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Ken Burns’ Vietnam War: An Object Lesson in the Failures of the Objective Lens

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By Reed Richardson

Source: FAIR

If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, written by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.

But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.

Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns rises to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, he has produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.

As a Washington Post article (9/18/17) on all the behind-the-scenes detective work that went into the film makes clear, Burns and Novick did an incredible amount of research and original reporting. However, the narrative shortcomings of the documentary mirror many of the same journalistic sins one finds in the corporate media’s coverage of the far-off wars of today. Much like the mainstream press, Burns suffers from inherent biases about objectivity that affect his storytelling.

In an insightful New Yorker profile (9/4/17) of Burns by Ian Parker, one can see the tendrils of the filmmaker’s can’t-we-find-a-consensus editorial viewpoint that longs for inviolable truths sure to exist somewhere in between the ideological extremes:

Burns frequently—almost hourly—says, “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time,” paraphrasing a remark made by Wynton Marsalis, in Jazz. Burns uses the line less to acknowledge historical uncertainty than to advertise inclusiveness: a desire to guide all but the most sectarian or jaded viewers through an obstacle course of their own biases. He is not disengaged from his material, but his sense of a subject, and his sense of an audience’s reaction to that subject, seem to be fused. He once said, “I want to bring everybody in.”

Later in that story, Burns betrays more of this tendency for false equivalence when he makes a prediction about the bifurcated political reaction his documentary would receive. Sounding very much like a put-upon, but archly centrist editorial page editor, he makes clear that he sees angering both the right and the left simultaneously as an occupational hazard, if not a proxy for having arrived closest to the truth:

After The Vietnam War, I’ll have to lie low. A lot of people will think I’m a Commie pinko, and a lot of people will think I’m a right-wing nutcase, and that’s sort of the way it goes.

While this suggests little capacity on the part of Burns to engage in past criticisms of his work—chief among them, his tendency to overindulge in hokey American splendor-ism—that’s not to say there aren’t stark departures from his oeuvre in The Vietnam War. In just the first few minutes of the first episode, “Deja Vu,” over a squawling original Trent Reznor score, Burns literally pushes the audience backwards by spooling iconic footage of the war—and protests of it—in reverse. It’s a disorienting, but shrewd gambit; a recognition of all the baggage the Vietnam War still carries in the American psyche.

Right after this jarring sequence, though, the old Burns reappears. We see languid, gauzy shots of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, overlaid with Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and former US senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland talking philosophically about the tragedy of suffering and surviving war. As presented, Cleland’s connection to the war is inexplicably vague—he’s only identified on-screen by his name and “Army”—and, though he is a triple amputee because of wounds suffered from a grenade blast in Vietnam, he is filmed only in close up, as if Burns still wants to ease his audience into the full violence wrought by the war. (Burns repeats this ambiguous decontextualization of his interview subjects throughout the documentary.) Then, the film’s narration, once again voiced by longtime actor Peter Coyote, offers up what journalism would call the “nut graf,” the defining leitmotif of the 17 hours and 55 minutes yet to come.

America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions made by five American presidents belonging to both political parties.

There is a lot to unpack in this short passage, but it is accurate in its summation of Burns’ narrative focus throughout his film: that is, long on personal perspectives and documentary evidence of the chronological evolution, but short on broader conclusions about American foreign policy, or any real condemnation of the indescribable cruelty and dishonesty among policymakers who orchestrated it. In one telling anecdote, Burns confided to the New Yorker that his team debated saying “ended in defeat” in this section, but nevertheless chose “failure” instead.

Likewise, the film’s “begun in good faith by decent people” line doesn’t merely land like a false note, it deafens like a discordant symphony. As Veterans for Peace pointed out, Burns’ own documentary refutes this claim. Nearly every episode in the film offers up myriad examples of our elected officials, the military, or CIA willfully lying to the public (or each other) about the US’s involvement in Vietnam, often for personal or political gain.

Nor can you overlook the passive construction of the language, which helps to strip agency from the war’s cheerleaders. Burns’ equivocations here represent stunning intellectual cop-outs, pure and simple, and throw doubt on all that follows.

Relevant to such a compromised take is how Burns and Novick get funding for their projects. Less than a quarter of their money is provided by government sources; the rest comes from charities and the private sector. So perhaps it’s foolish to believe any Ken Burns documentary—partly paid for by the likes of David Koch and Bank of America, among other sponsors—would offer up a polemicized indictment of US politicians and war policy.

By all accounts, Burns and Novick maintain full editorial independence, but their funding pipeline for future projects also greatly depends upon the continued generosity of those same nonprofit and corporate benefactors, who don’t ordinarily court highly controversial filmmakers. As a result of this ongoing relationship, there’s an unseen, but unmistakable gravitational pull that serves to keeps the pair from wandering too far afield from conventional wisdom. Just like Bank of America, in other words, Ken Burns has a brand to protect.

To stay safely within the bounds of convention, Burns and Novick spend a great deal of their time “in-country,” so to speak, on a simple, universal theme: War is hell. And their ability to convey the visceral fear and pathos of battle at the human level is remarkable and poignant: “In war, nobody wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won or lost,” says Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese soldier Burns interviews. (Bao is no random grunt—he is also the author of The Sorrow of War, a novel of a soldier’s anguish—but, again, Burns identifies him only as “North Vietnamese Army.”)

When paired with the blunt, chilling lessons that combat taught US Marine Karl Marlantes, the combination has a powerful effect. “One of the things I learned in the war is that we’re not the top species on the planet because we’re nice,” recounts Marlantes about a firefight from 1969. “People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff, and I’ll always argue that it’s just finishing school.”

Feeding this seething killing machine on the American side was a wide-open, virulent streak of racism, which Burns, to his credit, delves into (finally) in the fifth episode. (A Washington Post podcast interview with Burns—9/22/17—delves further into this aspect of the war.) Still, the film can never quite make the leap between the countless tragedies on the tactical level and strategic policies that enabled them and then quickly metastasized.

The most famous battlefield atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre, which was mostly covered up and pinned on one Lt. William Calley, again shows Burns putting his directorial thumb on the scale. Rather than call the massacre “murder,” as it was originally described by Novick, Burns switched the script to read that “the killing of civilians has happened in every war.” While true, this statement is so banal that it is meaningless, and serves to inoculate My Lai and all the other atrocities committed in the war of their conscience-shocking power. In effect, the film’s stance is normalizing war crimes. And Burns all but confesses to this in a bizarre admission to the New Yorker: “‘Killing’ was the better word, [Burns] said, ‘even though My Lai ismurder.’”

These distinctions without differences betray a corrupted objectivity, one that can’t really reckon with the fact that the wanton destruction and unceasing, lawless violence seen at My Lai was more the rule than the exception. Perpetrating atrocities was, in fact, standard operating procedure for entire units on the US and Vietnamese sides throughout the war, not merely the work of a few deranged individuals. One academic who studies democide (murder by government) conservatively estimates North Vietnam killed 216,000 non-combatants between 1954 and 1975. (The Vietnamese government had been silent about the film until this week, when it issued a boilerplate response. But Vietnamese citizens have been able to watch a version of the documentary with Vietnamese subtitles on PBS online.)

To cite but one specific example of this lawless killing by the US military, the “Tiger Force” recon platoon of the 1/327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, committed a “wave of terror” in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1967. This bloodthirsty campaign was detailed in a 2003 series by the Toledo Blade (10/19/03). But for a more exhaustively comprehensive look at the tsunami of illegal killing by the US across the entire theater, you’re better off reading Nick Turse’s damning account: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. As an American Conservative (7/30/13) book review of Turse’s book makes clear:

The relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: It was policy. This was a war fought along Fordist principles—Robert McNamara had gone to the Department of Defense straight from the helm of the auto giant—and the slaughter was industrial in scale. Victory over the Viet Cong was to be achieved by quantifiable “kill ratios,” to reach that elusive tipping point where the insurgency could no longer replenish its troops. This approach hard-wired incentives to secure a high “body count” down the chain of command, with the result that US soldiers often shot civilians dead to pad their tallies and thereby move up the ranks.

Turse sent copies of his book to Burns’ team, and it is listed as a source in the show’s online bibliography. But while episodes two and three of Burns’ series do take time to cite McNamara’s chilling preference for quantifying enemy deaths as success (i.e., the infamous “body counts”), the film still fails to connect all the dots as to how this high-level political and military mindset—also propelled by racism—set the conditions for consistent, everyday atrocities, versus mere military operations, by combat units. (Thomas Bass’s highly critical essay covering the entire 18-hour documentary—Mekong Review, 8–10/17—discusses this.)

Ironically, Burns and Novick’s compromised framing also echoes much of the jingoistic reporting of the war as it was happening, which the film does an admirable job of debunking. Most TV media coverage of the early years of ever-expanding war, Burns notes, was almost willfully obtuse, invoking World War II newsreels that portrayed the war in terms that were “enthusiastic, unquestioning, good guys fighting and defeating bad guys.” At one point, Burns features a Marine, Roger Harris, telling his mother in 1967 that “she shouldn’t believe what she sees in the newspaper, what she sees on television, because we’re losing the war.”

There were a few, notable exceptions, however. While Vietnam was still fighting French colonial rule, on-the-ground reporters like Seymour Topping, the local Associated Press correspondent in Saigon, were warning that Western imperialist intentions in the country were doomed to fail. In 1951, Topping said as much to a young congressmember from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the nation for the first time.

Once the US began sending advisers, and then combat troops, in the early 1960s, Burns points to a handful of reporters—Neil Sheehan (who was an adviser to the documentary), the New York Times’ David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne of the AP—who dared to buck the party line. After spending time in the field, the film notes, they “were beginning to see that from the Vietnamese countryside, things looked very different than they did from the press offices in Washington or Saigon.”

But even intrepid reporters committed to telling the truth about the war were susceptible to creeping American bias. Sheehan, who had fought in Korea, acknowledges that he found riding along in US helicopters on an South Vietnamese Army air assault raid “absolutely thrilling.” Similarly, Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who filed countless battlefield reports during the war, says in the film:

You can’t just be a neutral witness to something like war.… It’s not something you can stand back and be neutral and objective, and all of those things that we try to be as reporters, journalists and photographers. It doesn’t work that way.

Not coincidentally, when Galloway recounts a landmark 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley, where the Air Cavalry unit he was with faced a massive, frontal attack by the Viet Cong, he notably lapses into the first-person plural: “We had two things going for us. We had a great commander and great soldiers and we had air and artillery support out the yin-yang.” That Galloway later co-authored a New York Times bestselling book about the battle with its US commander, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, and was later awarded a Bronze Star by the US Army for helping rescue a wounded soldier during that battle, goes unmentioned by Burns.

It’s this blindspot—the failure to see that one is adopting the point of view of one’s subjects—that ultimately dooms the film’s potential. Which is a tragedy, since the US is currently failing to learn the the same painful, sunk-costs lessons of Vietnam with its bipartisan, Groundhog Day war policy in Afghanistan. As Drake University political science professor, David Skidmore, noted in his review of the film (Military Times, 9/17/17):

Now Trump has also reneged from previous pledges to disengage from Afghanistan…the histories of US military involvements in Vietnam and Afghanistan should serve as warnings to future presidents who might be tempted to again jump onto the treadmill of perpetual war.

Burns has said he wants his film to act at as “some sort of vaccination” to war, to “get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored.” But by denying the role and agency of the people who lied us into the Vietnam War, and then kept lying to keep us from leaving, his film misdiagnoses the real problem.

Looking for an invading sickness or outside cause for the mayhem and destruction our country unleashed upon Vietnam, and itself, is a dodge. In the end, the answer to the fundamental question about the Vietnam War, “Why?,” cannot be found in any clinical or objective analysis—no matter how many hours of documentary footage you have—that stubbornly avoids placing blame where it is so richly due.

As US Empire Fails, Trump Enters a Quagmire

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By Kevin Zeese

Source: Information Clearing House

A quagmire is defined as a complex or unpleasant position that is difficult to escape. President Trump’s recently announced war plans in Afghanistan maintain that quagmire. They come at a time when US Empire is failing and its leadership in the world is weakening. The US will learn what other empires have learned, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”

During the presidential campaign, some became convinced that Trump would not be an interventionist president. His tweets about Afghanistan were one of the reasons. In January of 2013, he tweeted, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” Now, we see a president who carries on the interventionist tradition of US Empire.

While Afghanistan has been a never-ending active war since 9-11, making the 16-year war the longest in US history, the truth is the United States became directly involved with Afghanistan some 38 years ago, on July 3, 1979. As William Rivers Pitts writes “On that day, at the behest of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter signed the first directive in an operation meant to destabilize the Soviet-controlled government of Afghanistan.” In fact when the US dropped the MOAB bomb, Trump was bombing tunnels built with the assistance of the CIA in the 1980′s for the mujaheddin and Bin Laden.

Trump’s Afghan policy is inaccurately described as a new approach but has only one element that is new – secrecy, as Trump will not tell us how many soldiers he will send to this war. His so-called new strategy is really a continuation of the permanent war quagmire in Afghanistan, which may be an intentional never ending war for the empire’s geopolitical goals. Ralph Nader reviews 16 years of headlines about Afghanistan, calling it a “cruel boomeranging quagmire of human violence and misery… with no end in sight.”

Another Afghan Review Leads To Same Conclusion: More War

During his campaign for president, Trump called for the US to pull out of Afghanistan. Early in his administration, President Trump announced a review of the Afghanistan war. This week when he announced escalation of the war, Trump noted this was his instinct. Unfortunately, the president did not trust his previous instincts and missed an opportunity to end the war.

We have seen how President Trump refuses to admit mistakes, so it is highly unlikely he will change course from this mistaken path. His rationale is so many US soldiers have given their lives that we must stay until the United States wins. This is the quandary – the US must continue the war until we win because soldiers have died but continuing the war means more will die and the US must stay committed to war because more have died.

After we read President Trump’s Afghanistan war speech, we went back and re-read President Obama’s Afghanistan war speech given in March 2009.  It is remarkable how similar the two speeches are. When Russian president Putin was interviewed by filmmaker Oliver Stone as well as when he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly, he made a point proven by US policy in Afghanistan, “Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change.”

Both presidents conducted a lengthy review early in their administration and both talked with generals and diplomats who convinced them to escalate rather than end the war. Both presidents put forward what they claimed was a new strategy but in reality, was just doing the same thing over again: more troops, building up Afghanistan’s military by working closely with them, using economic and diplomatic power and putting pressure on Pakistan not to be a safe haven for the Taliban and those fighting against the United States.

To ensure a quagmire both presidents said that decisions would not be based on a timeline but on conditions on the ground. Both promised victory, without clearly defining what it would mean; both raised fears of the Taliban and other anti-US militants using Afghanistan to attack the United States again. Trump had the advantage of knowing that President Obama’s approach had failed despite repeated bombings in Pakistan and working with Afghan troops, but that didn’t alter his course.

Afghanistan Victims of a February, 2012 US air strike that killed 8 children in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

Failure To Learn Lessons Ensures Repeating Them

According to Mike Ludwig, since President Obama approved a troop surge in 2009, the war in Afghanistan has claimed at least 26,512 civilian lives and injured nearly 48,931 more. In July, the United Nations reported that at least 5,243 civilians have been killed or injured in 2017 alone, including higher numbers of woman and children than previous in years. Trump seems less concerned than previous presidents with killings of civilians.

Trump noted that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region was now the densest part of the world when it comes to anti-US militants, saying there were 20 terrorist groups in the area. President Obama added tens of thousands of troops to the Afghanistan war, dropped massive numbers of bombs and the result was more terrorism. The US was killing terrorists but the impact was creating more anti-American militants. Trump failed to connect these dots and understand that more US attacks create more hatred against the United States.

After Obama failed to ‘win’ the war by adding tens of thousands of troops, with more than 100,000 fighting in Afghanistan at its peak, Trump should have asked his generals how adding thousands more (reports are between 4,000 and 8,000 soldiers) would change failure to success. Wasn’t there anyone in the room who would tell Trump there is nothing new in the Trump strategy that Obama and Bush had not already tried. Steve Bannon was the most opposed to war in the administration and reportedly fought against more war, but he was not in the room. Did anyone in the room stand up to the hawk-generals?

The policy of working more closely with the Afghan military in order to build them up ended in disaster in the Obama era. The New Yorker wrote in 2012: “We can’t win the war in Afghanistan, so what do we do? We’ll train the Afghans to do it for us, then claim victory and head for the exits.” But, the US discovered that it could not train the Afghans in the ‘American way of war.’ In 2012, the Obama administration ended the program of fighting alongside Afghan soldiers to train them because those soldiers were killing US soldiers. How many US soldiers will die because Trump was ignorant of this lesson?

Trump also took the wrong lesson from the Iraq war and occupation. He inaccurately described the so-called withdrawal from Iraq as hasty. He points to the rise of ISIS as created by the vacuum in Iraq when the US reduced its numbers of troops. Trump said the US “cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”

In fact, ISIS rose up because the killing of hundreds of thousands, some reports say more than a million, of Iraqis, displacement of more than a million more, the destruction of a functioning government as well as war crimes like the Abu Gharib torture scandal made it easy to recruit fighters. Furthermore, the training and supply of weapons to Sunnis during the ‘Awakening’ created armed soldiers looking for their next job.

It was US war and occupation that created ISIS. The seeds had been planted, fertilized and were rapidly growing before the US reduced its military footprint. Trump is repeating the mistake of more militarism, and in the end ISIS or some other form of anti-US militancy will thrive.

The US does not want to face an important reality – the government of the United States is hated in the region for very good reasons. Bush lied to us about 9-11 when he claimed they hate us for our freedoms. No, they hate the US because US militarism kills hundreds of thousands of people in the region, destroys functioning governments and creates chaos.

Victory Means Something Different to an Empire

In trying to understand why the US is fighting a war — a war that has been unwinnable for 16 years — it helps to look at a map and consider the resources of an area.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former adviser, predicts the US will be in Afghanistan for the next 50 years. Indeed, that may be the ‘victory’ the empire seeks. Afghanistan is of geopolitical importance. It is a place where the US can impact China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ to Europe where China can take the place of Russia and the United States in providing wealthy Europeans with key commodities like oil and gas. Just as the United States has stayed in Germany, Italy and other European states and Japan after WW II,  and in Korea after the Korean war, the empire sees a need to be in Afghanistan to be well positioned for the future of the empire. Terrorism is not the issue, economic competition with China, which is quickly becoming the leading global economic power, is the real issue.

And, competition with Russia and China is at the top of the list of the bi-partisan war party in Washington. Pepe Escobar points out that “Russia-China strategic partnership wants an Afghan solution hatched by Afghans and supervised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (of which Afghanistan is an observer and future full member). So from the point of view of neocon/neoliberalcon elements of the War Party in Washington, Afghanistan only makes sense as a forward base to harass/stall/thwart China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”

Afghanistan is next to China, India and Pakistan, three nuclear powers that could pose military risks to the United States. Having multiple bases in Afghanistan, to allegedly fight terrorists, will provide the forward deployment needed to combat each of those nations if military action is needed.

Afghanistan also borders on Iran, which could be a near-future war zone for the United States. Positioning the US military along the Afghanistan-Iran border creates a strategic advantage with Iran as well as with the Persian Gulf where approximately 18.2 million barrels of oil per day transit through the Strait of Hormuz in tankers.

Afghanistan’s land contains $3 trillion in rare earth minerals needed for computers and modern technology including rich deposits of gold, silver, platinum, iron ore and copper. The US has spent $700 billion in fighting a failed war and President Trump and empire strategists are looking to make sure US corporations get access to those minerals. Since the US Geological Survey discovered these minerals a decade ago, some see Afghanistan as the future  “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a raw material used in phone and electric car batteries. US officials have told Reuters that Trump argued at a White House meeting with advisers in July that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.

Jeffrey St. Clair reminds us not to forget the lucrative opium trade. Afghanistan is the largest source for heroin in the world. He writes:

Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, opium production has swelled, now accounting for more than one-third of the wrecked Afghan economy. In the last two years alone, opium poppy yields have doubled, a narcotic blowback now hitting the streets of American cities from Amarillo to Pensacola. With every drone strike in the Helmond Province, a thousand more poppies bloom.

The decision on a never ending war — with no timetable for exit — is evidence that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are in charge of US foreign policy with Trump as a figurehead.  Of course, the war also ensures immense profits for the war industry. St. Clair emphasizes that “in 2016, the Pentagon spent $3.6 million for each US soldier stationed in Afghanistan.  A surge of 4,000 to 10,000 additional troops, either as ‘private military units’ or GIs, will come as a welcome new infusion of cash to the dozens of defense corporations that invested so heavily in his administration.”

The firing of Steve Bannon just before the meeting that decided Afghanistan’s future was not coincidence as he was the opponent of escalation. Glenn Greenwald writes in the Intercept that this permanent power structure has been working since his election to take control of foreign policy. He also points to the appointment of Marine General John Kelly as chief of staff and how National Security Adviser, General McMaster, has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy. The deep state of the permanent national security complex has taken over and the Afghan war decision demonstrates this reality.

With these geopolitical realities, staying Afghanistan may be the victory the Pentagon seeks — winning may just be being there. The Intercept reported this week that the Taliban offered to negotiate peace, but peace on the terms of the Taliban may not be what the US is seeking.

Call for an End to War for Empire

It would be a terrible error for people to blame Trump for the Afghanistan war which began with intervention by Jimmy Carter, became a hot war after 9-11 under George Bush, escalated under Obama and now continues the same polices under Trump. The bi-partisan war hawks in Congress for nearly 40 years have supported these policies. Afghanistan is evidence of the never ending policy of full spectrum dominance sought by the US empire. The bi-partisans warriors span the breadth of both parties, Jeffrey St. Clair highlights the Afghanistan war cheering by Senator John McCain and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Throughout recent decades the United States has failed to show what Kathy Kelly called the courage we need for peace and continues the cowardice of war. In fact, many ask why are we still at war in Afghanistan: Osama bid Laden is dead, other alleged 9-11 attack attackers are caught or killed. This shows that calling Afghanistan the longest running Fake War in US history is right — fake because it was never about terrorism but about business. If terrorism were the issue, Saudi Arabia would be the prime US enemy, but Saudi Arabia is also about business.

We share the conclusion of human rights activist and Green vice presidential candidate in 2016 Ajamu Baraka who wrote for the Black Alliance for Peace that:

In an obscene testament to U.S. vanity and the psychopathological commitment to global white supremacy, billions have already been wasted, almost three thousand U.S. lives lost and over 100,000 dead. It is time to admit defeat in Afghanistan and bring the war to an end. Justice and common sense demand that the bloodletting stop.

When we understand the true motives of US Empire, that conclusion is even worse — to steal resources from a poor nation and put in place permanent bases from which to conduct more war. US hegemony is costly to millions of people around the world and at home it sucks more than 54% of discretionary spending from the federal budget and creates an empire economy that only serves the wealthiest corporate interests that profit from transnational military dominance while creating a record wealth divide where most people in the United States are economic slaves. It is not only time to end the Afghanistan war but to end US Empire.

Obama Fears Backlash from Saudi 9/11 Bill — So What?

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By Klaus Marre

Source: Who.What.Why.

Only an idiot would sign an order triggering a process that ends up with them in court. President Barack Obama is not an idiot and that is why he vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).

The legislation, which allows victims of terror attacks on US soil to sue foreign governments, was very popular in Congress where lawmakers did not want to seem unpatriotic ahead of the election. That is why, to Obama’s great disappointment and consternation, Congress overrode the veto — and immediately showed buyer’s remorse.

Specifically, its purpose is as follows:

The purpose of this Act is to provide civil litigants with the broadest possible basis, consistent with the Constitution of the United States, to seek relief against persons, entities, and foreign countries, wherever acting and wherever they may be found, that have provided material support, directly or indirectly, to foreign organizations or persons that engage in terrorist activities against the United States.

What the legislators had apparently not considered, even though it was Obama’s main argument for not supporting the bill, were the unintended consequences of JASTA. Sure, allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia sounded like a great idea to lawmakers running for reelection.

Yet the law will also open up the United States, its military and intelligence services to the same kind of action abroad. That is something Obama wanted to avoid at all costs — and why the White House called the veto override the “single most embarrassing thing” the Senate has done in decades.

But why? Shouldn’t the United States conduct itself in a way that would prevent it from getting sued abroad? The president, who has access to more intelligence than anybody else, clearly didn’t think so.

If JASTA allows Saudi Arabia to be sued for whatever level of complicity in the 9/11 attacks a US court finds sufficient evidence of, just imagine what the United States government can be taken to court for.

There is already talk of Vietnam War veterans being particularly vulnerable to lawsuits. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Could Pakistanis whose wedding got blown up by a drone take Obama to court? Can one of the many torture victims sue to get the names of their guards, torturers, etc. and then seek compensation from them? Or what about GITMO prisoners who were released without ever being charged? Finally, what about any citizen of a country that was plunged into turmoil as a result of CIA actions?

Maybe an easier challenge would be to figure out who couldn’t sue the United States once this precedent has been established.

But we ask again: Would that really be such a bad thing, especially going forward? It could serve as a deterrent and maybe the United States, as well as the other big players on the world stage, would think twice about intervening in the affairs of other countries if the threat of personal accountability would hang over their heads.

“Crimes against Peace”: Historic Class Action Law Suit against George W. Bush

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The case for Aggressive War against George W. Bush and his Administration.

By Inder Comar

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

On March 13, 2013, my client, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, filed a class action lawsuit against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in a federal court in California.

 She alleges that these six defendants planned and waged the Iraq War in violation of international law by waging a “war of aggression,” as defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, more than sixty years ago. (The current complaint can be found here). 

At the Nuremberg Trials, American chief prosecutor and associate justice of the US Supreme Court Robert H. Jackson focused his prosecution on the planning and execution of the various wars committed by the Third Reich. Jackson aimed to show that German leaders committed “crimes against peace,” and specifically, that they “planned, prepared, initiated wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances.”

For Jackson, the Nuremberg Trials were a high watermark of legalism. In his report regarding the negotiations of the treaty that would set up the Nuremberg Tribunal, Jackson wrote that the Tribunal “ushers international law into a new era where it is in accord with the common sense of mankind that a war of deliberate and unprovoked attack deserves universal condemnation and its authors condign penalties.” He concluded, “all who have shared in this work have been united and inspired in the belief that at long last the law is now unequivocal in classifying armed aggression as an international crime instead of a national right.”

The Nuremberg Tribunal agreed with Jackson. In its famous judgment in 1946, the Tribunal wrote,

“War is essentially an evil thing . . . to initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The case against Bush is based on the conduct of members of the administration prior to coming into office as well as conduct taking place on and after 9/11. Years before their appointment to the Bush Administration, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were vocal advocates of a militant neoconservative ideology that called for the United States to use its armed forces in the Middle East and elsewhere.

They openly chronicled their desire for aggressive wars through a non-profit called The Project for the New American Century (or PNAC). In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would personally sign a letter to then-President Clinton, urging the president to implement a “strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” which included a “willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.”

On 9/11, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz openly pressed for the United States to invade Iraq, even though intelligence at the time confirmed that it was al Qaeda, and not Saddam, that was responsible. Richard Clarke, former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism, famously told President Bush that attacking Iraq for 9/11 would be like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor.

We now know that the Bush Administration began a concerted effort to scare and mislead the American public in order to obtain support for the Iraq War. As alleged in the complaint, this included the famous phrase that “the smoking gun could not be a mushroom cloud,” which was used repeatedly by Administration officials on news shows as a way of equating non-action with the vaporization of a United States city. The Administration used bogus and false intelligence to make the case for weapons of mass destruction, and also falsely linked al Qaeda to Iraq, despite the fact that there has never been any evidence of any operational linkages between the two. These were not simple mistakes: this was an intentional campaign by Administration officials to use faulty data to garner support for a war.

The crime of aggression was completed when these officials failed to secure proper authorization for the war. So concerned with their invasion, the Administration dismissed any need for a formal Security Council mandate. Today, Kofi Annan, an official Dutch inquiry, the Costa Rican Supreme Court, a former law lord from the House of Lords (Lord Steyn) and a former chief prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials (Benjamin Ferencz) have all concluded the Iraq War was illegal under international law.

After months of briefing, the Northern District of California will issue its order any day as to whether it will recognize the crime of aggression, and whether my client may pursue a civil case against the Bush-era defendants based on that crime. In August of last year, the Obama Department of Justice requested that the district court immunize Bush and his high officials from civil charges on the basis that they were acting “within the scope of their authority.” This issue also remains pending before the court, but it should be noted that both Nuremberg, as well as the more recent Pinochet decision, reject the idea of immunity for leaders when they step outside the appropriate scope of their authority.

We need your support and attention to this case. We cannot let the crime of aggression disappear into history; indeed, even the International Criminal Court has now provided its own definition for aggression, with jurisdiction for this crime being enabled after 2017. We must affirm Jackson’s belief that, “law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, under God and the law.”

For most of the post-war period, this notion — that leaders must be held accountable for their decisions to go to war — has gathered dust. This must change, or else the legacy of Nuremberg, and its foundation for the post-war international legal regime, will be tossed aside in favor of the state of anarchic international relations that led to the Second World War itself. It is time to fulfill Jackson’s dream of a global order governed by law, not war. And it is time for accountability over the Iraq War and for the millions of people who lost their lives or who were affected by it.

Inder Comar is counsel of record for Sundus Shaker Saleh in her case against members of the Bush Administration. The case is Saleh v. Bush, Case No. 3:13-cv-1124 JST (N.D. Cal. March 13, 2013). The firm is providing case updates at witnessiraq.com and is representing Saleh pro bono.