Not only do Americans, including American mainstream media, never ask the question why do we have so many military bases and outposts strewn across the Middle East, but they never contemplate for a second what would it be like if Iraq, Syria, etc. decided to have military bases in this country and use them for bombing raids as they deemed fit. The unqualified right of the US to establish military bases and outposts wherever the hell the US National Security State wants to is accepted as totally normal, as natural as the air we breathe or the sun rising in the morning. Until this "normalization" is dead and buried, you can be sure there will a lot more dead and buried corpses across the Middle East.
This is the dilemma we are in... most people in the US don't pay any attention to what their own country is doing overseas. Even when something ends up in the news, most Americans don't seem to care much or think much about what is actually going on. As far as the media are concerned, they are owned by the wealthy, and the and the talking heads (they sure aren't journalists) are paid to read from the teleprompter. So don't expect them to actually discuss what is going on. I see protests all across Europe, but almost nothing in the US. Since the US is the source of the problem, I don't expect any changes in foreign policy any time soon without a lot more pressure from voters.
If you don't want to bring them home, you support imperialism, or maybe just blindly and stupidly treat war like a football game wave the flag virtue-signaling, but you don't give a shit about our troops.
Most Americans just don't want to bother cause in our imperialistic capitalistic system they're too busy worrying about food on the table or rent to pay rather than foreign policy. Plus there are l a lot of folks that are just to ignorant or kinda get off on us kicking ass in Africa, in South Americ, on the border with Mexico or the Middle east. Kicking ass and killing non whites is their thing. Hell they don't even mind it if we kick ass on Americans esp'ly if they be non whites. that's America in a nut shell folks. This be us.
That will definitely go in THE BEST OF BRACING VIEWS, Bill.
Thank You for nailing it as good as or better than You have ever done; at least since i've been following You.
So again, yet, and still, the Question remains: What needs to be done to end this Bullshit, this Insanity, and this Nation being on a Collision Course With Reality? And Who needs to make that happen and How is that to be done?
The most important---and essential--question is "How." The Left is great at articulating the what and who. You can find tomes and tomes giving different possible answers to the what and who questions. But when it comes to the "how" question, the Left is, for the most part, clueless, beyond the very old ideas of "organize" and "educate." So, because the answer to the "how" question remains unknown, the Left is pretty much reduced to picketing, protesting and chanting. There are lots of folks with intense passion and determination, but without a very strong, disciplined organization that has the capacity, including financially, to actually unite people all across this country to take on the very formidable MICIMATT complex, it is hard to see how any challenge to the status quo can happen.
America's so-called "Left" ~ be they in DC with Bernie, AOC and the Squad, etc, or over in Berkeley, CA at what's left of "The Peoples Park," and all points in between ~ has done absolutely nothing to confront, deal with, and challenge the MICIMATT since, first, 9/11 which spawned "The Forever War," and now Ukraine and Gaza in Cold War II.
So, if the so-called "Left" isn't going to do anything about it, the most important and essential question is indeed HOW? And the critical follow-up question is WHO?
WHO is actually, really going to make what needs to happen Happen?
Of course, the MICIMATT includes media, academe, and think tanks. We can add Hollywood to the media. The truth is that the media, academe, and think tanks, which many Americans think are leftist or left-leaning, are actually rightist or right-leaning, obedient to the general desires of the MI part of the complex.
Also, it's obviously not the Left alone that is at fault. The Right is also far too obedient to the MIC. Yes, you hear criticisms here and there. but when push comes to shove, every Congressional district wants its piece of the huge MI pie.
Ike had it right -- only an alert and knowledgable citizenry (Left, Right, and in-between) can truly keep the MIC in its place. But that would require unity of purpose as well as education and transparency. The MIC loves to sic the left on the right, and vice-versa, wave the flag, keep almost everything meaningful "classified," and sell militarism and nationalism as patriotism.
It's a very tough nut to crack, requiring teamwork and sacrifice.
Yes, the prognosis isn't good, Jeff. I wish I could be more optimistic. I started writing against the MIC in the early 1980s: the Reagan "defense" buildup. Forty years later, the MIC is stronger now than it was then. Ike's warning from 1961 is still not being heeded by nearly all Americans.
It is, in a word, discouraging, as you know from your own experience.
You know the true face of war--so many Americans have never seen it. Or have chosen to look away. And so the madness of militarism and empire continues.
i can only imagine how discouraging it has been ~ and must be ~ over these past 40+ years for You, Bill.
In a completely different spirit and intent from how the hackneyed term is typically used: "Thank You for Your Service."
This nation could use a whole bunch of Veterans who are against War and what it has done, is doing, and will continue to do to this nation and the entire Planet
The question remains: How can the American People be encouraged/ enticed/even forced to stop looking away and actually, really SEE what has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen unless and until They force it to stop?
America is in deep trouble of its own making and the prognosis is awful. The answer is to make peace-making more profitable than war-making. Unlike voting, it cannot be done without thinking and, as Bill often says, sacrifice.
It is important to provide this kind of context so that we can turn the narrative in a more truthful direction. You cannot justify the 9/11 attacks, or Hamas for that matter, but by understanding that they are a reaction to US imperial activity gives us better understanding, through which we may be able to point toward a solution-as in withdrawal.
In the end they don’t “hate the US for our freedoms”, the hate the US because they kill their people and steal their shit.
1st Q: 'failed experiment' is a paronomasic trope, an inaccurate apothegm for all life forms that have gone extinct. videlicet, if you define us as a separate species from all other life forms that have ever disported themselves here, there, and, round-about the water columns, aquifers, air columns, lithosphere. stratosphere, etc. that have been known to occupy said-realms, then i suspect our putative 'species' will not be exempt from that inexorable evolutionary process. on the other hand, incorporating the long-term perspective, given we are all cosmic manifestations of sagan's 'starstuff', no life form or non-life form can be viewed as 'going extinct' or as a 'failed experiment'; all are simply steps along the inevitable cosmic evolutionary route towards... what? where? who of us is sufficiently fatiloquent or imaginative to vaticinate? certainly not i. perhaps towards the inennarable concept of infinity?
2nd Q: neither 'americans' nor human beings' nor any other category of distinction; we are all manifestly integral to that relentless evolutionary dynamic.
3rd~5th Qs: i have no idea why america or any other hegemonistic empire climbed aboard the train to oblivion, or any others that will follow in their wake for that matter. i'm a lowly research scientist, not an historian, politician, socio-economist, or militarist. overreach perhaps? esurience? hubris? the reasons are complex and multifarious, so it's plausible that any speculative conjectures would be sweeping generalizations of reality.
6th Q: no need at all "to fight it"; just enjoy it and make the best of your exiguously brief time here, in that particular manifestation you regard as YOU! i do not define sanguinity as something to be abjured or abrogated from the zeitgeist, but rather as a means by which one can confront onerous challenges, or burdensome fardels, or the inevitability of death, whether as an individual or a 'species' [by whatever definition].
7th Q: yes, all 7 of them do, b/c their definition of 'hope' is operable in their immediate ambit, not the evolutionary dynamic of which we are all an integral part... on our way to joining the dodo bird in this incalculable time~space continuum. nonetheless, they do not embrace 'false hopes', only the sanguine variety that aids them in meeting and enduring immediate difficulties.
8th Q: what world view? what mindset [it's one word]? be specific please. i can best describe them as 'realists', but jolly, jocular, and joyful ones... as are most of their bairns, w/ the exception of one of our granddaughters who remains embittered over our 1st son's divorce from her mother. she will be more optimistic about life when she matures.
will endeavour to find that flim, fireman. it won't be available here on mindoro island in the philippines, at least not in our balatero baranguy, but perhaps it can be accessed via youtube. we do not have netflix nor a television, just this computer and a sluggish internet connection. appreciate the suggestion in any case
It's all a power game, and the U.S. will do whatever it wishes to maintain and expand that power, like all preceding colonial powers. We are a fully fledged corporatocracy now, and the military industrial complex is in charge. This behavior will only grow worse as climate change creates ever-increasing migrations, shrinking agricultural yields, and water rationing. Still, we wish to continue harvesting the planet as if we don't have to change our behavior. The Willow drilling project in Alaska is about competition with Russia and China for yet more natural resources to extract and burn on our ill planet. That pause on LNG terminals in the Gulf, just that a pause, whose emissions will dwarf Willow. It's all well plotted insanity. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/giving-pause-to-disaster
my preferential rejoindre to those xian numbnuts would be to claim that contrary to their retaliatory sanguinity, hitch died a happy fellow and had no regrets about escaping over the horizon, precisely b/c he'd had quite enough of their septic effluvia, lethiferous balderdash, and malodorous barfdom... particularly their worship of the OT blood-soaked hegemon w/ whom the xian and jew zionists remain so besotted..
After OPERATION DESERT STORM, Papa Bush could chortle: "By God,, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
Maybe what we're trying to do in Ukraine and Gaza is kick the latest one: "The Forever War Syndrome."
When the US got run out of Afghanistan back in 2021, the most expensive military force and power on the Planet kept its streak of not winning a War in 76 years completely intact. Unless, of course, one considers Panama, Grenada, and Kuwait "Wars."
Unless they want to see that Loser's Losing Streak continued, the American People better hope ~ probably against all hope ~ that their "Leaders" don't end up sending troops to either of those Theatres of Cold War II. Or when the time comes, to East Asia to deal with "The China Threat."
@Bill Astore : In 2001 Biden Laden stated very clearly that his complaint was American bases. American media assiduously avoided reporting this fundamental aspect of the conflict, preferring the narrative that he was a crazy man.
And those bases were specifically the ones the US established on Muslim's Holiest Land in Saudi Arabia after OPERATION DESERT STORM and the "liberation" of Kuwait in 1991, Bush Senior's main claim to fame.
Getting a full-time combat-ready presence in that part of the world was something the US had been trying to figure out how to do since the end of World War II, if not WW I.
Anybody remember the "Kuwait Incubator Babies"? That lie was what sold the American People on ODS. Just like the lie of Tonkin Gulf sold Americans on Vietnam, and the lie of 9/11 sold them on their very own "Forever War."
Thanks for the greater specificity on the context of Bin Laden’s raid on American targets. Our media and national leaders can’t stand to report accurately on “our enemies” objectives. We have to dig for that information.
In case anybody is interested in the percentage of Americans who are Veterans:
"The share of the U.S. population with military experience has declined, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1980, about 18% of U.S. adults were veterans, but that share fell to 6% in 2022.
"This happened alongside a decrease in active-duty personnel after the military draft ended in 1973. The number of active-duty service members dropped from 3.5 million in 1968, during the military draft era [Note: and the peak of Vietnam], to about 1.3 million in today’s all-volunteer force. Active-duty service members now comprise less than 1% of all U.S. adults."
Not only do Americans, including American mainstream media, never ask the question why do we have so many military bases and outposts strewn across the Middle East, but they never contemplate for a second what would it be like if Iraq, Syria, etc. decided to have military bases in this country and use them for bombing raids as they deemed fit. The unqualified right of the US to establish military bases and outposts wherever the hell the US National Security State wants to is accepted as totally normal, as natural as the air we breathe or the sun rising in the morning. Until this "normalization" is dead and buried, you can be sure there will a lot more dead and buried corpses across the Middle East.
We have to have a lot of bases to protect our other bases (sarc)
It's bases all the way down.
One can never have too many bases
And no MSM talking heads are asking "what is the basis for the bases?"
This is the dilemma we are in... most people in the US don't pay any attention to what their own country is doing overseas. Even when something ends up in the news, most Americans don't seem to care much or think much about what is actually going on. As far as the media are concerned, they are owned by the wealthy, and the and the talking heads (they sure aren't journalists) are paid to read from the teleprompter. So don't expect them to actually discuss what is going on. I see protests all across Europe, but almost nothing in the US. Since the US is the source of the problem, I don't expect any changes in foreign policy any time soon without a lot more pressure from voters.
Support out troops. Bring them home.
If you don't want to bring them home, you support imperialism, or maybe just blindly and stupidly treat war like a football game wave the flag virtue-signaling, but you don't give a shit about our troops.
Most Americans just don't want to bother cause in our imperialistic capitalistic system they're too busy worrying about food on the table or rent to pay rather than foreign policy. Plus there are l a lot of folks that are just to ignorant or kinda get off on us kicking ass in Africa, in South Americ, on the border with Mexico or the Middle east. Kicking ass and killing non whites is their thing. Hell they don't even mind it if we kick ass on Americans esp'ly if they be non whites. that's America in a nut shell folks. This be us.
That will definitely go in THE BEST OF BRACING VIEWS, Bill.
Thank You for nailing it as good as or better than You have ever done; at least since i've been following You.
So again, yet, and still, the Question remains: What needs to be done to end this Bullshit, this Insanity, and this Nation being on a Collision Course With Reality? And Who needs to make that happen and How is that to be done?
Happy you enjoyed it, Jeff.
Jeff, nothing will happen to end this Bullshit, this Insanity, and this Nation being on a Collision Course With Reality?
Its baked in the cake - right from the beginning when a few entitled English slave owners decided they wanted to have a new free country!
Like the Roman empire, it's in the Yank psyche, and it is just as doomed.
The most important---and essential--question is "How." The Left is great at articulating the what and who. You can find tomes and tomes giving different possible answers to the what and who questions. But when it comes to the "how" question, the Left is, for the most part, clueless, beyond the very old ideas of "organize" and "educate." So, because the answer to the "how" question remains unknown, the Left is pretty much reduced to picketing, protesting and chanting. There are lots of folks with intense passion and determination, but without a very strong, disciplined organization that has the capacity, including financially, to actually unite people all across this country to take on the very formidable MICIMATT complex, it is hard to see how any challenge to the status quo can happen.
i agree with You 100%, Charlie.
America's so-called "Left" ~ be they in DC with Bernie, AOC and the Squad, etc, or over in Berkeley, CA at what's left of "The Peoples Park," and all points in between ~ has done absolutely nothing to confront, deal with, and challenge the MICIMATT since, first, 9/11 which spawned "The Forever War," and now Ukraine and Gaza in Cold War II.
So, if the so-called "Left" isn't going to do anything about it, the most important and essential question is indeed HOW? And the critical follow-up question is WHO?
WHO is actually, really going to make what needs to happen Happen?
Of course, the MICIMATT includes media, academe, and think tanks. We can add Hollywood to the media. The truth is that the media, academe, and think tanks, which many Americans think are leftist or left-leaning, are actually rightist or right-leaning, obedient to the general desires of the MI part of the complex.
Also, it's obviously not the Left alone that is at fault. The Right is also far too obedient to the MIC. Yes, you hear criticisms here and there. but when push comes to shove, every Congressional district wants its piece of the huge MI pie.
Ike had it right -- only an alert and knowledgable citizenry (Left, Right, and in-between) can truly keep the MIC in its place. But that would require unity of purpose as well as education and transparency. The MIC loves to sic the left on the right, and vice-versa, wave the flag, keep almost everything meaningful "classified," and sell militarism and nationalism as patriotism.
It's a very tough nut to crack, requiring teamwork and sacrifice.
That nails the Diagnosis of the Disease, Bill. And it also nails the prescribed Treatment.
But Your concluding sentence leads to only one inevitable conclusion: That the Prognosis at this time is not very good.
Yes, the prognosis isn't good, Jeff. I wish I could be more optimistic. I started writing against the MIC in the early 1980s: the Reagan "defense" buildup. Forty years later, the MIC is stronger now than it was then. Ike's warning from 1961 is still not being heeded by nearly all Americans.
It is, in a word, discouraging, as you know from your own experience.
You know the true face of war--so many Americans have never seen it. Or have chosen to look away. And so the madness of militarism and empire continues.
i can only imagine how discouraging it has been ~ and must be ~ over these past 40+ years for You, Bill.
In a completely different spirit and intent from how the hackneyed term is typically used: "Thank You for Your Service."
This nation could use a whole bunch of Veterans who are against War and what it has done, is doing, and will continue to do to this nation and the entire Planet
The question remains: How can the American People be encouraged/ enticed/even forced to stop looking away and actually, really SEE what has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen unless and until They force it to stop?
Way too many folks in America have been in the military.
Their whole frame of reference poisoned forever.
America is the only country in the world where the standard Job Application Form asks you to list your Military Experience and Rank!
It Is Always The End Times For Christians | Thea-NC | Atheist Experience 25.39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSvC5_65S38
These "end of the world" folks are the most excited for their deaths...it's so weird
In the US whenever something bad happens, it's always the end of the World (ie the USA)
But in the rest of the world where quite often even worse things happen ~ those things rarely cause people even to take much notice.
"The Lord will smite thee with the botch, emerods, scab and itch, but he loves you!"
- Deuteronomy 28:27
If he [Jesus] died for our sins, why are we going to hell anyway?
America is in deep trouble of its own making and the prognosis is awful. The answer is to make peace-making more profitable than war-making. Unlike voting, it cannot be done without thinking and, as Bill often says, sacrifice.
Keep up the good work, Bill!
"They hate us for our bases and bombs."
That's for damned sure.
It is important to provide this kind of context so that we can turn the narrative in a more truthful direction. You cannot justify the 9/11 attacks, or Hamas for that matter, but by understanding that they are a reaction to US imperial activity gives us better understanding, through which we may be able to point toward a solution-as in withdrawal.
In the end they don’t “hate the US for our freedoms”, the hate the US because they kill their people and steal their shit.
1st Q: 'failed experiment' is a paronomasic trope, an inaccurate apothegm for all life forms that have gone extinct. videlicet, if you define us as a separate species from all other life forms that have ever disported themselves here, there, and, round-about the water columns, aquifers, air columns, lithosphere. stratosphere, etc. that have been known to occupy said-realms, then i suspect our putative 'species' will not be exempt from that inexorable evolutionary process. on the other hand, incorporating the long-term perspective, given we are all cosmic manifestations of sagan's 'starstuff', no life form or non-life form can be viewed as 'going extinct' or as a 'failed experiment'; all are simply steps along the inevitable cosmic evolutionary route towards... what? where? who of us is sufficiently fatiloquent or imaginative to vaticinate? certainly not i. perhaps towards the inennarable concept of infinity?
2nd Q: neither 'americans' nor human beings' nor any other category of distinction; we are all manifestly integral to that relentless evolutionary dynamic.
3rd~5th Qs: i have no idea why america or any other hegemonistic empire climbed aboard the train to oblivion, or any others that will follow in their wake for that matter. i'm a lowly research scientist, not an historian, politician, socio-economist, or militarist. overreach perhaps? esurience? hubris? the reasons are complex and multifarious, so it's plausible that any speculative conjectures would be sweeping generalizations of reality.
6th Q: no need at all "to fight it"; just enjoy it and make the best of your exiguously brief time here, in that particular manifestation you regard as YOU! i do not define sanguinity as something to be abjured or abrogated from the zeitgeist, but rather as a means by which one can confront onerous challenges, or burdensome fardels, or the inevitability of death, whether as an individual or a 'species' [by whatever definition].
7th Q: yes, all 7 of them do, b/c their definition of 'hope' is operable in their immediate ambit, not the evolutionary dynamic of which we are all an integral part... on our way to joining the dodo bird in this incalculable time~space continuum. nonetheless, they do not embrace 'false hopes', only the sanguine variety that aids them in meeting and enduring immediate difficulties.
8th Q: what world view? what mindset [it's one word]? be specific please. i can best describe them as 'realists', but jolly, jocular, and joyful ones... as are most of their bairns, w/ the exception of one of our granddaughters who remains embittered over our 1st son's divorce from her mother. she will be more optimistic about life when she matures.
Thanks, Jeanie. Once i translate that into my level of English, i will respond appropriately.
will endeavour to find that flim, fireman. it won't be available here on mindoro island in the philippines, at least not in our balatero baranguy, but perhaps it can be accessed via youtube. we do not have netflix nor a television, just this computer and a sluggish internet connection. appreciate the suggestion in any case
My pleasure Jeanie Y.W...!
It's all a power game, and the U.S. will do whatever it wishes to maintain and expand that power, like all preceding colonial powers. We are a fully fledged corporatocracy now, and the military industrial complex is in charge. This behavior will only grow worse as climate change creates ever-increasing migrations, shrinking agricultural yields, and water rationing. Still, we wish to continue harvesting the planet as if we don't have to change our behavior. The Willow drilling project in Alaska is about competition with Russia and China for yet more natural resources to extract and burn on our ill planet. That pause on LNG terminals in the Gulf, just that a pause, whose emissions will dwarf Willow. It's all well plotted insanity. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/giving-pause-to-disaster
my preferential rejoindre to those xian numbnuts would be to claim that contrary to their retaliatory sanguinity, hitch died a happy fellow and had no regrets about escaping over the horizon, precisely b/c he'd had quite enough of their septic effluvia, lethiferous balderdash, and malodorous barfdom... particularly their worship of the OT blood-soaked hegemon w/ whom the xian and jew zionists remain so besotted..
After OPERATION DESERT STORM, Papa Bush could chortle: "By God,, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
Maybe what we're trying to do in Ukraine and Gaza is kick the latest one: "The Forever War Syndrome."
When the US got run out of Afghanistan back in 2021, the most expensive military force and power on the Planet kept its streak of not winning a War in 76 years completely intact. Unless, of course, one considers Panama, Grenada, and Kuwait "Wars."
Unless they want to see that Loser's Losing Streak continued, the American People better hope ~ probably against all hope ~ that their "Leaders" don't end up sending troops to either of those Theatres of Cold War II. Or when the time comes, to East Asia to deal with "The China Threat."
Maybe the goal isn’t to win war, just keep having them.
If History is any indicator, Geoffrey, it's not a question of "Maybe," but "Evidently, " if not "Obviously."
@Bill Astore : In 2001 Biden Laden stated very clearly that his complaint was American bases. American media assiduously avoided reporting this fundamental aspect of the conflict, preferring the narrative that he was a crazy man.
And those bases were specifically the ones the US established on Muslim's Holiest Land in Saudi Arabia after OPERATION DESERT STORM and the "liberation" of Kuwait in 1991, Bush Senior's main claim to fame.
Getting a full-time combat-ready presence in that part of the world was something the US had been trying to figure out how to do since the end of World War II, if not WW I.
Anybody remember the "Kuwait Incubator Babies"? That lie was what sold the American People on ODS. Just like the lie of Tonkin Gulf sold Americans on Vietnam, and the lie of 9/11 sold them on their very own "Forever War."
And now we have the Lies of Ukraine and Gaza.
Thanks for the greater specificity on the context of Bin Laden’s raid on American targets. Our media and national leaders can’t stand to report accurately on “our enemies” objectives. We have to dig for that information.
In case anybody is interested in the percentage of Americans who are Veterans:
"The share of the U.S. population with military experience has declined, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1980, about 18% of U.S. adults were veterans, but that share fell to 6% in 2022.
"This happened alongside a decrease in active-duty personnel after the military draft ended in 1973. The number of active-duty service members dropped from 3.5 million in 1968, during the military draft era [Note: and the peak of Vietnam], to about 1.3 million in today’s all-volunteer force. Active-duty service members now comprise less than 1% of all U.S. adults."
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/08/the-changing-face-of-americas-veteran-population/
Which helps explain why the last President who was a Veteran was Bush Senior.
Since then, Clinton, Cheney, Obama, Biden, and, of course, Corporal Bonespurs were, still are, and ever will be nothing but a bunch of Draft Dodgers.
Which also helps to explains why all of them were, are, and ever will be the War Mongers they are.