C4SS.ORG

Soldiers’ portraits before, during and after war

Voting is kind of like gambling on sports, but slightly more sacred …. You’ve got to play to win, and playing with only a vote is hardly playing at all. The people who place big bets, in large denominations, are the ones who get the big pay-outs. The rest of us are just paying the house. … Myself, I’m sick of arguing with the government. I don’t have any more argument with the government — I know what kind of beast it is, and I know what kind of woman I am. … If you love liberty, if you hate war, you should at once withdraw your support from the government. Withdrawing your moral support isn’t enough — it’s your practical support that the government feeds on — it doesn’t give a damn what your opinions are…. 

Support C4SS with Gina Lunori’s “If You Work for Peace, Stop Paying For War!”

The World Is a Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill on “Dirty Wars” and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks

… JEREMY SCAHILL: I called it Dirty Wars because, you know, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there’s—there is a such thing as a clean war and that the drone and what’s called targeted killing—I mean, I use that term myself, but it’s actually not—if you think about it, it’s actually not a very appropriate term for what’s going on, because it’s—as we know, these strikes are anything but targeted, in many cases, and we don’t know the—we don’t even know the identities of many of the people that we’re killing in intentional strikes. So, I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries. President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to what Reagan and company were doing in Central America. …

Because it was marked “confidential” on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn’t believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq.

Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.

I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.

Bingo! I’d just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest, so I had a right to be chuffed.

After phoning numbers from California to Kazakhstan to trick my mark, my next calls were to the State Department and Pentagon. Now that I had the specs on the scheme for Iraq’s oil – that State and Defense Department swore, in writing, did not exist – I told them I’d appreciate their handing over a copy (no expurgations, please) or there would be a very embarrassing story on BBC Newsnight.

Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq’s oil crafted by George Bush’s State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas.

I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away. …

North Korea announces that it has entered a “state of war” with South Korea and would deal with every inter-Korean issue accordingly.

“As of now, inter-Korea relations enter a state of war and all matters between the two Koreas will be handled according to wartime protocol,” the North said in a joint statement attributed to all government bodies and institutions.

“The long-standing situation of the Korean peninsula being neither at peace nor at war is finally over,” said the statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The two Koreas have always technically remained at war because the 1950-53 Korean War concluded with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. …

US 'shock and audit' over Iraq expenses

The final breakdown of every tax dollar spent by the United States to rebuild post-invasion Iraq was presented to Congress earlier this month - a down-to-the-nickel analysis of nine years and $60bn worth of waste, arrogance and ineptitude unequalled in American history.

The conclusive report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), was a 186-page document titled “Learning From Iraq”, which followed that misspent money on a tragic joyride through the expensive and embarrassing mega-blunders that have become synonymous with US”nation-building” efforts in Iraq since 2003.

Clearly a must-read for any official in US-occupied Afghanistan, the SIGIR report was based on 220 audits, 170 inspections, hundreds of investigations, and, most compellingly, candid interviews with 44 senior Iraqi officials and US military and congressional leaders, including US General David Petraeus, Senator John McCain and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Maliki, for example, told Bowen and his staff “$55bn could have brought great change to Iraq”, but the positive impact of that spending was”lost”. …

'Napalm,' by Robert M. Neer

Sometimes their faces looked scorched. Other times it appeared as if they had literally melted. Often, decades later, it was the skin around the eyes that gave away just what they’d been through. I talked to them up and down the length of what had been South Vietnam. Each had been burned by napalm dropped on their villages by American or allied South Vietnamese forces, and they told me about what it was like. They talked about the heat and the pain and the years of living with the consequences. …

Libertarians and War: A Bibliographical Essay

The relationship between war and libertarianism has interested me since 9/11. In the aftermath of those terrorist attacks, I witnessed in grim fascination many libertarians make excuses for government in the realm of national security. The proper libertarian position on war has become a matter of controversy, although I believe it shouldn’t be. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne said, as well as being “mass murder,” in the words of Murray Rothbard.

The following essay presents some of the most relevant materials and readings on this controversy. …

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care. …