Chris Hedges's Blog, page 88

NATO Should Be Dissolved

The three smartest words that Donald Trump uttered during his presidential campaign are “NATO is obsolete.” His adversary, Hillary Clinton, retorted that NATO was “the strongest military alliance in the history of the world.” Now that Trump has been in power, the White House parrots the same worn line that NATO is “the most successful Alliance in history, guaranteeing the security, prosperity, and freedom of its members.” But Trump was right the first time around: Rather than being a strong alliance with a clear purpose, this 70-year-old organization that is meeting in London on December 4 is a stale military holdover from the Cold War days that should have gracefully retired many years ago.

NATO was originally founded by the United States and 11 other Western nations as an attempt to curb the rise of communism in 1949. Six years later, Communist nations founded the Warsaw Pact and through these two multilateral institutions, the entire globe became a Cold War battleground. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the Warsaw Pact disbanded but NATO expanded, growing from its original 12 members to 29 member countries. North Macedonia, set to join next year, will bring the number to 30. NATO has also expanded well beyond the North Atlantic, adding a partnership with Colombia in 2017. Donald Trump recently suggested that Brazil could one day become a full member.

NATO’s post-Cold War expansion toward Russia’s borders, despite earlier promises not to move eastward, has led to rising tensions between Western powers and Russia, including multiple close calls between military forces. It has also contributed to a new arms race, including upgrades in nuclear arsenals, and the largest NATO “war games” since the Cold War.

While claiming to “preserve peace,” NATO has a history of bombing civilians and committing war crimes. In 1999, NATO engaged in military operations without UN approval in Yugoslavia. Its illegal airstrikes during the Kosovo War left hundreds of civilians dead. And far from the “North Atlantic,” NATO joined the United States in invading Afghanistan in 2001, where it is still bogged down two decades later. In 2011, NATO forces illegally invaded Libya, creating a failed state that caused masses of people to flee. Rather than take responsibility for these refugees, NATO countries have turned back desperate migrants on the Mediterranean Sea, letting thousands die.

In London, NATO wants to show it is ready to fight new wars. It will showcase its readiness initiative—the ability to deploy 30 battalions by land, 30 air squadrons and 30 naval vessels in just 30 days, and to confront future threats from China and Russia, including with hypersonic missiles and cyberwarfare. But far from being a lean, mean war machine, NATO is actually riddled with divisions and contradictions. Here are some of them:

French President Emmanuel Macron questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe, has called NATO “brain dead” and has proposed a European Army under the nuclear umbrella of France.
Turkey has enraged NATO members with its incursion into Syria to attack the Kurds, who have been Western allies in the fight against ISIS. And Turkey has threatened to veto a Baltic defense plan until allies support its controversial incursion into Syria. Turkey has also infuriated NATO members, especially Trump, by purchasing Russia’s S-400 missile system.
Trump wants NATO to push back against China’s growing influence, including the use of Chinese companies for the construction of 5G mobile networks—something many NATO countries are unwilling to do.
Is Russia really NATO’s adversary? France’s Macron has reached out to Russia, inviting Putin to discuss ways in which the European Union can put the Crimean invasion behind it. Donald Trump has publicly attacked Germany over its Nord Stream 2 project to pipe in Russian gas, but a recent German poll saw 66 percent wanting closer ties with Russia.
The UK has bigger problems. Britain has been convulsed over the Brexit conflict and is holding a contentious national election on December 12. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, knowing that Trump is wildly unpopular, is reluctant to be seen as close to him. Also, Johnson’s major contender, Jeremy Corbyn, is a reluctant supporter of NATO. While his Labour Party is committed to NATO, over his career as an anti-war champion, Corbyn has called NATO “a danger to world peace and a danger to world security.” The last time Britain hosted NATO leaders in 2014, Corbyn told an anti-NATO rally that the end of the Cold War “should have been the time for NATO to shut up shop, give up, go home and go away.”
A further complication is Scotland, which is home to a very unpopular Trident nuclear submarine base as part of NATO’s nuclear deterrent. A new Labour government would need the support of the Scottish National Party. But its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, insists that a precondition for her party’s support is a commitment to close the base.
Europeans can’t stand Trump (a recent poll found he is trusted by only 4 percent of Europeans!) and their leaders can’t rely on him. Allied leaders learn of presidential decisions that affect their interests via Twitter. The lack of coordination was clear in October, when Trump ignored NATO allies when he ordered U.S. special forces out of northern Syria, where they had been operating alongside French and British commandos against Islamic State militants.
The U.S. unreliability has led the European Commission to draw up plans for a European “defense union” that will coordinate military spending and procurement. The next step may be to coordinate military actions separate from NATO. The Pentagon has complained about EU countries purchasing military equipment from each other instead of from the United States, and has called this defense union “a dramatic reversal of the last three decades of increased integration of the transatlantic defence sector.”
Do Americans really want to go to war for Estonia? Article 5 of the Treaty states that an attack against one member “shall be considered an attack against them all,” meaning that the treaty obligates the U.S. to go to war on behalf of 28 nations—something most likely opposed by war-weary Americans who want a less aggressive foreign policy that focuses on peace, diplomacy, and economic engagement instead of military force.

An additional major bone of contention is who will pay for NATO. The last time NATO leaders met, President Trump derailed the agenda by berating NATO countries for not paying their fair share, and at the London meeting, Trump is expected to announce symbolic U.S. cuts to NATO’s operations budget.

Trump’s main concern is that member states step up to the NATO target of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic products on defense by 2024, a goal that is unpopular among Europeans, who prefer that their tax dollars go to nonmilitary items. Nevertheless, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will brag that Europe and Canada have added $100 billion to their military budgets since 2016—something Donald Trump will take credit for—and that more NATO officials are meeting the 2 percent goal, even though a 2019 NATO report shows only seven members have done so: the U.S., Greece, Estonia, the UK, Romania, Poland and Latvia.

In an age where people around the world want to avoid war and to focus instead on the climate chaos that threatens future life on earth, NATO is an anachronism. It now accounts for about three-quarters of military spending and weapons dealing around the globe. Instead of preventing war, it promotes militarism, exacerbates global tensions and makes war more likely. This Cold War relic shouldn’t be reconfigured to maintain U.S. domination in Europe, or to mobilize against Russia or China, or to launch new wars in space. It should not be expanded, but disbanded. Seventy years of militarism is more than enough.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

End the Wars, Win the Antiwar Vote

Like anyone else who was around that day, I can tell you exactly where I was on 9/11.

I was a Catholic school eighth grader, fresh off my 14th birthday. The school day lurched along for a while, but eventually we dropped the pretense of carrying on. Teachers ushered us into the adjoining church for a prayer service, then sent us home early.

Later on, in the car with my dad, we heard what sounded like an explosion — a sonic boom from the nearby air base. My dad pulled over alongside other panicked drivers, all of us scanning the sky. In our agitated state, we genuinely believed that our little corner of Ohio might be attacked, too.

Like so many others, that day was my first experience of genuine fear about the world outside. And that’s usually where we leave these reflections. We shouldn’t — because the truth is, the terror many of us felt that day pales in comparison to the terror we’ve visited on the world since then.

A new study from Brown University’s Costs of War project puts that terror into stark relief. It estimates that 800,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen in the wars we’ve launched since 9/11, with local civilians representing the largest share of that total.

But that’s a conservative estimate. When you add those who died from preventable causes thanks to decimated health care, food, and sanitation systems in our many war zones, American University’s David Vine writes, the figure climbs to 3.1 million. The vast majority are civilians.

That’s over 1,000 times the number of innocents who died on 9/11 — an almost incomprehensible toll.

Americans have also paid dearly for these wars: $6.4 trillion, plus significant losses of life and limb. Some 7,000 U.S. troops have died in these conflicts. Yet for all this suffering, the dual trends of war fatigue and rising nativism in our politics suggest that no one’s feeling any safer even after two decades of war.

This fall, a big survey by Data for Progress found substantial majorities of Americans supporting an end to our ground wars. That included 58 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats, many of whom also supported rolling back our global presence altogether.

Remarkably, while a few Democratic presidential candidates have called to end the wars, it’s Donald Trump who has most effectively weaponized the issue. There’s data to suggest his support in high-casualty states was key to his 2016 victory over the more hawkish-seeming Hillary Clinton.

Yet for all his bluster about getting U.S. troops out of “blood-stained sand,” more U.S. troops are deployed in the Middle East today than when Trump took office, locking down oil fields and defending brutal dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. Bombs fall more freely than ever, with Trump’s drone attacks vastly surpassing even the trigger-happy Obama administration’s. Even token measures to limit civilian casualties have been swept aside.

By embracing what’s right as well as what’s popular, leading Democrats have accelerated public support for fighting climate change and expanding health care. And with Trump failing to deliver on his antiwar pretenses, they have an enormous opportunity to do the same on ending our wars. In fact, if they want to afford those other things, they’ll have to.

In a lot of ways, the world’s a scarier place now than when I was in middle school. But with the right leadership, a lot more is possible, too. If we’re ever going to win the war on terror, the first step is to stop spreading it.

Georgia Governor Picks Political Newcomer for U.S. Senate

ATLANTA — Georgia’s Republican governor has chosen a wealthy businesswoman and political newcomer to fill an upcoming vacancy in the U.S. Senate, flouting President Donald Trump’s preferred candidate in a play for moderate suburban voters.

Gov. Brian Kemp formally announced his selection of Kelly Loeffler on Wednesday, pushing aside intense criticism from hard-core Trump advocates who wanted Kemp to appoint Rep. Doug Collins, one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress.

Kemp and Loeffler moved quickly to extinguish the rebellion from the right, pitching the little-known candidate as a Trump supporter and emphasizing her rural roots.

“I’m a lifelong conservative, pro-Second Amendment, pro-Trump, pro-military and pro-wall,” Loeffler said. “I make no apologies for my conservative values and I look forward to supporting President Trump’s conservative judges.”

And Loeffler has been quickly embraced by Senate GOP leadership and prominent members of the state party, which could make any top-tier Republican candidate rethink plans to challenge her for the seat. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called her “a terrific appointment.”

Loeffler will succeed three-term Sen. Johnny Isakson, who is stepping down at the end of the month because of health issues. She will be only the second woman in history to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate.

The tension between Republicans underscores a divide within the party on how the GOP can best position itself for success in 2020: by firing up and turning out hardcore Trump conservatives or pivoting to try to win back suburban moderates that have fled the party since Trump’s election. Kemp’s selection of Loeffler, and the embrace she’s received from Senate leadership, signals that party leaders recognize the perils of catering to the right and hitching every wagon to the president.

It comes down to “a difference in philosophy over how to win,” said Kerwin Swint, director of the school of government and international affairs at Kennesaw State University.

“Trump wants Collins obviously for his steadfast support of him, but Trump also believes in the base strategy of winning elections. That’s how he won, that’s how Kemp won,” Swint said. “Kemp understands that that’s how he won, but he looks at what’s happening in Georgia, the changing demographics, particularly female voters in metro Atlanta, and so I think his strategy and his thinking is, how long can we rely on this base strategy to win?”

The seat will be up for grabs again in a November 2020 special election for the final two years of Isakson’s term, and then again in 2022. Also on next year’s ballot will be Republican Sen. David Perdue, who is running for a second full term.

With both of Georgia’s GOP-held Senate seats on the ballot alongside Trump in 2020, the race is raising the state’s profile as a political battleground where Republicans still dominate but Democrats have made substantial inroads in recent elections.

Loeffler is the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream professional woman’s basketball franchise and CEO of financial services company Bakkt, which offers a regulated market for bitcoin. She was previously an executive at Intercontinental Exchange, a behemoth founded by her husband that owns the New York Stock Exchange. Bakkt is a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange.

Trump made clear that he preferred Collins to Loeffler, but has resigned himself to the pick, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the private discussions.

Collins has publicly left open the door to challenging Loeffler for the seat, but McConnell said she has his backing as well as that of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “She will be an incumbent Republican Senator,” McConnell said.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Washington and break the GOP’s hold on the Deep South. They’re spending big in Georgia, where demographic changes making the state less rural and more diverse could create opportunities for an upset.

Democrat Matt Lieberman, the son of former U.S. senator and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, is campaigning for the seat, and several other Democrats are mulling potential bids.

In September, Kemp took the unusual step of opening an online application process for Isakson’s Senate seat and asked everyone from congressmen to ordinary Georgians to apply.

The governor’s office was soon flooded with hundreds of applications. Many were sincere. Others, like one submitted for Kermit the Frog, were not.

Loeffler submitted her application just hours before the online portal was closed, prompting speculation that she may have done so at Kemp’s urging.

Other top Republicans who applied include Collins, former congressman Jack Kingston, state House Speaker Pro Tempore Jan Jones and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

___

Zeke Miller reported from London.

The Signature Wound of America’s Wars

When an announcement of a “Moral Injury Symposium” turned up in my email, I was a bit startled to see that it came from the U.S. Special Operations Command. That was a surprise because many military professionals have strongly resisted the term “moral injury” and rejected the suggestion that soldiers fighting America’s wars could experience moral conflict or feel morally damaged by their service.

Moral injury is not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis. It’s not on the Veterans Administration’s list of service-related disabilities. Yet in the decade since the concept began to take root among mental health specialists and others concerned with the emotional lives of active-duty soldiers and military veterans, it has come to be fairly widely regarded as “the signature wound of today’s wars,” as the editors of War and Moral Injury: A Reader, a remarkable anthology of contemporary and past writings on the subject, have noted.

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Uncle Sam Sent Me to Rehab for PTSD



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

For those not familiar with the tag, moral injury is related to but not the same as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which is a recognized clinical condition. Both involve some of the same symptoms, including depression, insomnia, nightmares, and self-medication via alcohol or drugs, but they arise from different circumstances. PTSD symptoms are a psychological reaction to an experience of life-threatening physical danger or harm. Moral injury is the lasting mental and emotional result of an assault on the conscience — a memory, as one early formulation put it, of “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

The idea remains controversial in the military world, but the wars that Americans have fought since 2001 — involving a very different experience of war fighting from that of past generations — have made it increasingly difficult for military culture to cling to its old manhood and warrior myths. Many in that military have had to recognize the invisible wounds of moral conflict that soldiers have brought home with them from those battlefields.

That shift was evident at the moral injury symposium, held in early August in a Washington, D.C., hotel. The feelings and experiences I heard about there were not necessarily representative of the climate in the wider military community. The special operations forces, which put on the event, have their own distinctive character, culture, and experiences, and a disproportionate number of the 130 or so attendees were mental-health specialists or chaplains, the two groups that have been most open and attuned to the very idea of moral injury. (A military chaplain in the Special Operations Command, in fact, first had the idea for the symposium.)

Still, the symposium emerged from the same history the rest of the military has lived through: 18 years of uninterrupted violence, of war without end in distant lands, that has killed or wounded some 60,000 Americans and a far greater number of foreign civilians, while displacing millions more and helping drive the worldwide refugee population to successive record-setting levels. Against that backdrop, those two days in Washington proved gripping and thought provoking in their own right. What follows are some of the thoughts they provoked in my mind as I listened or when I later reflected on what I heard.

Something Said, Something Unsaid

In the sessions I attended, virtually every speaker mentioned one relevant fact about our present wars and the soldiers who fight them. But a different relevant fact on the same subject was almost completely missing.

Again and again, participants spoke about the great change in how soldiers experience war. In past generations, for the great majority of service members, war was a one-time event. In the 18 years since 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, war has become a permanent part of soldiers’ lives in a continuing cycle of repeated deployments to battle zones. (And that’s not to mention the even more startling change for those who see combat remotely, sitting in front of screens and firing missiles or dropping bombs from unmanned aircraft flying over targets thousands of miles away.) As nearly all the symposium speakers pointed out, that change in the war-fighting experience has also changed the nature of combat trauma and the military culture’s understanding of and attitudes toward it.

Here’s the reality that almost nobody mentioned, though it’s closely related: the reason these wars have lasted this long and have become a permanent part of soldiers’ lives is that they have not been successful. My notes record only one presentation where that connection was even touched upon, and then only implicitly, not directly.

That single indirect mention came in a discussion group conducted by Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, the commanding officer of a Florida-based remotely piloted aircraft squadron. He mentioned that his MQ-9 Reaper drone crews increasingly have come to prefer missions in theaters other than Afghanistan. Specifically, he said, they were most positive about strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria where they “could see the front lines moving.” (That suggests he was referring mainly to the 2016-2017 period when those Reapers were supporting American and Iraqi ground forces recapturing territory that had been under ISIS occupation.) Those missions led to “less trauma” for his operators, he said. At another point, he added that “if it [an engagement] ends well, they look back on their lives differently.”

Other than that single remark about his crews preferring missions in other theaters, Blair never made any explicit comparison between Afghanistan and any other conflict zone. However, what he did say sounds like plain common sense. It’s logical that when a military operation is relatively successful, it’s easier for soldiers to explain to themselves and live with their own actions. It must help mitigate moral injury symptoms, at the very least, if they can tell themselves that a greater good was accomplished.

Conversely, if you did something that leaves you with doubt or regret but achieved no positive results, that would lead to more painful feelings and less defense against them. So, in one way, it seems odd that, except in those few moments, I didn’t hear anyone make the connection between the lack of victory in America’s wars and the incidence of trauma.

On the other hand, it’s not so surprising that such connections were not made more often or more clearly. They would only have reminded the participants of an uncomfortable reality: that America’s wars in the present era have, on the whole, fallen far short of producing any greater good that would help justify the moral injury so many soldiers are struggling with, not to mention all the other human damage those wars have caused.

I can’t know their inner feelings, but I can guess that it would have been painful for many symposium participants to admit that fact out loud or to let themselves think it at all. Probably it wasn’t something the organizers would have liked to hear either or remember when they face troubled soldiers in the months and years to come.

Moral Clarity Versus Moral Injury

Another moment in that same session suggested a different but related link between the nature and circumstances of a military operation and the likelihood of trauma. This one had to do with the moral perception of the operation itself.

Since his crews are not physically at risk when carrying out their missions, Lieutenant Colonel Blair pointed out, the traditional “kill or be killed” formula of the battlefield can’t help them explain their war to themselves. Instead, the drone fighter’s explanation has to be “kill or someone else will be killed.” In turn, that determines not just what they do, but who they feel they are. “Being a protector of others,” Blair said, becomes their “core identity.”

A couple of quotes in a December 2017 article on an Air Force website show how the missions against ISIS strongly validated that identity — and, indirectly, suggest why operations in other theaters have not.

The article, which I found after the symposium ended, was a feature about a remotely piloted aircraft unit (not Blair’s) that supported the ground operation to recapture Raqqa, the Syrian provincial city that ISIS designated as the capital of its so-called caliphate. One quote is from a squadron commander: “It wasn’t our aircrew just striking ISIS targets. We also were safeguarding and watching over [friendly Syrian troops] as they cleared civilians moving out of the city to safe locations.” The article also quoted a sensor operator: “My favorite part of this job is that I’m able to help civilians be safe and I’m able to help liberate whatever city we need to. There’s no better feeling than knowing you can directly impact the battlefield and other people’s lives.”

Obviously, when their screens showed them the civilians they were helping, and not just the enemies they were killing, those crewmen found moral clarity, rather than moral conflict, in their experience. From Blair’s comments, one can surmise that was true for his crews as well, presumably for similar reasons.

Sadly, it is also pretty obvious that such a sense of clarity has been the exception, not the rule, in the wars Americans have been fighting for nearly two decades. That doesn’t automatically mean those wars were not moral, but whatever their moral nature, it would only rarely have shown up on the drone operators’ screens — or in the sightlines of soldiers looking at actual battlegrounds in real space — as clearly as it did for those airmen remembering their Raqqa missions. (Not that Raqqa raised no moral questions at all. Yes, the fighting there liberated its inhabitants from an exceptionally brutal occupation. But it also destroyed most of their homes, largely in air strikes by U.S. and allied planes that, by one estimate, dropped 20,000 bombs on the city. By the time the campaign was over, Raqqa, like a number of other Syrian and Iraqi cities, was in almost complete ruins.)

A Question, Maybe Farfetched…

I didn’t frame it this way when I was at the symposium, but this question later came to mind: Has the U.S. military as an institution, not just its individual service members, morally injured itself over the last 18 years?

This is a military force that never stops declaring it’s the best and strongest in the world, but has not successfully concluded a significant war for nearly 30 years or maybe longer. (The first Gulf War of 1990-1991 looked like a great win at the time, but appears like anything but an unequivocally positive accomplishment in retrospect.) It may sound farfetched, but is it unreasonable to wonder if that dissonance, that wide gap between goals and actual accomplishments, might leave a collective sense of sorrow, grief, regret, shame, and alienation? That’s the list of feelings that Glenn Orris, a Navy chaplain, displayed on a chart in his symposium presentation and specified as the ones that keep morally injured service members awake at night.

I’m posing this as a question, not offering it as an answer. Certainly, at various moments during the symposium, I had a sense not just of individual but of collective trauma. As an outsider in that world, I can’t and won’t venture to evaluate the emotional state of the military as a whole. Still, the question doesn’t seem ridiculous.

A New Idea of What Moral Injury Really Is

The final event of the second day — an unusual closer for a professional or academic conference — was a reading of Sophocles’ play Ajax, as rewritten by Bryan Doerries. After the reading, Doerries, artistic director for Theater of War, the company that put on the performance, moderated a discussion with a panel of four recent veterans and members of the audience.

Essentially, he attempted to draw out the panelists and the audience on what the play was trying to say and how that 2,500-year-old story of a warrior’s depression, madness, and suicide might connect to their own experience. Listening to various responses, I found myself thinking that perhaps the main purpose of his, if not Sophocles’s, version was to make the audience think about what war is. What it really is, not the heroic myth humans have made of it from ancient times on. And then I thought, maybe that’s what we’d been talking about for the previous two days. Maybe that’s what moral injury is: realizing the true nature of war.

Along with that thought came another, one that first occured to me nearly 45 years ago when, as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, I personally witnessed the disastrous end of the Vietnam War. I’ve believed ever since that covering war from the losing side gave me a truer knowledge of its nature than I’d have gotten from that or any other war’s winning side. Maybe I should say darker, not truer, since I suppose the winners’ war is real, too. But whichever word you choose, my experience, I felt, gave me a more unobstructed view of war. I could see it more clearly for what it was precisely because there was no good result to balance against the death and loss and terror and despair. There was no excuse to explain away the human disaster I’d seen and written about for several years, no way to tell myself that the war was necessary or had served any purpose.

That bit of personal history makes me think it’s not accidental that our present consciousness of moral injury has come out of wars we didn’t win. They haven’t been lost in the same clear-cut way that the war in Vietnam was. They haven’t (yet) ended in the kind of catastrophically decisive final act I witnessed there in the spring of 1975 in the weeks that led to Saigon’s surrender. But these recent wars haven’t accomplished their goals either, or given our soldiers a worthwhile reason for what they’ve gone through, which is surely a key piece of the moral injury story.

I was a civilian journalist, not a soldier. I went to Vietnam to report, not to fight. I didn’t come home with any trauma symptoms. But I have all the feelings that Chaplain Orris listed as identifying markers for moral injury: sorrow, grief, regret, shame, and alienation. Those emotions come from what I learned about war, not from anything I did, and that makes me believe it may not be wrong to think that what we call moral injury might not be just one person’s response to particularly troubling events, but a symptom of something larger, of seeing war individually and collectively for what it truly is.

A Last Thought

In closing, I will turn back to the editors of War and Moral Injury. In their introduction, Douglas Pryer, a retired army intelligence officer and Afghanistan and Iraq veteran, and Robert Emmett Meagher, a classicist and professor of humanities at Hampshire College, pointed to an aspect of war that is missing in their anthology, the symposium, and in American culture more broadly:

“We must acknowledge a great gap in this text as in nearly every other on the subject of America’s wars and veterans: the deaths and wounds, physical and spiritual, inflicted on the ‘others,’ our enemies, especially our ‘civilian enemies.'”

Pryer and Meagher are right. Such an acknowledgement is almost entirely absent from the national discourse about our wars and their legacy. But without it, no moral wound, whether an individual’s or a society’s, can truly be healed.

The Radioactive Legacy We Are Leaving Our Children

After 70 years of building and operating nuclear power plants across the world, governments are bequeathing to future generations a radioactive legacy.

They remain unable to deal with the huge quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel they produce, says a group of independent experts − and as more reactors are reaching the end of their lives, the situation is worsening fast.

That is the conclusion of the first World Nuclear Waste Report (WNWR), produced by a group which says there are ever-growing challenges in waste management and no sustainable long-term solutions. They include two British academics: the economist Professor Gordon MacKerron, of the University of Sussex, and the independent radiation biologist Dr Ian Fairlie.

“Despite many plans and declared political intentions, huge uncertainties remain, and much of the costs and the challenges will fall onto future generations,” the report says.

Persistent risk

The waste, which can remain dangerous for more than 100,000 years, constitutes a continuous health hazard because of the routine release of radioactive gas and liquid waste into the environment. Yet it is likely to be another century before the problem is solved, the WNWR report says.

It notes: “The continued practice of storing spent nuclear fuel for long periods in pools at nuclear power plants (wet storage) constitutes a major risk to the public and to the environment.” There are now an estimated 250,000 tons of spent fuel in storage in 14 countries.

Despite its stark findings, the report makes no comment on the ethics of continuing to build nuclear stations when there is no way to get rid of the wastes they create.

The authors do not even quote the sixth report of the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution from 1976, only 20 years after the dawn of the nuclear age, chaired by the physicist Sir Brian Flowers.

Beyond reasonable doubt

That said: “There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future.”

Successive British governments, along with the rest of the world, ignored Flowers. 40 years on, there are massive stockpiles of radioactive waste in every nuclear nation across the planet.

However, because the problem is now so vast, this latest report concentrates on describing the issues faced in the democracies of Europe where there is a lot of official information available. Even here, governments have failed to properly estimate the true cost of dealing with the waste, and most are many decades away from finding any solutions.

Finland is the only country in the world currently building a permanent repository for its high-level waste. Many other countries have tried and failed, either because the geology proved unsuitable or because of objections from those affected.

“There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future”

As a result, spent fuel from reactors and other highly dangerous waste is in interim storage that carries severe safety risks, not least from loss of cooling water or terrorist attack. There are 60,000 tons of spent fuel in store in Europe alone.

The bill for dealing with the waste is huge, but no government has yet calculated accurately what it is, nor has any put aside enough funds to deal with it. By mid-2019 there were 181 closed nuclear reactors globally, but only 19 had been fully decommissioned, with just 10 restored as greenfield sites.

The report does not comment on governments’ competence or honesty, but it does make it clear they are not facing up to reality. For example, the UK has more than 100 tons of stored plutonium, for which it has no use − but it refuses to class plutonium as a waste. The report says it will cost at least £3 billion ($3.8bn) “to manage” whatever decision is reached to deal with it.

Each of the countries in Europe that has nuclear power stations is studied in the report. Spent fuel is the single most dangerous source of highly radioactive waste, and all 16 countries in Europe with highly irradiated fuel have yet to deal with it. France has the highest number of spent fuel rods with 13,990 tons in cooling ponds, Germany 8,485, the UK 7,700.

Information withheld

France has the largest unresolved stockpile of all categories of nuclear waste, plus the legacy of a uranium mining industry. The cost of decommissioning and waste management was put at €43.7 billion ($60.3bn) in 2014, but this is almost certainly an underestimate, the report says.

Looking outside Europe, the US probably has the largest and most complex volumes of nuclear waste in the world, the experts say. Yet it has no plans for dealing with it, and vast quantities of all types of waste are in temporary storage.

The authors admit that, despite their year-long study, the report cannot be comprehensive. This is because information from some countries, for example Russia and China, is not available. But they add that across the world all governments are failing to face up to the size of the task and its costs.

Although some countries had set notional dates for dealing with their wastes as far into the future as 2060, others had no idea at all. The authors promise to produce updated reports in future years.

The Left Is Finally Winning the War of Ideas

Good ideas are like viruses. They grow and spread despite our best efforts to stop them. And yes, our bulbous, awkward species does indeed work very hard to catch and kill good ideas.

At the time I write this column, the first Democratic primaries are approaching with the zest and excitement of an unavoidable bowel movement. Even if you read this a year or two or 10 from now, primaries will still be advancing toward you. As sure as the universe expands, the primaries approach. The moment we finish one election season, another is on the horizon.

This serves two purposes. First, it continuously makes voters think that we matter, that we have a lot of sway over the course this country takes. We don’t. (Well, not as much as we think we do.) And the second purpose is to fill the mainstream media airwaves with vacuous political play-by-play for two straight years. For example, by covering the three-point shift in Pete Buttigieg’s likability amongst Iowans (which matters as much as a three-point shift in the average Iowan’s concern about getting trichinosis from undercooked anchovies), the corporate media cogs can avoid talking about the exploitation of American workers or the massive debt crushing most people or the environmental collapse gripping the planet or the highly advanced, highly illegal surveillance state in which we live.

Our electoral politics is a beautiful smokescreen for the ruling elite.

But no matter what happens in these overtly rigged Democratic National Committee primaries, those of us who care about the world and care about our fellow human beings are winning the war of ideas. Simply take a look at the ideas that are dominating the Democratic presidential race, even though the corporate media has tried to ignore these solutions, attack them, dispute them, and then ignore them all over again.

1) Medicare for All

This is the idea that if you’re 5 years old and you break your arm, no matter how little you get paid at your child labor job, you shouldn’t have to fix your broken arm yourself with a papier-mâché cast made from soiled Kleenex and bird poop. Although  Medicare for All was initially put forward by the Green Party and left-wing activists, and now it’s a mainstream discussion. The idea perseveres despite interminable attacks from the moneyed and the well-heeled as they sit neck-deep in mountains of top-shelf health care. (I hear many of them get young blood transfusions just for kicks on the weekend.) The rich continue to espouse one of the worst systems in the developed world, as if it’s somehow justifiable that two-thirds of Americans who declare bankruptcy each year do so partially because of health care costs.

2) The Green New Deal

This is an economic proposal that would give a majority of Americans a job and switch to renewable energy, among other things. Basically it would solve both our fossil fuel death spiral and unemployment problems in one fell swoop. It was put forward initially by the Green Party and left-wing activists, but then it quickly rose to the level of mainstream discussion, resulting in a bill by Congress. This is an impressive feat even though there are criticisms of the Democratic rewriting of the Green New Deal (such as its failure to address the military-industrial complex, which happens to be the largest polluter in the known world, but maybe we’ll find a lost tribe in the Amazon that runs a few hundred thousand warships on diesel and then our Pentagon will drop down to the second biggest polluter).

3) Legalizing Marijuana

If I have to explain what this is to you, then you clearly haven’t turned on a television in the past 50 years nor caught a glimpse of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (the show, the movie, the action figure, the comic book, the video game, the candy or the song). The legalization of cannabis in all its nifty forms has rapidly spread across the country—which is not just crucial to people who have gained tremendous medical benefits from cannabis but also crucial for anybody who needs to get viciously baked in order to watch the impeachment hearings (which is the only legitimate way to watch the impeachment hearings).

Marijuana has become so widely accepted that Joe Biden recently became a laughingstock when he called weed a “gateway drug.” Yes grandpa, the evil weed is a gateway drug, and rock music is the devil’s work, and dancing with a girl before marriage can cause one’s phallus to fall off. … Not to mention, who is Joe Biden to tell us not to get a little loopy at the end of a long day? How many prescription meds must it take that guy to simply put on his pants each morning?

4) $15 Minimum Wage

I don’t have to tell you why this matters. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. You know what you can buy with $7 these days? A Ding-Dong out of the vending machine. So maybe, after a worker has labored for 39 straight hours, he can tether all the Ding-Dong packages together into a rudimentary raft that will allow him to float downriver to somewhere that treats him better. At $7.25 an hour, no one can possibly get by. I did the math: You’d have to work for 3700 years just to afford a ticket to the Mötley Crüe reunion tour. (And they’re not even good. Imagine if you wanted tickets to see someone good.)

5) Distrust of Mainstream Corporate Media

Even if you’re one of these certifiable nut-bags who still turns on CNN or Fox News every day all day, you still understand that you’re not getting the full truth. You might think you’re getting a piece of it, but not all of it. … Also, you should be euthanized.

(Okay, maybe not euthanized, but anyone who leaves cable news on in the background just to feel warm and cozy should at the very least be left on a faraway island to live out their days. If you’re one of them, please stop it. Corporate media crap is not the audio version of your childhood blankey. It’s pathetic PROPAGANDA. … Sorry to yell.)

6) Distrust of U.S.-Backed Coups and War Games

Most Americans are opposed to endless war now. We’re opposed to harming and killing so many millions in the name of propping up our bloated, belligerent empire that eats entire nations and then vomits up new KFC franchise locations. Obviously the growing disgust among most of the country has not managed to stop the bombs from falling, but it’s a start.

I’m sure you don’t have the time to read the entire list of ideas that were once considered far left and are now mainstream vibrant discussions—abolishing ICE, holding police accountable, distrusting the intelligence community AKA the surveillance state, questioning capitalism, ending factory farming, confronting the extreme climate crisis, etc. etc. Sure, our elections are rigged in favor of the two corporate Wall Street-funded parties. And yes, our media is owned and operated by the largest, most aggressive corporations in the world leaving little to no room on the air for the anti-war activists offering free hugs and senseless acts of kindness. But that’s why it’s all the more impressive that in so many areas, we are winning the seemingly endless battle for the mindscape of our country.

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Lee Camp’s new book. “Bullet Points and Punch Lines.” with a foreword by Chris Hedges. is available for pre-sale at LeeCampBook.com . This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “ Redacted Tonight .”

 

Plantations Can Help Us Heal the Wounds of Slavery

Thomas Jefferson may have written that all men were created equal in the Declaration of Independence. But he, along with so many of his fellow plantation owners, was still complicit in the institution of slavery.

Jefferson’s famous Monticello plantation, a picturesque venue most popular today for hosting weddings and other special occasions, was a place of terror for those African captives who would never gain freedom in Jefferson’s lifetime.

During a recent visit to Monticello, I learned that Jefferson personally kept upwards of 600 people in bondage. It was ironic — the very man I was taught to revere in history class kept my ancestors as property.

My trip to the plantation was emotional. I had heard stories of the slave quarters along Mulberry Row, and the recent discovery of unmarked graves of enslaved people who died at Monticello. Seeing the place firsthand was an altogether heavy experience.

But I also felt something else on that trip — something surprising: relief.

I had been certain that the dark history of slavery would be watered down at a tourist destination like Monticello. But thankfully, that was not the case. Instead, I was impressed by the site’s thorough, honest, and critical depiction of slave life at Monticello.

Our tour guide shared the brutality endured by slaves along Mulberry Row. He spoke of how they lived, and how they were severely punished to the point of death.

Our tour guide retold the radical truth of what my ancestors experienced under the purveyance of Thomas Jefferson. I was simultaneously angered by what I learned and satisfied that this history was offered in a way that demanded compassion and understanding by those present.

Yet, I was also appalled by the comments and questions of some of the white people on the tour. One man asked if Thomas Jefferson had been a “kind slave owner,” to which our tour guide — himself a white man — responded there was no such thing.

Another woman commented that the slave quarters weren’t “so bad.” Our tour guide responded with a simple question: “Would you live there?”

Such questions are not uncommon, and reports abound of white visitors complaining about having to confront facts about slavery during plantation tours. All this makes it abundantly clear that the history of slavery needs to be taught with unwavering honesty, whether when visiting a plantation or developing school curricula.

White America needs to acknowledge that, like it or not, racism is alive and well today because of the horrors of our past that helped shape who we are as a society. Racism is as American as Apple pie; to shirk away from the awful details is as shameful as the details themselves.

After 250 years of chattel slavery, and another 100 years of Jim Crow, one can only imagine the trauma Blacks have endured. Imagine our ancestors being bought, sold, beaten and separated from their families. Imagine the lynchings that took place in this country, and the justice that went unserved.

If it’s difficult for white Americans to discuss racism, how must Black Americans must feel?

In her book White Fragility, author Robin DiAngelo wrote that many white people lack the “racial stamina” to even engage in such conversations. As an activist, I would have to agree. But it’s hardly impossible, as the dedicated white tour guide at Monticello showed. And it’s worth it.

It’s been 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived on these shores, and that’s why we must talk about the history of race in America. In doing so, while bravely leaning into our discomfort, we heal. We reconcile our history. We’re no longer beholden to the guilt and shame of the past. Humanity is restored.

Google Co-Founders Step Down From Management Roles

SAN FRANCISCO — The co-founders of Google are stepping down as executives of its parent company, Alphabet, ending a remarkable two decades during which Larry Page and Sergey Brin shaped a startup born in a Silicon Valley garage into one of the largest, most powerful — and, increasingly, most feared — companies in the world.

Sundar Pichai, who has been leading Google as CEO for more than four years, will take on additional duties as Alphabet’s CEO, the position held by Page. The company isn’t filling Brin’s position as president.

Page and Brin started Google soon after they met as Stanford University graduate students in 1995.

What began as a way to catalog the growing internet has now become one of the most influential companies in the world. Google dominates online search and digital advertising and makes the world’s most widely used operating system for smartphones, Android. It’s hard to make it through a whole day without using one of Google’s services — ranging from online tools to email, cloud computing systems, phones and smart speaker hardware.

Yet Google has been facing pressure from privacy advocates over its collection and use of personal information to target advertising. It also faces allegations that it abuses its dominance in search and online advertising to push out rivals.

Google is the subject of antitrust inquiries from Congress, the Department of Justice and a contingency of states in the U.S. and from European authorities. The company has also faced harsh criticism about the material on its services. Its video streaming business, YouTube, was fined $170 million to settle allegations it improperly collected personal data on children without their parents’ consent.

Longtime tech analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies doesn’t expect much to change with the executive shuffle. And if anything does, he said, it will be due to government regulation.

Pichai assured employees in an internal email that his new job wouldn’t mean he was taking a step back from Google.

“I want to be clear that this transition won’t affect the Alphabet structure or the work we do day to day,” he wrote. “I will continue to be very focused on Google and the deep work we’re doing to push the boundaries of computing and build a more helpful Google for everyone.”

Alphabet — an umbrella corporation that the two created in 2015 — still boasts Google as its central fixture and key moneymaker. But it’s also made up of what are known as “other bets,” or longshot projects. That includes drone company Wing and self-driving car firm Waymo.

Page and Brin, in announcing the news Tuesday, said the company has “evolved and matured” in the two decades since its founding. Both promised to stay active as board members and shareholders.

“Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost,” they wrote in a blog post.

Page and Brin, both 46, both have been noticeably absent from Google events in the past year. Both stopped making appearances at the weekly question-and-answer sessions with employees, and Page didn’t attend this summer’s Alphabet shareholders meeting even though he was still in the CEO role.

Alphabet has been positioning Pichai as the de facto leader for quite some time. It has made him the top executive voice at shareholders meetings, on earnings call and as a spokesman at congressional hearings.

Pichai, 47, has worked at the company for 15 years, serving as a leader in projects to build Google’s Chrome browser and overseeing Android. Pichai, who has an engineering background, took over as the head of Google’s products before being promoted to CEO when Alphabet was created. Pichai is known as a soft-spoken and respected manager.

Last year, Google raised hackles in Congress by refusing to send Page or Pichai to a hearing on Russian manipulation of internet services to sway U.S. elections. Congressional officials left an empty chair while top executives from Facebook and Twitter appeared. Offended lawmakers derided Google as “arrogant.”

Although Bajarin said he doesn’t believe Brin and Page are leaving “because the fire is getting hotter,” he said Pichai’s role at Google has been preparing him for the increased government scrutiny.

Brin and Page still hold a majority of voting shares of Alphabet. According to a regulatory filing in April, Page holds 42.9% of the company’s Class B shares and 26.1% of its voting power. Brin holds 41.3% of the Class B shares and 25.2% of the voting power. According to Forbes magazine, Page has a net worth of $52.4 billion and Brin $56.8 billion.

“Keep in mind, they are not losing their title as billionaires, but they are changing their roles,” Bajarin said.

Google’s stock increased less than 1% in after-hours trading after the news was announced.

Google’s longest serving CEO is still Eric Schmidt, the former executive brought into the role in 2001 as a so-called “adult supervisor” for Brin and Page. Schmidt stepped into the position as the company’s board worried about the relative inexperience of Brin and Page to manage the growing company. He remained CEO until 2011, when Page once again became chief executive. Schmidt stayed on the board until this year.

Page grew up in Michigan, where his late father, Carl, was a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, and his mother taught computer programming. Page began working on personal computers when he was just 6 years old in 1979, when home computers were a rarity. The geeky impulses carried into his adulthood, leading him to once build an inkjet printer out of Legos.

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AP Technology Writers Mae Anderson in New York and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this story.

Desperate Asylum Seekers Running Through Traffic at Border Crossing

PHOENIX — For months, asylum seekers have been prohibited from filing their claims at U.S. border crossings under a much-criticized Trump administration policy. Now some are sprinting down vehicle lanes or renting cars to try to make it inside the U.S.

The migrants’ efforts are causing traffic delays at Arizona crossings because U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had to barricade lanes used by cars legally entering the U.S. from Mexico, officials said.

Shoppers, teachers and visitors traveling to the U.S. through Nogales, Mexico, endured up to five-hour waits Monday and over the weekend, causing concerns among local officials whose tax base relies on Mexican shoppers, especially during the holiday season.

In a statement, Customs and Border Protection said it’s committed to the safety of border crossers, adding that there’s been an increase of incursions through vehicle lanes “by asylum seekers attempting to evade established entry processes.”

“These tactics interfere with CBP officers conducting their responsibilities and exacerbates wait times for daily commuters,” the agency said in a statement. “CBP will not allow ports to be overrun, or unauthorized entry.”

The traffic jams could hurt sales at stores in Nogales, Arizona that depend on Mexican shoppers during the holiday season, said Mayor Arturo Garino.

Garino, a part-time teacher, said some students and teachers who live in Mexico but attend and work at schools across the border in the U.S. have been leaving their homes as early as 5 a.m. to arrive on time.

Garino said Mexican authorities were not doing enough to stem the problem. The Arizona Daily Star reported the Nogales, Sonora, police officers were checking cars headed north to the border on Monday afternoon.

The metal barricades are large and are meant to seal off traffic lanes.

About 3,000 migrants are living in Nogales, Mexico as they wait their turns to seek asylum, said Katie Sharar, communications director for the Kino Border Initiative, a religious-based group that provides meals to needy migrants on the Mexican side of the border.

Under a policy by the Trump administration known widely as “metering,” the asylum-seekers must wait in an unofficial line in Mexico until U.S. authorities call them up in a process that usually lasts several months.

Another policy, colloquially known as “Remain in Mexico,” requires asylum seekers to return to Mexico after they have made credible fear claims to justify their asylum requests and wait there while their immigration cases are pending.

“I think there’s just a lot of desperation and uncertainty. They don’t know what’s happening to them, they don’t know how the policy changes are gonna affect them,” Sharar said.

Sharar said she wasn’t familiar with the migrants who have run through vehicle lanes.

Customs and Border Protection did not respond to email and phone messages regarding questions about the migrants who rushed the border, what countries they come from and whether they were detained or faced criminal charges.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, said his first concern is public safety and that he is confident that U.S. officials will resolve the border traffic problems.

___

Associated Press writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Has the Backing of Leftists Worldwide

Leftist leaders from the United Kingdom to South America have a clear ally in the U.S. presidential election. In a crowded presidential primary, Bernie Sanders has distinguished himself from centrists like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and even fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren by calling the ouster of Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales a coup, praising Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and drawing parallels between his campaign and mass protests in Chile, Lebanon and Iraq.

Sanders’ support for international far-left leaders, Politico explains, “are a clear mark of distinction from Warren in a race in which their domestic agendas are viewed as very similar.”

“Bernie is the only candidate who has a comprehensive foreign policy vision to stand up to the growing movement of anti-democratic authoritarianism worldwide and find solidarity with working people around the world who, in many cases, share common needs,” Josh Orton, Sanders’ national policy director, told Politico.

During a Democratic candidate forum hosted by Spanish-language channel Univision, Sanders said, “I think Morales did a very good job in alleviating poverty and giving the indigenous people of Bolivia a voice that they never had before.” Of Morales’ ouster, Sanders added, “When the military intervenes … in my view, that’s called a ‘coup.’ ”

Sanders also said that Lula “has done more than anyone to lower poverty in [the country] and to stand up for workers.” In 2017, he said he was “very impressed” by UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, he saw “a real similarity” between their positions, and that he particularly appreciated Corbyn’s willingness to take on class issues.

Sanders’ commitment to worldwide leftism was apparent even before he announced his second run for president. In one 2017 speech, he called interventions in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America “just a few examples of American foreign policy and interventionism which proved to be counterproductive.”

So far, the world leaders appear to return the affection. Morales called him “hermano Bernie Sanders.” Lula thanked him for the solidarity.

As Truthdig’s Jacob Sugarman has observed about Morales’ ouster, “the response of leading Democrats and presidential hopefuls has been one of almost total silence, even among the party’s putative progressives.” Warren, Sugarman observes, “declined to comment publicly despite the gruesome precedent in the region.” Politico points out that a few days after Sanders’ initial comments, when pressed by The Young Turks on whether Morales’ ouster was a coup, Warren changed her tone and said, it “sure looks like that.”

In general, Warren has attempted an “all things to all people” approach on foreign policy. In a 2018 speech at American University, she described  America’s involvement in international politics thusly: “It wasn’t perfect — we weren’t perfect — but our foreign policy benefited a lot of people around the world.”

Read the full Politico story here.