smaller scale, while the rationales were equally mendacious. Ronald Reagan ordered the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and George H.W. Bush ordered the 1989 invasion of Panama.

In early 1991, President Bush triumphantly proclaimed that reluctance to use U.S. military might after the Vietnam War had at last been vanquished. His exultation came after a five-week air war that enabled the Pentagon to kill upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians. "It's a proud day for America," Bush said. "And, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."

Two decades later—delivering what the White House titled "Remarks by the President at the Commemoration Ceremony of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War"—Barack Obama did not even hint that the U.S. war in Vietnam was based on deception. Speaking in May 2012, after he had more than tripled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Obama said: "Let us resolve to never forget the costs of war, including the terrible loss of innocent civilians—not just in Vietnam, but in all wars."

Moments later, Obama flatly claimed: "When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it's necessary."

No matter how much the defenders of the militaristic status quo have tried to relegate Daniel Ellsberg to the past, he has insisted on being present

Such lies are the opposite of what Daniel Ellsberg has been illuminating for more than five decades. He says about the Vietnam War: "It wasn't that we were on the wrong side; we were the wrong side."

Outlooks like that are rarely heard or read in U.S. mass media. And overall, news outlets have much preferred to make only sanitized references to Ellsberg as a historic figure. Much less acceptable is the Daniel Ellsberg who, since the end of the Vietnam War, was arrested nearly a hundred times for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience against nuclear weapons and other aspects of the warfare industry.

After working inside the U.S. war machinery, Ellsberg became its highest-ranking operative to opt out—bravely throwing sand in its gears by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, at the risk of spending the rest of his life in prison. The 7,000-page study exposed lies about U.S. policies in Vietnam told by four successive presidents. During the 52 years since then, Ellsberg has continually provided key information and cogent analysis of pretexts for U.S. wars. And he has focused on what they've actually meant in human terms.

Ellsberg has explained, most comprehensively in his 2017 landmark book The Doomsday Machine, what is worst of all: The nation's military-industrial-media establishment refuses to acknowledge, let alone mitigate, the insanity of the militarism that is logically headed toward nuclear war.

Helping to prevent nuclear war has been an overriding preoccupation of Ellsberg's adult life. In The Doomsday Machine—subtitled "Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"—he shares exceptional insights from working for the doomsday system as an insider and then working to defuse the doomsday system as an outsider.

An upsurge of media attention to Ellsberg resulted from the emergence of other heroic whistleblowers. In 2010, U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning was arrested for leaking a vast quantity of documents that exposed countless lies and war crimes. Three years later, a former employee of a National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, went public with proof of mass surveillance by a digital Big Brother with mind-boggling reach.

By then, Ellsberg's stature as the Pentagon Papers whistleblower had risen to near-veneration among many liberals in media and others happy to consign the virtues of such whistleblowing to the Vietnam War era. But Ellsberg emphatically rejected the "Ellsberg good, Snowden bad" paradigm, which appealed to some eminent apologists for the status quo (such as Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a specious New Yorker piece contrasting the two). Ellsberg has always vigorously supported Snowden, Manning and other "national security" whistleblowers at every turn.

Ellsberg disclosed in a public letter in early March that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with a prognosis of three to six months to live. Now, in the closing time of his life, he continues to speak out with urgency, in particular about the need for genuine diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia, as well as the U.S. and China, to avert nuclear war.

Many recent interviews are posted on the Ellsberg website. Ellsberg remains busy talking with journalists as well as activist groups. Last Sunday, vibrant and eloquent as ever, he spoke on a livestream video sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America.

Grassroots activists are organizing for the national Daniel Ellsberg Week, April 24-30, "a week of education and action," which the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is co-sponsoring with the RootsAction Education Fund (where I'm national director). A central theme is "to celebrate the life's work of Daniel Ellsberg, to take action in support of whistleblowers and peacemakers, and to call on state and local governments around the country to honor the spirit of difficult truth-telling with a commemorative week."

No matter how much the defenders of the militaristic status quo have tried to relegate Daniel Ellsberg to the past, he has insisted on being present—with a vast reservoir of knowledge, an awesome intellect, deep compassion and commitment to nonviolent resistance—challenging systems of mass murder that go by other names.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Recently, the US Senate voted on a bipartisan basis to rescind the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq. President Biden, who voted for that AUMF in 2003, has said he will sign it if it gets to his desk.

At this writing, it is unclear if the U.S. House will post the rescission for a vote and, if so, whether it will pass in that chamber. I fervently hope that it will, so one of the most notorious episodes in U.S. history can be peacefully laid to rest.

If that does happen, it would be a strong parallel to the rescission of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution by the U.S. Senate in 2009. That AUMF in 1964 was also based on deception and authorized the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, which became the greatest American debacle of that era.

But far more important, rescinding the Iraq AUMF would repudiate deception and manipulation by any Presidential Administration as happened with the George W. Bush Administration in getting Congress to support it. It would also discourage open-ended Congressional AUMFs with no expiration date, which so far has allowed the one in Iraq to continue for two decades. In short, it would re-establish the Constitutional principle that only Congress can declare war, and repudiate the decades-long trend toward an imperial US presidency.

In the lead-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq 20 years ago, as the executive director of the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action, I helped lead intensive organizing to try to prevent it.

We organized numerous demonstrations opposing the Bush administration's campaign to start a war with Iraq, including joining a demonstration of over 1 million in New York City shortly before the March 19, 2003 invasion. With demonstrations worldwide attended by tens of millions, it was the largest anti-war mobilization in history to try to prevent a war.

We also did intensive lobbying in opposition to the Bush Administration’s AUMF to authorize the war. I remember being in a delegation that met with the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg shortly before the vote, at which he shared that he couldn’t justify sending his own son to that war so had decided to vote against it.

Starting in August 2002, there was an intense mobilization by the Bush Administration with neoconservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to promote the war based on the deception that it was needed to prevent Iraq from using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

That culminated with a presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council in February 2003 asserting the same supposed danger. The Council didn’t vote to support it. We put forward compelling evidence that the Bush Administration was deceiving the American people into supporting the war, but it began anyway.

Years later, I had an in-person conversation with the Chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, Dr. Hans Blix. He told me he had met in person with President Bush before he launched the war, and certified to him that Iraq had no nuclear weapons. He said he told him that if he were given just a few more months, he could certify that it also didn’t have Chemical or Biological Weapons. But Blix said Bush simply retorted that he had made the decision, and the US invasion happened shortly after.

Peace-loving citizens in the U.S. and across the world organized intensively to end the war. I’m proud that the Coalition for Peace Action played a leading role in that effort in our region. But it wasn’t ended until 2011 when the US finally withdrew its last remaining troops as part of an agreement in 2008, before Bush finished his second term. Over 5,000 U.S. Servicemembers were killed, and tens of thousands wounded—including countless returning US Servicemembers who suffer from PTSD to this day. And up to one million Iraqis died.

The U.S. House needs to complete rescission of this deceptive and extremely damaging AUMF. In January 2020, the Trump Administration invoked it to conduct a drone assassination of a top Iranian military leader who was in Bagdad, creating a grave danger of major war with Iran. Iran did a retaliatory strike against a U.S. base in Iraq. But thankfully, no U.S. troops were killed—though a considerable number were injured.

Wars of choice in Vietnam and Iraq have not led to peaceful American-style democracies, as those can never be imposed from the outside. We need to rescind the AUMF for the Iraq War, as we did with the Tonkin Gulf AUMF that green-lighted the Vietnam War. Readers wanting to support that goal can visit peacecoalition.org.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rev. Robert Moore.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a UN agency with climatologists from over 70 counties included) has just come out with a new report about climate change. The news is not good.

Basically, their arguments have gotten more refined, more specific: climate change is impacting humans, animals, and plants to a greater and greater extent, things are getting worse, and its impact will escalate the longer we hesitate to take resolute steps to address it.

The IPCC is making several points: the Earth’s temperature is rising and, with each increased increment, things are getting worse; moving forward, without major changes this decade, they will get exponentially worse. That’s my way of transmitting “scientese” into understandable English.

A few words before continuing: this “Synthesis Report of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report: Summary for Policy Makers” (March 19, 2023) is an effort to synthesize findings from a number of groups of scientists working together, each which focuses on a particular area (energy, biodiversity, etc.), and to present them to policymakers, many who have PhDs, often in the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and related fields. This is not written for the general public, but it needs to be shared in ways that other educated people and interested lay persons can understand; hence, this article by a PhD in Sociology who recognizes the importance of sharing technical writing far beyond the scientific community.

We must do everything we can to end war on this planet, and especially the U.S. efforts to dominate every country on Earth. And we also need to prevent any other country from establishing a subsequent empire.

The report is broken into three sections: after the introduction, it discusses current status and trends; future climate change, risks, and long-term responses; and responses in the near term (meaning up to 2040). In this article, I focus primarily on current status and trends, and following this report, do not discuss many of the changes taking place; I focus on some of the changes I believe are most salient.

In the introduction, they write: "This report recognizes the interdependence of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human systems….”(All quotes included, unless otherwise identified, are from the report and are italicized herein to draw attention to their specific wording; all temperatures provide use the Celsius scale, not Fahrenheit.)

In the report, they present findings from a wide-range of research, recognizing a range of possibilities; they give a median or mid-range (half of the scores are above and half below) result, with a very likely range between 5-95 percent of findings; this conveys the most likely range of 90% of the findings (pretty much guaranteeing the accuracy of the findings.) Reporting median findings is the best way to represent a range of numerical results; much more representative than averages.

Current Status and Trends

“Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gasses, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperatures reaching 1.1 degree Celsius above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”

What this says, should it not be clear, is that human beings have caused the Earth’s surface temperature to rise—not natural processes—through emitting greenhouse gasses, which include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NOx), and fluorinated gasses, with the first two being the most harmful. And we know the extent of this increase; compared to the median temperature from between the years 1850-1900, the median temperature between 2011 and 2020 was 1.1 degree Celsius higher. (The years 1850-1900 were chosen to represent “pre-industrial” civilization as this was the first period where climate records were generally kept globally, and industrialization was confined to only a few countries.)

This gives us a more stable period of comparison: median temperature across a 50-year period, instead of just the usual single years of 1750 (beginning of the industrial revolution) or 1880 (when detailed records began being compiled). Thus, we can be more confident of reported increases/decreases in the future.

Accordingly, we know that 58% of the approximate 2400 Giga-tons of carbon dioxide and equivalents emitted by humans into the atmosphere—a gigaton is equivalent to one billion metric tons or 2.2 trillion pounds—were emitted between 1850 and 1989 (139 years), while the other 42% were emitted between 1990-2019 , roughly a 30-year period. This shows that the annual rate of emissions is increasing faster in the second period than in the initial one.

The report continues, discussing very tiny amounts that have such a huge impact on atmospheric and ultimately planetary conditions: “In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations (410 parts per million) were higher than any time in a least 2 million years (high confidence) and concentration of methane (1866 parts per billion) and nitrous oxide (333 parts per billion) were higher than any time in at least 800,000 years (very high confidence).” It should be noted that in February 2023, according to NASA, the atmospheric CO2 level was 420 parts per million. (For a visual representation of the last 800,000 years of CO2 emissions—none which exceeded 300 parts per million until roughly 1950—see here.)

[These “confidence terms” are based on the type, amount, quality and consistency of evidence: very high confidence means 9 out of 10 chances of being correct; high confidence means 8 out of 10 chances of being correct; and medium confidence means about 5 out of 10 chances. (See Sophie Lewis and Allie Gallant, “Lost in Translation: Confidence and Certainty in Climate Science")

This is important. As carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, the more it attacks the very atmosphere that protects the Earth from the Sun’s rays. In other words, as I put it in a previous article, “the essential relationship is the more greenhouse gases released, the more damage to the atmosphere, leading to more warming and many related problems.”

We can see some of the impacts of this. Consider sea levels. Sea levels have been rising around the globe, and the rate of increase has been accelerating. Between 1901 and 1970, the average sea level rise was 1.3 millimeters (mm) per year. Between 1971 and 2006, it rose 1.9 mm a year. Yet, between 2006 and 2018, it rose 3.7 mm per year.

So what? Well, when you consider the large numbers of cities around the world that are on the coasts of oceans—Tokyo, Yokohama (Japan), Shanghai, Hong Kong (China), Haiphong and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Manila (Philippines), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Jakarta (Indonesia), Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney (Australia), Kolkata and Mumbai (India), Durban and Cape Town (South Africa), Alexandria (Egypt), Athens (Greece), Naples, Rome, Genoa and Turin (Italy), Marseilles (France), Barcelona (Spain), Lisbon (Portugal), London, Liverpool and Glasgow (United Kingdom), Antwerp (Belgium), Rotterdam and Amsterdam (Netherlands), Stockholm (Sweden) all come to mind, and then you get to Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Newport News, Savannah, Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle for a few in the US—then you are talking hundreds of millions of people who are at increasing risk from sea level rises. And then when we recognize that most coastal cities have major infrastructures—sanitation, transportation, electricity—below street level, then you can see that rising oceans threaten the well-being of people before rising to street level.

And will people in these areas sit there passively as the water rises and drown, or will they migrate inland to higher ground? And where will they go, and will there be jobs and food and housing for them in their new locations…?

The report argues that globally “approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change.” That’s almost one out of every two people on the planet!

Further,

“Increasing weather and climate extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and reduced water insecurity, with the largest adverse impacts observed in many locations and/or communities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, [Less Developed Countries], Small Islands and the Arctic, and globally for Indigenous Peoples, small-scale food producers and low-income households.” Altogether, “Between 2010 and 2020, human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions, compared to regions with very low vulnerability.”

But this damage extends beyond human beings. “Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric, and coastal and open ocean ecosystems” (emphasis added). We humans are killing the physical environment on which human survival depends.

Yet the physical environment is not the only victim; humans are especially susceptible to extreme heat events:

In all regions, increases in extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality and morbidity (very high confidence). The occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases (very high confidence) and the incidence of vector-borne diseases (high confidence) have increased. In assessed regions, some mental health challenges are associated with increasing temperatures (high confidence), trauma from extreme events (very high confidence), and loss of livelihoods and culture (high confidence). Climate and weather extremes are increasingly driving displacement in Africa, Asia, North America (high confidence), and Central and South America (medium confidence), with small island states in the Caribbean and South Pacific being disproportionately affected relative to their small population size (high confidence).

And this is not just limited to isolated cases:

In urban areas, observed climate change has caused adverse impacts on human health, livelihoods and key infrastructures. Hot extremes have intensified in cities. Urban infrastructure, including transportation, water, sanitation and energy systems have been compromised by extreme and slow-onset events, with resulting economic losses, disruptions of services and negative impacts to well-being. Observed adverse impacts are concentrated amongst economically and socially marginalized urban residents (high confidence).

While there are obviously other cases, Super Storm Sandy’s assault on New York City during 2012 shows unequivocally that urban areas are at serious risk, and it is people of color and the poor of all colors who are particularly at risk.

To sum up: “Adverse impacts from human-caused climate change will continue to intensify,” with widespread and substantial impacts and related losses and damages attributed to climate change having been observed, and that impacts are driven by changes in multiple, physical climate conditions that have been caused by human behaviors.

And those physical climate conditions have primarily been by emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As we continue to do that, we are hastening the risk to human, animal, and most plants’ survival on this planet.

Now, admittedly, there have been significant efforts in some areas and localities to address the problems of climate change; these are referred to “adaptation” and “mitigation.” Adaptation to climate change has resulted in “at least 170 countries and many cities including adaptation in their climate policies and planning processes (high confidence).” However, “Most observed adaptation responses are fragmented, incremental, sector-specific, and unequally distributed across regions … with the largest adaptation gaps among lower income groups (high confidence).”

Key barriers to adaptation are limited resources, lack of private sector and citizen involvement, insufficient mobilization of finance (including for research), low climate literacy, lack of political commitment, limited research and/or slow and low-uptake of adaptation science, and low sense of urgency (emphasis added).

Mitigation, on the other hand, refers to efforts to mitigate the impact of climate change, such as building sea walls to respond to sea level rise. Many of these efforts are basically stop-gap measures that suggest that our political leaders are responding to the problem when they really are not.

The issue, going forward, is how do we respond? The crisis is real and getting worse. What are we going to do about it?

Future Climate Change, Risks, and Long-term Responses

There are a number of choices in how we respond that humans collectively can take; we have the power to choose how we go forward.

Now, in reality, without broad, widespread, and continued mobilization that is based on solid organization and determined actions, these decisions will be made by people who have political and economic power in our world; and their collective interests are not to help out people around the world but to maintain their own wealth and power. We can never forget that. (The report did not say that; I did: as the result of over 50 years of political activism, I aver it is the truth.) In fact, as the report states, “The 10% of households with the highest per capita emissions contribute 35-45% of global consumption-based household [greenhouse gas] emissions, while the bottom 50% contribute 13-15% (high confidence.)” And, I argue, that means we must unify with forces around the globe; no one people can make the required changes by themselves.

However, what climate science provides us with are various options by which we can go forward. These scientists can tell us the different options and the ramifications of choosing each one against another. This is invaluable and necessary, but not sufficient. They can tell us what options are available, in their opinions, but they do not tell us which ones we should take; that is a collective political decision that humans must collectively consider and choose. Yet, having these options gives us places from where to start our discussions.

To do this, scientists prepare models that will suggest future behavior: if we choose this, then that is likely to happen. And it’s up to us to decide if these ramifications are worthy and/or desirable within our current context. (And then we must decide which ones we will organize to achieve, and how hard we are willing to fight to attain them.)

However, when one looks at models, we must always remember that models are based on assumptions: if you assume this, then that likely that will happen. So, scientific models are not certainties; they are “best guesses” as to what will result if we do or allow certain things to happen and depend on the assumptions included that affect the outcomes.

The report spends considerable time discussing these plausible models, but it doesn’t do it in a systematic way that is easily accessible to non-physical scientists. And I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing them, although I will say a little about them and urge each of you to read the report for yourself and your friends.

The report gives us five plausible scenarios: if we are willing to accept an increase of 1.4 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 median temperature; 1.8 degrees; 2.7 degrees; 3.6 degrees and 4.4 degrees. They give these options with the understanding that “Global warming will continue to increase in the near term (2020-2040) mainly due to increased cumulative CO2 emissions in nearly all considered scenarios and modelled pathways. Furthermore, “In the near term, global warming is more likely than not to reach 1.5 degrees even under the very low [greenhouse gas] emission scenario … and likely or very likely to exceed 1.5 degrees under higher emissions scenarios” (emphases in original report).

Why the emphasis on 1.5 degrees? It is the limit at which many scientists believe humans can survive without causing the physical environment to be destroyed. It is a controversial “limit,” and a considerable number of scientists believe it is too high. (For a cogent argument that the IPCC’s work is too conservative, see David Spratt, “IPCC: Separating the Science from the Politics?” Nonetheless, it is the “target” set by the IPCC as being “relatively safe.”

The point to remember, however, is that the greater the global warming, the greater the deleterious impacts on both human and natural environments, and these impacts will further worsen things for humans, animals, and most plants while contributing to the worsening attacks on the physical environments on which we depend: “With every additional increment of global warming, changes in extremes continue to become larger” and “continued emissions will further affect all major climate system components.”

If exponential risk of change is not bad enough, the risk is ever worse; the report discusses likelihood and risks of unavoidable, irreversible or abrupt changes: “The likelihood and impacts of abrupt and/or irreversible changes in the climate system, including changes triggered when tipping points are reached, increase with further global warming (high confidence).”

The report ends clearly: “International cooperation is a critical enabler for achieving ambitions climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate resilient development (high confidence).”

Comment

The science, I believe, is incontrovertible—climate change threatens the very existence of humans, animals, and most plants on this planet—although arguments can still be made about how soon we must resolutely act to actually have a chance of stopping this; some people argue that it’s already too late, while others believe it can be stopped if acted upon soon (by 2030), while others think we have more time: that is not settled. There is also hope that even if the Earth’s surface temperature exceeds 1.5 degrees, that future inventions could bring the temperature back below 1.5 degrees, and restore some kind of atmospheric stability, although I don’t see any evidence to date that supports the development of something that effective.

However, there are two things not mentioned in the report: war and capitalism.

I think we need to think out and propose more globally collective solutions that are designed and intended to surpass capitalism and its related problems.

With any war (Russia v. Ukraine, Israel v. Palestine, Saudi Arabia v. Yemen, US vs. the world), there is tremendous death and environmental destruction. Focusing only on the latter here, every shell shot, every plane launched, every bridge or building struck harms the environment. Period. And this environmental and human destruction doesn’t end with the cessation of hostilities: people in Vietnam are still dealing with unexploded ordinance and poisoning of their people and environment from U.S. use of Agent Orange and other defoliants, and the “American war,” as the Vietnamese call it, ended in 1975.

We must do everything we can to end war on this planet, and especially the U.S. efforts to dominate every country on Earth. And we also need to prevent any other country from establishing a subsequent empire.

Tied into that, although with a related albeit different dynamic, is capitalism. As seems obvious to me, the economic system’s immediate demand for increased production is killing us through the emission of greenhouse gases. Simply, it must be stopped as soon as possible; I don’t think there’s any support by anyone with any sense that capitalism will save us, that it will create the tools to remove carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gasses quick enough or sufficiently enough to keep the Earth’s temperature at 1.5 degrees or below, and especially not in the face of its need for increased production. And, even should something emerge that could even potentially solve this problem, it still would not address the exploitation, oppression, and inequalities required by capitalism.

Accordingly, I think we need to think out and propose more globally collective solutions that are designed and intended to surpass capitalism and its related problems. This obviously means drastically reducing growth in the more economically developed countries, while transferring money and resources to the less-developed countries, so they can try to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Neither war nor capitalism were mentioned in this report by the IPCC: something, obviously, is missing!

Conclusion

Climate change is threatening the very existence of humans, animals, and most plants on the planet. The evidence is overwhelming, and is getting more and more established and uncontroversial over time.

Yet we need to include many more things into the mix; I’ve begun here by including the need to end all wars and capitalism as well. I don’t think we can do this by continuing to think as the status quo demands; I think we need to think outside of the box, if you will, to have any chance to make the changes necessary for survival of all species. (For one example, although needing to be updated is my 2017 article, “Addressing Seriously the Environmental Crisis,” which is online here.)

It is clear that we cannot depend on our economic or political “leaders”: if we’re going to survive, we have to do it ourselves, but together, and globally.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kim Scipes.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. - Matthew 5:9

In a brilliant op-ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades. The title of Parsi's article, "The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,"refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's use of the term "indispensable nation" to describe the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world.

The irony in Parsi's use of Albright's term is that she generally used it to refer to U.S. war-making, not peacemaking. In 1998, Albright toured the Middle East and then the United States to rally support for President Clinton's threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win support in the Middle East, she wasconfronted by heckling and critical questions during a televised event at Ohio State University, and she appeared on the Today Show the next morning to respond to public opposition in a more controlled setting. Albright claimed, "..if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see here the danger to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life."

Albright's readiness to take the sacrifices of American troops for granted had already got her into trouble when she famously asked General Colin Powell, "What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Powell wrote in his memoirs, "I thought I would have an aneurysm."

But Powell himself later caved to the neocons, or the "fucking crazies" as he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they made up to try to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the "crazies" at every turn. Albright and the neocons' exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the U.S. political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator.

Today, this is true in the war in Yemen, where the U.S. chose to join a Saudi-led alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining neutral and preserving its credibility as a potential mediator. It also applies, most notoriously, to the U.S. blank check for endless Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure. For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the same applies to the African Union's successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia, and to Turkey's promising mediation between Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure and weaken Russia.

But neutrality has become anathema to U.S. policymakers. George W. Bush's threat, "You are either with us or against us," has become an established, if unspoken, core assumption of 21st century U.S. foreign policy. The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.

The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.

Most U.S. politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from local to state to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to nothing about foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon cliches like the ten or twelve packed into Albright's vague justification for bombing Iraq: freedom, democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to all of us, we are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and women in uniform, and "we have to use force."

Faced with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and Democrats alike have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly hands of the neocons, who have brought the world only chaos and violence for 25 years.

All but the most principled progressive or libertarian members of Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the real world that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or by suicidal inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that we must cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.

It is no wonder that Americans think the world's problems are insoluble and that peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar moment of global dominance to persuade us that that is the case. But these policies are choices, and there are alternatives, as China and other countries are dramatically demonstrating. President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a "peace club" of peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine, and this offers new hope for peace.

During his election campaign and his first year in office, President Biden repeatedly promised to usher in a new era of American diplomacy, after decades of war and record military spending. Zach Vertin, now a senior adviser to UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, wrote in 2020 that Biden's effort to "rebuild a decimated State Department" should include setting up a "mediation support unit… staffed by experts whose sole mandate is to ensure our diplomats have the tools they need to succeed in waging peace."

Biden's meager response to this call from Vertin and others was finallyunveiled in March 2022, after he dismissed Russia's diplomatic initiatives and Russia invaded Ukraine. The State Department's new Negotiations Support Unit consists of three junior staffers quartered within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. This is the extent of Biden's token commitment to peacemaking, as the barn door swings in the wind and the four horsemen of the apocalypse - War, Famine, Conquest and Death - run wild across the Earth.

As Zach Vertin wrote, "It is often assumed that mediation and negotiation are skills readily available to anyone engaged in politics or diplomacy, especially veteran diplomats and senior government appointees. But that is not the case: Professional mediation is a specialized, often highly technical, tradecraft in its own right."

The mass destruction of war is also specialized and technical, and the United States now invests close to a trillion dollars per year in it. The appointment of three junior State Department staffers to try to make peace in a world threatened and intimidated by their own country's trillion-dollar war machine only reaffirms that peace is not a priority for the U.S. government.

By contrast, the European Union created its Mediation Support Team in 2009 and now has 20 team members working with other teams from individual EU countries. The UN's Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs has a staff of 4,500, spread all across the world.

The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is diplomacy for war, not for peace. The State Department's top priorities are not to make peace, nor even to actually win wars, which the United States has failed to do since 1945, apart from the reconquest of small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait. Its actual priorities are to bully other countries to join U.S.-led war coalitions and buy U.S. weapons, to mute calls for peace in international fora, to enforce illegal and deadly coercive sanctions, and to manipulate other countries into sacrificing their people in U.S. proxy wars.

The result is to keep spreading violence and chaos across the world. If we want to stop our rulers from marching us toward nuclear war, climate catastrophe, and mass extinction, we had better take off our blinders and start insisting on policies that reflect our best instincts and our common interests, instead of the interests of the warmongers and merchants of death who profit from war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. - Matthew 5:9

In a brilliant op-ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades. The title of Parsi's article, "The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,"refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's use of the term "indispensable nation" to describe the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world.

The irony in Parsi's use of Albright's term is that she generally used it to refer to U.S. war-making, not peacemaking. In 1998, Albright toured the Middle East and then the United States to rally support for President Clinton's threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win support in the Middle East, she wasconfronted by heckling and critical questions during a televised event at Ohio State University, and she appeared on the Today Show the next morning to respond to public opposition in a more controlled setting. Albright claimed, "..if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see here the danger to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life."

Albright's readiness to take the sacrifices of American troops for granted had already got her into trouble when she famously asked General Colin Powell, "What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Powell wrote in his memoirs, "I thought I would have an aneurysm."

But Powell himself later caved to the neocons, or the "fucking crazies" as he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they made up to try to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the "crazies" at every turn. Albright and the neocons' exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the U.S. political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator.

Today, this is true in the war in Yemen, where the U.S. chose to join a Saudi-led alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining neutral and preserving its credibility as a potential mediator. It also applies, most notoriously, to the U.S. blank check for endless Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure. For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the same applies to the African Union's successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia, and to Turkey's promising mediation between Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure and weaken Russia.

But neutrality has become anathema to U.S. policymakers. George W. Bush's threat, "You are either with us or against us," has become an established, if unspoken, core assumption of 21st century U.S. foreign policy. The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.

The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.

Most U.S. politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from local to state to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to nothing about foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon cliches like the ten or twelve packed into Albright's vague justification for bombing Iraq: freedom, democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to all of us, we are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and women in uniform, and "we have to use force."

Faced with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and Democrats alike have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly hands of the neocons, who have brought the world only chaos and violence for 25 years.

All but the most principled progressive or libertarian members of Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the real world that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or by suicidal inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that we must cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.

It is no wonder that Americans think the world's problems are insoluble and that peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar moment of global dominance to persuade us that that is the case. But these policies are choices, and there are alternatives, as China and other countries are dramatically demonstrating. President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a "peace club" of peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine, and this offers new hope for peace.

During his election campaign and his first year in office, President Biden repeatedly promised to usher in a new era of American diplomacy, after decades of war and record military spending. Zach Vertin, now a senior adviser to UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, wrote in 2020 that Biden's effort to "rebuild a decimated State Department" should include setting up a "mediation support unit… staffed by experts whose sole mandate is to ensure our diplomats have the tools they need to succeed in waging peace."

Biden's meager response to this call from Vertin and others was finallyunveiled in March 2022, after he dismissed Russia's diplomatic initiatives and Russia invaded Ukraine. The State Department's new Negotiations Support Unit consists of three junior staffers quartered within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. This is the extent of Biden's token commitment to peacemaking, as the barn door swings in the wind and the four horsemen of the apocalypse - War, Famine, Conquest and Death - run wild across the Earth.

As Zach Vertin wrote, "It is often assumed that mediation and negotiation are skills readily available to anyone engaged in politics or diplomacy, especially veteran diplomats and senior government appointees. But that is not the case: Professional mediation is a specialized, often highly technical, tradecraft in its own right."

The mass destruction of war is also specialized and technical, and the United States now invests close to a trillion dollars per year in it. The appointment of three junior State Department staffers to try to make peace in a world threatened and intimidated by their own country's trillion-dollar war machine only reaffirms that peace is not a priority for the U.S. government.

By contrast, the European Union created its Mediation Support Team in 2009 and now has 20 team members working with other teams from individual EU countries. The UN's Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs has a staff of 4,500, spread all across the world.

The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is diplomacy for war, not for peace. The State Department's top priorities are not to make peace, nor even to actually win wars, which the United States has failed to do since 1945, apart from the reconquest of small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait. Its actual priorities are to bully other countries to join U.S.-led war coalitions and buy U.S. weapons, to mute calls for peace in international fora, to enforce illegal and deadly coercive sanctions, and to manipulate other countries into sacrificing their people in U.S. proxy wars.

The result is to keep spreading violence and chaos across the world. If we want to stop our rulers from marching us toward nuclear war, climate catastrophe, and mass extinction, we had better take off our blinders and start insisting on policies that reflect our best instincts and our common interests, instead of the interests of the warmongers and merchants of death who profit from war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

Last month, the House and Senate Armed Services committees held hearings to discuss the Department of Defense’s legislative asks and priorities regarding U.S. special operations forces. In those hearings, Department officials made clear that one of their top priorities for the upcoming legislative cycle is expanding an obscure security cooperation authority: section 1202 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes the U.S. military to work “by, with, and through” foreign partners to counter foreign adversaries like Russia and China.

In advocating for an expansion of section 1202, Department officials have reportedly promised that the authority would be “limited to noncombat operations.” Congress, however, should cast a wary eye on this promise and on the Department’s overarching request for broader authority.

Section 1202 is a provisional authority, in effect through 2025, that permits the Department of Defense to recruit, train, equip, and pay salaries to foreign militaries, paramilitaries, and even private individuals who are supporting U.S. “irregular warfare” operations — defined as “competition . . . short of traditional armed conflict” — against supposed malign state actors. By putting section 1202 partners on payroll, U.S. forces gain the ability to command them, directing them to achieve U.S. military objectives either alongside U.S. forces or in U.S. forces’ stead. As a result, the Department describes its relationship with section 1202 partners as one of “operational control,” and it refers to these partners as “surrogate forces.”

Surrogate forces can be a powerful tool: They are a force multiplier and can afford the Department of Defense access or credibility that American troops may not have in a foreign context. But working by, with, and through foreign partners carries serious risks, both of escalation and of unlawful combat.

In the past, security cooperation programs have pulled U.S. forces into combat with adversaries who are not clearly covered by any congressionally enacted authorization for use of military force (“AUMF”). This is especially true of surrogate force programs run under 10 U.S.C. § 127e, an established counterterrorism authority on which section 1202 is based. According to investigative reporting, the Department has used section 127e surrogate forces to pursue Boko Haram and various Islamic State affiliates in countries ranging from Cameroon to Egypt. Neither Boko Haram nor any Islamic State affiliate has been publicly disclosed as one of al-Qaeda’s “associated forces” or “successor forces” who can be targeted under the 2001 AUMF, per the executive branch’s interpretation of that authority. This raises questions about whether the Department has worked by, with, and through surrogates to target these or other organizations under yet‑undisclosed interpretations of the 2001 AUMF or the president’s constitutional authority — or worse, whether the Department has treated section 127e as a de facto AUMF.

Department of Defense officials have taken pains to distinguish section 1202 from its progenitor, section 127e. In a conversation in mid-2022, a current Department official assured me that section 1202 surrogate forces were not being commanded into combat like their section 127e peers. That same official, however, was unaware of any written Department policy that would prevent section 1202 programs from being used for combat. Other former and current Department officials with whom I spoke were similarly unaware of such a policy, and a public memorandum outlining the Department’s original procedures for implementing section 1202 contained no language prohibiting kinetic programs. (The memorandum was set to expire on August 3, 2022. The Department has not published a replacement policy, and the New York Times is now suing the Department under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain any such policy.) One current official with experience working on section 1202 programs said he would be “surprised” if the Department decided to promulgate a policy foreclosing combat because “you want to be flexible, in case you’re asked by [a lawmaker] or the president” to have surrogate forces undertake kinetic operations.

Nor are the weak limits in section 1202 itself — its definition of “irregular warfare” and its rules of construction — sufficient to prevent combat through surrogate forces. Although “irregular warfare” is defined as conduct “short of traditional armed conflict,” the Department of Defense views nontraditional or gray-zone conflict as encompassing “the full range of military and other capabilities,” including proxy and guerilla operations. As recently as last summer, a group of Department lawyers, writing in their personal capacity, assessed that the Department could run section 1202 programs in Ukraine to assist war efforts against Russia, so long as the United States did not itself “become embroiled in the ongoing conflict.”

The rules of construction similarly fail to guard against the use of section 1202 to engage in combat. Although one rule specifies that section 1202 is not itself an AUMF, it does not prevent the Department of Defense from using surrogate forces in furtherance of the president’s claimed authority to use force under Article II of the Constitution. The rule prohibiting the use of surrogates for operations that U.S. forces “are not . . . legally authorized to conduct themselves” suffers from the same defect, according to multiple Department of Defense officials with whom I have spoken. This is worrying because the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) has interpreted Article II of the Constitution to allow the president to use force, without congressional authorization, whenever it is in the “national interest” and unlikely to produce a conflict of sufficient nature, scope, and duration to constitute “war in the constitutional sense.” Leading experts have criticized that OLC’s interpretation “provides no meaningful constraint” on the president’s authority to launch airstrikes or direct U.S. forces into low‑intensity combat. Indeed, recent presidents have relied on this interpretation of Article II to intervene in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and attack Bashar al-Assad’s military installations in Syria — without Congress’s prior approval.

If Department of Defense officials are telling Congress that section 1202 programs will not involve combat, they may be making a promise they cannot keep. Without real guardrails, mission creep or personnel turnover (including in the White House) could easily result in section 1202 surrogate forces being commanded into combat. There’s certainly an appetite to push the present boundaries: Just last week, a former Marine Corps official proposed using kinetic section 1202 programs to “target[] Chinese military assets” in the South China Sea.

To the extent that Congress wants to prevent section 1202 surrogate forces from being used like their section 127e counterparts, Congress needs to limit the authority, not expand it. Congress should add language to section 1202 that would prevent the authority from being used to implement expansive interpretations of the president’s authority to use force without congressional authorization. This could be a simple fix, accomplished by requiring section 1202 programs to support “ongoing and statutorily authorized” U.S. irregular warfare operations. Congress should also improve its capacity to oversee section 1202 programs, which are poorly understood by most members of the defense committees and largely concealed from members of the foreign affairs committees.

Our Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the constitutional power to declare war. It gives Congress the authority to create, fund, and regulate the military. As it stands, section 1202 is an overbroad authority that already risks degrading these constitutional prerogatives and removing decisions of war and peace from democratic debate and accountability. Contrary to the Department of Defense’s assertions and asks, expanding section 1202 would deepen these risks, widening the aperture for U.S. forces to engage in and direct combat in unauthorized, foreign wars.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Katherine Yon Bright.

“Chief Drake said it was too early to discuss a possible motive for the shooting, though he confirmed that the attack was targeted. The authorities were reviewing writings, and had made contact with the shooter’s father. . . .”

Yeah, they’ll figure it out.

The latest mass shooting: Six people dead, including three 9-year-old children, at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. The alleged shooter, age 28 – a former student at Covenant – stomped into the school on March 27 carrying (God bless America) two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun. He/she, apparently transgender, was eventually shot dead by police.

In other news . . .

Excuse me. Let’s sit with the insanity for a moment, shall we? This isn’t a reality TV show. And the killer’s “motive”? Somehow that matters? Will a precise analysis let the authorities stop the next similarly motivated individual before he opens fire? I fear, oh so deeply, that that’s not even the point. Mass murder is simply part of the Great American Shrug. We’re an exceptional nation, the world’s greatest democracy and greatest hope, and the darn killings . . . well, nobody’s perfect. And after all, it’s not guns that kill people, People – especially if they’re mentally ill – kill people.

But as I sit with this latest horror – according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 130 mass shootings in the United States so far this year (defined as at least four people being killed or injured) – I can only do one thing: Stretch the outrage.

Stretch it beyond Covenant School. Stretch it beyond Nashville. Beyond assault weapons. Beyond politics. There’s a deep interplay with hell in the American social structure; in the global social structure. Gun control, however sensible and sane, won’t transcend it. Mass murder emerges from an unexamined, unaddressed dark spot in the collective human consciousness. It can be described in one word: dehumanization.

This is not simply a loner’s psychological flaw: the denial of full, or any, humanity – any spiritual value – to chosen others. It’s a phenomenon embedded in the social norm. We have enemies. We need them. We kill them.

We go to war!

“Wearing camouflage pants, a black vest and a backward red baseball cap, the assailant walks through rooms and hallways with a weapon drawn.”

The killer, whatever his specific “motive,” was playing war. He had, in his mind and heart, dehumanized the occupants of Covenant School. This is the game the nations of the world – in particular, “USA! USA!” – play with one another on a regular basis. Mass shootings? They’re everywhere. When we (the good guys with guns) wage war, we have no choice. When noncombatants – let’s say, oh, a bunch of nine-year-old children – die, they magically morph into collateral damage.

The phenomenon of war is collectively glorified. It’s horrific consequences are either justified or ignored, unless the enemy does it. And it so happened, as I was absorbing the news about the Nashville shooting, this was also in the news:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin,” according to the Associated Press, “announced plans on Saturday to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, a warning to the West as it steps up military support for Ukraine.

“Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.”

Tactical nukes! The King of Evil has clicked the doomsday clock several notches forward. A world on the brink of nuclear war? There’s no context the media can put this in, though it tosses in Putin’s justification for playing nuclear brinksmanship: the Brits are giving Ukraine armor-piercing weaponry. While of course this doesn’t justify Putin’s madness, let’s be clear: Both sides are insane. Dehumanization creates nothing but more of the same.

Depleted uranium, stronger than steel, is dirty as hell. The U.S. used it in Iraq, with, of course, zero accountability. In its two catastrophic invasions of Fallujah in 2004, for instance, the use of DU and white phosphorous left an aftermath of cancer and birth defects of virtually unimaginable magnitude. For instance, cancer cases in Iraq rose from an average of 40 per 100,000 people in 1991, to 1,600 per 100,000 people by 2005, according to Al-Jazeera.

And, my God: “Doctors in Fallujah are continuing to witness the aforementioned steep rise in severe congenital birth defects, including children being born with two heads, children born with only one eye, multiple tumors, disfiguring facial and body deformities, and complex nervous system problems.

“. . . many families are too scared to have children, as an alarming number of women are experiencing consecutive miscarriages and deaths with critically deformed and ill newborns.”

Dehumanization makes so much possible! A lonely, troubled soul committing a mass murder is just the least of it. I don’t know about you, but I see a direct link between such acts and the wars that nations wage against each other, generating consequences – actual and potential – a million, perhaps a billion, times the costs borne this week at Covenant School.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

This week marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war left at least 800,000 to 1.1 million Iraqis dead, and certainly many more injured, maimed, and permanently displaced.

The invasion and subsequent military occupation destroyed Iraq's once-modern infrastructure and much of its environment while shredding the country's social fabric. The war gave rise to religious and ethnic divides, created unfathomable levels of corruption, left a legacy of sectarian militias and terrorist organizations including ISIS. War crimes by the U.S. military and private contractors, even beyond the initial crime of aggression, exploded from Abu Ghraib to Fallujah to Nisour Square and beyond.

This week the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced its war crimes indictment of the president of the country whose troops had invaded and occupied another country, and committed horrific war crimes. While we continue to call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, we know that justice for war crimes—in all wars—remains an urgent necessity. The indictment of President Vladimir Putin is appropriate as the invasion of Ukraine was illegal and Russia's ongoing assault and occupation of Ukrainian territory is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. U.S. war criminals are missing from the same dock.

Accountability doesn't happen on its own, it must be fought for—in all cases, including that of the United States.

So it is also true that the president, as well as the vice-president, the secretary of defense (now dead), and many more high-ranking officials of the United States should have been—and still should be—indicted for war crimes. The invasion of Iraq was, like Ukraine, illegal. The U.S. occupation was a violation of international humanitarian law. And U.S. troops committed horrific and well-documented war crimes.

Moscow's clearly illegal Ukraine war is condemned by the United States primarily as a violation of Washington's self-defined "rules-based order." Accountability is demanded, and the United States even grants the ICC, albeit grudgingly, some level of legitimacy to impose accountability on Putin and other Russian officials. We have witnessed the possibility of Putin being held to account by the Court greeted with cheers in Washington and in the media across the United States.

President Biden and other officials are among those cheering Putin's indictment, despite the longstanding U.S. refusal to provide intelligence or other assistance to the ICC regarding war crimes in Ukraine or elsewhere. Indeed they recognize supporting the ICC would set a precedent for ICC jurisdiction over U.S. troops and political leaders responsible for Iraq and other war crimes in so many places in the world—an accountability long rejected in Washington.

War Crime Charges for Them, But Never for Us

It's not new for Washington to claim to support the ICC in principle even while refusing to actually recognize its jurisdiction. The United States was among the seven outlier countries—joining Israel, China, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen—that voted against the Rome Treaty which established the International Criminal Court in 1998.

Russia signed the Treaty in 2000, but withdrew its signature in 2016, two years after its intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Washington, finally, also signed on in 2000 but never ratified the Treaty, and withdrew its signature even before Russia did. In 2002 then-President George W. Bush, already mobilizing for his illegal war in Iraq, instructed his UN ambassador John Bolton to "unsign" the treaty. Three years later Bush signed what became known as the "Invade The Hague" Act, authorizing the U.S. military to use whatever force necessary to free any U.S. citizen ever arrested by the International Criminal Court.

The indictment of President Vladimir Putin is appropriate as the invasion of Ukraine was illegal and Russia's ongoing assault and occupation of Ukrainian territory is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. U.S. war criminals are missing from the same dock.

This kind of victor's justice—a longstanding component of American exceptionalism—is an old story in U.S. politics and historiography since World War II. But it has become less hidden and more explicit in the last two decades as the Global War on Terror reshaped so much of the world. In even more recent years, the elusive "rules-based order" has replaced international law as the basis (albeit aspirational, if nothing else) of global legitimacy for Washington. And some of that shift goes back to the war in Iraq.

What waging an illegal war necessitates

In 2002 and early 2003, as the United States and its British backers prepared to invade Iraq based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, imaginary links between al Qaeda and Iraq's government, claims of bringing "democracy" to Iraq and more, they pushed for a UN Security Council resolution that would explicitly authorize their war. Earlier resolutions threatening Iraq were not passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, a prerequisite for legalizing an act of war. At the time, 11 of the 15 UNSC members refused to pass a second resolution. Without Council authority, the U.S.-UK launched their war in clear violation of international law. The UN's then-Secretary General Kofi Annan would eventually acknowledge that the war was illegal.

But that finding was based on actual international law—the treaties, conventions, and covenants that were written, agreed to, signed, and ratified by governments committed to upholding their terms. Those included the UN Charter, the Geneva and Hague Conventions, prohibitions on producing or using specific kinds of weapons (now finally including nuclear weapons), and much more. The U.S. war in Iraq was illegal because the invasion violated Articles 39 and 51 of the UN Charter; the use of white phosphorous as a weapon violated the Chemical Weapons Convention; the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and a host of other military actions all violated many of the Geneva Conventions; and more. When U.S. officials and pundits accuse other governments of rejecting the never-defined, never written-down, never agreed-to "rules-based order," there is no identifiable law or rule being referenced, it is simply a statement that the U.S. doesn't like the way another government operates.

The "rules-based order" of the 21st century is the order defined and imposed by the United States and its closest allies.

Washington's clearly illegal Iraq war didn't violate some amorphous "rules-based order." It violated long-established and specific principles of international law. The war's violations of actual international law were widely known and discussed but largely ignored by officials and mainstream media, and U.S. accountability for war crimes has never been on the table. No U.S. officials have been held accountable for their crimes, no U.S. reparations for the massive destruction the war wrought on Iraq and Iraqis have been offered, and no apologies have been made.

The "rules-based order" of the 21st century is the order defined and imposed by the United States and its closest allies.

The comparison here is not a case of "what-about-ism" aimed at protecting Russia. There is little doubt that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine and there should be accountability for those crimes. It is also undoubtedly true that authoritarian and aggressive leaders around the world have relied on the impunity enjoyed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others responsible for U.S. war crimes in Iraq, as a green light for their own crimes. If U.S. war criminals had been held to serious account, it is likely that some of the other militaristic authoritarians around the world, perhaps including Vladimir Putin, might have held back from some of their illegal actions.

Right now most countries around the world, including those critical of U.S./NATO provocations of Russia over the last decades, are critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Most European and other U.S. allies, some for their own reasons, others under U.S. pressure, toe the U.S./NATO line. But many other governments, while appropriately refusing to support Washington's sanctions and dangerous escalation of this terrible war, are reluctant even to denounce the Russian invasion, because they resent U.S. hypocrisy and double standards. Accountability doesn't happen on its own, it must be fought for—in all cases, including that of the United States.

The refusal of sequential U.S. governments to hold their predecessors accountable for war crimes in Iraq, indeed their continuation of many of those criminal actions, has had serious consequences for Iraq and for the world. The best way to help the people of Ukraine and the people of Iraq is to hold the United States accountable for its crimes too.

This piece was co-published with Foreign Policy In Focus.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Phyllis Bennis.

In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.

Eight years later, in his famous farewell address, a frustrated and alarmed president called out “the military-industrial complex,” prophetically warning of its anti-democratic nature and the disastrous rise of misplaced power that it represented. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, fully engaged in corralling, containing, and constraining it, he concluded, could save democracy and bolster peaceful methods and goals.

The MICC’s response was, of course, to ignore his warning, while waging a savage war on communism in the name of containing it. In the process, atrocious conflicts would be launched in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as the contagion of war spread. Threatened with the possibility of peace in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the MICC bided its time with operations in Iraq (Desert Storm), Bosnia, and elsewhere, along with the expansion of NATO, until it could launch an unconstrained Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those “good times” (filled with lost wars) lasted until 2021 and the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Only Americans, Ike once said, can truly hurt America. Meaning, to put the matter in a more positive context, only we can truly help save America. A vital first step is to put the word “peace” back in our national vocabulary.

Not to be deterred by the fizzling of the nightmarish war on terror, the MICC seized on a “new cold war” with China and Russia, which only surged when, in 2022, Vladimir Putin so disastrously invaded Ukraine (as the U.S. had once invaded Afghanistan and Iraq). Yet again, Americans were told that they faced implacable foes that could only be met with overwhelming military power and, of course, the funding that went with it — again in the name of deterrence and containment.

In a way, in 1953 and later in 1961, Ike, too, had been urging Americans to launch a war of containment, only against an internal foe: what he then labeled for the first time “the military-industrial complex.” For various reasons, we failed to heed his warnings. As a result, over the last 70 years, it has grown to dominate the federal government as well as American culture in a myriad of ways. Leaving aside funding where it’s beyond dominant, try movies, TV shows, video games, education, sports, you name it. Today, the MICC is remarkably uncontained. Ike’s words weren’t enough and, sadly, his actions too often conflicted with his vision (as in the CIA’s involvement in a coup in Iran in 1953). So, his worst nightmare did indeed come to pass. In 2023, along with much of the world, America does indeed hang from a cross of iron, hovering closer to the brink of nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Updating Ike’s Cross of Iron Speech for Today

Perhaps the most quoted passage in that 1953 speech addressed the true cost of militarism, with Ike putting it in homespun, easily grasped, terms. He started by saying, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (An aside: Can you imagine Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or any other recent president challenging Pentagon spending and militarism so brazenly?)

Ike then added:

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

He concluded with a harrowing image: “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Ike’s cost breakdown of guns versus butter, weapons versus civilian goods, got me thinking recently: What would it look like if he could give that speech today? Are we getting more bang for the military megabucks we spend, or less? How much are Americans sacrificing to their wasteful and wanton god of war?

Let’s take a closer look. A conservative cost estimate for one of the Air Force’s new “heavy” strategic nuclear bombers, the B-21 Raider, is $750 million. A conservative estimate for a single new fighter plane, in this case the F-35 Lightning II, is $100 million. A single Navy destroyer, a Zumwalt-class ship, will be anywhere from $4 to $8 billion, but let’s just stick with the lower figure. Using those weapons, and some quick Internet sleuthing, here’s how Ike’s passage might read if he stood before us now:

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick-veneer and reinforced concrete school in 75 cities. It is five electric power plants, each serving a town with 60,000 inhabitants. It is five fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 150 miles of pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with more than 12 million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 64,000 people.”

(Quick and dirty figures for the calculations above: $10 million per elementary school; $150 million per power plant [$5,000/kilowatt for 30,000 homes]; $150 million per hospital; $5 million per new mile of road; $8 per bushel of wheat; $250,000 per home for four people.)

Grim stats indeed! Admittedly, those are just ballpark figures, but taken together they show that the tradeoff between guns and butter — bombers and jet fighters on the one hand, schools and hospitals on the other — is considerably worse now than in Ike’s day. Yet Congress doesn’t seem to care, as Pentagon budgets continue to soar irrespective of huge cost overruns and failed audits (five in a row!), not to speak of failed wars.

Speaking of wasteful warships, Ike was hardly the first person to notice how much they cost or what can be sacrificed in building them. In his prescient book The War in the Air, first published in 1907, H.G. Wells, the famed author who had envisioned an alien invasion of Earth in The War of the Worlds, denounced his own epoch’s obsession with ironclad battleships in a passage that eerily anticipated Ike’s powerful critique:

The cost of those battleships, Wells wrote, must be measured by:

“The lives of countless men… spent in their service, the splendid genius and patience of thousands of engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their account we must put stunted and starved lives on land, millions of children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost—that was the law of a nation’s existence during that strange time. Surely they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the whole history of mechanical invention.”

Little could he imagine our own era’s “wasteful megatheria.” These days, substitute nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, aircraft carriers, and similar “modern” weapons for the ironclads of his era and the sentiment rings at least as true as it did then. (Interestingly, all those highly touted ironclads did nothing to avert the disaster of World War I and had little impact on its murderous course or ponderous duration.)

Returning to 1953, Eisenhower didn’t mince words about what the world faced if the iron cross mentality won out: at worst, nuclear war; at best, “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system, or the Soviet system, or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

Ike’s worst-case scenario grows ever more likely today. Recently, Russia suspended the START treaty, the final nuclear deal still in operation, that oversaw reductions in strategic nuclear weapons. Instead of reductions, Russia, China, and the United States are now pursuing staggering “modernization” programs for their nuclear arsenals, an effort that may cost the American taxpayer nearly $2 trillion over the coming decades (though even such a huge sum matters little if most of us are dead from nuclear war).

In any case, the United States in 2023 clearly reflects Ike’s “cross of iron” scenario. It’s a country that’s become thoroughly militarized and so is slowly wasting away, marked increasingly by fear, deprivation, and unhappiness.

It’s Never Too Late to Change Course

Only Americans, Ike once said, can truly hurt America. Meaning, to put the matter in a more positive context, only we can truly help save America. A vital first step is to put the word “peace” back in our national vocabulary.

“The peace we seek,” Ike explained 70 years ago, “founded upon a decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are the needs that challenge this world in arms.”

The real needs of humanity haven’t changed since Ike’s time. Whether in 1953 or 2023, more guns won’t serve the cause of peace. They won’t provide succor. They’ll only stunt and starve us, to echo the words of H.G. Wells, while imperiling the lives and futures of our children.

This is no way of life at all, as Ike certainly would have noted, were he alive today.

Which is why the federal budget proposal released by President Biden for 2024 was both so painfully predictable and so immensely disappointing. Calamitously so. Biden’s proposal once again boosts spending on weaponry and war in a Pentagon budget now pegged at $886 billion. It will include yet more spending on nuclear weapons and envisions only further perpetual tensions with “near-peer” rivals China and Russia.

This past year, Congress added $45 billion more to that budget than even the president and the Pentagon requested, putting this country’s 2023 Pentagon budget at $858 billion. Clearly, a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is in our collective future, perhaps as early as 2027. Perish the thought of how high it could soar, should the U.S. find itself in a shooting war with China or Russia (as the recent Russian downing of a U.S. drone in the Black Sea brought to mind). And if that war were to go nuclear…

The Pentagon’s soaring war budget broadcast a clear and shocking message to the world. In America’s creed, blessed are the warmakers and those martyrs crucified on its cross of iron.

This was hardly the message Ike sought to convey to the world 70 years ago this April. Yet it’s the message the MICC conveys with its grossly inflated military budgets and endless saber-rattling.

Yet one thing remains true today: it’s never too late to change course, to order an “about-face.” Sadly, lacking the wisdom of Dwight D. Eisenhower, such an order won’t come from Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or any other major candidate for president in 2024. It would have to come from us, collectively. It’s time to wise up, America. Together, it’s time to find an exit ramp from the highway to hell that we’ve been on since 1953 and look for the on-ramp to Ike’s highway to peace.

And once we’re on it, let’s push the pedal to the metal and never look back.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Astore.

On Saturday, March 18, 2023—marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. war on Iraq—22 demonstrations against U.S. warmaking were held across the nation, including Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, hundreds gathered to protest outside the CNN building in Hollywood. What follows are the remarks made by longtime peace activist and author, Rev. John Dear:

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: we are sick and tired of your endless wars, your military spending, your nuclear weapons, your global domination, your violence, your imperialism and fascism and corporate greed and permanent warfare. We remember the U.S. war on Iraq, and how we killed millions of sisters and brothers there for a great lie, to steal their oil and sell weapons and help the one percent get richer. We remember the U.S. war on Afghanistan, and how we killed and injured countless innocent civilians for a great lie so we could get their oil and sow chaos in the world and sell weapons. With thousands of people in over twenty demonstrations across the nation we say today, enough is enough! No more endless wars!

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: stop building nuclear weapons, stop spending billions and billions to upgrade our nuclear weapons, stop bankrupting our country by spending for war and nuclear war preparations. Use that trillion dollars instead on food and water for the hungry and thirsty, schools, jobs, housing and healthcare for the poor and everyone. Stop preparing for and threatening nuclear warfare on our sisters and brothers around the world, stop risking nuclear winter! Resume all treaties for nuclear disarmament, sign the UN Ban treaty, ands join the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons so that we can welcome a new future without nuclear weapons!

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: stop the economic warfare of sanctions against 40 nations in the world, including Syria after the horrific recent earthquake. Close our 730 military bases in over a hundred countries around the world. Stop escalating the Russian war on Ukraine. We demand negotiations not escalation! We want an immediate ceasefire, not permanent warfare! The way forward is diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, not giving billions for another long war. Dismantle NATO, that relic of the Cold War and create new nonviolent institutions for global nonviolent conflict resolution. Stop selling weapons to all sides in all wars. Stop funding the Israeli occupation and killing of the Palestinians. Stop all hostilities and preparations for global war with China. And in the name of the Creator, stop the war on Mother Earth!

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the people of the United States: war is the ultimate failure. War is immoral, illegal, and just downright impractical. War doesn’t work. War never leads to peace. War always sows the seeds for future wars. War is demonic, evil, anti-life, anti-creation, anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-democracy, and anti-humanity. War is the definition of mortal sin. Peaceful means are the only way to a peaceful future and the God of peace. So like the Abolitionists of old who announced the abolition of slavery and the vision of a new world of equality, we announce the abolition of war itself, and poverty, racism, corporate greed, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and the coming of a new nonviolent world of peace with justice for all people and creation.

Dear friends, today, in the name of the God of peace, we say with all the great peacemakers of history from Jesus of Nazareth to Saint Francis, from Dorothy Day and Rosa Parks to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.: we choose the way of peace and nonviolence! Today we pledge to be nonviolent to ourselves, nonviolent to all people, nonviolent to all creatures and Mother Earth, and to work for a new culture of nonviolence, to build up a new global grassroots, people power movement of active nonviolence for justice, disarmament and creation the likes of which the world has never seen, to abolish war and welcome God’s reign of peace and nonviolence here on earth.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rev. John Dear.

On Saturday, March 18, 2023—marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. war on Iraq—22 demonstrations against U.S. warmaking were held across the nation, including Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, hundreds gathered to protest outside the CNN building in Hollywood. What follows are the remarks made by longtime peace activist and author, Rev. John Dear:

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: we are sick and tired of your endless wars, your military spending, your nuclear weapons, your global domination, your violence, your imperialism and fascism and corporate greed and permanent warfare. We remember the U.S. war on Iraq, and how we killed millions of sisters and brothers there for a great lie, to steal their oil and sell weapons and help the one percent get richer. We remember the U.S. war on Afghanistan, and how we killed and injured countless innocent civilians for a great lie so we could get their oil and sow chaos in the world and sell weapons. With thousands of people in over twenty demonstrations across the nation we say today, enough is enough! No more endless wars!

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: stop building nuclear weapons, stop spending billions and billions to upgrade our nuclear weapons, stop bankrupting our country by spending for war and nuclear war preparations. Use that trillion dollars instead on food and water for the hungry and thirsty, schools, jobs, housing and healthcare for the poor and everyone. Stop preparing for and threatening nuclear warfare on our sisters and brothers around the world, stop risking nuclear winter! Resume all treaties for nuclear disarmament, sign the UN Ban treaty, ands join the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons so that we can welcome a new future without nuclear weapons!

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: stop the economic warfare of sanctions against 40 nations in the world, including Syria after the horrific recent earthquake. Close our 730 military bases in over a hundred countries around the world. Stop escalating the Russian war on Ukraine. We demand negotiations not escalation! We want an immediate ceasefire, not permanent warfare! The way forward is diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, not giving billions for another long war. Dismantle NATO, that relic of the Cold War and create new nonviolent institutions for global nonviolent conflict resolution. Stop selling weapons to all sides in all wars. Stop funding the Israeli occupation and killing of the Palestinians. Stop all hostilities and preparations for global war with China. And in the name of the Creator, stop the war on Mother Earth!

Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the people of the United States: war is the ultimate failure. War is immoral, illegal, and just downright impractical. War doesn’t work. War never leads to peace. War always sows the seeds for future wars. War is demonic, evil, anti-life, anti-creation, anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-democracy, and anti-humanity. War is the definition of mortal sin. Peaceful means are the only way to a peaceful future and the God of peace. So like the Abolitionists of old who announced the abolition of slavery and the vision of a new world of equality, we announce the abolition of war itself, and poverty, racism, corporate greed, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and the coming of a new nonviolent world of peace with justice for all people and creation.

Dear friends, today, in the name of the God of peace, we say with all the great peacemakers of history from Jesus of Nazareth to Saint Francis, from Dorothy Day and Rosa Parks to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.: we choose the way of peace and nonviolence! Today we pledge to be nonviolent to ourselves, nonviolent to all people, nonviolent to all creatures and Mother Earth, and to work for a new culture of nonviolence, to build up a new global grassroots, people power movement of active nonviolence for justice, disarmament and creation the likes of which the world has never seen, to abolish war and welcome God’s reign of peace and nonviolence here on earth.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rev. John Dear.

The attack against Iraq by the United States and its coalition in 2003 was a blatant and reprehensible act of aggression for which there has yet to be any meaningful accountability. At least hundreds of thousands and possibly more than one million Iraqis lost their lives through this illegal undertaking. Millions more were displaced. The self-determination of the people of Iraq and their ability to choose their own destiny and place in the world was irreparably shattered.

Numerous cultural and political elites in the United States gleefully supported the war as a courageous or even joyous act. It was the opposite. The Iraq War constituted an attack on the very concept of the international rule of law. In addition to the injuries inflicted upon Iraqis, two decades have now passed since the invasion without any examination of how U.S. conduct has contributed to current international anarchy and aggravated great power violence and confrontation.

There has never been a reckoning for the Iraq War

The planners and executors of the Iraq War have never faced a formal judicial reckoning. The Iraq Inquiry undertaken by the United Kingdom, which released a report in 2016 (the “Chilcot Report”) did not opine on the lawfulness of the war. Nevertheless, several submissions made to the Iraq Inquiry by international lawyers underscored the illegality of the invasion. Professor Nicholas Grief and others from Kent Law School concluded that without a second Security Council resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq, "the invasion of Iraq constituted an act of aggression, contrary to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter."

A formal process of national atonement should be initiated in the United States in order to create cultural reflection, political change, and judicial accountability for the heinous crimes committed against Iraq and the Iraqi people.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who was Deputy Legal Adviser to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and who resigned immediately prior to the invasion, told the Iraq Inquiry that, "I regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal, and I therefore did not feel able to continue in my post . . . Acting contrary to the Charter, as I perceived the Government to be doing, would have the consequence of damaging the United Kingdom's reputation as a State committed to the rule of law in international relations and to the United Nations." These opinions affirm the conclusion that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself reached in 2004 when he stated unequivocally: "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal."

At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Robert Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who was named Chief Prosecutor against defeated Nazi leaders, promised the world that, "To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well." He argued, "The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched."

The Nuremberg Tribunal agreed with Jackson. In convicting high-ranking Nazi leaders for their grave international crimes, the Tribunal held, "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent States alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

The United States must engage in a process of national atonement

A formal process of national atonement should be initiated in the United States in order to create cultural reflection, political change, and judicial accountability for the heinous crimes committed against Iraq and the Iraqi people. Such a process of national atonement should, among other things and at the very minimum, ensure that:

• U.S. international relations are conducted in conformity with international law, including the principles of equal rights and self-determination for all peoples and the general prohibition of aggression;

• U.S. leaders are themselves held accountable by a U.S. court or other neutral legal tribunal for grave international legal violations, including the crime of torture and the crime of aggression; and

• Reparations are made to Iraq consistent with principles of international State responsibility for the aggression against Iraq.

This process of national atonement should further prompt the United States to work for a genuine international legal order in which all countries cooperate to maintain a just peace and the international rule of law.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dave-Inder Comar.

This week, the United States and South Korea kicked off their springtime joint military drills—the largest in five years. North Korea has long protested these war drills, calling them a rehearsal for invasion. Not surprisingly, then, North Korea conducted submarine-fired cruise missiles tests on Sunday.

We can expect these tit-for-tat provocations to continue as long as everyone continues to go by the same playbook. While the United States cannot control North Korea's behavior, the Biden administration can take steps to end the tensions that have permeated the Korean Peninsula for more than 70 years—chiefly, by pivoting its strategy toward getting back to the table with North Korea and negotiating a peace agreement. The Biden administration should follow the lead of Congress, which is once again calling for a peace-first approach to formally end the Korean War.

On March 1, Congressman Brad Sherman and 20 original cosponsors re-introduced the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, the first time that legislation on peace in Korea has been re-introduced in Congress. The bill calls for diplomacy with North Korea to formally end the Korean War, a review of travel restrictions to North Korea, and the establishment of liaison offices in the US and North Korea. First introduced in 2021, it was the first bill calling for an end to the Korean War, following the success of the first House Resolution, H.Res.152, in the 116th Congress, which also called for ending the war.

Officially ending the Korean War is important because the unresolved war is the root cause of tensions in Korea. While the armistice agreement signed in 1953 ended active fighting of the Korean War, it was always meant to be replaced with a peace agreement. To this day, it has not been, and there are no guardrails preventing a resumption of active fighting. Thus, replacing the armistice with a formal peace agreement would go a long way toward building peace and stability in Korea.

While the President could formally end the Korean War through executive powers alone, Congressional support is important to building the political will for a long-lasting peace agreement

As Congressman Sherman stated at his press conference announcing the re-introduction of the bill, "The continued state of war on the Korean Peninsula does not serve the interests of the United States nor our constituents with relatives in North and South Korea." The re-introduction of the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act provides an opportunity to reinvigorate diplomacy and end this war once and for all.

This opportunity comes at a time of heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula. In 2022, North Korea conducted an unprecedented number of missile tests, including testing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could in theory strike the US mainland. Both the US and North Korea maintain dangerous nuclear postures and first-strike capabilities, and in September 2022 North Korea passed a law lowering the threshold for a nuclear first strike. The US has also doubled down on its nuclear first-use policy, despite support for a no-first-use policy from President Joe Biden as a candidate. In a further raising of tensions, earlier this year President Yoon Suk Yeol declared South Korea may build its own nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the US, South Korea, and Japan continue to strengthen their conventional capabilities to deter North Korea, ramping up bilateral and trilateral exercises.

Compounding the danger of these developments are the larger geopolitical forces at play in the region. The US-China great-power competition continues to grow more dangerous, with provocations that could escalate into a military conflict. Additionally, Japan recently announced its largest military build-up since World War 2, including doubling defense spending by 2028 and developing new counter-strike capabilities aimed at China.

Formally ending the Korean War with a peace agreement provides an opportunity for cooperation between all parties and could act as a stepping stone to reversing the militarization in the Asia-Pacific region and healing historic wounds from the last century's wars. Approaches of previous US administrations across partisan lines have failed to improve the security crisis in Korea. The Biden administration has an opportunity to change course and restart negotiations with North Korea. Instead of saying that they are ready to meet North Korean anywhere and anytime, they should try a new peace-first approach that has the potential to address the root cause of tensions.

Congress has an especially important role to play in calling on the administration to take a different approach to North Korea policy. While the President could formally end the Korean War through executive powers alone, Congressional support is important to building the political will for a long-lasting peace agreement and demonstrating that multiple branches of the US government support a new relationship with North Korea and an end to the war. And Congressional support is growing.

This is a particularly important year to build support for a new US approach; July 27, 2023 marks the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War armistice, and it's long past time to replace the 1953 ceasefire with a peace agreement to formally end the war. For the sake of the Korean people, and people around the world, we need to end the state of war that has persisted for more than 70 years. It is time to close this chapter of war and open the door to a transformed, peaceful US-North Korea relationship.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Colleen Moore.

Last week, the White House released President Biden’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2024, which begins October 1 of 2023.

As usual, the biggest portion of the discretionary budget request—52 percent—was for military spending.

While that’s usual, what’s not usual is the sheer level of that military spending. The Biden request calls for $886 billion in spending for the military and war preparations.

That’s near historical high levels, on par with spending at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—even though those wars officially ended with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021.

It’s far higher than the height of military spending during the Reagan years at the height of the Cold War. Looking further back, the Biden request is higher than the height of the Vietnam or Korean wars, too.

The Biden request is $28 billion higher than what Congress approved for regular military and nuclear weapons operations in 2023 (excluding most military aid for Ukraine).

But the Biden request is just the beginning of the story.

Biden’s request of $886 billion has no legal force. At best it’s an opening bid, and if past patterns hold, Congress will approve significantly more. In 2023, for example, the Biden request was for $813 billion, and Congress ultimately approved $858 billion. And if you add military aid from the Department of Defense to Ukraine, military spending in 2023 was more than $890 billion.

We can fully expect Congress to follow this path again, if left to their own devices. Hawks will refuse to retire weapons systems, add new ones, or insist that we need more money for inflation - all tricks they successfully used in 2023 to bump up military spending.

And the administration has promised to continue aid to Ukraine. While that now faces some opposition in Congress, the war in Ukraine shows no end in sight, so it’s likely that the U.S. is not done spending.

All of that means that without serious pressure from outside, military spending in FY 2024 is shaping up to be one of the highest in history.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Lindsay Koshgarian.

March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.

While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its "coalition of the willing" to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.

Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.

The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.

The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. "full spectrum dominance" to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as "a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept."
Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.

For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.

And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons' "regime-change" strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.

Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons' takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.

PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
Nuland's nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee's support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons' war plan.

It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden's administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden's campaign promise to "elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement." Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.

What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.

At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world's population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.

In a panel discussion on "Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order" at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists—from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to "build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war." Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, "We don't want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything."
Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: "Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame," she said. "We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities."

So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to "rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South" is to "debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard."

But the double standard between the West's responses to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.

The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia's crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.

As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

The Pentagon released its budget request for Fiscal Year 2024 Thursday. The figure for the Pentagon alone is a hefty $842 billion. That’s $69 billion more than the $773 billion the department requested for Fiscal Year 2023.

Total spending on national defense — including work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy — comes in at $886 billion. Adding in likely emergency military aid packages for Ukraine later this year plus the potential tens of billions of dollars in Congressional add-ons could push total spending for national defense to as much as $950 billion or more for FY 2024. The result could be the highest military budget since World War II, far higher than at the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the height of the Cold War.

The proposed budget is far more than is needed to provide an effective defense of the United States and its allies.

If past experience is any guide, more than half of the new Pentagon budget will go to contractors, with the biggest share going to the top five — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — to build everything from howitzers and tanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Much of the funding for contractors will come from spending on buying, researching, and developing weapons, which accounts for $315 billion of the new budget request.

As suggested above, Congress will probably add a substantial amount to the Pentagon’s request, largely for systems and facilities located in the states and districts of key members. That’s no way to craft a budget — or defend a country. When it comes to defense, Congress should engage in careful oversight, not special interest politics.

Unfortunately, in recent years the House and Senate have accelerated the practice of jacking up the Pentagon’s budget request, adding $25 billion in FY 2022 and $45 billion in FY 2023. Given threat inflation with respect to China and the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is a danger that the $45 billion added for FY2023 could be the floor for what might be added by Congress in the course of this year’s budget debate.

Exceptions to the rush to throw more money at the Pentagon may come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) have introduced the “People Over Pentagon Act,” which calls for a $100 billion annual cut in the DoD budget. A group of conservative lawmakers centered around the Freedom Caucus have called for a freeze on the discretionary budget at FY2022 levels. But different members have given different views on how Pentagon spending would fit into a budget freeze, from assertions that it will be “on the table” to a denial by one at least one member, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), that Pentagon cuts should come into play at all.

It has been reported that President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that we should spend all we need for national defense and not one penny more. But the new motto of the Pentagon and the Congress appears to be “spend now and ask questions later.” Rather than matching funding to a viable national security strategy, the Pentagon and the Congress are pushing for whatever the political market will bear. The notion that tradeoffs need to be made against other urgent national priorities is a foreign concept to most members of the House and Senate, as they have routinely raised the Pentagon budget at the expense of other urgent national needs.

There is more than money at stake. An open-ended strategy that seeks to develop capabilities to win a war with Russia or China, fight regional wars against Iran or North Korea, and sustain a global war on terror that includes operations in at least 85 countries is a recipe for endless conflict.

We can make America and its allies safer for far less money if we adopt a more realistic, restrained strategy and drive a harder bargain with weapons contractors that too often engage in price gouging and cost overruns while delivering dysfunctional systems that aren’t appropriate for addressing the biggest threats to our security.

The Congressional Budget Office has crafted three illustrative options that could ensure our security while spending $1 trillion less over the next decade. A strategy that incorporates aspects of these plans and streamlines the Pentagon budget in other areas could be sustained at roughly $150 billion per year less than current levels.

A new approach would take a more objective, evidence-based view of the military challenges posed by Russia and China, rely more on allies to provide security in their own regions, reduce the U.S. global military footprint, and scale back the Pentagon’s $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. Cutting wasteful spending practices and slowing or replacing spending on unworkable or outmoded systems like the F-35 and a new $13 billion aircraft carrier could save billions more. And reducing spending on the half a million-plus private contractors employed by the Pentagon could save hundreds of billions over the next decade.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more spending. It needs more spending discipline, tied to a realistic strategy that sets clear priorities and acknowledges that some of the greatest risks we face are not military in nature. Thursday’s announcement is just the opening gambit in this year’s debate over the Pentagon budget. Hopefully critics of runaway spending will have more traction this year than has been the case for the past several years. If not, $1 trillion in annual military spending may be just around the corner, at great cost to taxpayers and to the safety and security of the country as a whole.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Hartung.

A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay—given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid?

Boston is a severely unequal city with an extremely segregated public school system: 80 percent of children in public school are low-income; 90 percent are students of color, mainly Latino and Black; higher income families with children leave for suburbs when their children become of school age, according to the Dorchester Reporter. Almost all new residential buildings are high-income; and the city is referred to as “two Bostons.”

In one of these “two Bostons” live low-wage women workers, a wage that consigns them to poverty compounded throughout their lives and in old age. “Nearly two-thirds of all low-wage workers in the United States are women,” an inequality worsened by racial inequality. Consider, too, the persistent “motherhood penalty”—whereby mothers are further set back financially by lack of paid parental leave and government-funded child care.

But, my worry today for these working mothers and their children that day concerned only one dimension of the arduous reality facing many women—most egregiously women of color—as we mark International Women’s Day, March 8, a day founded on the fact of women’s inequality. Female textile workers launched the first march on March 8, 1857 in protest of unfair working conditions and unequal rights for women—one of the first organized strikes by working women, during which they called for a shorter work day and decent wages.

Women have gained considerable rights since that and subsequent marches, through our own organizing, protests, and arrests: the right to vote, to own property, to inherit, to education, to have once-legal rape in marriage criminalized. A revolution for human rights without weapons, fists or a drop of blood spilled. Yet, only a handful of countries are nearing full equality for women; and ours is not even close. Indeed, U.S. women's progress in gaining equality has both stagnated and lost ground.

Worst of all, violence against women by men in all its forms: pornography, rape, prostitution, physical beating, murder increased during Covid. Women’s reproductive rights have been trampled by the 2022 Supreme Court decision to void the right to abortion; and many states are sponsoring a plethora of regulations to deny women access to abortion and birth control. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that domestic abusers can own guns – a “death sentence for women and their families,” given “abusers are five times more likely to kill their victims if they have access to firearms.”

From 2001 to 2019, approximately 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a period of time in which more than 18,000 US women were killed—nearly 3 per day—by current or former intimate partners. (For those who assume male violence and war are inevitable, don’t waste your time on a doomed view. Consider this: during thousands of years in Neolithic Europe women and men lived in egalitarian, peaceful societies, according to respected archeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas.)

In that same period of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an estimated 14,400 US women died before, during and just after childbirth—more than twice the number of US soldiers killed in these wars. Thousands of memorials commemorate those who gave their lives for their country in war; name one for women killed by men or who lost their lives giving birth to the next generation.

The injustice of women’s inequality ripples out to national governments. Peace and the security of nations are powerfully linked with the equality of women. Comparing the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women in those countries, researchers have found that the degree of equality of women within countries predicts best how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Further, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less stable and more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to resolve conflict.

So, if you care about turning back from the warpath the U.S. is on and eliminating nuclear weapons, consider the words of the revered Ghanian statesman and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan:

“There is no policy more effective in promoting development, health, and education than the empowerment of women and girls … and no policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by H. Patricia Hynes.

In the conflict-ridden realm of international relations, certain terms are particularly widely used, and one of them is “red lines.” Derived from the concept of a “line in the sand,” first employed in antiquity, the term “red lines” appears to have emerged in the 1970s to denote actions one nation regards as unacceptable from other nations. In short, it is an implicit threat.

Vladimir Putin, self-anointed restorer of the Russian empire, has tossed about the term repeatedly in recent years. “I hope nobody will get it into their heads to cross Russia’s so-called red line,” he warned in April 2021. “Where it will be drawn, we will decide ourselves in each specific case.” These red lines, although addressing a variety of issues, have been proclaimed frequently. At the end of that November, Putin announced that Russia would take action if NATO crossed its “red lines” on Ukraine, saying that the deployment of offensive missile batteries on Ukrainian soil would serve as a trigger. In mid-December, as Russian military forces massed within striking distance of Ukraine, the Russian foreign ministry demanded that NATO not only rule out any further expansion, but remove any troops or weapons from NATO members Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Balkan countries, and obtain Russian permission before holding any military drills in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, or Central Asia.

Finally, on February 24, 2022, Putin―ignoring a U.S. offer to negotiate some of these items―sent a massive Russian military force pouring into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion. “This is the red line that I talked about multiple times,” he said, and “they have crossed it.” Most nations were not impressed by this justification, for the Russian invasion and subsequent annexation of large portions of Ukraine were clear violations of international law and, as such, were condemned by the United Nations General Assembly and the International Court of Justice.

Of course, Putin’s red lines and international aggression, though particularly blatant, are hardly the only features of this kind that have appeared throughout Russian or world history.

The United States has a lengthy record in this regard. As Professor Matthew Waxman of Columbia Law School has written, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 involved “drawing a red line―with an implicit war threat” against “any European efforts to colonize or reassert control in the Western Hemisphere.” Given the relative weakness of the United States at the time, the U.S. government did not attempt to enforce President James Monroe’s grandiose pronouncement.

But, with the emergence of the United States as a great power, its government expanded the Monroe Doctrine to justify frequent U.S. meddling in hemispheric affairs, including conquering and annexing Latin American territory. Even in recent decades, when U.S. annexations have become a relic of the past, the U.S. government has engaged in military intervention in other lands, especially in the Caribbean and Central America, but also in Asia and the Middle East (where President George W. Bush drew what he called “a line in the sand”).

In recent years, as China’s military and economic power have grown, its government, too, has begun emphasizing its red lines. Meeting with U.S. President Joseph Biden in mid-November 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that Taiwan was the “first red line that must not be crossed.” Xi did not mention the tension-fraught situation in the South China Sea, where China had set up military fortifications on islands claimed by its neighbors, including Vietnam and the Philippines. But here, as well, China had red lines―leading to the current dangerous confrontations between U.S. and Chinese warships in the region. Sharply rejecting a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague that denied China’s control of the area, the Chinese government continued to build up fortifications on the disputed islands. Furthermore, Chinese troops have continued for more than six decades to engage in violent military clashes with Indian troops along the disputed border, in the Himalayan region, between their two nations.

Although it could be argued that red lines are only an innocent expression of what a nation considers unacceptable in world affairs, it’s worth noting that they are employed especially by major nations. The “great powers,” after all, have the military strength to give their warnings some credibility. Conversely, smaller, weaker nations do not usually bother to issue such pronouncements, as their warnings―and even their interests―are rarely taken as seriously. For this reason, the issuance of red lines usually boils down to a matter of what nation has the power to compel other nations to accept its demands.

Consequently, red lines lead inevitably to spheres of influence that other nations are supposed to respect―including a U.S. sphere in Latin America, a Russian sphere in Europe, and a Chinese sphere in Asia. Naturally, people and nations living in the shadow of these major powers are not enthusiastic about this arrangement, which explains why many Latin Americans want the Yankees to go home, many Europeans fear Russian hegemony, and many Asians are wary of the rise of China.

Another problem with the issuance of red lines is their tendency to inspire international conflict and war. Given their roots in the professed interests of a single nation, they do not necessarily coincide with the interests of other nations. In this competitive situation, conflict is almost inevitable. Where, in these circumstances, is there a place for collective action to fashion a common agreement―one recognizing the fundamental interests of all nations?

Rather than a world of red lines proclaimed by a few powerful nations, what humanity needs is a strengthened United Nations―a global federation of nations in which competing national priorities are reconciled and enforced through agreements, treaties, and international law.

Setting red lines for the world is too important to be left to individual, self-interested countries. They should be set―and respected―by all.

This article was first published by the History News Network and appears here with permission.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

There's something irrational about President Biden's knee-jerk dismissal of China's 12-point peace proposal titled "China's Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis."

"Not rational" is how Biden described the plan that calls for de-escalation toward a ceasefire, respect for national sovereignty, establishment of humanitarian corridors and resumption of peace talks.

"Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis," reads the plan. "All efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis mU.S.t be encouraged and supported."

Biden turned thumbs down

"I've seen nothing in the plan that would indicate that there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed," Biden told the press.

In a brutal conflict that has left thoU.S.ands of dead Ukrainian civilians, hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, eight million Ukrainians displaced from their homes, contamination of land, air and water, increased greenhouse gasses and disruption of the global food supply, China's call for de-escalation would surely benefit someone in Ukraine.

Other points in China's plan, which is really more a set of principles rather than a detailed proposal, call for protection for prisoners of war, cessation of attacks on civilians, safeguards for nuclear power plants, and facilitation of grain exports.

"The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that's a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational," said Biden.

Instead of engaging China—a country of 1.5 billion people, the world's largest exporter, the owner of a trillion dollars in U.S. debt and an industrial giant—in negotiating an end to the crisis in Ukraine, the Biden administration prefers to wag its finger and bark at China, warning it not to arm Russia in the conflict.

Psychologists might call this finger-wagging projection—the old pot calling the kettle black routine. It is the U.S., not China, that is fueling the conflict with at least $45 billion dollars in ammunition, drones, tanks, and rockets in a proxy war that risks—with one miscalculation—turning the world to ash in a nuclear holocaust.

It is the U.S., not China, that has provoked this crisis by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, a hostile military alliance that targets Russia in mock nuclear strikes, and by backing a 2014 coup of Ukraine's democratically elected Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, thus triggering a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, regions Russia has more recently annexed.

Biden's sour attitude toward the Chinese peace framework hardly comes as a surprise. After all, even former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennettcandidly acknowledged in a five-hour interview on YouTube that it was the West that last March blocked a near-peace deal he had mediated between Ukraine and Russia.

Why did the U.S. block a peace deal? Why won't President Biden provide a serious response to the Chinese peace plan, let alone engage the Chinese at a negotiating table?

President Biden and his coterie of neo-conservatives, among them Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, have no interest in peace if it means the U.S. concedes hegemonic power to a multi-polar world untethered from the all-mighty dollar.

What may have gotten Biden unnerved—besides the possibility that China might emerge the hero in this bloody saga—is China's call for the lifting of unilateral sanctions. The U.S. imposes unilateral sanctions on officials and companies from Russia, China and Iran. It imposes sanctions on whole countries, too, like Cuba, where a cruel 60-year embargo, plU.S. assignment to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, made it difficult for Cuba to obtain syringes to administer its own vaccines during the COVID pandemic. Oh, and let's not forget Syria, where after an earthquake killed tens of thoU.S.ands and left hundreds of thoU.S.ands homeless, the country struggles to receive medicine and blankets due to U.S. sanctions that discourage humanitarian aid workers from

operating inside Syria.

Despite China's insistence it is not considering weapons shipments to RU.S.sia, Reuters reports the Biden administration is taking the pulse of G-7 countries to see if they would approve new sanctions against China if that country provides RU.S.sia with military support.

The idea that China could play a positive role was also dismissed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said, "China doesn't have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine."

Ditto from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who toldABC's Good Morning America, "China has been trying to have it both ways: It's on the one hand trying to present itself publicly as neutral and seeking peace, while at the same time it is talking up Russia's false narrative about the war."

False narrative or different perspective?

In AugU.S.t of 2022, China's ambassador to Moscow charged that the United States was the "main instigator" of the Ukraine war, provoking Russia with NATO expansion to RU.S.sia's borders.

This is not an uncommon perspective and is one shared by economist Jeffrey Sachs who, in a February 25, 2023 video directed at thousands of anti-war protesters in Berlin, said the war in Ukraine did not start a year ago, but nine years ago when the U.S. backed the coup that overthrew Yanukovych after he preferred Russia's loan terms to the European Union's offer.

Shortly after China released its peace framework, the Kremlin responded cautiously, lauding the Chinese effort to help but adding that the details "need to be painstakingly analyzed taking into account the interests of all the different sides." As for Ukraine, President Zelinsky hopes to meet soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping to explore China's peace proposal and dissuade China from supplying weapons to Russia.

The peace proposal garnered more positive responses from countries neighboring the warring states. Putin's ally in Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, said his country "fully supports" the Beijing plan. Kazakhstan approved of China's peace framework in a statement describing it as "worthy of support." Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán—who wants his country to stay out of the war—also showed support for the proposal.

China's call for a peaceful solution stands in stark contrast to U.S. warmongering this past year, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Aus.tin, a former Raytheon board member, said the U.S. aims to weaken Russia, presumably for regime change—a strategy that failed miserably in Afghanistan where a near 20-year U.S. occupation left the country broke and starving.

China's support for de-escalation is consistent with its long-standing opposition to U.S./NATO expansion, now extending into the Pacific with hundreds of U.S. bases encircling China, including a new base in Guam to house 5,000 marines. From China's perspective, U.S. militarism jeopardizes the peaceful reunification of the People's Republic of China with its break-away province of Taiwan. For China, Taiwan is unfinished business, left over from the civil war 70 years ago.

In provocations reminiscent of U.S. meddling in Ukraine, a hawkish Congress last year approved $10 billion in weapons and military training for Taiwan, while House leader Nancy Pelosi flew to Taipei—over protests from her constituents—to whip up tension in a move that brought U.S.-China climate cooperation to a halt.

A U.S. willingness to work with China on a peace plan for Ukraine might not only help stop the daily loss of lives in Ukraine and prevent a nuclear confrontation, but also pave the way for cooperation with China on all kinds of other issues—from medicine to education to climate—that would benefit the entire globe.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Wei Yu.

Twenty years ago — on February 15, 2003 — the world said no to war. People rose up in almost 800 cities around the world in an unprecedented movement for peace.

The world stood on the precipice of war. U.S. and U.K. warplanes and warships — filled with soldiers and sailors and armed with the most powerful weapons ever used in conventional warfare — were streaming towards the Middle East, aimed at Iraq.

Anti-war mobilizations had been underway for more than a year as the threat of war against Iraq took hold in Washington, even as the war in Afghanistan had barely begun.

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan was difficult following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even though none of the hijackers were Afghans and none lived in Afghanistan, most Americans saw the war as a legitimate response — a view that would change over the next two decades, with the vast majority saying the war wasn’t worth fighting when American troops were withdrawn in 2021.

But Iraq was different from the beginning. There was always opposition. And as the activist movement grew, its grounding in a sympathetic public expanded too. By the time February 15, 2003 came around — a year and five months after the 9/11 attacks — condemnation of the looming war was broad and fierce.

Plans for February 15 had been international from the beginning, starting with a call to mobilize against the war issued at the European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002. With just a few weeks of organizing, the first internet-based global protest erupted.

On that day, beginning early in the morning, demonstrators filled the streets of capital cities and tiny villages around the world. The protests followed the sun, from Australia and New Zealand and the small Pacific islands, through the snowy steppes of North Asia and down across Southeast Asia and the South Asian peninsula, across Europe and down to the southern tip of Africa, then jumping the pond first to Latin America and then finally, last of all, to the United States.

Across the globe, the call came in scores of languages: “The world says no to war!” and “Not in our name!” echoed from millions of voices. The Guinness Book of World Records said between 12 and 14 million people came out that day — the largest protest in the history of the world. The great British labor and peace activist, former MP Tony Benn, described it to the million Londoners in the streets that day as “the first global demonstration, and its first cause is to prevent a war against Iraq.”

What a concept — a global protest against a war that had not yet begun, with the goal to stop it.

Standing against the scourge of war

It was an amazing moment — a movement that pushed governments around the world to do the unthinkable: They resisted pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom and said no to endorsing Bush’s war.

The governmental opposition included the “Uncommitted Six” members of the UN Security Council. Under ordinary circumstances, U.S.-dependent and relatively weak countries like Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan could never have stood up to Washington alone. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

With diplomatic support from “Old Europe,” including Germany and France who for their own reasons opposed the war, the thousands filling the streets of their capitals allowed the Six to resist fierce pressure from Washington.

The U.S. threatened to kill a free-trade agreement seven years in the making with Chile. (The trade agreement was quite terrible, but the Chilean government was committed to it.) Washington threatened to cancel U.S. aid, granted under the African Growth & Opportunity Act, to Guinea and Cameroon. Mexico faced the potential end of negotiations over immigration and the border. And yet all stood firm.

The day before the protests, February 14, the Security Council was called into session once again, this time at the foreign minister level, to hear the final reports of the two UN weapons inspectors for Iraq.

Many had anticipated that their reports would somehow wiggle around the truth — that they would say something Bush and Blair would grab to try to legitimize their spurious claims of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Or at least they might appear ambivalent enough for the U.S. to use their reports to justify war.

But the inspectors refused to bend the truth, stating unequivocally that no such weapons had been found.

Following their reports, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin responded with an extraordinary call, reminding the world that “the United Nations must remain an instrument of peace, and not a tool for war.” In that usually staid, formal, rule-bound chamber, his call was answered with a roaring ovation beginning with Council staff and quickly embracing the diplomats and foreign ministers themselves.

Enough governments said no that the United Nations was able to do what its Charter requires, but what political pressure too often makes impossible: stand against the scourge of war.

A new internationalism

On the morning of February 15, just hours before the massive New York rally began outside the United Nations, the great actor-activist Harry Belafonte and I accompanied South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to meet with then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan on behalf of the protesters. We had to be escorted by police to cross what the NYPD had designated its “frozen zone” — not in reference to the bitter 18 degree temperature or the biting wind whipping in from the East River, but the forcibly deserted streets directly in front of UN headquarters.

In the secretary-general’s office on the 38th floor, Bishop Tutu opened the meeting. He looked at Kofi across the table and said, “We are here today on behalf of those people marching in cities all around the world. And we are here to tell you, that those people marching in all those cities around the world, we claim the United Nations as our own. We claim it in the name of our global mobilization for peace.”

It was an incredible moment. And while we weren’t able to prevent the Iraq war, the global mobilization pulled governments and the United Nations into a trajectory of resistance shaped and led by global movements. We created what the New York Times the next day called “the second superpower.” It was a new kind of internationalism.

Midway through the marathon New York rally, a brief Associated Press story came over the wires: “Rattled by an outpouring of international anti-war sentiment, the United States and Britain began reworking a draft resolution…. Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the final product may be a softer text that does not explicitly call for war.” Faced with a global challenge to their desperate struggle for UN and global legitimacy, Bush and Blair threw in the towel.

Someone called in the text to those of us backstage. A quick debate: Should we announce it? What if it wasn’t true? What did it mean? A quick decision: Yes, the people have the right to know. Someone pushed me back out onto the stage to read the text.

Half a million people or more, shivering in the cold, roared their approval.

We didn’t stop the war. But we changed history.

Our movement changed history, but we didn’t prevent the Iraq war. While the AP story was true, it reflected the U.S.-U.K. decision to ignore international law and the UN Charter and go to war in violation of them both.

Still, the protests proved the war’s clear illegality and demonstrated the isolation of the Bush administration’s policies — and later helped prevent war in Iran in 2007 and the bombing of Syria in 2013. And they inspired a generation of activists.

February 15 set the terms for what “global mobilizations” could accomplish. Eight years later some Cairo activists, embarrassed at the relatively small size of their protest on February 15, would go on to help lead Egypt’s Arab Spring as it overthrew a U.S.-backed dictator. Occupy protesters would be inspired by February 15 and its internationalism. Spain’s indignados and others protesting austerity and inequality would see February 15 as a model of moving from national to global protest.

In New York City on that singular afternoon, some of the speakers had particular resonance for those shivering in the monumental crowd.

Harry Belafonte, veteran of so many of the progressive struggles of the last three-quarters of a century, called out to the rising U.S. mobilization against war and empire, reminding us that our movement could change the world, and that the world was counting on us to do so.

“The world has sat with tremendous anxiety, in great fear that we did not exist,” he said. “But America is a vast and diverse country, and we are part of the greater truth that makes our nation. We stand for peace, for the truth of what is at the heart of the American people. We will make a difference — that is the message that we send out to the world today.”

Belafonte was followed by his close friend and fellow activist-actor Danny Glover, who spoke of earlier heroes, of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and of the great Paul Robeson on whose shoulders we still stand. And then he shouted: “We stand here today because our right to dissent, and our right to participate in a real democracy, has been hijacked by those who call for war. We stand here at this threshold of history, and we say to the world, ‘Not in Our Name’! ‘Not in Our Name!'”

The huge crowd, shivering in the icy wind, took up the cry, and “Not in our Name!” echoed through the New York streets.

Our movement’s obligation as “the second superpower” remains. February 15 inspired a generation. Now what we need is a strategy to rebuild the breadth and intensity of that moment, to build broadly enough to engage with power and to challenge once again the wars and militarism, the poverty and inequality, the racism and xenophobia and so much more oppression that still faces people around the world.

We have a lot of work to do.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Phyllis Bennis.

Whether you’re Black in South Bend, Indiana, a student in Parkland, Florida, Indigenous or Mexican, on either side of the border, we suffer the same – disproportionately and fatally – from policies on guns, the environment, and immigration.

We live among each other and understand that in many ways our fates are as interconnected as these issues. We go to the same schools where we receive the same under-funded education; we live in the same neighborhoods affected by over-policing, militarization, gangs, and cartels; we depend on the same lands threatened by polluting industries and the erasure of climate change; and, we share a long history of Black and brown communities being destabilized by guns.

We can no longer talk about these intersecting issues in the U.S. without addressing the inextricable links to Mexico and the communities they impact the most: Black and brown people, Indigenous Peoples, migrants, and victims of gun violence.

Gun violence in the U.S. is a leading cause of death for people under 45 – and the leading cause of death for Black, male teenagers. While the number of murders and suicides by guns hit the highest rate in 30 years in 2021, killing over 48,000 people in the U.S., the homicide rate in Mexico is double ours. Data tells us that roughly 70 percent of the firearms involved in homicides in Mexico can be traced back to the U.S.

Perhaps these numbers can help paint a picture for people who don’t have to live every day with the sound of gunshots in their neighborhoods or the haunting trauma of friends or family lost due to a senseless shooting. Our reality of gun violence, however, is not one that can be summed up by statistics alone. We have experienced the impacts firsthand.

We can’t forget the day in Parkland at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a shooter walked in and killed 17 people and injured many more. The images of students bleeding out on the school floor don’t fade. And of course, the Parkland killings and trauma are but one of a seemingly endless chain of horrifying mass shootings.

Whose responsibility is it when teenagers can access military-grade weapons? Why do the American firearm manufacturers who produce the guns that too easily slip into the hands of young people in the U.S. as well as drive cartel violence and drug trade across the border in Mexico have no accountability? And why aren’t our political leaders asking these questions?

We need the leaders of North America to understand how policy failures on gun violence, climate disasters, and immigration in the U.S. and Mexico are affecting the lives of real people from diverse backgrounds across our borders.

An increasing frequency and severity of forest fires, droughts, storms, and floods due to climate change are displacing entire communities from their homes and ancestral lands, especially people of color, low-income communities, women, Indigenous Peoples, and Central Americans. It threatens their livelihoods and their traditional ways of life.

Along with gun violence from gangs and cartels, corrupt police, militarization, and poverty-related circumstances, these people are forced to leave their homes in search of a safer place to live. Families throughout the region want to stay home but must relocate as a matter of survival. Sadly, federal entities in Mexico and the U.S. detain and deport many of them, or criminal organizations kill them, en route to safer places to live.

In fact, North America is now one of the deadliest regions in the world for migrants, with 2022 setting a record number of migrant deaths at the Mexico-U.S. border (a record previously shattered in 2021). International agreements to protect migrants from violence have been ignored and undermined, leaving thousands of families stranded at borders as a result.

These circumstances are unacceptable, unfair, and unsustainable. We want our national leaders to end the proliferation of gun violence and the militarized drug war; stop the destructive impacts of pollution and climate change that disproportionately impact people of color and low-income communities; and support migrant populations with compassionate immigration policies, rather than criminalization.

Note: Both authors will be speaking at the Peace Summit in Mexico City, Mexico Feb. 23-24.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jorden Giger.

On Friday, February 7th, the Golden Rule peace boat gently sailed over sacred whale breeding grounds, with an ever respectful sense of protection to our beautiful fellow creatures, then bravely showed its sails entering St. Mary's River of the historic town of St. Mary's which joins the beautiful, yet ominous entrance of the East River. Along the East River exists the most deadly concentration of Ohio Class nuclear weapon laden submarines on the East Coast, if not the world, the Naval Submarine Base of Kings Bay.

This base remains the most extensive single construction project ever undertaken by the U.S. Navy. It contains the largest indoor dry dock in the world, and as a result, it services not only our own fleet but the Tridents of the United Kingdom. It is one of the most unknown and hidden sites of what Mahatma Ghandi called "the most diabolical use of science." Which is why the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 chose this site for their personal sacrifice (my term, not theirs) for the whole.

Since there is no official auditing that has been transparent or completed by or of our Pentagon, it is unknown how low the Navy's projected $ 15 billion cost for building just one of the new Columbia Class subs. Twelve new Columbia Class submarines were ordered in 2016 to replace all the current Trident submarines, one by one, each year, with the first to be completed in 2030!

The Golden Rule anti-nuclear sailboat, a national project of Veterans For Peace, will also be sailing in the months ahead to facilities that are building these future subs slated for Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay – General Dynamics Electric Boat facility in Quonset Point Rhode Island, and assembled at Groton, Connecticut, with Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding subcontracting, to name a few of the main players. The missiles and warheads are manufactured by other larger corporations we know too well – Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, etc.

During the Golden Rule’s stay in St. Mary's and Brunswick, all the industries benefitting from these orders to “modernize our nuclear Triad" are gathering together in DC at the Annual Nuclear Deterrent Summit. Well over a hundred corporations, public officials and universities meet to ensure and guarantee their own piece of the nuclear devastation pie.

On April 4, 2018, seven Catholic Worker activists, in solidarity with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s prophetic call, and on the anniversary of his assassination, surreptitiously entered into the submarine base’s "kill zone” in prayer, wishing to awaken U.S. citizens to their current course toward omnicide.

The “Kings Bay Plowshares 7” were arrested in the dark hours of the morning, praying together, after spray painting "Love One Another" on the walkway, affixing crime tape to the entrance of buildings, reading out loud their statement of intent, leaving a carefully placed copy of Daniel Ellsberg's new book The Doomsday Machine, holding up a banner of Martin Luther King, Jr. They symbolically spread their own blood from pre-filled viles to remind those of the unimaginable loss of life if one of these weapons were to ever detonate anywhere, by accident (read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser), by mechanical failure, cyber-attack or by the design of a mad person/leader/government.

It took over an hour for the nation's highest level of security at our Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay to realize the seven had entered. Once discovered, the seven were fully cooperative with the arrest, displaying compassion to those working at the base and those arresting them. Imagine that in this installation with a Marine Battalion Security Force, if happened to be terrorists and not followers of Pope Francis, who has condemned the possession and threat of use of these devices, built and maintained with trillions of our precious taxpayer dollars.

There are eight Ohio Class Trident submarines based at Kings Bay. Other nuclear submarines come in for refurbishment and repair, and the United Kingdom's Trident Vanguard fleet are also serviced in this Naval Base. The submarine base is home to three major U.S. Navy commands – Trident Training Facility, Trident Refit Facility, The Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic, and a Marine Corps Security Force Battalion.

Each Ohio Class Trident submarine carries 24 missiles and each of these missiles carries up to 12 thermonuclear warheads (currently limited to 8 warheads each by treaty). Each of these warheads holds the destructive capacity of 100 kilotons (W76), or 455 kilotons (W88). Hiroshima's incomprehensible, utter devastation was approximately 13 kilotons.

Many of the residents of the beautiful St. Mary's/ Brunswick area are oblivious to what great danger infuses their otherwise tranquil environment, and how in a moment, they and all they know would vanish. There is no doubt that this base would be a top preemptive target.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7, were found guilty of three felonies and a misdemeanor. Unbelievably to many of us, the jury requested to know if there were actually nuclear missiles on the base. The jurors, all residents of the area, did not know. Siding with the prosecution (U.S. Federal lawyers), the judge ordered the answer to this question to not be given to the jurors. "The presence of such weapons could not be confirmed."

Nor were the Seven allowed to read their letter of intent to the jurors, share the purpose of their action, the long history of international laws on this matter, the new Nuclear Ban Treaty, or the very real and grave facts of nuclear weapons, what they actually do, and what they cost us. They were not allowed to cite the evidence they brought onto the base (Doomsday Machine, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, their own statement, and a bell from Nagasaki). The case was narrowed to the slight (but overdramatized) damage of "government" property, and trespassing. The Seven were sentenced individually, and several spent up to two years incarcerated.

Watch Patrick O'Neill and Martha Hennessy read the Kings Bay Plowshares 7’s powerful statement on the day of their action:

In his book, The Voyage of the Golden Rule, Captain Albert Bigelow describes the 1958 trial of the crew of the historic wooden boat, for the crime – more or less – of intention to trespass in international waters, as they would attempt to interfere with US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. The 1958 trial had striking similarities to the Kings Bay 7 trial sixty years later, and the constraints imposed by the US government, placing nuclear secrecy over democracy. However, the 1958 Golden Rule crew did have more media access and press coverage. The 1958 protesters had people from around the world cheering them on to stop the arms race, stop the nuclear testing. Thousands of letters and many levels of support.

The Kings Bay Plowshares action was much less known, and was not covered by any mainstream media on or after April 4th, 2018. They were effectively silenced and ignored.

However those of us who witnessed their noble defense directly were changed forever. It was a transformative experience to witness, regardless of the outcome. The arc of gratitude for such sacrifice, from the brave protesters of 1958 through 2018, and from all in-between, inspire and carry us forward today, on this small 34-foot ketch appropriately called the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” In these extremely darkening days, here before us is an embracing, courageous, wise, loving light that shows the way to life.

May we also call out one of Brunswick, Georgia’s great guides in spirit and for nuclear abolition, Robert Randall, who recently passed. Robert Randall, PRESENTE!

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Anthony Donovan.

Are America’s national interests best served by our stance on the Ukraine-Russia war? It is striking that within the Democratic Party, with its long tradition of anti-war activism, there are no prominent voices raising this question.

President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the influence of the military industrial complex on war policy. But he would likely fear speaking out today, even though the doomsday clock now says America’s stance on the Ukraine-Russian war has helped put all of us in the greatest peril ever. All the NATO countries disagree. As do the major newspaper editorial boards. Polls say about 90 percent of Democrats back continuing to give aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia.

As a consequence, no potential Democratic presidential contender dares to oppose the policy. Such public opposition would be labeled disloyal, even pro-Russian.

Yet history says the American people are being ill served by this chloroform of conformity. This is true based on an unimpeachable source: the American people.

In 1952, Eisenhower won the presidency by promising to change Democratic President Harry Truman’s Korean War policy. Even after Truman’s disastrous showing in the New Hampshire primary, Democrats stuck with the status quo. Ike won in a landslide.

In 1968, when little known Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) announced his intention to challenge Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War policy, he met universal derision from the party establishment. They declared him a certain loser, indeed a flake.

A few weeks after a disastrous showing in the New Hampshire primary, LBJ quit the race. Democrats nominated Johnson war apologist Vice President Hubert Humphrey to the loud opposition of antiwar activists. Humphrey seemed a certain loser until Johnson suddenly agreed with his critics. LBJ said his emissaries would attend formal peace negotiations. Polls soon had the race statistically tied. But Humphrey lost a close election to Richard Nixon.

In 1992, polls suggested support from usually loyal Democratic voters for Republican President George H.W. Bush’s Gulf war policy made him unbeatable for reelection. All the big-name Democratic hopefuls declined to run. But little-known Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton rejected the poll results. He won the 1992 contest by the biggest electoral margin of any Democratic challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

As has been famously observed, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) originally backed Republican President George W. Bush’s Iraq War stance. But little-known former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) launched the longest long shot antiwar presidential candidacy in four decades. He seemed poised to win until Kerry cleverly morphed from hawk to dove. Kerry won the nomination but lost to Bush in the closest reelection bid since 1916.

In 2008 Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seemed on a fool’s mission challenging Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the Democratic nomination. But the underdog Illinoisian had opposed the Iraq War while Clinton supported Bush’s war resolution. Had she been willing to admit a mistake, she almost certainly would have stopped Obama’s campaign in its tracks. But she refused. He won.

Obama’s general election opponent had won the GOP nomination in part due to his support for Bush’s Iraq war policy. Obama won with the biggest Democratic margin of any challenger since FDR.

In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces had been assumed an easy winner. The West therefore gave Ukraine the obligatory lip service. Russia had nuclear weapons, and the U.S. had no interest in poking the Russian bear. But the Russian army proved grossly overrated. Ukraine forces, led by formerly derided ex-comedian President Volodymyr Zelensky, demonstrated unexpected prowess.

However, without the West’s money and arms, Ukraine would have eventually lost. For nearly a year, America and its allies have funded the war against Russia. This put Putin in an increasingly difficult position both on the battlefield and at home.

Russia uses increasingly more powerful weapons in turn requiring the West to send ever more powerful weaponry to the Ukrainians. The end game is unclear. Peace must eventually come. But it will likely require the United States to make a commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild Ukraine.

The 2024 election cycle has only just begun. But the prospects are not good that we will have a serious presidential candidate who dares to disagree with current war policy. Never before has the chloroform of conformity been inhaled so deeply.

As has been famously observed, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.

We can assume that any treaty will include America agreeing to foot the biggest part of the reconstruction costs. This amount may far exceed the funds needed to rebuild the schools for all the poor children in America. It may exceed the funds required to provide training for all the workers who will be put out of jobs by artificial intelligence.

We have a $31.5 trillion national debt, in good measure due to our military spending and forgiving trillions in debt as an incentive for other countries to forgo military solutions to problems.

It is not disloyal to either party or to the country to question a dangerous situation no one in America would have wanted a year ago. Asking the necessary questions is the opposite of disloyalty; it is the height of patriotism.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Paul Goldman.

I like to sing and what I like best is to do so at the top of my lungs when I’m all alone. Last summer, taking a walk through the corn fields in New York’s Hudson River Valley with no one around but the barn swallows, I found myself belting out a medley of tunes about peace from my long-ago, summer-camp years. That was the late 1950s, when the miseries of World War II were still relatively fresh, the U.N. looked like a promising development, and folk music was just oh-so-cool.

At my well-meaning, often self-righteous, always melodious camp, 110 children used to warble with such sweet promise:

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
but other lands have sunlight too and clover
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine”

It seemed such a sensible, grown-up way to think — like, duh! we can all have the good stuff. That was before I got older and came to realize that grown-ups don’t necessarily think sensibly. So many years later, as I finished the last chorus, I wondered: Who talks, let alone sings, that way about peace anymore? I mean, without irony and with genuine hope?

Since my summer ramble, International Peace Day has come and gone. Meanwhile, militaries are killing civilians (and sometimes vice versa) in places as disparate as Ukraine, Ethiopia, Iran, Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen. It just goes on and on, doesn’t it? And that’s not even to mention all the fragile truces, acts of terrorism (and reprisal), quashed uprisings, and barely repressed hostilities on this planet.

Don’t get me started, by the way, on how the language of battle so often pervades our daily lives. Little wonder that the Pope, in his recent Christmas message, bemoaned the world’s “famine of peace.”

Amid all of that, isn’t it hard to imagine that peace stands a chance?

Sing Out!

There’s a limit to how much significance songs can carry, of course, but a successful political movement does need a good soundtrack. (As I found out while reporting then, Rage Against the Machine served that purpose for some post-9/11 antiwar soldiers.) Better yet is an anthem crowds can sing when they gather in solidarity to exert political pressure. After all, it feels good to sing as a group at a moment when it doesn’t even matter if you can carry a tune as long as the lyrics hit home. But a protest song, by definition, isn’t a song of peace — and it turns out that most recent peace songs aren’t so peaceful either.

As many of us of a certain age remember, antiwar songs thrived during the Vietnam War years. There was the iconic “Give Peace a Chance,” recorded by John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and pals in a Montreal hotel room in 1969; “War,” first recorded by the Temptations in 1970 (I can still hear that “absolutely nothing!” response to “What Is It Good For?”); Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train,” from 1971; and that’s just to begin a list. But in this century? Most of the ones I came across were about inner peace or making peace with yourself; they are self-care mantras du jour. The few about world or international peace were unnervingly angry and bleak, which also seemed to reflect the tenor of the time.

It’s not as if the word “peace” has been cancelled. The porch of a neighbor of mine sports a faded peace flag; Trader Joe’s keeps me well-supplied with Inner Peas; and peace still gets full commercial treatment sometimes, as on designer T-shirts from the Chinese clothing company Uniqlo. But many of the organizations whose goal is indeed world peace have chosen not to include the word in their names and “peacenik,” pejorative even in its heyday, is now purely passé. So, has peace work just changed its tune or has it evolved in more substantial ways?

Peace 101

Peace is a state of being, even perhaps a state of grace. It can be as internal as individual serenity or as broad as comity among nations. But at best, it’s unstable, eternally in danger of being lost. It needs a verb with it — seek the, pursue the, win the, keep the — to have real impact and, although there have been stretches of time without war in certain regions (post-WW II Europe until recently, for example), that certainly doesn’t seem to be the natural state of all too much of this world of ours.

Most peace workers probably disagree or they wouldn’t be doing what they do. In this century, I first experienced pushback to the idea that war is innate or inevitable in a 2008 phone interview with Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist noted for his work with Vietnam War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. That was the subject we were talking about when he veered off-topic and asserted his belief that it was indeed possible to end all war.

Most such conflicts, he thought, stemmed from fear and the way not just civilians but the military brass so often “consume” it as entertainment. He urged me to read Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s treatise Perpetual Peace. When I did, I was indeed struck by its echoes over two centuries later. On recurring debates about reinstating the draft, to take one example, consider Kant’s suggestion that standing armies only make it easier for countries to go to war. “They incite the various states to outrival one another in the number of their soldiers,” he wrote then, “and to this number no limit can be set.”

The modern academic field of peace and conflict studies — there are now about 400 such programs around the world — began about 60 years ago. Underpinning peace theory are the concepts of negative and positive peacefirst widely introduced by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung (though Jane Addams and Martin Luther King both used the terms earlier). Negative peace is the absence of immediate violence and armed conflict, the conviction perhaps that you can buy groceries without taking a chance on getting blown to smithereens (as in Ukraine today). Positive peace is a state of sustained harmony within and among nations. That doesn’t mean no one ever disagrees, only that the parties involved deal with any clash of goals nonviolently. And since so many violent clashes arise from underlying social conditions, employing empathy and creativity to heal wounds is essential to the process.

Negative peace aims at avoiding, positive peace at enduring. But negative peace is an immediate necessity because wars are so much easier to start than to stop, which makes Galtung’s position more practical than messianic. “I am not concerned with saving the world,” he wrote. “I am concerned with finding solutions to specific conflicts before they become violent.”

David Cortright, a Vietnam War veteran, professor emeritus at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and co-creator of Win Without War, offered me this definition of such work in an email: “To me, the question is not ‘world peace,’ which is dreamy and utopian and too often used to ridicule those of us who believe in and work for peace, but rather how to reduce armed conflict and violence.”

Peace Comes Dropping Slow

Peace movements tend to mobilize around specific wars, swelling and declining as those conflicts do, though sometimes they do remain in our world afterward. Mother’s Day, for instance, grew out of a call for peace after the Civil War. (Women have been at the forefront of peace actions since Lysistrata organized the women of ancient Greece to deny men sex until they ended the Peloponnesian War.) A few still-active antiwar organizations date from before World War I and several arose from the Vietnam War resistance movement and the antinuclear one of the early 1980s. Others are as recent as Dissenters, organized in 2017 by young activists of color.

Today, a long list of nonprofits, religious groups, NGOs, lobbying campaigns, publications, and scholarly programs are intent on abolishing war. They generally focus their efforts on educating citizens in how to rein in militarism and military funding, while promoting better ways for countries to coexist peacefully or stanch internal conflicts.

Count on one thing, though: it’s never an easy task, not even if you limit yourself to the United States, where militarism is regularly portrayed as patriotism and unbridled spending on murderous weapons as deterrence, while war profiteering has long been a national pastime. True, a signer of the Declaration of Independence later proposed a Peace-Office to be headed by a Secretary of Peace and put on equal footing with the War Department. Such an idea never got further, however, than renaming that War Department as the more neutral-sounding Defense Department in 1949, after the U.N. Charter outlawed wars of aggression. (If only!)

According to a database compiled by the Military Intervention Project, this country has engaged in 392 military interventions since 1776, half of them in the past 70 years. At the moment, this country isn’t directly waging any full-scale conflicts, though U.S. troops are still fighting in Syria and its planes still launching strikes in Somalia, not to speak of the 85 counterterror operations Brown University’s Costs of War Project found the U.S. had engaged in from 2018 to 2020, some of which are undoubtedly ongoing. The Institute for Economics and Peace ranks the U.S. 129th out of 163 countries in its 2022 Global Peace Index. Among the categories we’ve flunked in that reckoning are the size of our jailed population, the number of counterterrorist activities conducted, military expenditures (which leave the rest of the planet in the dust), general militarism, our nuclear arsenal being “modernized” to the tune of almost $2 trillion in the decades to come, the staggering numbers of weapons we send or sell abroad, and the number of conflicts fought. Add to that so many other urgent, interlacing problems and mundane brutalities against this planet and the people on it and it’s easy to believe that pursuing sustained peace isn’t just unrealistic but distinctly un-American.

Except it isn’t. Peace work is all too crucial, if only because a Pentagon budget accounting for at least 53% of this country’s discretionary budget undercuts and sabotages efforts to address a host of crucial social needs. It’s hardly surprising, then, that U.S. peace activists have had to adjust their strategies along with their vocabulary.They now stress the interconnectedness of war and so many other issues, partly as a tactic, but also because “no justice, no peace” is more than a slogan. It’s a precondition for achieving a more peaceful life in this country.

Recognizing the interconnectedness of what plagues us means more than just coaxing other constituencies to add peace to their portfolios. It means embracing and working with other organizations on their issues, too. As Jonathan King, co-chair of Massachusetts Peace Action and professor emeritus at MIT, put it aptly, “You need to go where people are, meet them at their concerns and needs.” So, King, a longtime peace activist, also serves on the coordinating committee of the Massachusetts Poor People’s Campaign, which includes ending “military aggression and war-mongering” on its list of demands, while Veterans For Peace now has an activeClimate Crisis and Militarism Project. David Cortright similarly points to a growing body of peace research, drawing on science and other scholarly fields, including feminist and post-colonial studies, while pushing a radical rethinking of what peace means.

Then there’s the question of how movements accomplish anything through some combination of inside institutional work, general political clout, and public pressure. Yes, maybe someday Congress might finally be persuaded by a lobbying campaign to revoke those outdated Authorizations for Use of Military Force passed in 2001 and 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks and the wars that followed. That, at least, would make it harder for a president to deploy U.S. troops in distant conflicts at will. However, getting enough members of Congress to agree to rein in the defense budget would likely require a grassroots campaign of staggering size. All that, in turn, would undoubtedly mean a melding of any peace movement into something far larger, as well as a series of hold-your-nose compromises and relentless fundraising appeals (like a recent plea asking me to “make a down payment on peace”).

The Peace Beat?

This fall, I attended a panel, “Chronicling War and Occupation,” at a student-organized conference on freedom of the press. The four panelists — impressive, experienced, battered war correspondents — spoke thoughtfully about why they do such work, whom they hope to influence, and the dangers they deal with, including the possibility of “normalizing” war. At question time, I asked about coverage of antiwar activity and was met with silence, followed by a half-hearted reference to the suppression of dissent in Russia.

True, when bullets are flying, it’s not the time to ponder the alternative, but bullets weren’t flying in that auditorium and I wondered whether every panel about war reportage shouldn’t include someone reporting on peace. I doubt it’s even a thought in newsrooms that, along with war reporters, there could also be peace reporters. And what, I wonder, would that beat look like? What might it achieve?

I doubt I ever expected to see peace in our time, not even long ago when we sang those lilting songs. But I have seen wars end and, occasionally, even avoided. I have seen conflicts resolved to the betterment of those involved and I continue to admire the peace workers who had a role in making that happen.

As David Swanson, co-founder and executive director of World Beyond War, reminded me in a recent phone call, you work for peace because “it’s a moral responsibility to oppose the war machine. And as long as there’s a chance and you’re working at what has the best chance of succeeding, you have to do it.”

It’s as simple — and as bedeviling — as that. In other words, we have to give peace a chance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Nan Levinson.

More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the U.S. Army War College and many other military institutions across the world. A passage from it describing an ultimatum Athens gave a weaker power has stayed with me all these years. And here it is, loosely translated from the Greek: “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.”

Recently, I read the latest National Defense Strategy, or NDS, issued in October 2022 by the Pentagon, and Thucydides’s ancient message, a warning as clear as it was undeniable, came to mind again. It summarized for me the true essence of that NDS: being strong, the United States does what it wants and weaker powers, of course, suffer as they must. Such a description runs contrary to the mythology of this country in which we invariably wage war not for our own imperial ends but to defend ourselves while advancing freedom and democracy. Recall that Athens, too, thought of itself as an enlightened democracy even as it waged its imperial war of dominance on the Peloponnesus. Athens lost that war, calamitously, but at least it did produce Thucydides, a military leader who became a historian and wrote all too bluntly about his country’s hubristic, ultimately fatal pursuit of hegemony.

Imperial military ambitions contributed disastrously to Athens’s exhaustion and ultimate collapse, a lesson completely foreign to U.S. strategists. Not surprisingly, then, you’ll find no such Thucydidean clarity in the latest NDS approved by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In place of that Greek historian’s probity and timeless lessons, the NDS represents an assault not just on the English language but on our very future. In it, a policy of failing imperial dominance is eternally disguised as democratic deterrence, while the greatest “strategic” effort of all goes (remarkably successfully) into justifying massive Pentagon budget increases. Given the sustained record of failures in this century for what still passes as the greatest military power on the planet — Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, of course, but don’t forget Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and indeed the entire $8 trillion Global War on Terror in all its brutality — consider the NDS a rare recent “mission accomplished” moment. The 2023 baseline “defense” budget now sits at $858 billion, $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.

With that yearly budget climbing toward a trillion dollars (or more) annually, it’s easy to conclude that, at least when it comes to our military, nothing succeeds like failure. And, by the way, that not only applies to wars lost at a staggering cost but also financial audits blown without penalty. After all, the Pentagon only recently failed its fifth audit in a row. With money always overflowing, no matter how it may be spent, one thing seems guaranteed: some future American Thucydides will have the material to produce a volume or volumes beyond compare. Of course, whether this country goes the way of Athens — defeat driven by military exhaustion exacerbated by the betrayal of its supposedly deepest ideals leading to an ultimate collapse — remains to be seen. Still, given that America’s war colleges continue to assign Thucydides, no one can say that our military and future NDS writers didn’t get fair warning when it comes to what likely awaits them.

Bludgeoning America with Bureaucratese

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.

That’s a saying I learned early in my career as an Air Force officer, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to discover that it’s the NDS’s guiding philosophy. The document has an almost Alice in Wonderland-like quality to it as words and phrases take on new meanings. China, you won’t be surprised to learn, is a “pacing challenge” to U.S. security concerns; Russia, an “acute threat” to America due to its “unprovoked, unjust, and reckless invasion of Ukraine” and other forms of “irresponsible behavior”; and building “combat-credible forces” within a “defense ecosystem” is a major Pentagon goal, along with continuing “investments in mature, high-value assets” (like defective aircraft carriers, ultra-expensive bombers and fighter jets, and doomsday-promising new ICBMs).

Much talk is included about “leveraging” those “assets,” “risk mitigation,” and even “cost imposition,” a strange euphemism for bombing, killing, or otherwise inflicting pain on our enemies. Worse yet, there’s so much financial- and business-speak in the document that it’s hard not to wonder whether its authors don’t already have at least one foot in the revolving door that could, on their retirement from the military, swing them onto the corporate boards of major defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon.

Perhaps my favorite redefined concept in that NDS lurks in the word “campaigning.” In the old days, armies fought campaigns in the field and generals like Frederick the Great or Napoleon truly came to know the price of them in blood and treasure. Unlike U.S. generals since 1945, they also knew the meaning of victory, as well as defeat. Perish the thought of that kind of campaigning now. The NDS redefines it, almost satirically, not to say incomprehensibly, as “the conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military initiatives aimed at advancing well-defined, strategy-aligned priorities over time.” Huh?

Campaigning, explains the cover letter signed by Secretary of Defense Austin (who won’t be mistaken for Frederick II in his bluntness or Napoleon in his military acuity), “is not business as usual — it is the deliberate effort to synchronize the [Defense] Department’s activities and investments to aggregate focus and resources to shift conditions in our favor.”

Got it? Good!

Of course, who knows what such impenetrable jargon really means to our military in 2023? This former military officer certainly prefers the plain and honest language of Thucydides. In his terms, America, the strong, intends to do what it will in the world to preserve and extend “conditions in our favor,” as the NDS puts it — a measure by which this country has failed dismally in this century. Weaker countries, especially those that are “irresponsible,” must simply suffer. If they resist, they must be prepared for some “cost imposition” events exercised by our “combat-credible forces.” Included in those are America’s “ultimate backstop” of cost imposition… gulp, its nuclear forces.

Again, the NDS is worthy of close reading (however pain-inducing that may be) precisely because the secretary of defense does claim that it’s his “preeminent guidance document.” I assume he’s not kidding about that, though I wish he were. To me, that document is to guidance as nuclear missiles are to “backstops.” If that last comparison is jarring, I challenge you to read it and then try to think or write clearly.

Bringing Clarity to America’s Military Strategy

To save you the trauma of even paging through the NDS, let me try to summarize it quickly in my version — if not the Pentagon’s — of English:

1. China is the major threat to America on this planet.
2. Russia, however, is a serious threat in Europe.
3. The War on Terror continues to hum along successfully, even if at a significantly lower level.
4. North Korea and Iran remain threats, mainly due to the first’s growing nuclear arsenal and the second’s supposed nuclear aspirations.
5. Climate change, pandemics, and cyberwar must also be factored in as “transboundary challenges.”

“Deterrence” is frequently used as a cloak for the planetary dominance the Pentagon continues to dream of. Our military must remain beyond super-strong (and wildly overfunded) to deter nations and entities from striking “the homeland.” There’s also lots of talk about global challenges to be met, risks to be managed, “gray zone” methods to be employed, and references aplenty to “kinetic action” (combat, in case your translator isn’t working) and what’s known as “exploitable asymmetries.”

Count on one thing: whatever our disasters in the real world, nobody is going to beat America in the jargon war.

Missing in the NDS — and no surprise here — is any sense that war is humanity’s worst pastime. Even the mass murder implicit in nuclear weapons is glossed over. The harshest realities of conflict, nuclear war included, and the need to do anything in our power to prevent them, naturally go unmentioned. The very banality of the document serves to mask a key reality of our world: that Americans fund nothing as religiously as war, that most withering of evils.

Perhaps it’s not quite the banality of evil, to cite the telling phrase political philosopher Hannah Arendt used to describe the thoughts of the deskbound mass-murderers of the Holocaust, but it does have all of war’s brutality expunged from it. As we stare into the abyss, the NDS replies with mind-numbing phrases and terms that wouldn’t be out of place in a corporate report on rising profits and market dominance.

Yet as the military-industrial complex maneuvers and plots to become ever bigger, ever better funded, and ever more powerful, abetted by a Congress seemingly lustful for ever more military spending and weapons exports, hope for international cooperation, productive diplomacy, and democracy withers. Here, for instance, are a few of the things you’ll never see mentioned in this NDS:

1. Any suggestion that the Pentagon budget might be reduced. Ever.
2. Any suggestion that the U.S. military’s mission or “footprint” should be downsized in any way at all.
3. Any acknowledgement that the U.S. and its allies spend far more on their militaries than “pacing challengers” like China or “acute threats” like Russia.
4. Any acknowledgment that the Pentagon’s budget is based not on deterrence but on dominance.
5. Any acknowledgement that the U.S. military has been far less than dominant despite endless decades of massive military spending that produced lost or stalemated wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
6. Any suggestion that skilled diplomacy and common security could lead to greater cooperation or decreased tensions.
7. Any serious talk of peace.

In brief, in that document and thanks to the staggering congressional funding that goes with it, America is being eternally spun back into an age of great-power rivalry, with Xi Jinping’s China taking the place of the old Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin’s Russia that of Mao Zedong’s China. Consistent with that retro-vision is the true end goal of the NDS: to eternally maximize the Pentagon budget and so the power and authority of the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Basically, any power that seeks to push back against the Pentagon’s vision of security through dominance is defined as a threat to be “deterred,” often in the most “kinetic” way. And the greatest threat of all, requiring the most “deterrence,” is, of course, China.

In a textbook case of strategic mirror-imaging, the Pentagon’s NDS sees that country and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as acting almost exactly like the U.S. military. And that simply cannot be allowed.

Here’s the relevant NDS passage:

“In addition to expanding its conventional forces, the PLA is rapidly advancing and integrating its space, counterspace, cyber, electronic, and information warfare capabilities to support its holistic approach to joint warfare. The PLA seeks to target the ability of the [U.S.] Joint Force to project power to defend vital U.S. interests and aid our Allies in a crisis or conflict. The PRC [China] is also expanding the PLA’s global footprint and working to establish a more robust overseas and basing infrastructure to allow it to project military power at greater distances. In parallel, the PRC is accelerating the modernization and expansion of its nuclear capabilities.”

How dare China become more like the United States! Only this country is allowed to aspire to “full-spectrum dominance” and global power, as manifested by its 750 military bases scattered around the world and its second-to-none, blue-water navy. Get back to thy place, China! Only “a free people devoted to democracy and the rule of law” can “sustain and strengthen an international system under threat.” China, you’ve been warned. Better not dare to keep pace with the U.S. of A. (And heaven forfend that, in a world overheating in a devastating way, the planet’s two greatest greenhouse gas emitters should work together to prevent true catastrophe!)

Revisiting the Oath of Office

Being a retired U.S. military officer, I always come back to the oath of office I once swore to uphold: “To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Naturally, if China, Russia, or any other country or entity attacks or otherwise directly menaces the U.S., I expect our military to defend this country with all due vigor.

That said, I don’t see China, Russia, or weaker countries like Iran or North Korea risking attacks against America proper, despite breathless talk of world “flashpoints.” Why would they, when any such attack would incur a devastating counterattack, possibly including America’s trusty “backstop,” its nuclear weapons?

In truth, the NDS is all about the further expansion of the U.S. global military mission. Contraction is a concept never to be heard. Yet reducing our military’s presence abroad isn’t synonymous with isolationism, nor, as has become ever more obvious in recent years, is an expansive military structure a fail-safe guarantor of freedom and democracy at home. Quite the opposite, constant warfare and preparations for more of it overseas have led not only to costly defeats, most recently in Afghanistan, but also to the increasing militarization of our society, a phenomenon reflected, for instance, in the more heavily armed and armored police forces across America.

The Pentagon’s NDS is a classic case of threat inflation cloaked in bureaucratese where the “facts” are fixed around a policy that encourages the incessant and inflationary growth of the military-industrial complex. In turn, that complex empowers and drives a “rules-based international order” in which America, as hegemon, makes the rules. Again, as Thucydides put it, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.

Yet, to paraphrase another old book, what does it profit a people to gain the whole world yet lose their very soul? Like Athens before it, America was once a flawed democracy that nevertheless served as an inspiration to many because militarism, authoritarianism, and imperial pretense didn’t drive it. Today, this country is much like Thucydides’s Athens, projecting power ever-outwards in a misbegotten exercise to attain mastery through military supremacy.

It didn’t end well for Athens, nor will it for the United States.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Astore.

The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on the significance of his life and work. It is particularly important to do so this year, with unapologetic racism on the rise and a Cold War atmosphere permeating Washington.

Dr. King had a deep understanding of the links between America’s domestic and foreign predicaments, expressed most clearly in his speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4 1967, one year before he was assassinated.

King understood that Vietnam was not an isolated case of U.S. military adventurism:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality… we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees [like the one against the war in Vietnam] for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

King’s predictions about where the United States would intervene were not accurate, but the process he described has all too sadly played out, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Somalia to Syria and beyond.

These direct interventions don’t take into account America’s role as the world’s leading arms trading nation, supplying equipment to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have been used in a brutal war in Yemen that has led to direct and indirect deaths approaching 400,000 people. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States supplied weapons to 103 nations between 2017 and 2021 — more than half the countries in the world. For many citizens of the world, their first association with America is a U.S. soldier or a U.S.-supplied weapon in the hands of their government or one of their adversaries.

This U.S. record of wide-ranging military intervention and runaway arms sales is a far cry from the “diplomacy first” foreign policy that the Biden administration has pledged to pursue. To its credit, the administration stuck to its commitment to get the United States out of its disastrous 20-year engagement in Afghanistan. And in some cases, as in Ukraine, U.S. arms have been supplied for defensive purposes, to help Kyiv fend off a brutal Russian invasion. But on balance, the United States still adheres to the kind of militarized foreign policy that Dr. King warned us about well over 50 years ago.

Quincy Institute non-resident fellow and Tufts University professor Monica Toft has noted the broader impacts of America’s addiction to military force in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs:

This is an unfortunate trend. For evidence, look no further than the disastrous U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The overly frequent resort to use of force also undermines U.S. legitimacy in the world. As the U.S. diplomatic corps and American influence abroad shrink, the country’s military footprint only grows.

Toft also points to the impact on U.S. interventionism on the reputation of America in the world. A Pew research poll conducted between 2013 and 2018 found that the number of foreigners who considered the United States a threat nearly doubled over that time period, from 25 percent to 45 percent.

King also underscored the domestic consequences of rampant interventionism:

A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

The domestic costs of militarism are painfully present today. The budget signed by President Biden last month provides $858 billion for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. That’s well over half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget — the portion that includes virtually everything the government does other than mandatory entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare: environmental protection, public health, administration of justice, job training, education, and more. Meanwhile Congress has resisted the administration’s attempts to get additional funding for Covid relief, and terminated the Child Tax Credit, one of the most effective means of eliminating poverty.

King understood that the roots of the warfare state run deep, driven by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign, co-chaired by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis and inspired by Dr. King, have taken up the call to address these issues. More groups and individuals need to do so if we are to foster a genuine “diplomacy first” foreign policy, with the immense benefits for American and global security and prosperity and equality at home that would entail.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Hartung.

The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on the significance of his life and work. It is particularly important to do so this year, with unapologetic racism on the rise and a Cold War atmosphere permeating Washington.

Dr. King had a deep understanding of the links between America’s domestic and foreign predicaments, expressed most clearly in his speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4 1967, one year before he was assassinated.

King understood that Vietnam was not an isolated case of U.S. military adventurism:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality… we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees [like the one against the war in Vietnam] for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

King’s predictions about where the United States would intervene were not accurate, but the process he described has all too sadly played out, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Somalia to Syria and beyond.

These direct interventions don’t take into account America’s role as the world’s leading arms trading nation, supplying equipment to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have been used in a brutal war in Yemen that has led to direct and indirect deaths approaching 400,000 people. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States supplied weapons to 103 nations between 2017 and 2021 — more than half the countries in the world. For many citizens of the world, their first association with America is a U.S. soldier or a U.S.-supplied weapon in the hands of their government or one of their adversaries.

This U.S. record of wide-ranging military intervention and runaway arms sales is a far cry from the “diplomacy first” foreign policy that the Biden administration has pledged to pursue. To its credit, the administration stuck to its commitment to get the United States out of its disastrous 20-year engagement in Afghanistan. And in some cases, as in Ukraine, U.S. arms have been supplied for defensive purposes, to help Kyiv fend off a brutal Russian invasion. But on balance, the United States still adheres to the kind of militarized foreign policy that Dr. King warned us about well over 50 years ago.

Quincy Institute non-resident fellow and Tufts University professor Monica Toft has noted the broader impacts of America’s addiction to military force in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs:

This is an unfortunate trend. For evidence, look no further than the disastrous U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The overly frequent resort to use of force also undermines U.S. legitimacy in the world. As the U.S. diplomatic corps and American influence abroad shrink, the country’s military footprint only grows.

Toft also points to the impact on U.S. interventionism on the reputation of America in the world. A Pew research poll conducted between 2013 and 2018 found that the number of foreigners who considered the United States a threat nearly doubled over that time period, from 25 percent to 45 percent.

King also underscored the domestic consequences of rampant interventionism:

A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

The domestic costs of militarism are painfully present today. The budget signed by President Biden last month provides $858 billion for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. That’s well over half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget — the portion that includes virtually everything the government does other than mandatory entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare: environmental protection, public health, administration of justice, job training, education, and more. Meanwhile Congress has resisted the administration’s attempts to get additional funding for Covid relief, and terminated the Child Tax Credit, one of the most effective means of eliminating poverty.

King understood that the roots of the warfare state run deep, driven by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign, co-chaired by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis and inspired by Dr. King, have taken up the call to address these issues. More groups and individuals need to do so if we are to foster a genuine “diplomacy first” foreign policy, with the immense benefits for American and global security and prosperity and equality at home that would entail.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Hartung.

V. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is a war crime. Although the “NATO expansion” is an apparent effort to encircle Russia on its western border with new NATO members, despite the promise of the Bush I administration not to do so, may be considered on the issue of appropriate punishment, it is no defense to the crime. In fact, aggressive war, or a war of invasion, is the “ultimate war crime” according to the Nuremberg Tribunal and the US Prosecutor Justice Jackson.

Recent precedent supports that Putin is subject to prosecution for the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal and Commission were established under the Laws of Malaysia; they had a pre-existing Statute and Rules of Procedure. They also paid for a qualified Team of Malaysian Barristers to defend the Defendants. They put on as vigorous a Defense as could have been made.

Despite that excellent defense, the accused--George W. Bush and Tony Blair--were convicted of war crimes based on overwhelming evidence of their guilt. In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict (2011) that found George W. Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, among others as a result of their roles in the Iraq invasion.

George W. Bush, the former US President, and seven key members of his administration were found guilty of war crimes: Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee, and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

In addition to the crime of aggressive war, the trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan following the illegal invasions and wars of aggression.

At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their key legal advisors, who were all convicted as war criminals.

Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements, and other relevant material have been sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council, apparently in support of “official criminal prosecution” by that body.

Mr. Putin ought to be concerned that this precedent, along with the Nuremberg Tribunal’s rulings, indicates a serious judgment by informed members of the international community that wars of aggression, and the other crimes that unavoidably follow such invasions, will be met with condemnation and legal action. The people of the world will demand and expect accountability, as no person is above the law.

Although, as of yet, Mr. Bush and his fellow defendants have not been brought before any “official” bar of justice, their status as War criminals will follow them and dog their days should they leave the “protection” of nations arguably complicit in their crimes. They travel internationally at risk of arrest by nations committed to the rule of law. They are branded with the “mark of Cain” indelibly and arguably even more odiously.

Of course, the condemnation of Mr. Putin’s like crime by US and Allied Officials would carry more moral force should Mr. Bush et al. be charged officially by those nations in which they have sought refuge—all such nations bear a duty to do so under the law of nations. Mr. Putin should not take solace in the lack of their prosecution. The unequal application of the law, especially the law of war, has long been one of its major defects. Both "victor's justice" (no consequential prosecution of a prevailing power) and superpower impunity (no documentable legal consequences for superpower war crimes or crimes against humanity) are at issue now as in the past.

However, the Israeli example of hunting down War Criminals from the Nazi regime despite their evasion of the official Nuremberg Tribunal is but one example of what the future may hold for such criminals. Lead amongst these was Simon Wiesenthal, ironically born in Ukraine. The great mass of humanity yearns for justice, despite being burdened with “leaders” whose arrogance erroneously enables them to conclude they are immune from justice. In this regard, universal jurisdiction over war crimes has the potential to ensnare war criminals and is very threatening to the Kissingers and Rumsfelds of this world, who have curtailed their travel schedules apparently out of fear of arrest in some nations that prefer the rule of law to war and justice for all to justice for some.

Perhaps, if brought to trial, Mr. Putin will call Mr. Bush as a witness for his defense. If Mr. Bush eludes accountability, Mr. Putin may argue, then I cannot be held accountable for the invasion of Ukraine without violating the principle of “equal justice under law.” On its face, this claim has some force, especially against US efforts, if any, to prosecute Mr. Putin, as it is foundational in US law that the law applies equally to all.

If Mr. Putin is guilty, then so is Mr. Bush. Selective prosecution in War Crimes cases makes a mockery of the rule of law and supports the claim that Nuremberg and all such efforts are mere “victors justice” that ignores the war crimes of victors while punishing losers, an extreme example of “might makes right.” Surely, it falls short of Abe Lincoln’s aspirational aphorism: “right makes might.”

Or perhaps, the prosecution would call Mr. Bush as an “expert” witness on what it takes to plan and commit a war of aggression, an illegal invasion, to lay a foundation for the tribunal to evaluate Mr. Putin’s plans and acts. This could be problematic, as Mr. Bush could elect to “plead the fifth,” taking the position that his testimony could open him to criminal prosecution for the same crime as Mr. Putin—a criminal war of aggression. And were Mr. Bush to testify his own words could convict him, thus taking the fifth is valid.

Regardless of the legal morass, the foregoing creates, humanity clearly owes a debt to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal. It provides a compelling precedent for the assertion that the law of the international community repudiates “victors’ justice” and that wars of aggression are crimes.

Even Mr. Bush appears to support that view. The 43rd president was making a presentation to an audience at his presidential library in Dallas on Wednesday, May 18, 2022 when he condemned “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq – I mean Ukraine.” With such a declaration against his interest, Mr. Bush ratified the legitimacy of the Tribunal’s indictment and judgment of conviction.

The law of humanity is bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice, no matter how obstructionists like Mr. Putin, and Mr. Bush, try to stop it. On second thought, perhaps these “birds of a feather” ought to be “tried together?” Were it so, right could make might, and the rule of law could be promoted to its rightful place in a world free of war criminals.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kary Love.

War is a language of lies. Cold and callous, it emanates from dull, technocratic minds, draining life of color. It is an institutional offense to the human spirit.

The Pentagon speaks the language of war. The President and Congress speak the language of war. Corporations speak the language of war. They sap us of outrage and courage and the appreciation of beauty. They commit carnage of the soul.

Take for example, the recent report issued by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) entitled “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.” This think tank conducted 24 iterations of wargames whereby China invades Taiwan. The U.S. and its allies respond. The result each time: No one wins. Not really.

The report states,

“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of servicemembers. Such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years. While Taiwan’s military is unbroken, it is severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services. China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war.”

Degraded. A damaged economy. Losses. The report is referring to enormous numbers of men, women, and children slaughtered by bombs and bullets, of economies and livelihoods catastrophically ruined, countries devastated for years. It does not even address the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. Its words are void of the sharp pain and grief of such reality, lifeless, soulless. These zombie-technocrats do not just make war on people, but on reason, on human emotion.

A poet is needed to tell the truth. Poetry recognizes not the ideal but the real. It cuts to the bone. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t look away.

They died and were buried in mud but their hands protruded.

So their friends used the hands to hang helmets on.

And the fields? Aren’t the fields changed by what happened?

The dead aren’t like us.

How can the fields continue as simple fields?

Language can free our minds or imprison them. What we say matters. The hard, bare, truthful words of reckoning. Utter the words of truth about war and the military can no longer continue its somnambulant recital of death.

A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife

to peel the face from a dead man

and hang it from the branch of a tree

flowering with such faces.

War utilizes a philology emptied of humanity. It speaks in an intentionally mind-numbing manner to glaze over the horrid, murderous acts contemplated. The omnicidal wargames report by CSIS continues, “There is no rigorous, open-source analysis of the operational dynamics and outcomes of an invasion despite its critical nature.” It sounds antiseptic, boring, but in reality, it is, well, . . .

It is worse than memory, the open country of death.

We were meant to think and speak poetically. To lay bare the lie. Poetry detests the banal, combs through the detritus to give uncommon testimony. It is to think and speak realistically and transcendentally, to illuminate the works of the world, whether those works be baleful or beautiful. Poetry sees things as they are, looks at life not as an object to be exploited but contemplated, revered.

Why lie? Why not life, as you intended?

If we take our humanity seriously, our response to the warmakers must be rebellion. Peaceful and poetic, forceful and unrelenting. We need to raise the human condition as they seek to degrade it. The Merchants of Death cannot defeat a movement that speaks the language of poetry.

The Corporate State knows what they are doing. They seek to anesthetize our minds first so they can kill our bodies without resistance. They are good at it. They know how to divert us, deplete us. And should we muster enough violent rage, they know how to respond to our violence. But not poetic protest. Their neural pathways do not lead to poetry, to nonviolent potential, to visions of lovingkindness. Their language, their words, and their power, wither before the truthful expression of their deeds.

That is why we feel

it is enough to listen

to the wind jostling lemons,

to dogs ticking across the terraces,

knowing that while birds and warmer weather are forever moving north,

the cries of those who vanish

might take years to get here.

Non-violent revolutionaries speaking the language of poetry can win. It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state. And despite our rights, we live in a repressive Corporate-Totalitarian State which imprisons truth-tellers and kills widely and indiscriminately across the globe. Are there 11 million among us in these here United States willing to speak and hear the honest language of poetry?

And so, don’t look away. Speak with unflinching courage and honesty. Words matter. Give witness to life, and to the dirty lie of war. Be a Poet Revolutionary. The truth will kill the Beast.

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.

I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.

I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

(Poetry by Carolyn Forche)

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Veterans Day celebrations have come and gone. One thing about veterans: Everyone's for them. But what does that really encompass? How did they get here? And what of the veterans to come?

The World Veterans Federation (WVF) is an international network comprised of 172 veterans organizations from 121 countries representing about 60 million veterans worldwide. It acts as a humanitarian, peace, and justice advocate not just for veterans but for victims of war. Out of those 121 countries with 60 million veterans, one country contains about 19 million — over 30% — of all the world’s veterans. That’s the United States.

Why so many? The U.S. represents only 4.25% of the world’s population. That outsize representation, where we dramatically outnumber other countries in producing veterans, is repeated in our jails where we imprison more than 20% of the entire world’s prison population and repeated in our routine gun shootings where we own 42% of the world’s privately held guns.

Veterans For Peace (a U.S. member of WVF), was formed in 1985. Odds are you’ve never heard of it. It suffers from a lack of recognition, particularly among members of Congress, precisely because it stands in opposition to US wars of aggression (Iraq in 2003 as characterized by Kofi Annan).

It’s irrational to honor veterans and create them simultaneously. Over 99% of our living veterans have not fought in defensive wars! It matters when veterans are created in wars for an unspecified (or bogus) national interest. This is not a trivial point.

Foreign policy is a blind spot for Americans. This became part of Martin Luther King’s message. He said if you want to understand what’s taking place in America, look past that to what America is doing overseas. The military violence we sow overseas mirrors the violence of the oppressed here at home.

King did not merely have a dream on the Washington Mall. If that was all there was to it, he wouldn’t have become an enemy of the state. He audaciously demanded of his country social and economic justice. Without realizing the enormous compliment it was paying Karl Marx and communism, the state regarded him as a communist for demanding such things. Which is the more radical? Asking for this, or denying it.

It’s over half a century since King’s assassination, martyred at the age of 39. We exploit his memory each year with a national holiday bearing his name, but we have not moved an inch closer to remodeling our country on the world stage to exemplify what it could be like at home.

Unless we are truly defending our country—and not for the so-called national interest that represents the class interests of the one percent—the best way to honor veterans is not with 10% off and thank you for your service. Peace, not war, is the way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. This is the central theme of Veterans For Peace.

For possible change, these things must be demanded, but who gets to make demands on Washington? The top one percent own 32.3% of the country’s wealth, against the bottom fifty percent owning a mere 2.6%. Half the country owns practically nothing.

It takes the totality of the bottom ninety percent, owning 30.2%, to approach the wealth of the one percent. Of course this has no affect on the balance of power. The bottom ninety percent are so divided it’s not funny, and even if they weren't, they don't run anything. The well-off section between 91 and 99% doesn't run anything either. The top 1%—although not necessarily agreeing with one another—run the country.

As far as the general public is concerned, placing faith in the U.S. Supreme Court is bound to disappoint. For much of its history, it’s been on the wrong side of the people. Whatever else can be said about it, our recent conservative court is being faithful to its roots. For example, the Citizens United ruling enables the 1% (corporations , plutocrats, and Wall Street) to spend unlimited funds on elections. There’s a straight line from this to the founding fathers’ enshrinement of property rights (land, capital, patriarchy, slaves) in our Constitution. That’s what they wanted.

John Jay—founding father, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and first U.S. Chief Justice—expressed the principle very clearly: "Those who own the country ought to govern it." For all the lip service about democracy, that’s the way it was designed, and that’s the way it’s been.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by James Rothenberg.

What is democracy but platitudes and dog whistles? The national direction is quietly predetermined — it’s not up for debate. The president’s role is to sell it to the public; you might say he’s the public-relations director in chief:

“. . . my Administration will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors, tackle shared challenges, and set our world firmly on a path toward a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. . . . We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.”

These are the words of President Biden, in his introduction to the National Security Strategy, which lays out America’s geopolitical plans for the coming decade. Sounds almost plausible, until you ponder the stuff that isn’t up for public discussion, such as, for instance:

The national defense budget, recently set for 2023 at $858 billion and, as ever, larger than the rest of the world’s military budget combined. And, oh yeah, the modernization — the rebuilding — of the nation’s nuclear weapons over the next three decades at an estimated cost of nearly $2 trillion. As Nuclear Watch put it: “It is, in short, a program of nuclear weapons forever.”

And the latter, of course, will go forward despite the fact that in 2017 the countries of the world — well, most of them (the vote in the United Nations was 122-1) — approved the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which flat-out bans the use, development and possession of nuclear weapons. Fifty countries ratified the treaty by January 2021, making it a global reality; two years later, a total of 68 countries have ratified it, with 23 more in the process of doing so. Not only that, as H. Patricia Hynes points out, the mayors of more than 8,000 cities all across the planet are calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

I mention this to put Biden’s words in perspective. Does “a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow” ignore the demands of most of the world and include the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons, many still on hair-trigger alert? Does it mean the ever-present possibility of war and the ongoing manufacture and sale of every imaginable weapon of war? Is a near-trillion-dollar annual “defense” budget the primary way we intend to “outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors”?

And here’s another flicker of reality that’s missing from Biden’s words: the non-monetary cost of war, which is to say, the “collateral damage.” For some reason, the president fails to mention how many civilians’ deaths — how many children’s deaths — will be necessary to secure a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. How many hospitals might it be necessary, for instance, for us to accidentally bomb in coming years, as we bombed the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015, killing 42 people, 24 of whom were patients?

Public relations platitudes do not seem to have room to acknowledge videos of U.S.-inflicted carnage, such as Kathy Kelly’s description of a video of the Kunduz bombing, which showed the president of Doctors Without Borders (a.k.a., Médecins Sans Frontières) walking through the wreckage a short while later and speaking, with “nearly unutterable sadness,” to the family of a child who had just died.

“Doctors had helped the young girl recover,” Kelly writes, “but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. ‘She’s safer here,’ they said.

“The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen-minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.”

Those who believe in the necessity of war — such as the president — may well feel shock and sadness when a child, for instance, is unintentionally killed by U.S. military action, but the concept of war comes complete with flowers of regret: It’s the fault of the enemy. And we will not be vulnerable to his whims.

Indeed, the dog whistle in Biden’s brief quote above is the calm acknowledgement of U.S. intention to stand up to the dark forces on the planet, the autocrats, who do not share our vision of freedom for all (except little girls in bombed hospitals). Those who, for whatever reason, believe in the necessity, and even the glory, of war, will feel the pulse of the U.S. military budget coursing through his positive, happy words.

When public relations circumvents reality, an honest discussion is impossible. And Planet Earth is in desperate need of an honest discussion about the elimination of nuclear weapons and, God help us, ultimately transcending war.

As Hynes writes: “If the U.S. could once again replace its masculinist power with creative foreign policy and reach out to Russia and China with the purpose of dismantling nuclear weapons and ending war, life on Earth would have a heightened chance.”

How can this become a country with a creative foreign policy? How can the American public move beyond being spectators and consumers and become actual, literal participants in U.S. foreign policy? Here’s one way: the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, an online event scheduled for November 10-13, 2023.

As Kelly, one of the organizers, describes it: “The Tribunal intends to collect evidence about crimes against humanity committed by those who develop, store, sell, and use weapons to commit crimes against humanity. Testimony is being sought from people who’ve borne the brunt of modern wars, the survivors of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia, to name but a few of the places where U.S. weapons have terrified people who’ve meant us no harm.”

Victims of war will be interviewed. Those who wage war, and those who profit from it, will be held accountable to the world. My God, this sounds like real democracy! Is this the level at which truth shatters the platitudes of war?

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.

The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.

Dr. Liu’s sad observations seemed to echo in the words of Pope Francis lamenting war’s afflictions. “We live with this diabolic pattern of killing one another out of the desire for power, the desire for security, the desire for many things. But I think of the hidden wars, those no one sees, that are far away from us," he said. “People speak about peace. The United Nations has done everything possible, but they have not succeeded.” The tireless struggles of numerous world leaders, like Pope Francis and Dr. Joanne Liu, to stop the patterns of war were embraced vigorously by Phil Berrigan, a prophet of our time.

“Oppose any and all wars,” he urged. “There has never been a just war.” “Don’t get tired!” he begged people, adding, “I love the Buddhist proverb, ‘I will not kill, but I will prevent others from killing.’ ”

People who’ve embraced his message continue meeting at the Pentagon, as happened December 28 when activists commemorated the “Feast of the Holy Innocents.” Christians traditionally dedicate this day to the remembrance of a time when King Herod ordered the massacre of children under two years of age because of a paranoid belief that one of the recently born children in the region would grow up to oust Herod from power and kill him. Activists gathered at the Pentagon held signs decrying the slaughter of innocents in our time. They’ll protest the obscenely bloated military budget which the U.S. Congress just passed as a part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.

As Norman Stockwell of The Progressive recently noted, “The bill contains nearly $1.7 trillion of funding for FY2023, but of that money, $858 billion is earmarked for the military (‘defense spending’) and an additional $45 billion in ‘emergency assistance to Ukraine and our NATO allies.’ This means that more than half ($900 billion out of $1.7 trillion) is not being used for ‘non-defense discretionary programs’—and even that lesser portion includes $118.7 billion for funding of the Veterans Administration, another military-related expense.”

By depleting funds desperately needed to meet human needs, the U.S. “defense” budget doesn’t defend people from pandemics, ecological collapse, and infrastructure decay. Instead it continues a deranged investment in militarism. Phil Berrigan’s prophetic intransigency, resisting all wars and weapons manufacturing, is needed now more than ever.

Outraged by the reckless slaughter of innocent people in wars ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Phil Berrigan insisted that weapons manufacturers profiting from endless wars should be held accountable for criminal activity. The weapons corporations rob people, worldwide, of the capacity to meet basic human needs.

The appallingly greedy Pentagon budget represents a corporate takeover of the U.S. Congress. As the coffers of weapons manufacturers swell, these military contractors hire legions of highly paid lobbyists tasked with persuading elected officials to earmark even more funds for companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. According to militarists, stockpiles of weapons must be used up, in order to justify more weapons manufacturing. Media complicity is necessary, and can be purchased, in order to frighten U.S. taxpayers into the continued bankrolling of what could become worldwide annihilation.

Phil Berrigan, who in his lifetime evolved from soldier to scholar to prophetic anti-nuclear activist, astutely linked the racial oppression he opposed as a civil rights activist to the rising oppression caused by militarism. He likened racial injustice to a terrible hydra that contrives a new face for every area of the world. Throughout his life, Phil Berrigan identified with people menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war. Elaborating on this theme in a book called No More Strangers, published in 1965, he wrote that the dispassionate decision of people in the United States to practice racial discrimination made it “not only easy but logical to enlarge our oppressions in the form of international nuclear threats.”

How can we in the United States prevent the killing that goes on, in our name, in multiple wars, exacerbated by weapons made in the U.S.A? How can we resist the growing potential, acute scourge of a nuclear exchange as warring parties continue issuing nuclear threats in Ukraine and Russia?

One step we can take involves both political and humanitarian efforts to hold accountable the corporations profiting from the U.S. military budget. Drawing on Phil Berrigan’s steadfastness, activists worldwide are planning the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal scheduled to be held November 10 to 13, 2023. The Tribunal intends to collect evidence about crimes against humanity committed by those who develop, store, sell, and use weapons to commit crimes against humanity. Testimony is being sought from people who’ve borne the brunt of modern wars, the survivors of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia, to name but a few of the places where U.S. weapons have terrified people who’ve meant us no harm.

“We render you, corporations obsessed with war profiteering, accountable; answerable!,” declares the Reverend Dr. Cornel West on the Tribunal’s website.

On November 10, 2022, organizers of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal and their supporters served a “subpoena” to the directors and corporate offices of weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. The subpoena, which will expire on February 10, 2023, compels them to provide to the Tribunal all documents revealing their complicity in aiding and abetting the United States government in committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, bribery, and theft.

People menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war often have nowhere to flee, nowhere to hide. Thousands upon thousands of the victims are children.

Mindful of the children who are maimed, traumatized, displaced, orphaned, and killed by all of the wars raging today, we must hold ourselves accountable as well. Phil Berrigan’s challenge must become ours: “Meet me at the Pentagon!” Or at its corporate outposts.

Humanity literally cannot live in complicity with the patterns that lead to bombing hospitals and slaughtering children.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The Russo-Ukrainian War drags on like a bad dream. Admittedly, there are slight glimmers of hope: Russian President Vladimir Putin stated his readiness to participate in an international peace conference; but Ukraine must firstrecognize Russian annexations, especially Crimea and territories around Kherson, demilitarize, and also guarantee Russian security. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he, too, is willing to negotiate; but Russia must first meet ten conditions including withdrawal from all Ukrainian territories including Crimea. The insincerity on both sides is striking: negotiations are unnecessary when the demands of each have been met in advance.

Negotiate now! The stated preconditions for talks are merely excuses to delay them. There is no time to wait. Waves of Russian bombs are blasting Kyiv and Ukraine’s cities to bits while its Kamikaze drones have struck 600 miles into Russia, whose citizens are languishing under stringent sanctions. The defeats have mounted and Putin’s possible successors including Yevgeny Prigozhin, the power behind “Wagner,” the savage mercenary group, are sharpening their knives. Following the failure of the Russian president’s initial land strategy, which littered Ukraine with mass graves, his air attacks have wrecked one-third of Ukraine’s electric grids and power stations leaving one-third of its citizens without heat, water, or electricity in freezing temperatures. Estimates are that 100,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed. Thousands of Ukrainian lives have been lost at the front, and many more at home through lack of consumer staples, hospital beds, and medicines. Those numbers will climb: Russia is preparing for a counter-attack using 200,000 fresh troops, Belarus might open a “second front,” Ukraine is continuing its land-war and employing ever more lethal missiles.

The humanitarian catastrophe is worsening and the global community must prioritize the material needs of everyday citizens (and soldiers) over those of governments.

Contradictions also exist whose resolution is possible only with the success of negotiations between these warring states:

• Ukraine is completely reliant on Western humanitarian and military in defending its sovereignty. Terminating aid is unthinkable though indefinitely maintaining it at current levels is impossible.
• Under present circumstances, Russia has an incentive to drag out the conflict while Ukraine feels the pressure to win an unwinnable war as quickly as possible. Either way, further escalation is likely.
• Ukraine’s territorial victories have led Russia to bomb civilian targets mercilessly in a spiraling increase of violence. That will lead Ukraine to attempt strengthening its aviation corps, and air defense systems, whereas Russia will expand its army to protect against invasion. However, what both sides present as “defensive” strategies will likely turn into future offensives.
• Leaders of Ukraine and Russia have staked their reputations on military victory even though their economies are on the verge of collapse, and their citizens are despairing. The national interests of civil society, and the national interests of the state, are thus objectively in conflict.

Congress has just provided the American military with a 35% increase and a total budget of $813 billion. Much of it is intended to replenish weapons already sent to Ukraine, and new weapons will surely need replenishing in the future. Close to $20 billion has already gone to Ukraine and upwards of $48 billion has just been allocated for the coming year, including “patriot” defense missiles. However, the United States seems ready for talks: President Joe Biden has refused to send battle tanks, precision missiles, and fighter jets to Ukraine even while pressuring Iran to cease sending drones to Russia. That can all change. The House of Representatives in 2023 will have a new Republican majority controlled by its far-right wing. That faction’s most extremist representatives are very influential. They blame inflation on aid to Ukraine, call for abolishing it completely, and consider this “Biden’s war.”

The United Kingdom is the second largest donor to Ukraine; it has provided roughly 2.3 billion euros in aid during 2022. However, the UK is expecting a recession; it is still reeling from Brexit, erratic economic policies, and its inflation rate is over 10%. The European Union is now shouldering more of the burden by implementing a total embargo on importing Russian oil. This will negatively impact the Russian economy, but also create hardships for its own citizens. Fissures are also growing between the Eastern and Western democracies over how to distribute the costs of aid as well as the destructive capacities of weapons sent to Ukraine. Understandably, Eastern countries are more worried about Russian territorial ambitions than their Western counterparts. They also differ in their views on possibility of war between NATO and Russia. Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible for any of them to ignore signs of an alliance forming between Russia, Iran, China, Belarus, and other dictatorships, to counter NATO.

Western media justifiably salutes the courage and resilience of Ukraine in facing Russia’s genocidal invasion. However, support for the citizens of Ukraine is uncritically conflated with support for the government’s war efforts. Such thinking is compounded by fears of “appeasement,” though costs imposed by this war should temper Russia’s imperialist ambitions for the foreseeable future. Self-styled realists’ dismissal of negotiations with Russia reinforces their indifference to turning prolongation of the war into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, human rights activists bemoan Russian atrocities even as they endorse policies that assure their continuance. Should the situation worsen for Russia, probabilities increase that Putin will launch a “tactical” nuclear strike.

Negotiations cannot wait until that happens, there is a withdrawal of forces, and the war aims of each side are accepted. That is especially the case since rough parameters for an agreement exist.

• Negotiations must include all nations directly or indirectly involved in the conflict, and initially call for immediate de-escalation and troop withdrawals to the borders of March 23, 2022.
• Security guarantees are necessary for both nations: Ukraine must agree to become a neutral and non-nuclear state, and agree to remain outside NATO in exchange for permission join the EU. Sanctions on Russia would be lifted in accordance with its de-escalation of the conflict.
• Monitoring the implementation of peace and investigating human rights violations must involve independent international agencies. For example, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) will need to oversee plans to deal with refugees, exchange of prisoners, collection of corpses, and elimination of land-mines.
• Creating an international “fund, similar perhaps to the global climate fund, is necessary for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Continuing support for Ukraine is vital, but it must come with conditions. Even speculative suggestions for peace are necessary when there is only talk of war. The humanitarian catastrophe is worsening and the global community must prioritize the material needs of everyday citizens (and soldiers) over those of governments. Not to talk about peace is to perpetuate war—pure and simple—and that is something the people of Russia and Ukraine cannot afford. Negotiate now!

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Stephen Eric Bronner.

What would the United States be like if it was like Israel?

After the most recent election is held, the president comes out and says that settling North America is the exclusive privilege of white Christians. He is determined to make some parts of the U.S. whiter and more Christian by giving incentives for people to move there. He names Detroit and the south side of Chicago, the state of Hawaii, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole oil-rich lands in Oklahoma.

Both inside the U.S. and in its occupied territory in the northwest, 33 million settlers, ten percent of the population, will be mobilized to establish apartment complexes in these places. Only white Christians will be allowed to live in them.

Only white Christians are allowed to be cabinet secretaries and congressional majority and minority leaders. Non-white non-Christians like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are expelled from the House for their inflammatory speeches questioning white privilege. The citizenship rights of all Native Americans outside the original 13 colonies are revoked and they are put under martial law.

In this future Christian Zionist America, the U.S. has invaded Canada and occupied British Columbia, including Vancouver and the Great Bear Rainforest, a First Nations reserve. That is another place the president says there have to be more white Christian people, displacing the Wuikinuxv Nation, the Heiltsuk Nation, the Haida Nation and other first nations tribes. Vancouver residents from Hong Kong have their citizenship revoked and are expelled back to China. Washington State is now connected to Alaska, which the president maintains is necessary to the security of the U.S., given that you can see Russia from there. The U.S. army goes back to using conscription to have enough troops to patrol Vancouver and the rest of the province.

The new president then announces that ultimately British Columbia will be formally annexed to the United States, making the fifty-first state and renamed White Columbia. He says, however, that Washington only wants the land and real estate, and that British Columbians will never be given U.S. citizenship.

Ottawa’s vehement protests against this Yankee land grab are disregarded, and Canada is reminded of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Washington vows that Canada will never be allowed to have a nuclear program of its own.

When armed gangs from Vancouver manage to fire some rockets at Seattle, the U.S. Air Force scrambles F-18s and bombs the city, bringing down apartment buildings. People in Kitsilano are called and given an hour to get out of their homes before they are bombed. The U.S. also bombs the airport and stops any flights out of Vancouver, and forbids people in British Columbia to go out in fishing boats since they pose a security hazard. What with being able to see Russia and all.

The president appoints the head of the Southern Baptist Convention to oversee Christianity in the United States, and to decide who is a white Christian. Only Southern Baptists are considered Christians. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics are declared ineligible to have “Christian” written on their identity cards. They can be American citizens, just as non-whites can, but they are second-class citizens.

The new president declares that white Christian businesses don’t have to serve gay people or trans people or single women who are dressed indecently and in the company of unrelated men. One of his cabinet secretaries suggests that white Christian physicians shouldn’t have to treat gays, either.

The president of Christian Zionist America declares that all oppressed white Christians around the world, such as the Afrikaaners in South Africa and the Germans in Brazil, are free to come to the United States and will be given citizenship immediately. They would be wise to become Southern Baptists and get properly baptized on arrival, though. They will be given government help to appropriate resources from non-whites and non-Christians, especially in First Nation reserves in British Columbia and in Asian-majority neighborhoods in Hawaii and Los Angeles.

Stamps are issued honoring Dylann Roof (who shot down African-Americans) and Wade Michael Page (who shot down U.S. Sikhs),

Both inside the U.S. and in its occupied territory in the northwest, 33 million settlers, ten percent of the population, will be mobilized to establish apartment complexes in these places. Only white Christians will be allowed to live in them. They will be built on land confiscated from its present owners. The white Christian settlers will be allowed to walk around with assault rifles and defend themselves from any attacks from the angry owners of the land and other resources that the settlers have just helped themselves to.

Any local non-white person who makes a fuss about all these outsiders moving in and taking their land and petroleum will be put in federal penitentiary and kept in solitary, without charge or trial, for as long as the local white Christian sheriff wants. This includes children and minors. Sometimes to teach them a lesson, bulldozers will be brought in and their family homes will be destroyed. If they try to rebuild, the home will be demolished again, hundreds of times if necessary.

These African-Americans, Latinx people, Asian-Americans and indigenous North Americans will be reminded that settling North America is an exclusively white Christian right.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

It's been an extraordinary year in foreign policy, dominated by an ongoing, brutal war following the February Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO, struggling with its mission before 2022, appearsmore emboldened and unified than ever.

Meanwhile, tensions have continued to roil between the U.S. and China on a number of fronts, not the least, the fate of Taiwan.

In the Middle East, Biden's post-Russian outreach to Saudi Arabia and inabilityto stop assistance to Riyadh in the Yemen war underscores the problematic nature of Washington's relations with despotic governments there, while trying to maintain an"autocracies vs. democracies" approach to geopolitics in other parts of the world.

After two years in office, the Iran nuclear deal looks"dead," while the U.S. slaps more sanctions on Tehran in the wake of crackdowns on protesters and reported drone transfers to Russia.

Phew.

With so much going on, we asked our own Quincy Institute experts to weigh in on the following prompt: what needs to happen almost immediately in 2023 for U.S foreign policy to start out on the right foot for the year? Why?

Bill Hartung, senior research fellow; arms trade, Pentagon budgets :

The Biden administration should start the year by stemming the tide of ever rising Pentagon budgets. The current budget is one of the highest since World War II, and the increase from FY2022 to FY2023 alone is higher than the entire military budget of every other country in the world except China.Large portions of these funds are wasted on price gouging, cost overruns, and weapons that aren't useful for the current challenges we face. We can provide a more effective defense for less by cutting waste, eliminating dysfunctional and unnecessary weapons programs, and pursuing a more restrained, non-interventionist foreign policy that truly puts diplomacy first.

Ben Freeman, research fellow; foreign lobbying, transparency

Congress and the president must, finally, enact meaningful reforms to curb foreign influence in the U.S. Behind most U.S. foreign policy decisions are agents working on behalf of foreign powers—in both illicit and legal influence operations—that often push U.S. foreign policy in a decidedly more interventionist and militarized direction. This is usually in theinterests of these foreign governments, not the U.S. national interest.

To thwart this malign influence or, at the very least, to increase the public's awareness of it, a number of reforms are needed. This includes improvements to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring think tanks to disclose all foreign funding (particularly when those think tank's scholars are testifying before Congress), and providing more resources to the Department of Justice and other government agencies investigating illicit election interference operations like those launched by Russia and the UAE.

Anatol Lieven, Director of Eurasia Program

The first priority for the Biden administration in 2023 should be to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine, leading to peace negotiations. The longer the war continues, the greater the damage to the world economy and to key U.S. allies in Europe.

Ukraine has preserved its independence and saved or reconquered the great majority of its lands and has little more of real importance to gain in this war. Further major Ukrainian advances would threaten Russian control of Crimea and risk nuclear war. They would also take Ukraine into territories whose populations are in fact loyal to Russia.

In the meantime, Russian bombardments are causing great harm to the Ukrainian population and economy, and the exigencies of wartime are increasing authoritarianism in Ukraine. Only when the fighting ends can Ukraine begin the process of reconstruction, political reform, and moves to join the European Union.

Suzanne Loftus, research fellow, Eurasia Program:

While continuing to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, the Biden Administration, with the help of the international community, must start encouraging a feasible end to the war through the use of diplomacy. Concomitantly, a long-term security agreement for the future of Europe should be reached to ensure lasting peace on the continent. Through the use of political pragmatism, Washington must help open a path to a peace that would ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, end the ongoing suffering, uphold international law, create lasting peace in Europe, and ease current ripple effects on the world economy

Sarang Shidore, Director of Studies and senior research fellow, Asia:

The United States should do two things to start off the new year. First, return, through concrete actions, to the One China policy that has been a solid foundation for peace and stability in Asia for decades. Thecurrent drip-drip undermining of this policy is a dangerous, slippery slope that is generating a major risk of great power war. Second, discard counterproductive tropes that stretch credibility such as "democracy v. autocracy" and "rules-based order"when engaging the Global South. Instead, begin the hard work of finding intersections of interests and fashioning new bargains that retain or expand non-militarized U.S. influence in the region.

Annelle Sheline, research fellow, Middle East Program:

The Biden administration should end all U.S. support for Saudi military actions in Yemen. If the administration fails to take action,Senator Bernie Sanders should reintroduce the Yemen War Powers Resolution to end U.S. involvement in that devastating conflict. Biden could transform U.S. policy towards the Middle East overall by rethinking America's support for dictators by reducing arms sales to these governments, and instead prioritize partnership in the realms of economic development, education, and technology.

Steve Simon, senior research analyst, Middle East:

The U.S. should declare a renewed focus on climate change and international public health challenges, especially early warning systems; schedule a major address on the administration's trade and diplomatic initiatives, especially in Asia and Africa. A policy is emerging but a statement would be useful for Congress and in foreign capitals. In the State of the Union address in January, broach the topic of a national security budget that would allocate resources to agencies and departments outside of the Pentagon; and, hearkening back to days of old, declare a renewed commitment to science education and research funded out of DoD resources.

Michael Swaine, Director of the East Asia Program:

Stop digging the hole.

In Asia, the United States needs to discard any remaining aspirations for regional dominance, listen more closely and respond more realistically to the concerns and needs of the middle powers, including key U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan. Most of these powers want to work with both the U.S. and China to develop a more economically-oriented, inclusive, and positive-sum set of policy objectives that reverse the polarization of the region, lessen the securitization of virtually every policy sphere, and provide a revised set of regional norms and standards that most countries can support, including China. Many of these nations also want the Taiwan situation stabilized on the basis of a revived commitment by the U.S. and China to One China and peaceful unification, respectfully.

The U.S. could start this process by framing these efforts as a search, in consultation with other Asian nations, of a model for constructive, beneficial forms of peaceful coexistence among all political systems.

This is broad and aspirational, but as a first step, requires serious listening and the dropping of the usual political slogans.

Adam Weinstein, research fellow; Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan

Washington needs to recalibrate its engagement in parts of the world where U.S. military intervention and its side-effects dictated relations for decades, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East. Drawdowns and reductions in U.S. troops should not spell diplomatic and economic disengagement. Military cooperation and force are occasionally useful tools to augment diplomacy, but for too long they have eclipsed it altogether. Traditional diplomacy was relegated to putting out fires for failed U.S. military interventions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Our generals became reckless, while our diplomats grew risk averse.

Now what is needed is a creative rethink of how diplomacy, aid, and economic engagement is conducted. These tools are less blunt than military intervention, but their results are inherently more sustainable. Washington must possess the humility to accept the conditions it cannot positively influence, strategic patience and foresight to tackle what it can, and self-awareness to know the difference.

Jake Werner, research fellow; East Asia, China

The Biden administration should prepare a hard pivot to U.S.–China cooperation on issues of global significance, to launch at Blinken's upcoming visit to Beijing. The administration devoted its first two years to organizing the most powerful countries in the world against China, from steady condemnation of China's system and its foreign policy, to initiatives countering China's overseas endeavors and cutting off its economy from advanced technology, as well as increasing saber-rattling around Taiwan.

The Biden record signals that China cannot survive and prosper in the world the U.S. seeks to shape. If the administration devoted as much energy and resources to working with China on the truly existential threats facing humanity—including necessary revision of some of the most hostile and coercive policies of the last two years—then the relationship could be diverted from the current path of destructive conflict toward constructive coexistence.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Responsible Statecraft.

When the president of thepoorest,most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invokedin the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we've reached Peak Zelensky.

It's a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media's shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, "Methinks the media doth hype too much."

Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.

Let's remember that before ascending to his country's presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky's greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I'm not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I'm not joking.

Now, he's Europe's George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn't want you to know.

The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen,recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine's electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.'s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don't. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, "Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo."

Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

That's more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn't even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.' imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

France's Macron and Germany's Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

Macron suggestedin a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. "We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table."

Scholz was even more specific. In anarticle in Foreign Affairs he declared, "We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe."

This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.'s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia's security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In aWall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, "Our focus is…to take back territory that's been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th."

Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.' earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken's opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It's the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: "The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis." Ding. "Contestant #3?" "Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?"

A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn't have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin's highest priority and what he asked for--and was denied--in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they've constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let's be honest, often abused--since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert Freeman.

On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a "peace summit" in February to be chaired by UN Secretary General Guterres, but with the precondition that Russia must first faceprosecution for war crimes in an international court. On the other side, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov issued a chillingultimatum that Ukraine must accept Russia's terms for peace or "the issue will be decided by the Russian Army."

There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded, and the stench of death.

But what if there were a way of understanding this conflict and possible solutions that encompassed the views of all sides and could take us beyond one-sided narratives and proposals that serve only to fuel and escalate the war? The crisis in Ukraine is in fact a classic case of what International Relations scholars call a "security dilemma," and this provides a more objective way of looking at it.

A security dilemma is a situation in which countries on each side take actions for their own defense that countries on the other side then see as a threat. Since offensive and defensive weapons and forces are often indistinguishable, one side's defensive build-up can easily be seen as an offensive build-up by the other side. As each side responds to the actions of the other, the net result is a spiral of militarization and escalation, even though both sides insist, and may even believe, that their own actions are defensive.

In the case of Ukraine, this has happened on different levels, both between Russia and national and regional governments in Ukraine, but also on a larger geopolitical scale between Russia and the United States/NATO.

The very essence of a security dilemma is the lack of trust between the parties. In the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis served as an alarm bell that forced both sides to start negotiating arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms that would limit escalation, even as deep levels of mistrust remained. Both sides recognized that the other was not hell-bent on destroying the world, and this provided the necessary minimum basis for negotiations and safeguards to try to ensure that this did not come to pass.

After the end of the Cold War, both sides cooperated with major reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but the United States gradually withdrew from a succession of arms control treaties, violated itspromises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and used military force in ways that directlyviolated the UN Charter's prohibition against the "threat or use of force." U.S. leaders claimed that the conjunction of terrorism and the existence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons gave them a new right to wage "preemptive war," but neither the UN nor any other country ever agreed to that.

U.S. aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was alarming to people all over the world, and even to many Americans, so it was no wonder that Russian leaders were especially worried by America's renewed post-Cold War militarism. As NATO incorporated more and more countries in Eastern Europe, a classic security dilemma began to play out.

President Putin, who was elected in 2000, began to useinternational fora to challenge NATO expansion and U.S. war-making, insisting that new diplomacy was needed to ensure the security of all countries in Europe, not only those invited to join NATO.

The former Communist countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO out of defensive concerns about possible Russian aggression, but this also exacerbated Russia's security concerns about the ambitious and aggressive military alliance gathering around its borders, especially as the United States and NATO refused to address those concerns.

In this context, broken promises on NATO expansion, U.S. serial aggression in the greater Middle East and elsewhere, and absurd claims that U.S. missile defense batteries in Poland and Romania were to protect Europe from Iran, not Russia, set alarm bells ringing in Moscow.

The U.S. withdrawal from nuclear arms control treaties and its refusal to alter its nuclear first strike policy raised even greater fears that a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons were beingdesigned to give the United States a nuclear first strike capability against Russia.

On the other side, Russia's increasing assertiveness on the world stage, including its military actions to defend Russian enclaves in Georgia and its intervention in Syria to defend its ally the Assad government, raised security concerns in other former Soviet republics and allies, including new NATO members. Where might Russia intervene next?

As the United States refused to diplomatically address Russia's security concerns, each side took actions that ratcheted up the security dilemma. The United States backed the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, which led to rebellions against the post-coup government in Crimea and Donbas. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting the breakaway "people's republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Even if all sides were acting in good faith and out of defensive concerns, in the absence of effective diplomacy they all assumed the worst about each other's motives as the crisis spun further out of control, exactly as the "security dilemma" model predicts that nations will do amid such rising tensions.

Of course, since mutual mistrust lies at the heart of any security dilemma, the situation is further complicated when any of the parties is seen to act in bad faith. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted that Western leaders had no intention of enforcing Ukraine's compliance with the terms of the Minsk II agreement in 2015, and only agreed to it tobuy time to build up Ukraine militarily.

The breakdown of the Minsk II peace agreement and the continuing diplomatic impasse in the larger geopolitical conflict between the United States, NATO and Russia plunged relations into a deepening crisis and led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Officials on all sides must have recognized the dynamics of the underlying security dilemma, and yet they failed to take the necessary diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis.

Peaceful, diplomatic alternatives have always been available if the parties chose to pursue them, but they did not. Does that mean that all sides deliberately chose war over peace? They would all deny that.

Yet all sides apparently now see advantages in a prolonged conflict, despite the relentless daily slaughter, dreadful and deteriorating conditions for millions of civilians, and theunthinkable dangers of full-scale war between NATO and Russia. All sides have convinced themselves they can or must win, and so they keep escalating the war, along with all its impacts and the risks that it will spin out of control.

President Biden came to office promising anew era of American diplomacy, but has instead led the United States and the world to the brink of World War III.

Clearly, the only solution to a security dilemma like this is a cease-fire and peace agreement to stop the carnage, followed by the kind of diplomacy that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and successive arms control treaties. Former UN official Alfred de Zayas has also called for UN-administeredreferenda to determine the wishes of the people of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.

It is not an endorsement of an adversary's conduct or position to negotiate a path to peaceful coexistence. We are witnessing the absolutist alternative in Ukraine today. There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded and the stench of death.

If proposals for peace talks are to be more than PR exercises, they must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the security needs of all sides, and a willingness to compromise to see that those needs are met and that all the underlying conflicts are addressed.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

It was big news when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of at least nine tech journalists last week (over alleged dox-ing) and then reinstated them this week after Twitter users demanded as much.

The only reason for Arikat’s suspension would seem to be that he is Palestinian and speaks up for Palestinians.

But in yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there has been scarcely any attention given to the arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, a fixture at the State Department briefings as the longtime Washington correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper, a Palestinian publication.

Arikat said he woke up on December 3 to read a notice from Twitter that his account had been “permanently suspended after careful review”. No reason was given; and despite the assurance that he could appeal the suspension if he thought the decision was wrong, Twitter has not responded to numerous letters Arikat has sent the media giant.

The only reason for Arikat’s suspension would seem to be that he is Palestinian and speaks up for Palestinians. His case has elicited no concern in the press. Let alone efforts to discover the pretext for the action.

Al-Quds is clearly being targeted as a Palestinian source. Today there is news that Facebook has shut down the official page of the Al-Quds newspaper.

In recent days Said Arikat has been smeared in the Zionist press as “anti-Israel” because of his questions of U.S. policy at State Department briefings. A month ago, the Jerusalem Post attacked Arikat as a supposed propagandist and conceded that he has wide influence on social media.

Arikat’s last action on twitter was a retweet on December 2 of a tweet by Dana Ben-Shimon, the Palestinian affairs correspondent for a Zionist newspaper, Israel Hayom, about what Palestinians were describing on social media as the “Cold Blooded Execution” of an unarmed man, Ammar Mufleh, 23, in Huwara south of Nablus by Israeli forces during an attempted arrest. The killing has rightly drawn international outrage.

Arikat’s suspension is outrageous and unfair. He has retweeted news items thousands of times in recent years without incident. As anyone who has followed his questions at the State Department and his tweets and writings and appearances knows, the 74-year-old is a courtly and soft-spoken reporter (formerly the spokesperson for the United Nations in Iraq) with a point of view reflecting the interests of the Palestinian community, particularly Jerusalem.

At this website, we rely on Arikat to raise important human rights issues with the State Department. Otherwise, State would often face no scrutiny whatsoever for its unbreakable support for Israel. Like when Arikat stood up for Shireen Abu Akleh after her killing last May.

“As bad as Twitter is, I think it’s been positive for the Palestinian people,” Arikat says.

December 2, Arikat’s last day on Twitter, was unremarkable. As is customary, he retweeted a number of tweets he found newsworthy, including comments by Peter Beinart, Noura Erakat, Benzion Sanders of Breaking the Silence, and citations of Arikat’s own article that day (on the pillorying of UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese over her former criticisms of the Israel lobby). He went to bed that night after retweeting the execution tweet by Dana Ben-Shimon.

Arikat also says that his DM’s were hacked in the last month, and some people received DMs purporting to be from him that were not.

As a dean of State Department reporters, who has been in that briefing room for more than 20 years, Arikat tells me that several mainstream reporters have reached out to him in sympathy, but none has actually done anything to publicize the outrage. Hey folks– let’s put our shoulders to the wheel, this is a no-brainer.

P.S. Arikat’s suspension came up at a State briefing on Dec. 16. Spokesperson Vedant Patel was critical in a nuanced manner of the tech journalists’ suspensions by Twitter. “It is certainly difficult to square how these removals are consistent with promoting free exchange. But again, social media companies make their own independent decisions on content moderation, and I’m just not going to speak to those actions.”

Arikat interjected, “By the way, they suspended me without explanation.”

Patel repeated the boilerplate: “Our support for free speech and freedom of the press is well documented.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Philip Weiss.

It is that time of the year when generous people make donations to civic organizations that are the bedrock of our democratic society. Some are worthy charities. Others are advocates for change through advancing justice.

Below are many nonprofit groups working for causes furthering environmental and consumer health and safety, economic well-being, and peace.

Here are my recommendations for giving to these competent, honest, and results-oriented organizations. Visit their informative websites.

Alternative Radio: https://www.alternativeradio.org/

Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest: https://www.appalachia-spi.org/

Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest: https://aclpi.org/

Beyond Nuclear: https://beyondnuclear.org/

Beyond Pesticides: https://www.beyondpesticides.org/

Center for Health, Environment & Justice: https://chej.org/

Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment: https://crpe-ej.org/

Children’s Advocacy Institute: https://www.sandiego.edu/cai/

Clean Air Campaign, Inc. [Send donations to: 307 7th Avenue, Room 1705 New York, NY 10001.]

Doctors Without Borders USA: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

Earth Island Institute: https://www.earthisland.org/

FlyersRights.org: https://flyersrights.org/

Family Farm Defenders: https://familyfarmers.org/

Honor the Earth: https://honorearth.org/

Indian Law Resource Center: https://indianlaw.org/

Solitary Watch: https://solitarywatch.org/

Nuclear Information and Resource Service: https://www.nirs.org/

Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance: https://www.orepa.org/

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: https://peer.org/

Veterans for Peace: https://www.veteransforpeace.org/

Western Organization of Resource Councils Education Project: https://www.worc.org/ep/

Whirlwind Wheelchair: https://whirlwindwheelchair.org/

Contributions to these 501(c)(3) organizations are tax deductible.

I have followed and donated to all these groups for several years. Reading their reports and letters is an educational tour de force. They demonstrate how a few dedicated people with small budgets and large goals can overcome immense odds and obstacles to get our society to do the right things for the people. They invite your participation along with your donations to further their quest for justice in their fields of activity.

Their combined budgets are less than what our military spends in about 3 hours of a 24-hour day. Their budgets are also about how much Peter Kern, CEO of Expedia, receives in a year from a rubber-stamp board of directors.

These comparisons invite extrapolations about how our tax money and consumer dollars are spent now and could be spent better in cooperative or collaborative endeavors.

One brief example: For a modest portion of what people are overpaying for their health insurance to a few giant, gouging, wasteful, claims-denying insurance companies, communities can build their own cooperatively owned primary care hospitals or clinics focused on preventative practices and attentive care. There are fewer available hospital beds in the US than we had in the nineteen seventies. The prospect of more pandemics breaking family and public budgets, invites us to band together to build community health care institutions, which makes great sense.

The same is true for building other community institutions to address local economic necessities in energy, food, communications, housing, education and recreational facilities.

The energy of democratic cooperation is exemplified by the above recommended organizations of citizen doers and innovators. Pitch in, deepen and benefit from these reservoirs of skilled good will. They bring you restorative tidings.

(To progressive readers doing some last-minute holiday shopping, be sure to check out the CounterPunch online bookstore. There are plenty of engrossing titles for you to peruse. And it is a way to avoid Amazon.)

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ralph Nader.