Once again, this review of Tariq Khan's The Republic Shall be Kept Clean is behind a paywall. It can be easily released for the small price of $4.00 a month. This will include a subscription to CP+ (the stuff behind the paywall). Please consider subscribing.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/12/the-reality-of-washingtons-enterprise/
F-16s are not defensive weapons. Indeed, they exist to attack cities far from where the generals and colonels are drinking coffee and strutting about. They bring death and then more death. Giving them to a military drunk on its own glorification is akin to putting an alcoholic in the driver’s seat of a big pickup truck with a bottle of whiskey next to him and a tank full of gas. No matter what the stated promises of Kyiv are, the fact is giving these planes to its military is a drastic escalation of a conflict that would have most likely never have started if it weren’t for Washington’s endless meddling and provocation. Even if one believed that Kyiv was fighting a just war when the current round began in February 2022, denying that this is now a war between the NATO Axis and Russia requires some very intentional blindness to the facts. Unfortunately, that blindness is epidemic.
Originally designed and built by the General Dynamics corporation—a company whose only business is war ever since its development of the Gatling gun in the 19th century, the planes are now produced only for foreign sale by the world’s biggest weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Although the US no longer purchases new F-16s, it continues to fly them in training missions, especially with the Air National Guard. Indeed, it was only after the Air National Guard base near Burlington, Vermont received several F-35s that the F-16s they previously used for training were moved elsewhere.
According to the defense industry website Defenseone.com, F-16 training specifically for foreign pilots usually takes place in Phoenix at Luke Air Force Base. However, the training for Ukrainians “will likely happen entirely in Europe.”(5/19/23) Of course, this doesn’t mean that some pilots might also be trained in the US. Nor does it mean that NATO pilots will not be flying these planes along with Ukrainians in country. Indeed, given the quick turnaround the war planners seem to be hoping for, the likelihood of joint NATO-Ukrainian teams does not seem far-fetched at all. Either way, this escalation increases the possibility of a greater war, with no guarantee of a victory for Kyiv. Despite the stories in the US media about Russia’s military incompetence, the truth of the matter is that Moscow has been able to answer every escalation by Kyiv./NATO. This is one reason why the war is stalemated. The fact that so many armchair warriors in the US (and European) media are cheering this escalation seems to illuminate that they do not know what they are talking about. However, it does show the effectiveness of the US propaganda machine in promoting war. Those columnists, reporters and talking heads who repeat the stories put out by the war machine’s propaganda wing are little more than Pentagon pawns. They are certainly not journalists in any genuine sense of the word.
Beyond the gifting of F-16s, there is also the ongoing increase in military aid to Kyiv by the United States. In what I can only consider to be a piece of accounting trickery akin to Donald Trump’s financial malfeasance inside his own companies, the Pentagon recently came up worth another $3 billion to provide weapons and ammo for Ukrainian forces. The story the Pentagon is telling the American people is that they overcharged for earlier shipments, writing down the munitions’ current value as opposed to the original purchase value. The actual facts are pretty much irrelevant, given that the war machine never seems to suffer no matter how the US economy is doing. This extra three billion means that US taxpayers will have given Kyiv an average of over $93 million dollars a day since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Not only has this money been provided with barely a peep of dissent in Congress (and that from right-wingers whose true motives are always questionable), but with an almost complete shutdown of opposing voices in the public sphere. On a deeper note, this grotesque spending on war while budget cuts for health care, food assistance, veterans services and education are being considered prove that Washington’s dependence on the war industry is like that of an opiate addict shooting up on the back streets of Manhattan or any other inner city. Neither even knows how strung out they really are.
Regarding that almost universal stifling of dissenting voices in the US, ever since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, those who oppose it have been labeled as tools of Putin. This charge is almost always a lie. It is is the modern equivalent of red-baiting. In reality, most people who oppose the war also oppose Russia's invasion. This is reminiscent of the nonsense people pulled on antiwar voices when we opposed the war in Vietnam, the US wars in Central America and the wars in Iraq. We are not tools of Putin, but comrades of those around the world who oppose the war—from Russia to Ukraine to Berlin to China and beyond. If anyone is a dupe of one of the warring powers, it would be those who echo the words of Washington, Brussels, Bonn, London and Kyiv as those capitols bring us closer to the threat of a much larger European war.
This is behind a subscriber-only paywall. It's $25/yr and well worth it!
A neat little review of my book Living the American Nightmare. It's in the British socialist newspaper MorningStar.
Click below
The content is the same, but the book is set up more formally.
Pelosi is a Congresswoman not a Senator. Piece will be corrected soon. My mistake
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/08/nancy-does-taiwan-while-general-flynn-cleans-his-guns/
Since this was written, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman, has joined the Supreme Court...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/01/so-this-is-the-freedom-we-kill-other-people-for/
Once again, this is behind a paywall---a year's subscription to Counterpunch is a mere $25. Check it out...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/26/on-the-precipice-of-global-civil-class-war/
In 1965 I lived in Peshawar, Pakistan on a small US military base. The base existed to spy on China and the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1965 a war broke out between India and Pakistan over the nation of Kashmir. For those who don't know, Kashmir is a region on the subcontinent that is claimed by both India and Pakistan. It is also the home of a longtime independence movement. After a summer of increasing hostilities in other parts of the country, the war came to Peshawar. On my tenth birthday, the Indian Air Force bombed military and civilian areas near the US base where my family lived with a couple hundred other US citizens. The next day, US troops dug deep long trenches in the yards of the Americans, place sheets of plywood over them and covered the plywood with dirt. These would be our bomb shelters. They also painted every window on base black and began enforcing a curfew that required us to turn off all electric lights at dusk. For the next week, the bombers came every night. We spent most nights in the trenches in our backyards. Anti-aircraft guns fired all around us and we heard the ack-ack of the guns and the bombs whistle as they fell, then explode. It was both scary and adventuresome. My siblings who were with me in that trench continue to deal with the trauma it created. After a week of bombing, the Pentagon evacuated the women and children from the base. After an overland journey to Kabul, Afghanistan and then a flight on a C-130 outfitted for troop transport, we ended up living in military barracks in Karamursel, Turkey. We stayed there for three months. The nations supplying weapons to each side halted their shipments and a truce was negotiated at peace talks in Tashkent.
This was my first brush with war. The other was when my father deployed to DaNang, Vietnam in late 1968. Despite a couple close calls, he made it home physically intact and relatively stable emotionally. My experience in Pakistan taught me two very important things. The first was that war is a foolish, if not downright idiotic method of problem solving. The second lesson was that a war could be ended if the combatants ran out of weapons and ammunition.
That week of huddling through the night in hastily-made air raid shelters while bombers dropped their ordnance a couple miles away and heavy artillery on the ground tried to shoot them down was enough war for me. I knew then that I would not allow the draft to take me. I wasn't going to die for that nonsense and I wasn't going to kill. The lessons I learned from my experience seem to be the exact opposite of the lessons learned by those who make and profit from war.
My week of war is nothing compared to those who have fought in wars or lived in countries where war ripped apart their lives. However, that week is considerably more experience than the majority of those politicians and profiteers who now insist on escalating the war between Russia and Ukraine. These men and women, who act as if war is a Hollywood film or a video game, act as if they have little understanding of the trauma they are inflicting. Nor do they seem to be considering alternatives to the escalation they champion. Their lives as US citizens are lives full of triumphalism and military madness—a madness that sees war not as a last resort, but all too often as the only resort. Even after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, these politicians and all too many who vote for them reject the compromise peace requires in favor of combat; combat most often carried out by working class men and women.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on weaponry for Ukraine's military, banning all things Russian and reviving the lend-lease legislation of World War Two, the US should be insisting on a ceasefire and a negotiated peace. This approach may lack the optics of war, but is most likely where the war will end up, anyhow. Unfortunately, for the reasons stated above and more, Washington demanding a ceasefire is unlikely to happen any time soon. The madness of war is in place. This war is just too easy for US politicians and their constituents, especially those who make money from war: no body bags of US troops, big profits and no protests. It is the perfect war crime.
