THE FOGHORN OF WAR: The Price Of Admission

Meet The Presser

I just watched a Republican Leadership presser re: long-stalled NatSec funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, etc., and what strikes me is how utterly delusional American politicians are regarding the world the United States has made. Reps. McCaul (R-TX) & Scalise (R-LA) proclaimed "the world's on fire" and blamed Biden’s "weakness" for setting the match. They bloviated about the need for "strength" in the face of Putin, "the Ayatollah" and China. Reps. Stefanik (R-NY) & McCaul claimed Putin was "emboldened" by the pullout from Afghanistan which, they say, was his green light to invade Ukraine.

Of course, they conveniently overlook the giant flashing green light called Iraq. If ever there was a signal for tin-pot dictators and petty imperialists to start their engines, it was the United States wantonly breaking the “Rules-Based Postwar International Order” into a thousand pieces by defiantly destroying a nation that did not attack it nor posed it any threat. The kicker is that tens of thousands of bombs were dropped, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, all because the US government peddled a badly-scripted lie to justify its crime.

Instead, the GOP’s House Leadership peddled pabulum about a messy, discombobulated pullout from Afghanistan that, they also conveniently ignore, was negotiated by Trump. Stefanik also said Biden’s supposedly precipitous pullout compromised US power in “the Middle East.” Obviously, her kisser is too close to Trump’s rump to see maps showing that Afghanistan is quite notably located in Central Asia.

Then again, if any of the GOP’s House Leadership had even a modicum of shame or an ounce of self-awareness, they'd notice that Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib are just now having their day in court ... finally allowed to face the contractors the US paid to illegally detain and abuse them. They'd see that tortured detainees at Gitmo are still stuck in a perpetual limbo of due process denied. And they'd see the unmistakable message the invasion of Iraq sent to the entire world—that the US could attack any nation at any time without any cause, and it could fearlessly walk away from the Geneva Conventions and confidently step outside the Rules-Based Postwar International Order. There were no legal consequences or sanctions regimes. For Iran and North Korea, on the other hand, it did demonstrate the consequences of NOT having weapons of mass destruction. The absence of WMDs, it turns out, is also a “green light.” Is it any wonder Iran seeks the security North Korea enjoys?

But mostly, the war on Iraq (and a half-dozen other Global War On Terror-affected nations) let the cat bolt from the bag … the truth was out ... the rules-based international system was truly "exceptional" ... meaning, it applied to everyone EXCEPT the United States (and, as we’ve seen, its franchisee in Israel).

Military aggression. Torture. Political imprisonment. Land seizure. If you do one or more of those things, you are an outlaw. If we do it? Nothing. Nada. Not even an apology, let alone a prosecution or, gasp!, reparations.

It’s almost as if we believe the world should be grateful that we don't follow the rules we wrote. Truth be told, the world should thank us for our service. We are the “leaders of the free world,” after all.

The depth of this denial is matched only by the breadth of its implications. How can the US admonish Putin with a straight face? It certainly hasn’t phased him. President Xi seems unimpressed by US admonitions about Taiwan or his starring role as the embodiment of evil among the denizens of Capitol Hill. And then there’s Iran, which beat the US at its own game in Iraq. Amazingly enough, there are US politicians today calling Russia, China and Iran “the Axis of Evil,” thus illustrating just how little (or how much) they’ve learned from the callow jingoism that started this mess in the first place.

Now the whole world is not just on fire figuratively, it’s also literally on fire ... awash in the climate-altering carbon produced by our globe-spanning empire of oil ... an empire that was built with a great deal of “help” by our terrorism-funding Saudi partners. The Saudis literally get away with murder because they are our murderers and US impunity means unqualified immunity for anyone who helps us do our dirty work.

To keep the “freedom” and the oil flowing, we've bombed, overthrown, invaded, destabilized and extracted ... all of it backed by the full faith and credit of our world-dwarfing military. Meanwhile, inflation-addled taxpayers fill the Military-Industrial trough with a little more lucre every single year, lavishing hundreds of billions of dollars on a global protection racket for Big Oil and its partners in the Gulf. And despite it all, we still find ourselves bitching and moaning about the price of gas.

Yet, the real problem, according those Congressional “leaders” at this morning’s presser, is that the United States is not "showing strength." Really? Do they know that Jimmy Carter is the ONLY post-WWII president who never bombed another country? Have they ever stopped to tabulate the deaths the US has wrought ... in Indochina and Indonesia and Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua ... or in East Africa or South America or on the many battlefields of the Middle East?

Then again, they don’t want to know.

And maybe that’s the real reason the “world is on fire.” We can’t handle the truth that we are the arsonist who appointed himself as the world’s firefighter.