By Nick Turse
The American Empire Project (9/5/18)
4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later.
But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 — as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of America. Similar legions of rifle-toting troops did the same after World War I ended with the defeat of Germany and its allies in 1918. And Sherman tanks rolling through the urban canyons of midtown Manhattan? That followed the triumph over the Axis in 1945. That’s what winning used to look like in America — star-spangled, soldier-clogged streets and victory parades.
Enthralled by a martial Bastille Day celebration while visiting French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris in July 2017, President Trump called for just such a parade in Washington. After its estimated cost reportedly ballooned from $10 million to as much as $92 million, the American Legion weighed in. That veterans association, which boasts 2.4 million members, issued an August statement suggesting that the planned parade should be put on hold “until such time as we can celebrate victory in the War on Terrorism and bring our military home.” Soon after, the president announced that he had canceled the parade and blamed local Washington officials for driving up the costs (even though he was evidently never briefed by the Pentagon on what its price tag might be).
What was once the mark of failure for a conventional army is now the benchmark for success.
The American Legion focused on the fiscal irresponsibility of Trump’s proposed march, but its postponement should have raised an even more significant question: What would “victory” in the war on terror even look like? What, in fact, constitutes an American military victory in the world today? Would it in any way resemble the end of the Civil War, or of the war to end all wars, or of the war that made that moniker obsolete? And here’s another question: Is victory a necessary prerequisite for a military parade?
The easiest of those questions to resolve is the last one and the American Legion should already know the answer. Members of that veterans group played key roles in a mammoth “We Support Our Boys in Vietnam” parade in New York City in 1967 and in a 1973 parade in that same city honoring veterans of that war. Then, 10 years after the last U.S. troops snuck out of South Vietnam — abandoning their allies and scrambling aboard helicopters as Saigon fell — the Big Apple would host yet another parade honoring Vietnam veterans, reportedly the largestsuch celebration in the city’s history. So, quite obviously, winning a war isn’t a prerequisite for a winning parade.
And that’s only one of many lessons the disastrous American War in Vietnam still offers us. More salient perhaps are those that highlight the limits of military might and destructive force on this planet or that focus on the ability of North Vietnam, a “little fourth-rate” country — to quote Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor of that moment — to best a superpower that had previously (with much assistance) defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan at the same time. The Vietnam War — and Kissinger — provide a useful lens through which to examine the remaining questions about victory and what it means today, but more on that later.
For the moment, just remember: 4,000,000,029,057, Vietnam War, Kissinger.
Peace in Our Time… or Some Time… or No Time
Now, let’s take a moment to consider the ur-conflict of the war on terror, Afghanistan, where the U.S. began battling the Taliban in October 2001. …
(Commoner Call photo by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link toe www.thecommonercall.org )
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Foreign Policy Magazine Reports ‘Al Qaeda Won’ On 9/11 Anniversary
Not only did Al Qaeda win, but the scale of their victory continues to blossom.
By Martin Cizmar
The Raw Story (9/11/18)
The nonpartisan magazine Foreign Policy marked the anniversary of September 11 with an essay about how the attack changed the United States, and concluded that Al Qaeda succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.
The provocative piece, headlined “Al Qaeda won,” is framed by the concept of “diathetical warfare,” which author Stephen Marche describes as “the battle for hearts and minds—not other people’s but our own.”
In this battle, victory is defined by “clarity,” and defeat as confusion.
And when you step back from 9/11 and look at the significance, you see that the United States has been plunged into a swamp of confusion to the point of electing a president who lies casually and doesn’t believe in objective truth.
“Diathetics is the rearrangement of the enemy’s mindset by spectacle and the means of its consumption,” he writes. “This is a new kind of war and a deeply confusing one. Confusion is its purpose. The problems of assessment are substantial.”
Not only did Al Qaeda win, but the scale of their victory continues to blossom.
“The cultural front opened by 9/11 keeps widening, and the terms of the struggles along those fronts, as each new technology opens them, are almost impossible to recognize immediately. …