War Is A Crime

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s the strange thing for the self-proclaimed greatest power in history, the very one that, in this century, has been fighting a series of unending wars across significant parts of the planet: if you exclude Operation Urgent Fury, the triumphant invasion of the island Grenada in 1983, and read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It wasn’t until this sentence in the sixth paragraph of the September 23rd New York Times article on the killing of Afghan civilians that the wedding slaughter was even mentioned: “But Haji Attaullah Afghan, head of the provincial council in Helmand, said read more

Mark Isaacs is the author, among other books, of the new book, The Kabul Peace House, which we discuss, and which describes a community of peace activists in Afghanistan. Mark is president of Sydney PEN, an affiliate of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers which defends freedom of expression and campaigns on behalf of writers who have been silenced by persecution or imprisonment. He speaks with us from Australia. His website is markjisaacs.com

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You cannot promote the rule of law by loudly bragging about committing murder. You cannot end terrorism by committing terrorism. Here is a U.S. president openly proclaiming that he has committed murder in order to let people be afraid they’ll be next. If anything fits the definition of terrorism, that does. The U.S. public cannot see it because (1) whatever the U.S. does is good, (2) Trump’s fans support anything he does, (3) loyalists of the Democratic Party believe that any crimes read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

You know, it’s strange. There are certain moments that you and everyone in your generation never forget. For instance, I can tell you exactly where I was — eating a 25-cent hamburger in a diner that might have been called the Yankee Doodle in New Haven, Connecticut — when a man stuck his head in the front door and said, “The president’s been shot.” That, of course, was John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and I have little doubt that, if you asked just about anyone else my age, they’d have a remarkably specific memory of that moment, too.

But here’s the strange thing that TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll brought to my mind with today’s piece on what may qualify as the single most important historical event of my life: the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. I have no idea what I was doing or where I was that November 9th in 1989 when I first heard that the forever structure dividing East from West that symbolized the two-superpower world of the Cold War was coming down. I have just vague memories of TV images of crowds surging and the wall being whacked at by people with sledgehammers.

And that should qualify as odd indeed. After all, my life was, in a sense, an artifact of the Cold War. I still remember photos of grim-faced Korean War G.I.s in Life magazine when I was only six or seven. I remember the duck-and-cover moments under my desk in school, preparation for the potential nuclear obliteration of my city, when I was just a few years older. I remember sitting in a car on the evening of October 22, 1962, with the radio on, and hearing the still-living John F. Kennedy alert the nation that the Cuban Missile crisis was underway and say that “we will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth; but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.” I think I tasted those very ashes then and felt I was a goner, that my specific world might blow sky-high. I remember being out in the streets amid masses of antiwar protestors in the Vietnam War years and wondering how all this would ever end. And so it went until that day in 1989 when, suddenly, to the utter shock of every last pundit, wise man, official, and politician in Washington, that wall began to be torn down and the Soviet Union’s end came into sight.

What a moment, as Carroll makes so clear today — and how strange that it and the hopes that went with it disappeared into the maw of the American national security state and its endless wars. Tom
What the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Means 30 Years Later
And the Return of War-as-the-Answer
By James Carroll

Some anniversaries are less about the past than the future. So it should be with November 9, 1989. In case you’ve long forgotten, that was the day when East and West Germans began nonviolently dismantling the Berlin Wall, an entirely unpredicted, almost unimaginable ending to the long-entrenched Cold War. Think of it as the triumph of idealistic hope over everything that then passed for hard-nosed “realism.” After all, Western intelligence services, academic Kremlinologists, and the American national security establishment had always blithely assumed that the Cold War would essentially go on forever — unless the absolute malevolence of Soviet Communism led to the ultimate mayhem of nuclear Armageddon. For almost half a century, only readily dismissed peaceniks insisted that, in the nuclear age, war and endless preparations for more of it were not the answer. When the Berlin Wall came down, such idealists were proven right, even if their triumph was still ignored.

Yet war-as-the-answer reasserted itself with remarkable rapidity. Within weeks of the Wall being breached by hope — in an era that saw savage conflicts in Central America, the Philippines, and South Africa transformed by a global wave of nonviolent resolution — the United States launched Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama by a combat force of more than 27,000 troops. The stated purpose of that act of war was the arrest of Panama’s tinhorn dictator Manuel Noriega, who had initially come to power as a CIA asset. That invasion’s only real importance was as a demonstration that, even with global peace being hailed, the world’s last remaining superpower remained as committed as ever to the hegemony of violent force.

Who Ended the Cold War?

While President George H.W. Bush rushed to claim credit for ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev was the lynchpin of that historic conclusion. It was he who, in the dramatic autumn of 1989, repeatedly ordered Communist forces to remain in their barracks while throngs of freedom-chanters poured into the streets of multiple cities behind the Iron Curtain. Instead of blindly striking out (as the leaders of crumbling empires often had), Gorbachev allowed democratic demands to echo through the Soviet empire — ultimately even in Russia itself.

Yet the American imagination was soon overtaken by the smug fantasy that the U.S. had “won” the Cold War and that it was now a power beyond all imagining. Never mind that, in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan issued his famed demand in then still-divided Berlin, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Soviet leader was already starting to do precisely that.

As the wall came down, the red-scare horrors that had disturbed American dreams for three generations seemed to dissolve overnight, leaving official Washington basking in triumphalism. The U.S. then wrapped itself in a self-aggrandizing mantle of virtue and power that effectively blinded this country’s political leadership to the ways the Cold War’s end had left them mired in an outmoded, ever more dangerous version of militarism.

After Panama, the self-styled “indispensable nation” would show itself to be hell-bent on unbridled — and profoundly self-destructive — belligerence. Deprived of an existential enemy, Pentagon budgets would decline oh-so-modestly (though without a “peace dividend” in sight) but soon return to Cold War levels. A bristling nuclear arsenal would be maintained as a “hedge” against the comeback of Soviet-style communism. Such thinking would, in the end, only empower Moscow’s hawks, smoothing the way for the future rise of an ex-KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. Such hyper-defensive anticipation would prove to be, as one wag put it, the insurance policy that started the fire.

Even as the disintegration of the once-demonized USSR was firmly underway, culminating in the final lowering of the hammer-and-sickle flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, the United States was launching what would prove to be a never-ending and disastrous sequence of unnecessary Middle Eastern wars. They began with Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990. In American memory, that campaign, which crushed the Iraqi autocrat’s army and forced it out of Kuwait, would be a techno-war made in heaven with fewer than 200 U.S. combat deaths.

That memory, however, fits poorly with what was actually happening that year. An internationally mounted sanctions regime had already been on the verge of thwarting Hussein without the U.S.-led invasion — and, of course, what Bush the father began, Bush the son would, with his 2003 shock-and-awe recapitulation, turn into the permanent bedrock of American politics. 

As the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War approaches, it should be obvious that there’s been a refusal in the United States to reckon with a decades-long set of conflagrations in the Greater Middle East as the inevitable consequence of that first American invasion in 1990. Above all, Desert Storm, with its monumental victory parade in Washington D.C., brought the Pentagon’s Cold War raison d’être back from the brink of obsolescence. That campaign and what followed in its wake guaranteed that violence would continue to occupy the heartlands of the U.S. economy, its politics, and its culture. In the process, the world-historic aspirations kindled by the miracle of the Berlin Wall’s dismantling would be thoroughly dashed. No wonder, so many years later, we hardly remember that November of hope — or the anniversary that goes with it.

Out of the Memory Hole

By revisiting its astonishing promise as the anniversary approaches, however, and by seeing it more fully in light of what made it so surprising, perhaps something of that vanished positive energy can still be retrieved. So let me call to mind the events of various earlier Novembers that make the point. What follows is a decade-by-decade retracing of the way the war machine trundled through recent history — and through the American psyche — until it was finally halted in a battle-scarred, divided city in the middle of Europe, stopped by an urge for peace that refused to be denied.

Let’s start with November 1939, only weeks after the German invasion of Poland that began what would become World War II. A global struggle between good and evil was just then kicking into gear. Unlike the previous Great War of 1914-1918, which was fought for mere empire, Hitler’s war was understood in distinctly Manichaean terms as both apocalyptic and transcendent. After all, the moral depravity of the Nazi project had already been laid bare when Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes everywhere in Germany were subject to the savagery of Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass.” That ignition of what became an anti-Jewish genocide took place, as it happened, on November 9, 1938.

The good-versus-evil absolutism of World War II stamped the American imagination so profoundly that a self-righteous moral dualism survived not only into the Cold War but into Washington’s twenty-first-century war on terror. In such contests against enemies defined as devils, Americans could adopt the kinds of ends-justify-the-means strategies called for by “realism.” When you are fighting along what might be thought of as an axis of evil, anything goes — from deceit and torture to the routine sacrifice of civilians, whose deaths in America’s post-9/11 wars have approached a total of half a million. Through it all, we were assured of one certain thing: that God was on our side. (“God is not neutral,” as George W. Bush put it just days after the 9/11 attacks.)

From Genocide to Omnicide

But what if God could not protect us? That was the out-of-the-blue question posed near the start of all this — not in August 1945 when the U.S. dropped its “victory weapon” on two cities in Japan, but in August 1949 when the Soviet Union acquired an atomic bomb, too. By that November, the American people were already in the grip of an unprecedented nuclear paranoia, which prompted President Harry Truman to override leading atomic scientists and order the development of what one called a “genocidal weapon,” the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Then came the manic build-up of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to proportions suitable less for genocide than for “omnicide.” Such weapons mushroomed (if you’ll excuse the word in a potentially mushroom-clouded world) from fewer than 200 in 1950 to nearly 20,000 a decade later. Of course, that escalation, in turn, drove Moscow forward in a desperate effort to keep up, leading to an unhinged arms race that turned the suicide of the human species into a present danger, one measured by the Doomsday Clock, of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was set at two minutes to midnight in 1953 — and then again in 2019, all these Novembers later.

Now, let’s flash forward another decade to November 1959 when the mortal danger of human self-extinction finally became openly understood, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began issuing blatant threats of nuclear war over — you guessed it — Berlin. Because part of that city, far inside Communist East Germany, was still occupied by American, French, and British forces, it amounted to a tear in what was then called the Iron Curtain, separating the Soviet empire from Western Europe. With thousands fleeing through that tear to the so-called Free World, the Soviets became increasingly intent on shutting the escape hatch, threatening to use the Red Army to drive the Allies out of Berlin. That brought the possibility of a nuclear conflict to the fore.

Ultimately, the Communists would adopt a quite different strategy when, in 1961, they built that infamous wall, a concrete curtain across the city. At the time, Berliners sometimes referred to it, with a certain irony, as the “Peace Wall” because, by blocking escape from the East, it made the dreaded war between the two Cold War superpowers unnecessary. Yet within a year the unleashed prospect of such a potentially civilization-ending conflict had hopscotched the globe to Communist Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 caused the world to shudder as incipient nuclear war between Washington and Moscow suddenly loomed. That moment, just before Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy stepped back from doomsday, might have changed something; a relieved world’s shock of recognition, that is, might have thrown the classic wooden shoe of sabotage into the purring engine of “realism.” No such luck, however, as the malevolent power of the war state simply motored on — in the case of the United States directly into Vietnam.

By November 1969, President Richard Nixon’s cynical continuation of the Vietnam War for his own political purposes had already driven the liberal-conservative divide over that misbegotten conflict into the permanent structure of American politics. The ubiquitous “POW/MIA: You Are Not Forgotten” flag survives today as an icon of Nixon’s manipulations. Still waving over ball parks, post offices, town halls, and VFW posts across the nation, that sad black banner now flies as a symbol of red state/blue state antagonism — and as a lasting reminder of how we Americans can make prisoners of ourselves.

By 1979, with the Vietnam War in the past, President Jimmy Carter showed how irresistible November’s tide — the inexorable surge toward war — truly was. It was in November of that year that militant Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage — the event that was credited with stymying the formerly peace-minded president. In reality, though, Carter had already initiated the historic anti-Soviet arms build-up for which President Ronald Reagan would later be credited.

Then, of course, Carter would ominously foreshadow America’s future reversals in the deserts of the Levant with a failed rescue of those hostages. Most momentously, however, he would essentially license future Middle East defeats with what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine — the formally declared principle that the Persian Gulf (and its oil) were “vital interests” of this country, worthy of defense “by any means necessary, including military force.” (And of course, his CIA would lead us into America’s first Afghan War, still in a sense going on some 40 years later.)

Retrieving Hope?

Decade by decade, the evidence of an unstoppable martial dynamic only seemed to accumulate. In that milestone month of November 1989, Washington’s national security “realists” were still stuck in the groove of such worst-case thinking. That they were wrong, that they would be stunned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union, should mandate thoughtful observance of this coming 30th anniversary.

During the late 1980s, a complex set of antiwar and antinuclear countercurrents seemed to come out of nowhere. Each of them should have been impossible. The ruthlessly totalitarian Soviet system should not have produced in Mikhail Gorbachev a humane statesman who sacrificed empire and his own career for the sake of peace. The most hawkish American president in history, Ronald Reagan, should not have responded to Gorbachev by working to end the arms race with him — but he did.

Pressuring those two leaders to pursue that course — indeed, forcing them to — was an international grassroots movement demanding an end to apocalyptic terror. People wanted peace so much, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted in 1959, that, miracle of all miracles, governments got out of their way and let them have it. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall that November 9th — a transformation accomplished by ordinary citizens, not soldiers — the political realm of the possible was substantially broadened, not only to include prospective future detente among warring nations, but an eventual elimination of nuclear weapons themselves.

Yet, in November 2019, all of that seems lost. A 

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Despite the upbeat words from America’s billionaire president about the “economic miracle” he has produced, economic inequality in the United States is on the rise.

In August 2019, the Economic Policy Institute reported that, in 2018, the average pay of CEOs at America’s 350 top firms hit $17.2 million―an increase, when adjusted for inflation, of 1,007.5 percent since 1978.  By contrast, the typical worker’s wage, adjusted for inflation, grew by only 11.9 percent over this 40-year period.  In 1965, the ratio of CEO-to-worker’s pay stood at 20-to-1; by 2018 (when CEOs received another hefty pay raise and workers received a 0.2 percent pay cut), it had reached 278-to-1.

An AFL-CIO study, released in June 2019, had similar findings.  Examining compensation at Standard & Poors 500 companies, the labor federation reported that average CEO pay in 2018 had increased by $5.2 million over the preceding 10 years.  This resulted in an average CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 287-to-1.

These figures, of course, are only averages, and at numerous major corporations, the economic gap between boss and worker is much greater.  According to the AFL-CIO, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at Walmart (America’s largest private employer) is 1,076 to 1, at Walt Disney Company 1,424-to-1, at McDonald’s 2,124-to-1, and at Gap 3,566-to-1.  At 49 S&P 500 firms, noted an Institute for Policy Studies report, half the work force―that is, 3.7 million employees―received wages below the official U.S. poverty line for a family of four.

Thus, despite the soaring incomes of top corporate executives and other wealthy Americans, the median household income in the United States grew by only 0.2 percent during 2018―a decline from the three previous years.  Commenting on U.S. wage stagnation, Sam Pizzigati, co-editor of inequality.org, observed that “average Americans have spent this entire century on a treadmill getting nowhere fast.  The nation’s median―most typical―households pocketed 2.3 percent fewer real dollars in 2018 than they earned in 2000.”

Although President Donald Trump has claimed that “inequality is down,” federal data released this year show that, in 2018, the nation’s income inequality reached the highest level since the U.S. Census Bureau began measuring it five decades before.

U.S. economic inequality is even greater in terms of wealth.  During the Democratic presidential debate in late June 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders reminded Americans that just three U.S. billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) possessed as much wealth as half the people in the United States combined.  And the three richest U.S. families―the Waltons (owners of Walmart), the Mars candy family, and the Koch family (owners of a vast fossil fuel conglomerate)―possessed a combined fortune ($348.7 billion), which is 4 million times the wealth of the median U.S. family.

Although the median net worth of U.S. households has declined (after adjusting for inflation) since the late 1990s, the fortunes of the wealthy have skyrocketed.  The American billionaires sharing their ostensible wisdom at the World Economic Forum in Davos at the beginning of 2019 made enormous gains in wealth over the previous decade.  They included Jamie Dimon (275 percent), Rupert Murdoch (472 percent), Stephen Schwarzman (486 percent), Marc Benioff (823 percent), and Mark Zuckerberg (1,853 percent).

According to computations made by Forbes in October 2019, the ten wealthiest Americans (with riches ranging from $53 billion to $107.5 billion each) had combined wealth of $697 billion―or an average of $69.7 billion each.  Assuming that, henceforth, they had no further income and had limitless longevity, they could each spend a million dollars a day for approximately 191 years.

Most other Americans possess far fewer economic resources.  In 2018, 38.1 million Americans lived below the U.S. government’s official poverty threshold, including many people working at multiple jobs.  Furthermore, another 93.6 million Americans lived close to poverty, bringing the total of impoverished and near-impoverished people to nearly 42 percent of the U.S. population.

Naturally, economic deprivation has serious consequences.  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 14.3 million households in America have difficulty providing enough food for their families.  Low income families are also plagued by inadequate education, alcohol and substance abuse, and poor housing, health, and life expectancy.  The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in September 2019 that poor Americans die at an earlier age than rich ones.  Indeed, in 2019, for the first time in a century, life expectancy in the United States declined for three consecutive years.  Suicide rates, which closely correlate with poverty, increased by 33 percent since 1999.  Even what is left of the dwindling middle class faces the crippling costs of health care, college education, and debt payments.

This situation bears no resemblance to that of America’s ultra-wealthy, who, in addition to pouring money into the campaign coffers of politicians that safeguard and expand their fortunes, continue purchases like one multi-billionaire’s acquisition of a $238 million Manhattan penthouse―a supplement to his two floors at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), Chicago penthouse ($59 million), and additional apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).  Other recent purchases by the ultra-rich include a $100 million, 305-foot “super-yacht” (complete with helipad and IMAX theater), private jet planes ($65 million), and (of course) gold toilet paper.

The latest attraction for America’s ultra-affluent is Manhattan’s 131-floor Central Park Tower building which, when completed, will become the tallest, most expensive residential dwelling in the United States.  It will feature 179 luxury condos ranging in price from $6.9 million to $95 million and a seven-story Nordstrom flagship store with six restaurants, plus three floors of “amenity space” (dubbed the Central Park Club) spanning 50,000 square feet, with an outdoor terrace, pools, a wellness center, and a massive ballroom.  The immense height of the structure will underscore the vast power of the super-rich, as well as enable them to avoid noticing the many “losers” left behind on the teeming streets below.

Lawrence Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).