Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir says his country will continue supporting the Takfiri militant groups operating to topple the Damascus government as long as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in power.
Speaking on the sidelines of the international peace talks on the Syria crisis in Vienna, Austria, on Saturday, Jubeir said the Riyadh regime only backs a political process that envisages President Assad’s removal from power.
“We will support the political process that will result in him (Assad) leaving or we will continue to support” Syria’s foreign-backed opposition in order to topple the Syrian leader “by force,” said the top Saudi diplomat.
The fresh round of talks on the Syria crisis opened in Vienna on Friday and ended on Saturday. Senior representatives from 17 countries, the United Nations, European Union as well as the Arab League were in attendance.
According to an official statement issued at the end of the meeting, the world diplomats seeking to find a solution to the Syria crisis would meet again in “approximately one month” to review progress towards a ceasefire and the start of a political process in the crisis-hit country.
The participants also agreed on a set calendar for a transition government in Syria within six months and elections in 18 months.
The parties to the international peace talks in Syria remain at loggerheads over the role that Assad would play in Syria’s political process.
While some countries, including the US and its allies, press for the removal of Assad as part of a solution to the Syrian crisis, others, notably Iran and Russia, say only the Syrian nation can decide over the matter.
Saudi Arabia has long been among the major supporters of the terror groups operating against the Syrian government since March 2011. The violence fueled by the foreign-backed Takfiris has so far claimed over 250,000 lives.
The previous round of talks on the crisis in Syria was held in the Austrian capital on October 30. At the end of the day-long talks, the participants agreed on respecting Syria’s national unity and sovereignty as well as uprooting terrorism in the violence-plagued Arab country.
Jubeir had repeated the same comments ahead of the October 30 round of Vienna talks, saying Riyadh sees no role for Assad in Syria’s political future.
However, Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi lashed out at the Saudi official for his statements, saying Riyadh is not qualified to participate in efforts to resolve the crisis in Syria as the kingdom is shedding the blood of people elsewhere.
Jubeir “who has no clue how diplomacy and politics work, should keep his mouth closed and keep his country out of a matter that is none of its business,” Zoubi added.
Europe sees Vienna talks positive
European Union foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, has described as “very good” the latest round of international talks on the Syrian conflict in Vienna.
“The process can definitively start” toward reaching a settlement for the nearly five-year conflict in Syria, Mogherini told journalists at the end of the day-long talks held in the Austrian capital on Saturday.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier also said the Vienna meeting had resulted in an agreement to convene meetings between the opposition and the incumbent Damascus government, and enforce a ceasefire by January 1.
November 15, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | European Union, Saudi Arabia, Syria |
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The recent events in Paris were undoubtedly horrific, and our thoughts are with those affected by these atrocious acts. The victims and their families, innocent people who did not volunteer to fight in any war, these defenseless civilians were attacked in the most heinous way possible.
And while the world’s media turns its gaze to Paris, there is another act of terrorism happening every day that the corporate media chooses to ignore.
It seems the main export of the USA and UK is terrorism, but sugar coated and wrapped in the PR-friendly guise of ‘promoting democracy’ and ‘protecting our freedoms’, making the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians easier to swallow, or more frequently, completely ignore.
Perhaps ironically then, is the fact that these acts are of course illegal and a violation of international law, and the sad truth is that these rouge nations, the USA and UK themselves are the biggest threats to freedom and democracy. We are witnessing doublespeak in action.
To date, the USA has been responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people since the end of World War II, in 37 nations. A report by James A. Lucas of Counter Currents explains:
This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.
The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.
These figures do not include the full figures of more recent violations, such as drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Statistics obtained by the Bureau Investigates reveal that approximately 2,464 – 7,177 people have been murdered in these nations. It is also estimated that 90% of those killed in these attacks are innocent civilians.
Make no mistake, each one of these 500-plus drone strikes is nothing less than a tax-payer funded terrorist attack.
At the time of publication, there are also a high number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of the illegal invasions, which has cost in excess of a staggering $1,500,000,000,000.
1,455,590 Iraqis have been murdered to date, and at least 91,000 Afghans.
This means nothing to the corporations who profit from global terrorism.
While the little amount of corporate media coverage that is devoted to exposing profiteering remains largely focused on oil firms, there are trillions of dollars being made in the supply of arms.
Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems as well as many others – often with government connections, are raking in billions of dollars from government contracts.
For example, Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in contracts in a single year.
So while my heart goes out to the victims and families of those affected by the despicable acts carried out in Paris, should we not also turn our outrage and contempt for these cowardly acts towards our own governments – who not only obliterate innocent lives on a daily basis, but actually allow profiteering from mass-murder, resulting in a never-ending cycle of destruction that we’re funding with our taxes.
The ending of terrorism begins with us.
November 15, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, BAE Systems, Boeing, Human rights, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Lockheed Martin, Pakistan, Somalia, UK, United States, Vietnam, Yemen |
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Fifty years ago next month (December 1965), with the urging of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the rubber stamp approval of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the United States Air Force started secretly spraying the forests of Laos with a deadly herbicide that was known as Agent Orange.
Operation Ranch Hand, whose motto was “Only We Can Prevent Forests” (a shameful takeoff of Smokey the Bear’s admonition), was a desperate, costly and ultimately futile effort to make it a little harder for the National Liberation Front soldiers from North Vietnam to join and supply their comrades-in-arms in the south.
Both the guerrilla fighters in the south and the NLF army had been fighting to liberate Vietnam from the exploitive colonial domination from foreign nations such as imperial France (that began colonizing Vietnam in 1874), then Japan (during World War II), then the United States (since France’s expulsion after their huge military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954) and then against its own nation’s U.S.-backed fascist/military regime in South Vietnam that was headed by the brutal and corrupt President Ngo Dinh Diem.
(Incidentally, the nepotism in Diem’s iron-fisted rule was almost laughable, with one brother being the Catholic Archbishop of Vietnam, a second brother being in charge of the Hue district, and a third brother being the co-founder of the only legal political party in South Vietnam as well as Diem’s principal adviser. True democracies do not criminalize political parties.)
The aim of the National Liberation Front was to unite the north and the south portions of the country and free it from the influence and occupation of foreign invaders. The leader of the liberation movement since its beginning was Ho Chi Minh, who had made sincere appeals to both President Woodrow Wilson (after World War I had weakened France’s colonial system) and President Harry Truman (after the Japanese had taken over Vietnam during World War II and then surrendered to the U.S. in 1945).
Each appeal asked for America’s help to liberate Vietnam from their French colonial oppressors and each one fell on deaf ears, even though Ho Chi Minh had frequently incorporated the wording and spirit of America’s Declaration of Independence in his continuous efforts to achieve justice for his suffering people.
Agent Orange’s Ecological Devastation
Operation Ranch Hand had actually been in operation since 1961, mainly spraying its poisons on Vietnam’s forests and crop land. The purpose of the operation was to defoliate trees and shrubs and kill food crops that were providing cover and food for the “enemy.”
Operation Ranch Hand consisted of spraying a variety of highly toxic polychlorinated herbicide solutions that contained a variety of chemicals that are known to be (in addition to killing plant life) human and animal mitochondrial toxins, immunotoxins, hormone disrupters, genotoxins, mutagens, teratogens, diabetogens and carcinogens that were manufactured by such amoral multinational corporate chemical giants like Monsanto, Dow Chemical, DuPont and Diamond Shamrock (now Valero Energy).
All were eager war profiteers whose CEOs and share-holders somehow have always benefitted financially from America’s wars. Such non-human entities as Monsanto and the weapons manufacturers don’t care if the wars that they can profit from are illegal or not, war crimes or not; if they can make money they will be there at the trough.
They are however, expert at duping the Pentagon into paying exorbitantly high prices for inferior, unnecessary or dangerous war materiel. One only needs to recall Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation and that company’s no-bid multibillion dollar contracts that underserved U.S. soldiers during the past three wars, but enriched any number of One Percenters.
Agent Orange was the most commonly used of a handful of color-coded herbicidal poisons that the USAF sprayed (and frequently re-sprayed) over rural Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It was also used heavily over the perimeters of many of the U.S. military bases, the toxic carcinogenic and disease-inducing chemicals often splashing directly upon American soldiers. (But “stuff happens” as Donald Rumsfeld would say).
The soil in and around some of the U.S. and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam) military bases continue to have extremely high levels of dioxin. The U.S. military bases where the barrels of Agent Orange were off-loaded, stored and then pumped into the spray planes or “brown water” swift boats are especially contaminated, as were those guinea pig “atomic soldiers” who handled the chemicals.
The Da Nang airbase today has dioxin contamination levels over 300 times higher than that which international agencies would recommend remediation. (Guess which guilty nation is doing nothing about Agent Orange contamination of the sovereign nation of Vietnam?)
It is fair to speculate that any American GI who spent any time at bases such as Da Nang, Phu Cat and Bien Hoa in the 1960s and 1970s may have been exposed. U.S. Navy swift boat crews that sprayed Agent Orange on the shores of the bushy rivers that they patrolled were often soaked by the oily chemicals that were sprayed from the hoses. Secretary of State Kerry, who commanded a swift boat as a U.S. Navy lieutenant, are you listening?
The poisonous spraying continued for a decade until it was stopped in 1971. The South Vietnamese air force, that had started spraying Agent Orange before the U.S. did, continued the program beyond 1971.
Chemical That Never Stops Poisoning
Agent Orange was a 50/50 mixture of two herbicides: 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4,5-T (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid). Other herbicide agents were mixtures of other equally toxic polychlorinated compounds, but every barrel was contaminated by substantial amounts of dioxin, one of the most toxic industry-made chemicals known to man.
The toxicity of the herbicidal chemicals known as “dioxins” or “dioxin-like compounds” is due to the chlorine atoms and the benzene molecules (or phenyl groups) in the compound to which they are attached.
Dioxins have very long half-lives and are thus very poisonous to the liver’s detoxifying enzymes that humans and animals rely on to degrade synthetic chemicals that get into the blood stream. The fatty tissues of exposed Vietnam vets, even decades after exposure, continue to have measureable levels of dioxins. …
According to Wikipedia, “War crimes have been broadly defined by the Nuremberg Principles as ‘violations of the laws or customs of war,’ which includes massacres, bombings of civilian targets, terrorism, mutilation, torture and the murder of detainees and prisoners of war (realities that abounded at places like My Lai and other massacre sites). Additional common crimes include theft, arson, and the destruction of property not warranted by military necessity.”
According to that definition, anybody with a smidgen of awareness of what really happens in any combat zone would have to conclude that every war that the U.S. military has ordered its young soldiers to go off and fight and kill in, especially the many corporate-endorsed, Wall Street wars, was laden with war crimes.
Four million innocent Vietnamese civilians were exposed to Agent Orange, and as many as 3 million have suffered diagnosable illnesses because of it, including the progeny of people who were exposed to it, approximating the number of innocent Vietnamese civilians that were killed in the war.
The Red Cross of Vietnam says that up to 1 million people are disabled with Agent Orange-induced illnesses. There has been an epidemic of birth defects, chronic illnesses, fetal anomalies and neurological and mental illnesses since the “American War.”
Most thinking humans would agree that destroying the health and livelihoods of innocent farmers, women, children, babies and old people by poisoning their forests, farms, food and water supplies qualifies as a war crime.
Disrespecting Sickened Veterans
According to Wikipedia, the chemical companies accused in an Agent Orange Vietnam veterans’ class action lawsuit in 1984 (against seven chemical companies that got Agent Orange contracts from the Pentagon) denied that there was a link between their poisons and the veterans’ health problems.
On May 7, 1984, as is usual for Big Corporations that know when they are losing, the seven chemical companies settled out of court for $180 million just hours before jury selection was to begin. The companies agreed to pay the $180 million as compensation if the veterans dropped all claims against them, with 45 percent of the sum to be paid by Monsanto.
Many veterans were outraged, feeling that they had been betrayed by the lawyers. Fairness Hearings were held in five major American cities, where veterans and their families discussed their reactions to the settlement, and condemned the actions of the lawyers and courts, demanding the case be heard before a jury of their peers. The federal judge refused the appeals, claiming the settlement was “fair and just.”
By 1989, the veterans’ fears were confirmed when it was decided how the money from the settlement would be paid out. A totally disabled Vietnam veteran would receive a corporate-friendly maximum of $12,000 spread out over the course of 10 years. By accepting the settlement payments, disabled veterans would become ineligible for many state benefits such as food stamps, public assistance and government pensions. A widow of a veteran who died because of Agent Orange would only receive $3,700.
According to Wikipedia, “In 2004, Monsanto spokesman Jill Montgomery said Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange, saying: ‘We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects.’”
Talk about governmental and corporate disrespect for military veterans who have been sickened by military toxins or physically or psychologically wounded in battle! Such shabby treatment of returning veterans has been the norm after every war, including the “bonus army” revolt of the 1930s when thousands of poor, disabled and/or unemployed World War I vets marched on Washington, DC, demanding the bonus that had been promised them in the 1920s. Rather than receiving justice, Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower ordered their troops to burn the bonus army’s temporary villages and disperse the vets empty-handed. …
I conclude this essay by listing the currently-accepted list of diseases that the Veteran Administration acknowledges can be caused by exposure to Agent Orange. This applies to American veterans, but one can be certain that the consequences are a hundred times worse for the Vietnamese people who were sprayed and who are still being exposed to it in the soil for the last 50 years.
The VA says that certain cancers and other health problems can be caused by exposure to Agent Orange and the other herbicides during their military service. Veterans and their survivors may be eligible for benefits if they have one of these diagnoses:
Amyloidosis, Chronic B-cell Leukemias, Chloracne, Type II Diabetes Mellitus, Hodgkins Disease, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Ischemic Heart Disease, Multiple Myeloma, Parkinson’s Disease, Peripheral Neuropathy, Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, Prostate Cancer, Respiratory Cancers (including lung cancer), Hairy Cell Leukemia, Soft Tissue Sarcomas and spina bifida in infants of Agent Orange exposed Vietnam veterans.
Gary G. Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his family practice career. He now writes a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. Many of Dr. Kohls’ columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn.
November 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Dow Chemical, DuPont, Human rights, Monsanto, Operation Ranch Hand, United States, Vietnam |
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The only aircraft carrier in the French Navy’s fleet, the Charles de Gaulle, will leave for the Persian Gulf on November 18, to join the fight against Islamic State in the region, Paris has confirmed.
“The naval group will leave Toulon (a major French naval base) in a few days, on November 18, to arrive in the Persian Gulf in mid-December,” government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said, as cited by Le Figaro.
France announced the deployment of its only aircraft carrier against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) on November 5.
“The deployment of the battle group alongside the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier has been undertaken in order to participate in operations against Daesch [ISIS] and its affiliate groups” the French president’s office said in an issued statement.
“The aircraft carrier will enable us to be more efficient in coordination with our allies” President Francois Hollande said, adding that it will “bolster Paris’ firepower in the region amid international efforts to launch Syrian peace talks.”
France started its airstrikes in Syria in September, a year after it launched similar operations in Iraq. It is now using six Rafale multirole fighter aircraft stationed in the United Arab Emirates and six Mirage 2000 fighters deployed in Jordan.
France carried out about 1,300 aerial missions in Iraq with 271 airstrikes destroying more than 450 terrorist targets. Only a few airstrikes have been carried out in Syria.
The Charles de Gaulle is the biggest European aircraft carrier. It is also the only nuclear-powered vessel of this nature outside the US. The vessel can deploy up to 40 fixed wing jets and helicopters including 12 Rafales. The Charles de Gaulle has already been used against the IS militants in Iraq – in February and in April, 2015.
November 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | France, ISIL, ISIS, Middle East, Syria |
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Americans are more likely to oppose deploying US ground troops against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group in Iraq and Syria as the US considers sending more boots on the ground, a new poll finds.
The latest data are from a November 4-8 Gallup poll that shows 53 percent of Americans oppose sending US ground troops to these countries while 43 percent support the idea.
US President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of “fewer than 50” special forces to Syria on October 30, reversing a longstanding refusal to put US boots on the ground.
“The fairly low level of Americans’ support for deploying ground troops could be related to their reluctance to engage in another major military commitment in Iraq, or elsewhere for that matter,” Gallup said.
A majority of Americans continue to describe the Iraq War as a mistake and have tended to express less support for recent US military involvements.
A US-led coalition has been bombing purported Daesh targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, but the air campaign has been largely ineffective.
Senior US military officials have said that the US will require “boots on the ground” in Syria and Iraq in order to retake territory from the Daesh.
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said recently that more US troops could “absolutely” be deployed to Syria if the Pentagon identifies more “capable local forces” that can fight against Daesh.
Earlier this month, US Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Brown said that Washington and its allies will increase airstrikes inside Iraq and Syria in the coming weeks.
November 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | Da’esh, Iraq, ISIL, Syria, United States |
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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
— George Orwell1
War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship.
— Chris Hedges2
My Chinese-born companion wanted to catch the latest news, so she tuned in to CBC. It was replete with Remembrance Day festivities and war veterans.
“Is this Canada?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
Her next utterance caused me to grab a pen and write down her words: “They went to other countries to kill other peoples?”
“No one has attacked Canada, so Canada’s soldiers only go to other countries,” I replied.3
“And we are to remember them every year?” she asked.
The inanity of a holiday dedicated to willing, albeit unwitting, accomplices of empire was on my mind since yesterday.
I was at a school which was renamed after a man who likely is a war criminal: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After all, he was the president who ordered the internment of US citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps and the commander-in-chief of a military that firebombed Tokyo.
That conflagration was called “the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history” by flight commander general Thomas Power.4
The US Strategic Bombing Survey went so far as to state that:
probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly.4
That such facts are a matter of history causes one to pause upon considering that an institute of learning is so named today.
The educator Noam Chomsky once made an acerbic comment about education: “Most schooling is just training for stupidity and conformity…”5
The events of 10 November brought this home to me. Roosevelt Elementary School held an assembly in the school gym. Students were informed that silence was expected on this solemn occasion. Near the front of the gym were seated a couple of veterans. Students sat on the floor, and teachers and parents were seated or standing around the gym’s perimeter.
A number of videos were presented. First there was a welcome from Indigenous educators and then came a Bryan Adam’s song, “Remembrance Day.” He calls it, WWII, a “bloody war” but the video features several images of violence.
The warring is updated to Canada’s participation in the aggression (what the Nuremberg Tribunal deemed “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”6 ) of Afghanistan with a simple ditty by a band that I had never heard of before, the Trews: “Highway of Heroes.”
In contrast to Bryan Adams’ “promise of glory” rationale for fighting —
For our king and our country and the promise of glory
We came from Kingston and Brighton to fight on the front line
— the Trews sing:
I served with distinction,
No visions of glory.
I served without question,
Or personal gain.
Seek no justification,
Its not part of my story.
To serve without question? Is this what schools would like to impart to young minds? Isn’t questioning integral to learning?
Who is a hero? Is going to fight another non-threatening country something that should be accepted?7
The usual reading of “In Flanders Fields,” observing two-minutes of silence, as well as the playing of the Canadian anthem were part of the agenda. The entire assembly was one of conformity. For any student to have demurred, it would likeliest have been labeled as disobedience. (Should instilling obedience be part of schooling?) Shouldn’t such heavy topics such as war and peace be discussed in classes? Are not contemplation, reflection, and forming one’s own conclusions part of becoming an independent thinker?
In 1931, Canada’s parliament changed the name of Armistice (referring to warring parties reaching agreement to cease hostilities) Day to Remembrance (remembrance for those serving Canada during times of war, conflict, and peace) Day. The change of title reflects a shift in emphasis from ending warring to serving in the warring. But is not society better served by a day more so dedicated to promoting universal peace and an end to all warring?
All Canadian involvement in wars have been wars of choice. That is something to remember and act upon.
No more should humans pick up weapons to use against other humans. Is this mindset, however, achievable when soldiers are venerated by society thus conferring a veneer of respectability to a profession which teaches killing?
Kim Petersen can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.org.
November 12, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | Canada |
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Hebron, Occupied Palestine – This morning, for four hours from 9am to 1pm, a group of Israeli Settlers were training on the rooftop of the illegal settlement building, Yona Menachem Rennert Beit Midrash, on Shuhada street. An instructor taught them how to hold a gun properly and how to adopt the best body position for shooting correctly. The young settlers were all carrying guns and shouted continuously during the exercises, disrupting the children and the teachers of Qurtuba school during their lessons, and also the neighborhood life, like for the Palestinian farmers who were picking olives on their land, near the school.
This kind of settler training, which takes place several times a week in the illegal settlements of Al-Khalil, are part of the Israeli settlement strategy. This is one example of how they are indoctrinating their youth, teaching them to hate Palestinians, and encouraging attacks against them.
Israeli law allows any Israeli who has a firearms license to carry a gun in the street. While the Palestinians have to endure the daily humiliation of being searched at each checkpoint as well as total military control of their daily life in case they might be carrying a knife.
November 11, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Hebron, Israeli settlement, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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Washington needs “boots on the ground” in Syria in addition to its air campaign against ISIS, which is not fruitful despite some progress. US Air Force secretary has admitted that “ground forces” is a must in order to “occupy” and “govern” parts of Syria.
In her comments, Secretary Deborah Lee James stressed the importance of the US-led air campaign, but admitted that airstrikes need to be backed by ground forces.
“Air power is extremely important. It can do a lot but it can’t do everything,” James said, just two days after Secretary of Defense Ash Carter supported President Obama’s “willingness to do more” in terms of US troops on Syrian ground.
“Ultimately it cannot occupy territory and very importantly it cannot govern territory,” James told reporters at the Dubai Airshow. “This is where we need to have boots on the ground. We do need to have ground forces in this campaign.”
When it comes to support, the US should assist the “Iraqi army, the Free Syrians and the Kurds” in the fight against Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL), James said.
Joined at the news conference by the head of Air Force’s Central Command, Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr, the civilian chief of the US Air Force also said that the US sought to speed up the resupply of munitions used by its allies in campaigns against IS militants in Syria and Iraq.
“That’s a key message that I’m going to be taking back to Washington, and it’s one that we are working pretty hard,” she told reporters, stressing that the Air Force is committed to a quicker process of approving foreign military sales.
“We need to redouble our efforts and get the message delivered back home that it is important to give much more quick consideration if at all possible,” she said.
Last week, Secretary Carter said that the US needed “much more than airstrikes” to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq and Syria.
“I don’t think it’s enough. I think we’re looking to do more. But the fundamental strategy in Iraq and Syria for dealing with ISIL and dealing a lasting defeat to ISIL is to identify then train, equip, and enable local forces that can keep the peace,” Carter said.
On October 30 the White House announced that it is planning to send up no “more than 50 troops” [special forces] to advise “moderate opposition” in Syria on the ground.
The White House spokesman Josh Earnest stressed that “these forces do not have a combat mission” while telling the reporters that the US has shown “a desire to intensify those elements of our strategy that have shown the most promise.”
According to a report from Lebanon’s satellite television channel, Al Mayadeen, American military advisors already arrived in Syria last week and started training “moderate rebels” near the city of Salma, located in the western province of Latakia.
The recent development contradicts President Obama’s 2013 promise not to put any “American boots on the ground in Syria” while also bringing up the issues concerning the previous failures of the US train and equip program.
The Pentagon gave up on the training part of the project in October, after senior Obama administration officials admitted that the US had only trained a handful of fighters, despite the program’s $500 million budget.
In September, it was revealed that one group of trainees had surrendered one quarter of their US-supplied weapons, ammunition, and vehicles in exchange for safe passage through territory held by another rebel group affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
The rebel training program’s $500 million budget in 2015 was in addition to the $42 million the Pentagon had already spent in 2014 to set it up.
November 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | ISIL, ISIS, Obama, Syria, United States |
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According to the U.S. State Government 2013-2015 Foreign Assistance report, an estimated $5.9 billion was spent on foreign military funding alone in fiscal year 2014. This is equivalent to 17% of the estimated $35 billion spent on total global aid discussed in our previous article. U.S. foreign military aid to countries ranged from $200,000 to $3.1 billion. Of the top 10 recipients, two countries received 75% of the $5.9 billion. Take a look on the map below to see who is getting the most foreign military financing from the U.S.
Below is a ranking of the the top 10 recipients and their respective world regions.
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Israel: $3.1B (Middle East)
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Egypt: $1.3B (Africa)
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Iraq: $300M (Middle East)
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Jordan: $300M (Middle East)
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Pakistan: $280M (Asia)
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Lebanon: $75M (Middle East)
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Philippines: $50M (Asia)
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Colombia: $29M (Latin America)
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Tunisia: $20M (Africa)
Research conducted by the World Bank shows that the on average, countries spend approximately 2.2% of GDP on the military. Israel, Iraq, Jordan and Pakistan allocated above average spending towards their military in 2014. The data shows that each country spent approximately 5.2%, 4.3%, 3.5%, and 3.4% of GDP, respectively, on military expenditures. These countries are also part of the top 5 recipients of U.S. foreign military financing, totaling $4.0 billion. … Full article
November 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | Egypt, Israel, United States |
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Trudeau “unveils most diverse Cabinet in Canada’s history”, was how one media outlet described the new Liberal cabinet. It includes a Muslim woman, four Sikhs, an indigenous woman, two differently abled individuals and an equal number of women and men. Half even refused any reference to God at Wednesday’s swearing in ceremony.
But in one respect there was no diversity at all. Every single person wore a Remembrance Day poppy. Even Justin Trudeau’s young children were made to publicly commemorate Canadians (and allies) who died at war.
As we approach the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month expect politicians of every stripe to praise Canadian military valour. At last year’s Remembrance Day commemoration Stephen Harper suggested that Canada was “forged in the fires of First World War”. The former Prime Minister described “the values for which they fought … Justice and freedom; democracy and the rule of law; human rights and human dignity.”
On Remembrance Day what is it we are supposed to remember? The valour, sacrifice and glory of soldiers — and no more?
What about the victims of Canadian troops? Should we abandon the search for truth and learning from our past on this day that is supposedly devoted to remembering?
Why not a diversity of recollection? An honest accounting of what really happened and why — isn’t that the best way to remember?
For example, World War I had no clear and compelling purpose other than rivalry between up-and-coming Germany and the lead imperial powers of the day, Britain and France. In fact, support for the British Empire was Ottawa’s primary motive in joining the war. As Canada’s Prime Minister Robert Borden saw it, the fight was “to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of our empire.”
To honour Canada’s diversity, how about this year we remember some of the victims of that empire?
For Africans World War I represented the final chapter in the violent European scramble for their territory. Since the 1880s the European powers had competed to carve up the continent.
Canada was modestly involved in two African theatres of World War I. A handful of Canadian airmen fought in East Africa, including naval air serviceman H. J. Arnold who helped destroy a major German naval vessel, the Königsberg, during the British/Belgian/South African conquest of German East Africa. Commandant of Canada’s Royal Military College from 1909 to 1913, Colonel J.H.V. Crowe commanded an artillery division for famed South African General Jan Christiaan Smuts and later published General Smuts’ Campaign in East Africa.
About one million people died as a direct result of the war in East Africa. Fighting raged for four years with many dying from direct violence and others from the widespread disease and misery it caused. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were conscripted by the colonial authorities to fight both in Africa and Europe.
J.H.V. Crowe was English born, but an individual with deeper roots in Canada, commanded the force that extended Britain’s control over the other side of the continent.
The son of a Québec City MP and grandson of a senator, Sir Charles MacPherson Dobell, commanded an 18,000 man Anglo-French force that captured the Cameroons and Togoland. Gazetted as Inspector General of the West African Frontier Force in 1913, the Royal Military College grad’s force defeated the Germans in fighting that destroyed many villages and left thousands of West Africans dead. Early in the two-year campaign Dobell’s force captured the main centres of Lomé and Douala and he became de factogovernor over large parts of today’s Togo and Cameroon. A telegram from London said “General Dobell should assume Government with full powers in all matters military and civil.”
British officials justified seizing the German colony as a response to the war in Europe, but to a large extent World War I was the outgrowth of intra-imperial competition in Africa and elsewhere. In The Anglo-French “Condominium” in Cameroon, 1914-1916 Lovett Elango points to “the imperialist motives of the campaign”, which saw the two allies clash over their territorial ambition. Elango concludes, “the war merely provided Britain and France a pretext for further colonial conquest and annexation.” After the German defeat the colony was partitioned between the two European colonial powers.
Canada’s massive contribution to World War I propped up British (as well as French, Belgian and South African) rule in Africa. It also added to it. Similar to the Berlin Conference of 1885, which effectively divided Africa among the European powers, after World War I European leaders gathered to redraw Africa’s borders. But this time the Canadian prime minister attended.
World War I reshaped colonial borders in Africa. Germany lost what is now Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and part of Mozambique (German East Africa) as well as Namibia (German West Africa), Cameroon and Togoland. South Africa gained Namibia, Britain gained Tanzania and part of Cameroon, France gained Togo and part of Cameroon while Belgium took Burundi and Rwanda.
The other British Dominions (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) that fought alongside London were compensated with German properties. With no German colonies nearby Ottawa asked the Imperial War Cabinet if it could take possession of the British West Indies as compensation for Canada’s defence of the Empire. London balked.
Ottawa was unsuccessful in securing the British Caribbean partly because the request did not find unanimous domestic support. Prime Minister Borden was of two minds on the issue. From London he dispatched a cable noting, “the responsibilities of governing subject races would probably exercise a broadening influence upon our people as the dominion thus constituted would closely resemble in its problems and its duties the empire as a whole.” But, on the other hand, Borden feared that the Caribbean’s black population might want to vote. He remarked upon “the difficulty of dealing with the coloured population, who would probably be more restless under Canadian law than under British control and would desire and perhaps insist upon representation in Parliament.”
Our racist and colonial past, as well as Canada’s role in exploiting people of colour all over the world, must also be included in our remembrance if we are to build a nation of respect for all people — the essence of real diversity.
November 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Africa, Australia, Cameroon, Canada, France, New Zealand, Remembrance Day, UK |
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While I was in the midst of trying to publicize the Jewish instigation and the folly of invading Iraq in early 2003 as an occasional writer of scripts for American Dissident Voices, PBS Frontline presented a rather helpful documentary called The War Behind Closed Doors, written by Michael Kirk, and coproduced by Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore.
The introduction to The War Behind Closed Doors is quite promising, with Frontline’s narrator stating: “Over two decades, they had served three presidents, and argued for one big idea, that the United States must project its power and influence throughout the world. This is the story of how they set out to change American foreign policy in the days immediately after the tragedy of September 11th.” Then, to be more specific about what that means, the intro includes a clip of former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack saying: “And it does seem very clear that this group seized upon the events of September 11th to resurrect their policy of trying to go after Saddam Hussein and a regime-change in Iraq.” This was a documentary that would clarify who was responsible for the drive for war against Iraq: Neoconservatives — which meant that that the war was not fundamentally about oil.
The documentary describes the path to invasion of Iraq (which seemed imminent but had not yet occurred when the program aired on 20 February 2003) as a struggle between Neoconservatives (also calling themselves “Neo-Reaganites” or “hawks”) led by Paul Wolfowitz, and “pragmatists” or “realists” ostensibly led by Colin Powell. The Neoconservative position was that Saddam Hussein’s government must be destroyed, while the pragmatists, without disputing the Neoconservatives’ provocative claims about Saddam Hussein, advocated containment as the appropriate response.
Brent Scowcroft (a pragmatist who had been an advisor to George H.W. Bush) is shown explaining to an interviewer that George H.W. Bush had deliberately left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991, contrary to what the Neoconservatives had wanted, because it was desirable to preserve a balance of power between Iraq and Iran, and because overthrowing Saddam Hussein might lead to various negative consequences — reasons that in hindsight make excellent sense.
The interviewer, and some other Jewish commentators in the documentary — Kenneth Pollack and Richard Perle — speak as if the goal of the 1991 war had been to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but Scowcroft is adamant that it was not.
LOWELL BERGMAN: I thought we had two interests. One was to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait, but the other really was to get Saddam out—
BRENT SCOWCROFT: No.
LOWELL BERGMAN: —of power.
BRENT SCOWCROFT: No, it wasn’t.
LOWELL BERGMAN: Well, either covertly or overtly.
BRENT SCOWCROFT: No. No, it wasn’t. That was never — you can’t find that anywhere as an objective, either in the U.N. mandate for what we did or in our declarations, that our goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. [PBS Frontline transcript]
The widespread belief that the goal of the 1991 war had been to eliminate Saddam Hussein was supported by the hyperbolic propaganda that had been used. The comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler started in the mass-media. In late 1990 President Bush joined the trend by comparing Saddam Hussein (unfavorably) to Hitler, because of the supposed brutality of the Iraqi troops in Kuwait (AP, 2 November 1990). There was a tendency to see everything in terms of this Hitler comparison, from “He gassed his own people!” to supposedly unprovoked invasions of neighboring states. Given that President George H.W. Bush had engaged in and never repudiated that kind of crazed propaganda, the first Bush Administration would necessarily be seen as having failed to fulfill a moral imperative when, ultimately, they did the practical thing by leaving Saddam Hussein in power.
In fact, George H. W. Bush did call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and then refrained from supporting such an effort, as the Neocons have charged. This can be seen either as disingenuous war-rhetoric or as vacillation between the influences of the pragmatists (Scowcroft) and the Neoconservatives (Wolfowitz), or as a combination of the two.
Immediately after the 1991 war, Paul Wolfowitz (as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy) authored a set of military guidelines that would justify preventive war — in other words, war against a state that had not attacked and was not threatening to attack, but might attack someday if not attacked first. Recall that in 1981 the State of Israel had been condemned by the UN Security Council for “preventive war” in its attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor, with the Reagan Administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, also voting to condemn. The President of the Security Council, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, explained:
The reasons on which the Government of Israel bases its contention are as unacceptable as the act of aggression it committed. It is inadmissible to invoke the right to self-defense when no armed attack has taken place. The concept of preventive war, which for many years served as justification for the abuses of powerful States, since it left it to their discretion to define what constituted a threat to them, was definitively abolished by the Charter of the United Nations. [Security Council Official Records, S/PV.2288 19 June 1981]
Wolfowitz was now advocating that the government of the United States adopt the uninhibited belligerence of the State of Israel, using military strikes to maintain hegemony against merely suspected (or perhaps imagined) threats.
Information about the Wolfowitz Doctrine was leaked to the news media by people within the administration who opposed it, and it became a source of embarrassment. Dick Cheney was ordered to rewrite Wolfowitz’s guidelines in a way that eliminated the option of unilateral preventive war.
Neoconservative William Kristol however commends the Wolfowitz Doctrine, declaring that Wolfowitz was “ahead of his time.” The narrator explains: “One day there would be a more receptive president, and another opportunity.”
That more receptive president was not Bill Clinton.
The narrator implies that George W. Bush was chosen as the likely successor to Bill Clinton as early as 1998, and that a group of “foreign-policy wisemen” including Wolfowitz on one hand and Colin Powell on the other, attempted to groom him for that position.
This period, when the struggle for the mind of George W. Bush occurred, shows most clearly that invading Iraq was not the idea of George W. Bush. William Kristol states that Bush was not immediately supportive of the Neoconservatives’ aggressive foreign policy: “I wouldn’t say that if you read Wolfowitz’s defense policy guidelines from 1992 and read most of Bush’s campaign speeches and his statements in the debates, you would say, ‘Hey, Bush has really adopted Wolfowitz’s worldview.’” Thus the pragmatists initially prevailed over the Neoconservatives, so that George W. Bush, in the period before the election, was advocating a reduced role for American military forces in the world.
The narrator says that Bush’s foreign policy during the first few months of his administration was “stalled between the two competing forces” — stalled between the Neocons and the pragmatists. Kristol indicates that this continued until the 9-11 attacks: “I think you could make a case that on September 10th, 2001, that it’s not clear that George W. Bush was in any fundamental way going in our direction on foreign policy.”
A pivotal moment, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came when Bush delivered a speech that evening that included the line: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
The War Behind Closed Doors treats this as a highly important utterance. Obviously it is important, since rumors that some government harbors or supports terrorists are easy to generate, and were in fact generated. The narrator says: “The hawks welcomed the president’s phrase, ‘those who harbor’ terrorism.” Richard Perle is quoted praising the speech.
David Frum, Bush’s Canadian-born Jewish speechwriter, also praises the speech:
Within 48 hours, he had made the two key decisions that have defined the war on terror. First, this is a war, not a crime. And second, this war is not going to be limited to just the authors of the 9/11 attack but to anyone who assisted them and helped them and made their work possible, including states. And that is a dramatic, dramatic event. And that defines everything.
What Frontline fails to mention is that it was Frum who insisted on that crucial line in Bush’s speech. One week before PBS Frontline aired its documentary, The Nation magazine had already revealed that detail:
It was not, alas, “a war speech.” It did, though, contain the line about making “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” And Frum cannot resist informing us he had been the one to insert that thought into every draft of the speech. [David Corn, “Who’s in Charge?” The Nation, 13 February 2003; emphasis added]
This casts a very interesting light on another comment from Frum about the speech: “When he laid down those principles, I don’t know whether he foresaw all of their implications, how far they would take him. I don’t know if he understood fully and foresaw fully the true radicalism of what he had just said.”
Who was really making the big decisions for which Frum liked to give Bush so much credit? Frum had put words into Bush’s mouth and then said that he was not sure that Bush had understood the implications. The picture that we get, by adding just a bit of information that Frontline had omitted, is that George W. Bush was pushed into belligerent posturing by his Jewish advisors.
The pragmatists continued to push the idea of going after terrorists rather than governments; Powell for example spoke of “persuading” governments that might be harboring terrorists. But the fact that the President had already talked about going after governments had created an expectation that was difficult to oppose.
Meanwhile the false notion that Iraq was unfinished business was revived. (Obviously such an evil man must be doing evil things.) The notion that Iraq was somehow a “state sponsor of terrorism” (having been taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism by the Reagan Administration in 1982, but reinstated amid the war-propaganda of 1990) was bandied about.
Dick Cheney is a favorite target for leftist critics of the War on Terror, and for the John Birch Society, who want a scapegoat that allows them to avoid saying anything critical of Jews. Very often, Cheney is represented as a key “Neocon.” In fact Cheney had worked with the Neoconservatives at various times since the days of “Team B” during the Ford Administration. But William Kristol described Cheney’s position at the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency thus: “Cheney is a complicated figure and, obviously, a very cautious and reticent figure, so hard to know what he thinks in his heart of hearts. I think he had feet in both camps, so to speak.” In other words, Cheney was not initially committed to the Neoconservative position on Iraq.
George W. Bush adopted the doctrine of preventive war that had been advocated by “the brains” of the Neoconservative outfit, Paul Wolfowitz (see here, p. 41ff, for a portrait of Wolfowitz’s Jewish identity and connections). From this, given 15 years of demonization-propaganda against Saddam Hussein and a little nudging from Jews like David Frum who were positioned to influence George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq followed.
At the time when The War Behind Closed Doors aired, the Neoconservatives were getting their way and enjoying practically unanimous support for their project, and perhaps it was overconfidence that motivated William Kristol to claim for his Neoconservative movement such unequivocal responsibility for the imminent war. There was always obfuscation about who had agitated for war, with many habitually blaming the oil industry or other economic interests, because such explanations fit their leftist theory about how the world works. It was extremely useful that PBS Frontline documented that it was in fact Neoconservatives who spent more than a decade agitating for that war, and also, if it did not explain exactly who these Neoconservatives were, at least gave some indications about who they were not.
There are however some negative aspects to The War Behind Closed Doors, the worst of them being the propaganda spouted by Jewish television-host Ted Koppel’s Jewish son-in-law, Kenneth Pollack, who also happened to be a former CIA analyst, a sometime member of the National Security Council and various think-tanks, and author of a pro-war book, The Threatening Storm, that was especially influential with liberals. (Pollack had excellent liberal credentials, having served in the Clinton administration; he was also indicted for spying on behalf of Israel, but the indictment was dropped under less than convincing circumstances.) Although supposedly giving an expert outsider’s perspective on the Neoconservatives’ agitation for war, and seeming to criticize the Neoconservatives in some ways, the most important part of what Pollack said really supported the Neoconservatives’ project. I suspected that Pollack was Jewish when I first saw the program in 2003 because of the general thrust of what he was saying, but now it is confirmed.
In the section of PBS Frontline’s The War Behind Closed Doors about Bill Clinton, Pollack promotes the idea that Saddam Hussein really was developing WMDs behind the backs of the UN’s weapons-inspectors, and tries to portray the clashes in the 1990s between Iraqi officials and the UN’s inspectors as the expression of some kind of psychological strategy on Saddam Hussein’s part for undermining “containment.” Frontline should have pointed out that there was no direct evidence for any ongoing WMD-program. It was all speculation, based, as Pollack says, on the fact that the Iraqis gave the inspectors trouble. But the friction between inspectors and Iraqi authorities was easily explained with the fact that the inspection-team, infiltrated by agents of the CIA, appeared to have been used to try to orchestrate a coup:
But one of the problems is, is that you have a situation, in June of 1996, where the United States is fomenting a coup against Saddam Hussein, a coup based upon Special Republican Guard units. At the same time, you have an UNSCOM inspection, UNSCOM 150, which is in Iraq, creating a confrontation by inspecting Special Republican Guard sites. [Scott Ritter, PBS Frontline: Spying on Saddam, 27 April 1999].
These known facts should have been brought to bear on Pollack’s statements.
The Newsweek of 24 February 2003, four days after this documentary aired, quoted Saddam Hussein’s son, General Hussein Kamel, as telling an interrogator in 1995: “All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear — were destroyed.” Pollack, with his positions in government as a supposed expert on Iraq, should have known about this.
It is the major fault of The War Behind Closed Doors that it allows Pollack’s claims in support of the WMD accusation to go undisputed. Pollack admitted after the invasion that he had been wrong (“I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence.” New York Times Magazine, 24 October 2004), but it is worse than being wrong: he was either a liar or incompetent. The failure to challenge Pollack’s statements is a crucial omission in PBS Frontline’s presentation, because the proposition that Saddam Hussein had been 100% successful in circumventing weapons-inspections was essential to the argument for war. Add the claim that weapons-inspections were not working (and probably could not work) to the premise that Saddam Hussein is “another Hitler,” and it becomes self-evident that one must go to war.
November 9, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | David Frum, Dick Cheney, Iraq, Israel, Kenneth Pollack, Paul Wolfowitz, United States, William Kristol, Zionism |
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In two recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and the academic studies that inspired them, the authors investigate the question of which war veterans are most likely to commit suicide or violent crimes. Remarkably, the subject of war, their role in war, their thoughts about the supposed justifications (or lack thereof) of a war, never come up.
The factors that take the blame are — apart from the unbearably obvious “prior suicidality,” “prior crime,” “weapons possession,” and “mental disorder treatment” — the following breakthrough discoveries: maleness, poverty, and “late age of enlistment.” In other words, the very same factors that would be found in the (less-suicidal and less-murderous) population at large. That is, men are more violent than women, both among veterans and non-veterans; the poor are more violent (or at least more likely to get busted for it) among veterans and non-veterans; and the same goes for “unemployed” or “dissatisfied with career” or other near-equivalents of “joined the military at a relatively old age.”
In other words, these reports tell us virtually nothing. Perhaps their goal isn’t to tell us something factual so much as to shift the conversation away from why war causes murder and suicide, to the question of what was wrong with these soldiers before they enlisted.
The reason for studying the violence of veterans, after all, is that violence, as well as PTSD, are higher than among non-veterans, and the two (PTSD and violence) are linked. They are higher (or at least most studies over many years have said so; there are exceptions) for those who’ve been in combat than for those who’ve been in the military without combat. They are even higher for those who’ve been in even more combat. They are higher for ground troops than for pilots. There are mixed reports on whether they are higher for drone pilots or traditional pilots.
The fact that war participation, which itself consists of committing murder in a manner sanctioned by authorities, increases criminal violence afterwards, in a setting where it is no longer sanctioned, ought of course to direct our attention to the problem of war, not the problem of which fraction of returning warriors to offer some modicum of reorientation into nonviolent life. But if you accept that war is necessary, and that most of the funding for it must go into profitable weaponry, then you’re going to want to both identify which troops to help and shift the blame to those troops.
The same reporter of the above linked articles also wrote one that documents what war participation does to suicide. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says that out of 100,000 male veterans 32.1 commit suicide in a year, compared to 28.7 female veterans. But out of 100,000 male non-veterans, 20.9 commit suicide, compared to only 5.2 female non-veterans. And “for women ages 18 to 29, veterans kill themselves at nearly 12 times the rate of nonveterans.” Here’s how the article begins:
“New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces.”
Does it really? Is their background really the problem? It’s not a totally crazy idea. It could be that men and women inclined toward violence are more likely to join the military as well as more likely to engage in violence afterward, and more likely to be armed when they do so. But these reports don’t focus primarily on that question. They try to distinguish which of the men and women are the (unacceptable, back home-) violence-prone ones. Yet something causes the figure for male suicides to jump from 20.9 to 32.1. Whatever it is gets absolutely disregarded, as differences between male and female military experiences are examined (specifically, the increased frequency of female troops being raped).
Suppose for a moment that what is at work in the leap in the male statistic has something to do with war. Sexism and sexual violence may indeed be an enormous factor for female (and some male) troops, and it may be far more widespread than the military says or knows. But those women who do not suffer it, probably have experiences much more like men’s in the military, than the two groups’ experiences out of the military are alike. And the word for their shared experience is war.
Looking at the youngest age group, “among men 18 to 29 years old, the annual number of suicides per 100,000 people were 83.3 for veterans and 17.6 for nonveterans. The numbers for women in that age group: 39.6 and 3.4.” Women who’ve been in the military are, in that age group, 12 times more likely to kill themselves, while men are five times more likely. But that can also be looked at this way: among non-veterans, men are 5 times as likely to kill themselves as women, while among veterans men are only 2 times as likely to kill themselves as women. When their experience is the same one — organized approved violence — men’s and women’s rates of suicide are more similar.
The same LA Times reporter also has an article simply on the fact that veteran suicides are higher than non-veteran. But he manages to brush aside the idea that war has anything to do with this:
“‘People’s natural instinct is to explain military suicide by the war-is-hell theory of the world,’ said Michael Schoenbaum, an epidemiologist and military suicide expert at the National Institute of Mental Health who was not involved in the study. ‘But it’s more complicated.'”
Judging by that article it’s not more complicated, it’s entirely something else. The impact of war on mental state is never discussed. Instead, we get this sort of enlightening finding:
“Veterans who had been enlisted in the rank-and-file committed suicide at nearly twice the rate of former officers. Keeping with patterns in the general population, being white, unmarried and male were also risk factors.”
Yes, but among veterans the rates are higher than in the general population. Why?
The answer is, I think, the same as the answer to the question of why the topic is so studiously avoided. The answer is summed up in the recent term: moral injury. You can’t kill and face death and return unchanged to a world in which you are expected to refrain from all violence and relax.
And returning to a world kept carefully oblivious to what you’re going through, and eager to blame your demographic characteristics, must make it all the more difficult.
November 9, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Moral injury, PTSD, United States |
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