Tag: perpetual war

The Pentagon Fails to Send Absentee Ballots to Active Military Service Members

Republican lawmakers demand answers from the Pentagon after military service members complained that they have not received enough absentee ballots to vote before Election Day.

GOP Reps. Brian Mast (R-FL), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), and Mike Waltz (R-FL) sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin citing their “grave concern over deficiencies in the Defense Department’s protocols” for the U.S. military because they said the absentee ballot stockpile has been “depleted and had not been replenished.”

“Our nation’s brave men and women in uniform brought to our attention that there has been inadequate education at the administrative level on how to register to vote, request an absentee ballot, and fill in a federal write-in absentee ballot if their state-issued ballot does not arrive in time,” the letter reads. “Other service members also stated that when a request for a federal write-in absentee ballot was made, they were told the base’s stockpile of such ballots was depleted and had not been replenished.”

The lawmakers also wrote that the Pentagon offered “inadequate education” on how service members can vote while deployed. 

The Republicans demanded that the Pentagon take extraordinary measures to ensure that the nation’s “elite warriors” have an opportunity to cast their vote in the upcoming election. However, with only three days until Election Day, lawmakers fear the government has not yet taken action. 

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The Next President Needs a Foreign Policy Reality Check 

On top of ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the next administration will inherit structural domestic and international obstacles that have been mounting for decades. Addressing these challenges while keeping our current U.S. foreign policy strategy on autopilot simply won’t cut it—it is time for a new approach. 

Since America’s victory in the Cold War, our national security elites in both parties have avoided asking fundamental questions about what missions the United States should be engaged in. These experts insist that maintaining a heavy military footprint across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia simultaneously is necessary for American security. 

Focusing on how to resource these missions without reflecting on their wisdom or sustainability misses the forest for the trees. Twenty years of open-ended nation-building efforts in the Middle East cost thousands of service members’ lives. These conflicts also came at the price of $6 trillion, damaged American military readiness, and aided our great power rivals by diverting our focus and energy.  

After decades of deficit spending, our national debt is approaching $36 trillion, a ten-fold increase from the end of the Cold War. After the COVID pandemic, our nation’s debt hadn’t been so large in relation to our economy since the Second World War. At this point, our interest payments alone are exceeding U.S. defense spending from this year. 

On top of these challenges, the trust funds for our biggest domestic programs—Social Security and Medicare—are on track to be insolvent in a decade and impose benefits cuts unless the next administration makes difficult domestic choices to secure their future.  

Taken together, the United States now experiences a strategic scarcity that our national security class has not had to deal with for generations.  

We cannot buy our way out of these constraints, as the Commission on the National Defense Strategy recently called for. Voters, especially in swing states, are already disillusioned with America’s level of involvement in conflicts abroad. Americans are not going to make the painful fiscal sacrifices needed to secure our financial future only to see trillions more squandered on flawed defense strategies.  

In the face of these challenges, Concerned Veterans for America’s new report, “Realism in Practice,” offers a fresh, disciplined path forward for U.S. foreign policy, rooted in assessing our strategic situation as it is, not as we might wish it to be. 

American strategic goals need to align with America’s available resources. Policymakers also need to use the right tools to achieve these goals, avoiding overreliance on an already overstretched, undermanned military. Our allies can and should take greater responsibility for their own defense. The United States needs to concentrate its military resources on regions most vital to its core interests, while relying more on diplomatic and economic engagement elsewhere.

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Biden’s Destructive Legacy

As President Biden’s term approaches its end, the US and several parts of the rest of the world are significantly worse off than they were when he took office. While the president is frequently lauded by members of the foreign policy establishment as a successful foreign policy leader, his tenure has been marked for the most part by deepening US involvement in foreign conflicts that show no signs of ending anytime soon. US policies under Biden have served only to stoke destabilizing conflict, and the president has shown no inclination to bring any of the wars currently backed by Washington to an end. Biden’s presidency showed the world just how extensive the rot in US foreign policy is, and most other nations will not soon forget what restored American “leadership” wrought.

Biden ran on the promise of ending America’s forever wars, but after the withdrawal from Afghanistan he then spent most of his presidency going out of his way to involve US in conflicts where no vital American interests were at stake. The risk of great power conflict has also risen under Biden as he has pursued a China policy of containment and rivalry that the US can ill afford while US-Russian relations have sunk to new lows over Ukraine. In the Middle East, Biden has enabled Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, backed their invasion of Lebanon, and supported their attacks on Iran. He has helped Israel sow chaos across the region, and he committed the US to a new open-ended and illegal war in Yemen. The president’s extreme ideological attachment to Israel led him to pursue an indefensible policy of unconditional support that has fueled the slaughter of civilians and created one of the worst man-made famines in modern times.

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Israel’s War on Journalism

There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas.

They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors.

Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.

And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.

The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination.

At least 134 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992. 

Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.  

Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza.

Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.

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South Africa Files ‘Overwhelming’ Evidence of Genocide

South Africa filed 750 pages of “overwhelming” proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on Monday, the deadline for submitting final evidence in the ongoing trial.

South African Ambassador to the Netherlands Vusi Madonsela delivered the legal document — known as a memorial — to the ICJ headquarters in the Dutch city. Under the court’s rules, the contents of the memorial cannot be made public at this time.

According to a statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the memorial is a “comprehensive presentation of the overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza.”

The office said the document “contains evidence which shows how the government of Israel has violated the Genocide Convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction, and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war and to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”

“The evidence will show that undergirding Israel’s genocidal acts is the special intent to commit genocide, a failure by Israel to prevent incitement to genocide, to prevent genocide itself, and its failure to punish those inciting and committing acts of genocide,” Ramaphosa’s office added.

South Africa’s filing comes amid Israel’s ongoing 387-day assault on Gaza, which according to Palestinian and international agencies has killed at least 43,020 people — most of them women and children. At least 101,110 others have been wounded and over 10,000 Gazans are missing and believed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed homes and other structures. Millions more Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened by Israel’s invasion and “complete siege” of Gaza.

The filing also comes one week after senior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet and national lawmakers spoke at a conference advocating the ethnic cleansing and recolonization of Gaza.

Ramaphosa’s office lamented that “Israel has been granted unprecedented impunity to breach international law and norms for as long as the United Nations Charter has been in existence.”

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The Ukraine War is Lost. Three Options Remain.

I started listening to George Beebe a few years ago when he was warning about tensions in Ukraine, the real risk of escalation to nuclear war and the dangers of groupthink.  Back in 2021 he assessed that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine given the combination of the US’s determination to bring the country into NATO and the fact that it was a “now-or-never moment” for Moscow to stop this happening.  Years earlier, US Ambassador to Moscow, and now CIA director, William Burns had urgently cabled Washington to warn that the Russians regarded Ukraine as ‘the reddest of red lines’:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” Ambassador Burns wrote. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

I quote all this because if Ukraine, all of Europe, and quite possibly all of us, are to be spared worse, we have to get past one very unhelpful word: “unprovoked”.

It stands in the way of doing what is utterly essential: deep, constructive and ongoing discussions between Russia and the West to create a security framework for all of Europe that is acceptable to all parties.

Since February 2022 Western propaganda has drummed into people’s minds that the invasion was “unprovoked”.  Very few outside the West, however, share this perspective.  George Beebe doesn’t support the invasion, estimates that Russia has a lot to answer for, but rejects this kind of simplistic rhetoric as unhelpful and potentially disastrous.  He was interviewed this past week by Professor Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris on The Duran and, in my estimation, gave a masterclass in responsible statecraft.

“There has been a lot of narrative management, a lot of policing of public discourse.” Beebe said. “Anybody who suggested that there may have been some element of provocation that affected Russian decisions on this was immediately anathematized.”

Beebe says the West has an erroneous idea as to the very nature of the conflict. The US and the Europeans defined the Russian invasion as a “deterrence model problem” rather than a “spiral model problem”.   In the former, the adversary is a kind of Hitler that must be stopped at all costs.

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Einstein Opposed Zionist Colonization in Palestine and Predicted the Current Catastrophe

A few weeks before the creation of the State of Israel, Shepard Rifkin, executive director of the Stern Group, requested that representatives of the group meet with Albert Einstein in the United States, “the greatest Jewish figure of the time” according to I.F. Stone. Einstein’s response was unequivocal:

“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”[2]

To grasp Einstein’s prescience, one need only replace “the British” with “the Americans” and “terrorist organizations” such as the Stern Group and the Irgun group with the Netanyahu government, the political descendants of the leaders of these groups, Menachem Begin and Yihtzak Shamir.

Einstein said that his “life was divided between equations and politics.” Yet, among his biographers—there are hundreds of them—and in the mainstream media, his extensive political writings on Israel and Zionism have been, at best, swept under the rug, at worst, completely distorted making him a supporter of the State of Israel.

That is, until the late Fred Jerome sought them out, found them, had them translated, mostly from German, and published them in the book Einstein on Israel and Zionism. Unfortunately, the first edition of this book, published by a New York publishing house, had a very small print run, was never promoted or made into an e-book, and sold out in no time, the publisher having bowed to enormous pressure from the Zionists. That is why Baraka Books has published a new edition with the agreement of Jocelyn Jerome, the author’s widow.

It was in Germany in the 1920s, a time of rampant anti-Semitism when the theory of relativity was attacked as “Jewish science,” that Einstein was drawn to the Zionist movement. It was not until 1914, when he arrived in Germany, that he “discovered for the first time that he was a Jew,” a discovery he attributed more to “Gentiles than Jews.” Before that, he had seen himself as a member of the human species.

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Israel’s Extremists Have a Plan for the Day after the Genocide 

Under the slogan ‘Gaza is Ours, Forever’, a large number of Israeli extremists and right-wing politicians met in the settlement of Be’eri, near the Gaza border region, on October 20-21.

The group represented the who’s who in the Israeli right, far right and ultranationalists. They included Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, May Golan and Bezalel Smotrich, as well as ten MKs of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

The event, entitled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, was organized by one of Israel’s most extreme settler movements, Nachala, led by the notorious Daniella Weiss.

To appreciate how extremist this 79-year-old settler is, consider this: on June 27, the Canadian government, though one of the most stalwart supporters of Netanyahu and his wars, imposed sanctions on her, due to her “role in facilitating (…) acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians.”

The hate-filled conference, however, was but a culmination of a year-long effort to build a case of why Israel should ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the Strip and re-establish illegal settlements.

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Failure of U.S. Leaders Should Precipitate More Efforts at People’s Diplomacy—Like in the Vietnam War Era

On September 19, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee hosted a webinar focused on the significant impact of women in the Vietnam era anti-war movement.

The first speaker, Vivian Rothstein, who was drawn to anti-war activism after participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, spoke about her participation in a conference in 1967 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, with 40 other American peace activists who met with members of the resistance in North and South Vietnam, including Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a top official with the southern-based National Liberation Front (NLF).

The Bratislava conference was co-organized by Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and provided an opportunity for U.S. peace activists to learn directly from Vietnamese about what the U.S. government was doing.

Rothstein said that the Vietnamese women asked to meet separately with the American women who were part of the delegation. They told them about horrific rapes being carried out by U.S. soldiers, bombing of villages, and parachuting of Vietnamese women onto U.S. military bases to serve as sexual playthings for U.S. GIs.

The Vietnamese women hoped that the American women would go back to their communities to tell people what was really going on, with the belief that they would pressure the U.S. government to end the war.

Rothstein said that the Bratislava conference was very meaningful for everyone who participated in it and a good example of people’s diplomacy—citizens getting together, independent of their government, to build ties and work toward peace.

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Trump vows no more foreign wars – Kamala, he says, will “gamble with the lives of millions”

If reelected as president in November, Donald Trump is promising to not send any more Americans to fight and die in foreign wars.

At a recent campaign stop in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate told a crowd that he and only he is able to prevent another world war, arguing that his Democrat rival, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III, guaranteed, because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.”

“To make her president would be to gamble with the lives of millions of people,” the former president continued. “Sons and daughters will end up getting drafted to fight in a war in a country you’ve never heard of.”

Earlier this year in his nomination acceptance speech, Trump vowed to “end every single international crisis that the current administration has created,” including both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts.

Trump has yet to reveal any specific plans for making this happen, but is sure that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are not the types to vote for because they want to continue supporting and financing “other people’s wars.”

“… if Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to war,” Trump wrote in a screed last week on his Truth Social platform.

“But I will not send you to fight and die in a foolish, never-ending foreign war,” Trump reiterated most recently at his Pennsylvania rally.

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