Tag: Vietnam

Collateral Damage: Can We Make Civilians Spectators Again? Probably Not

I am fully aware that the term “collateral damage” as used by the US Empire refers to the “unfortunate” death of innocent civilians as a result of “pre-war” sanctions. The most popular clip on the Internet is Secretary of State Madeline Albright being interviewed about the 500,000 children that died as a result of sanctions on Iraq between Gulf War I and II:

The reason I ‘air-quote’ the term pre-war is that in all reality, sanctions themselves are an act of war, even though it is on the economic variety. While there are no guns used, there is force used to ensure that the economic activity sanctioned actually does not take place, and that is indeed backed by guns. It is both coercion and violence-based. The state dictates that peaceful trade can not take place and its edicts will be followed, as the consequences to any business is well known. No business can go rogue in the sanction war.

Truth be told, we in the US on the domestic front are again close to having personal conversation scrutinized for words of support towards these sanctioned countries filled with people who desire peaceful trade with American citizens. If one supports Palestinian people, one is assumed to be anti-Semitic, if one supports Russian people, one is assumed to be a Russian-bot.

There was a time when war’s harm toward civilians caught in the crossfire was recognized and attempts were made toward international rules that safeguarded citizens as much as possible from the political conflicts that broke out across the world. By the 1700s in fact, this was the norm, which is why there was such disgust when British dragoon leader Banastre Tarleton would kill both the wounded enemy as well as civilians that appeared to “aid the enemy”.

By the time seven states decided to leave the American union in 1861, this norm had not yet changed. Most of the civilized world’s battles took place on the outskirts of cities.

From an article written by one who has seen war with his own eyes since Vietnam, Tom’s Dispatch writes about this time period:

In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas). “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the London Times. “The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood — ‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”

Yes, a picnic lunch adjacent to a large battle. You now know how everyone assumed that civilians would not be targeted. People in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya pretty much know the opposite is true with the US Empire in the 21st century.

Reflecting back once more:

That woman would be sorely disappointed. U.S. forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a rout of the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.

By in large, the southern armies were driven by principles. The leadership time and again desired to spare the civilian population of the havoc of war. When Robert E. Lee’s army invaded the northern states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, his men were under strict orders NOT to help themselves to the resources of these civilians but rely on their own supplies. This was even apparent at the end of the war in 1865 when a hungry, tired and destitute southern army under Robert E. Lee retreated from Richmond and came across a rare cow in the countryside. Robert E. Lee directed his hungry men to return that cow to its rightful owner.

We do however know that there were civilian deaths during this internal conflict where one section of the country desired to depart in peace. Tom’s Dispatch explains:

Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a U.S. Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.

“We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First U.S. Artillery, wrote in his official report. “I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.” Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.

We know she was not the last to die. Many would die as Union army cut swaths through the south in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Civilian’s fields, silver and homes would not be spared, nor were their personal bodies as many women were raped by the marauding troops from the north. As in many countries in the Middle East today, these atrocities would not soon be forgotten.

Tom’s Dispatch (Nick Turse) continues:

No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict — close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.

So by 1865 these ratios were starting to change. Civilian deaths are hard to estimate, but you can be assured that military deaths these days are minimal when compared to those of innocent civilians.

In Vietnam, we saw this on black and white TV before the government decided to control more of what the masses would view:

A century later, U.S. troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel ..

Since the 1960s, this trend has only accelerated and has not only produced more of what our own CIA calls “blowback” (I mean, when you blow up funeral processions with drones, you will multiply the number of freedom-fighters, errr I mean “terrorists” in a region) but it also has cause economic and political refugees seeking a better life in other regions of the world. For both the military-industrial complex and politicians, this is actually a win-win for them. How sick is that?

Tom’s Dispatch article winds down by saying:

In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims.  Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it — often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.

A safer place. I am sure this is what those imprisoned in Gaza feel, or those in Libya near Tripoli these days, or in various areas of Iraq and Afghanistan and even in areas of Syria.

This will probably all “come home to roost” as our foreign policy of intervention and disruption plus regime change causes people to uproot and move. There is always “baggage” involved when violence displaces families.

This all will not end well, nor will this country be exempt from the fallout.

-SF1

What is With the Obsession with Russia, Primarily, and China Secondarily? PART 1

I have to be honest, I am a “boomer” who served in the US Navy after Vietnam and before Gulf War I, in a relative season of peace (rare for the US Empire these days).

The 1970s saw increased cooperation and trade with China and in the late 1980s finally saw increased cooperation and trade with Russia. With the Cold War over, people in general felt a lot better about the global conflicts and started to look at our domestic issues. Politicians and the Deep State do not like that. In search of distractions the Deep State looked for opportunities and continued to feed skewed Intel to the US government.

One would have thought that peace would allow the US to get a handle on its own economy and its own trade balance sheet. Nothing could be further from the truth. What happens time and again in large corporations, government and in bureaucracy in general is that politics squanders opportunities to take things to the next level, a better place AFTER addressing some key foundational and structural issues. The problem with politics and older organizations is that the momentum of the status quo keeps the change agents and whistle-blowers at bay while the existing paradigm sucks the life out of the organization or nation slowly. Because the leaders are temporary custodians of the organization, there is little incentive to do anything but “kick the can” down the road for others to deal with, the next generations of corporate leaders or the next crop of politicians or even the next generation of consumers and taxpayers.

Not cool.

In our existing morass it is apparent that the US Empire desperately needs an enemy. It needed one in 1990 as the USSR dissolved into over a dozen republics and it needed it yet again after the easy Gulf War I win that failed to produce the need for military in a big way for the long haul. Enter the “War on Terror” (Gulf War II, Iraq Invasion), which was designed to never end. This helped Bush II and Obama to satisfy the deep state and elites who see nothing but upsides to perpetual war, but after some rather apparent blunders, the target has shifted to Russia especially followed by China. Sure North Korea and Iran are in the mix but I am pretty sure the deep state is after another multi decade conflict so it can keep its job.

The blunder in the war on terror had to do with the exposure from Wikileaks and other leaks that made it clear that ISIS was actually a US/Saudi/UK and Israel initiative (to keep Iran from being a regional power that threatened Israel). The attempts to regime change Libya and Syria were part of an effort to further destabilize the Middle East which sent refugees to Western Europe by the droves, destabilizing Germany and France especially. The empire likes to keep its competition at bay, either directly or indirectly.

For the past three years, Russia has received the brunt of the attacks claiming that its motives are evil. A quick look at maps from 1990 to present say otherwise:

As you can see, the efforts in the Ukraine in 2014 was an attempt to further weaken Russian influence in the region. Their actual restraint shows the wisdom that Putin possesses in dealing with the US Empire and NATO. Russia did tactfully stepped in and secured Crimea and the critical port of Sevastopol on the Black Sea which they had possession of under lease agreements up until the US sponsored regime change in 2014. Beyond this, with the vast majority of Crimeans desiring ties to Russia there was swift and peaceful investments made by Russia like the Crimean Bridge below:

Crimean Bridge
Sevastopol Naval Base (Russia) on the Black Sea

This peaceful move PLUS the fact that the Russians were invited by Syrians to remove ISIS from their territories actually allowed Russian military to test their weapon systems and now have an edge in several different technological categories that make the Pentagon nervous. The fact that in October 2015 when this calculated effort to push ISIS out of Syria really started, Obama predicted that Russia would fail:

Syria (October 2015)
Syria Dec 2018

So the US was showed up in Syria, as trespassers they “fought” ISIS until Russia could beat ISIS .. and now the US rebels hold the land east of the Euphrates River.

Then, in 2019, the US turns its attention to Venezuela. The US Empire DOES have an addiction that it is not ready to admit. Of course they pull out the old Monroe Doctrine crap .. wondered if that applied in Iraq and Afghanistan, opps, wrong continent. Geez. But I digress. Why can’t the US just defend the US? Because it has a “need for empire” and its belief in the myth called “American Exceptionalism”.

At its root, the US obsession with “extending” Russia until it breaks is summed up by Moon of Alabama in this hilarious highlighting of a RAND think-tank article that was revised to look at the US instead in this  post:

This brief summarizes a report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the Russian Federation and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress —overextend and unbalance— the United States’ economy and armed forces and the U.S. government’s political standing at home and abroad. Some of the options examined are clearly more promising than others, but any would need to be evaluated in terms of the overall strategy for dealing with the United States, which neither the report nor this brief has attempted to do.

Today’s United States suffers from many vulnerabilities — the financial crisis has caused a drop in living standards, regressive tax policies that have furthered that decline, a decreasing life expectancy, and increasing authoritarianism under Barack Obama’s and now Donald Trump’s rule. Such vulnerabilities are coupled with deep-seated (if exaggerated) anxieties about the possibility of Russia-inspired political manipulation, loss of great power status, and even military attack.

Despite these vulnerabilities and anxieties, the United States remains a powerful country that still manages to be Russia’s peer competitor in a few key domains. Recognizing that some level of competition with the United States is inevitable, RAND researchers conducted a qualitative assessment of “cost-imposing options” that could unbalance and overextend the United States. Such cost-imposing options could place new burdens on the United States, ideally heavier burdens than would be imposed on the Russian Federation for pursuing those options.

A team of RAND experts developed economic, geopolitical, ideological, informational, and military options and qualitatively assessed them in terms of their likelihood of success in extending the United States, their benefits, and their risks and costs.

Too funny, because the original 2019 RAND publication was focused in Russia’s situation and how the US might exploit her weaknesses.

What is noteworthy is the last line of this think-tank production, which SHOULD cause the deep state (as well as their Mossad ties) to pause in their agenda:

Most of the options discussed, including those listed here, are in some sense escalatory, and most would likely prompt some Russian counterescalation. Thus, besides the specific risks associated with each option, there is additional risk attached to a generally intensified competition with a nuclear-armed adversary to consider. This means that every option must be deliberately planned and carefully calibrated to achieve the desired effect. Finally, although Russia will bear the cost of this increased competition less easily than the United States will, both sides will have to divert national resources from other purposes. Extending Russia for its own sake is not a sufficient basis in most cases to consider the options discussed here. Rather, the options must be considered in the broader context of national policy based on defense, deterrence, and—where U.S. and Russian interests align—cooperation.

Cooperation, now there is a novel idea!

Hang on, there are more deep state and political thinkers that love their wallet more than life on this planet, especially for generations after their death!

Next time we will look more at China as well as the budding relationship that Russia and China are now enjoying and how Japan and other nations like Iran and Syria figure into all these geopolitics as well as the association called BRICS ( Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa ).

-SF1