deleted by creator
Yep, it’s all good as long as land wasn’t annexed
Who needs to formally annex land when you can install a puppet government, set up military bases for your decades long occupation, and rebuild the economy under the yoke of your own corporations.
Nearly all the benefits but small part of costs of the traditional empire.
And tankies says capitalism bring no progress smh (/s)
deleted by creator
A long time ago somebody linked me to a whole bunch of pictures and video from the invasion, and it was…Barbarossa-type shit. The image of the grinning American trooper hoisting his flamethrower in front of someone’s doomed farm, while not gory, is it’s own kind of horrifying. I highly recommend the article What I saw in Fallujah. It’s tough to read but necessary, from someone who was there on the ground and outside the purview of official media.
CW war crimes, mass human suffering
From the article:
The military was maintaining a strict cordon around most of Fallujah. As I could not enter the city, I set out to interview doctors and patients who had fled and were presently working in various hospitals around Baghdad. While visiting Yarmouk Hospital looking for more information about Fallujah, I came across several children from areas south of Baghdad. One of these was a 12-year-old girl, Fatima Harouz, from Latifiya. She lay dazed in a crowded hospital room, limply waving her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, were both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet. Her mother told us, “They attacked our home, and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.”
Victims’ testament
Fatima’s uncle was shot and killed, his wife had been wounded, and their home was ransacked by soldiers. “Before they left, they killed all our chickens.” A doctor who was with us looked at me and asked, “This is the freedom. In their Disneyland are there kids just like this?”
Another young woman, Rana Obeidy, had been walking home in Baghdad with her brother two nights earlier. She assumed the soldiers had shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. She had a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, but had struck her little brother and killed him. In another room, a small boy from Fallujah lay on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade thrown into his home by a US soldier had entered his body through his back and was implanted near his kidney. An operation had successfully removed the shrapnel, but his father had been killed by what his mother described as “the haphazard shooting of the Americans”. The boy, Amin, lay in his bed vacillating between crying with pain and playing with his toy car.
Later, I found myself at a small but busy supply centre in Baghdad set up to distribute goods to refugees from Fallujah. Standing in an old, one-storey building that used to be a vegetable market, I watched as people walked around wearily to obtain basic foodstuffs, blankets or information about housing. “They kicked all the journalists out of Fallujah so they could do whatever they want,” said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who had escaped from Fallujah three days before. “The first thing they did was bomb the hospitals because that is where the wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people are in the street and the soldiers are rolling their tanks over them. This happened so many times. What you see on the TV is nothing. That is just one camera. What you cannot see is much more.”
There were also stories of soldiers not discriminating between civilians and resistance fighters. Another man, Abdul Razaq Ismail, had arrived from Fallujah one week earlier and had been helping with the distribution of supplies to other refugees, having received similar help himself. Loading a box with blankets to send to a refugee camp, he said, “There are dead bodies on the ground and nobody can bury them. The Americans are dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling some bodies with tanks and leaving them at the soccer stadium.” Another man sat nearby nodding his head. He couldn’t stop crying. After a while, he said he wanted to talk to us. “They bombed my neighbourhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from under them.”
Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man in a torn shirt and dusty pants, told of how he escaped with his family, just the day before, while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, killing his cousin. “They used these weird bombs that first put up smoke in a cloud, and then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burned for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours.”
This was the first time I had heard a refugee describing the use of white phosphorous incendiary weapons by the US military, fired from artillery into Fallujah. Though it is not technically a banned weapon, it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use white phosphorous in an area where civilians may be hit. I heard similar descriptions in the coming days and weeks, both from refugees and doctors who had fled the city.
Several doctors I interviewed had told me they had been instructed by the interim government not to speak to any journalists about the patients they were receiving from Fallujah. A few of them told me they had even been instructed by the Shia-controlled Ministry of Health not to accept patients from Fallujah.
It would seem insane to me that none of these people ever went to the Hague if I didn’t know that the US has already threatened to bomb it. As a kid I used to think international law was some solemn thing, now I see It’s a comedy
Fun fact: the Hague Invasion Act was signed in August of 2002
deleted by creator
But they achieved all their objectives so well! /s
W raised the banner saying “Mission Accomplished” what more do you want? Jeez.
I want a president to land a jet on a freaking aircraft carrier!!!
Fucking shameful. I’m sorry world. Please know that many in the US condemn these wars, but there is very little we can do about them.
By the standards of Reddit, we are all guilty for failing to overthrow the governing class and US citizens deserve to be bombed
I for one agree
At this point we’re really straining not to make excuses for the lack of terror
Aren’t US republicans always proudly saying that their second amendment is meant to prevent exactly that?
I’m sorry, my hands are tied, I’m too busy eating seven dollar costco chicken to abolish the state
Boo hoo nothing we can do. Why even try amiright? /s
didn’t libya got turned into a slave trading nation, lol?
Ya, America saw a rising star in Africa, couldn’t exploit it, and kicked it over a millenia into the past. You aren’t allowed to prosper unless American corporations get the biggest slice of your pie.
Millions might have died but a few arms dealers made a lot of money so who can really say if the wars were good or bad?
Bush should be in jail for Iraq.
Regarding Afghanistan, we should have focused exclusively on counter-insurgency and let the Loya Jirga do its thing without US interference.
regarding afghanistan, you should’ve left it the fuck alone you imperialist
the more your shit government meddles there, the worse it gets.
the way to fix the cold war era meddling isnt to go in and kill a lot more people, it’s to stay the fuck away.
also give them back their fucking money.
deleted by creator
did they already plan to use afghanistan to export muslim extremism into xinjiang when they planned the invasion, or did they come up with that idea later?
I think they already had been, Uigyurs were fighting in the Soviet-Afghan war on the side of the muhajadeen and then brought that violence home in the 90s
CIA was heavily involved in creating the Afghan war though, Afghanistan would look like Vietnam or Cuba today if not for that.
deleted by creator
Or just not launched a war of aggression at all.
war is just a way for businesses to shore up their falling profits. destroying another country gives victor companies chances to rebuild, which temporarily shores up profit rates because so much capital is destroyed and the creation of new capital during the windup phase actually increases the rate of profit for a little bit. there are other techniques as well. that said, the corruption was so rampant that they didn’t even execute that well. either way the human costs of continuing to run capitalism as usual are staggering and wars are one of the many facets of that. all the other explanations and media outrage etc and just cover stories to make it palatable for the public, which has already believed the big lies about democracy and freedom existing under capitalism
Your argument would be very convenient for socialists or communists looking for an explanation that blames war on the rich. Unfortunately I do believe it is a gross oversimplification that is neither useful nor particularly true.
While it is true that the military industrial complex has gotten out of control in many western countries since World War II, the argument that private industry is the true beneficiary and intentional instigator of war can be readily disproved. Rather, this assumption made by many on the left is born from a partial realization of the truth that war is about resources, but the argument quickly loses the plot thereafter. War is indeed about resources, both physical and psychological in nature, or put more succinctly, war is about security. Each state actor responds and reacts as necessary in order to ensure their legitimate security needs are met.
This view was famously espoused by political scientist Kenneth Waltz when he built upon the theories of classic realists such as Machiavelli. Whereas Classic Realism suggests that war is about power, Waltz takes it one step further with Structural Realism and gives us an academic framework to understand the balance of power and the motivation behind state actors. Waltz suggests that these power shifts are the result of states reacting to perceived threats in order to ensure security. For instance, in the Structural Realist view, one could say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to gain security in response to a perceived NATO threat. Using this theory, we could similarly suggest that the US invasion of Afghanistan was a move to obtain greater security in a region that threatened the US hegemony (though the argument starts to break down here when we distinguish between the Taliban and Al Qaeda as neo-realism does not explain the action of non-state actors).
While it would be fair to say that in many western countries, the military industrial complex has acquired a massive amount of power and control over the government, it can hardly be said that war exists only for the benefit of war profiteers who help with nation building. The most obvious proof of this is the fact that war long pre-dates crony capitalism, nation building, and the military industrial complex as a whole. Furthermore, while lobbyists do hold an incredible amount of power, they are certainly not the rulers and final decision-makers of our country. Foreign policy is set by a number of diverse lawmakers and civil servants across the political landscape, but the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, which was opposed by the Military Industrial Complex, as well as the US intervention in Somalia which was wholly a humanitarian mission, are proof that they do not make the final decisions.
Our democracy certainly has many problems. Money pollutes our campaigns, and lobbyists hold far too much power. Trump’s five year lobbying ban for former US officials was a good start until he repealed it. We need more measures that limit lobbyists, and limit the ability of ANY politician or political party from totally derailing our country by putting us into unnecessary wars. We need more checks and balances in our system that prevent career politicians from fucking the rest of us over. And dammit, we definitely need to elect some better people than these jokers we’ve been electing lately. However; war is far more complex than you suggest.
The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
—Major General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corps
War is about the rate of profit decreasing and is one of the premier ways of conterveiling that decrease. Rate of profit is total surplus value (which is the amount of labor that the worker does not get paid for, which the capitalist pockets in order to reinvest in his business) divided over the cost of constant capital ( machines and commodites that go into production ) + the cost of labor (also called variable capital). ( r = s/ (c + v) ) When taken on national scale or on an industry scale or even on a global scale, you can see that the overwhelming tendency is for this value to decrease. Carchedi and Roberts have rather good empirical confirmation of this in their work, as do many other economists who study this tendency. Marx is the first one to come up with this, though the labor theory of value had been around previous to him in various unfinished forms.
The tendency of this ratio to decrease is due to the tendency of capitalism to, over time, invest more and more in labor-saving capital as a cost cutting measure to remain competitive and corner the market while overproducing commodities until it reaches limit of realizing profit while at the same time reducing its reliance on workers (labor) by laying people off and keeping fewer workers around to work the more advanced means of production. Initially capital is in an ascendant phase but overtime all of capital reaches this crisis.
This very tendency is what causes capitalist global crisis. Capitalist crisis is what causes global imperialist conflicts and wars. Iraq and Afghanistan are just examples.
What you are referring to in terms of military industrial complex and resource wars is simply the class of business owners employing some counterveiling tendencies to reverse the trend temporarily. Cheap resource extraction actually decreaces the value of C in the formula S/(C+V), so this increases the rate of profit. Making workers desperate for work, such as what’s happening in Ukraine, due to the war, decreases V without decreasing S, which also increases the rate of profit. Destroying an entire country destroys massive amounts of both C and V and allows entire industries to be started anew, which restarts the accumulation cycle in that region to its starting point, at which point it can enjoy a certain limited period of increasing rates of profit before the inevitable decrease.
Checks and balances and other half measures won’t do. The capitalist revolution overthrew kings and queens and got rid of feudalism but it benefited overwhelmingly the class of business owners and not anyone else. To get the rest of the classes to go along with them, they came up with fake shams like the Constitution and business-friendly philosophers came up with nonsense like the bill of rights. You should ask yourself whose rights? Clearly of those that control business, those who won the borgeois revolution. Those same people who, in the case of the US, fought to not pay taxes and own slaves, the same ones that did not allow regular working people to even vote without owning property. Its clearly a system for owners by owners with hogwash and bullshit for everyone else.
If we want a planet that will not be destroyed by this crashing system that only benefits a rather miniscule portion of the planet we (workers) will sieze control through revolution and reorganize society to benefit all from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. This will involve great deals of class consciousness as well as class based violence and terror in the period before establishing a dictatorship of the workers and solidifying the power of the workers councils. After that we will finally have the freedom necessary to reorganize production into a new mode of production that does not involve wage labor, commodities or classes, with the help of highly advanced means of production and advanced planning techniques as well as a culture born from class conscious struggle and the creativity of the working masses that will replace the current superstructure.
Naturally, ours is a fighting ideology but not one dedicated to shoring up the profits of a tiny minority of sick bastards.
War is not particularly complex, it’s just not something liberals are usually willing to understand as it challenges their little mythologies (many of which you repeated here).
Relatively simple questions are unanswerable by that framework, not even approximately. Let’s try some.
-
Who pushes for war in the first place? Where does the impetus come from? Normal folks don’t wake up and say, “yeah I’d like to destroy a country and its people 4500 miles away”, and they definitely don’t have the power to make war happen.
-
What gains the consent of the country to support and maintain war? Why do anti-war movements, even with millions of people, fail to stop war?
-
Why do the wars end? When they achieve their purpose? What purpose was that?
-
Who benefits from the wars? Are they involved in the process?
Of course, the driving factors here are simply capitalism and its political lackeys, attacking from multiple angles to ensure its seat of empire will achieve the desired ends by pushing and by removing obstacles. The impetus is a series of battling foreign policy think tanks, politicians ready to support military spending, a friendly (and racist!) media apparatus, and war profiting companies paying every single one of those groups to keep the heat up for the next boondoggle. Constant vilification of established “enemies” and attempts to create new ones, usually targeted at countries that undermine the power of the global seat of capital and therefore its ability to exploit labor and resources internationally.
This is why Saudi Arabia is an “ally” while Iran is an enemy. All things the same, Americans would be just as racist towards both, care just as little for their lives, know just as little about them. But one cozies up to the hegemony of international capital and the other does not, so you are to hate the one and not the other. Scads of anti-Iranian think tanks and propaganda while the Saudis get occasional mention and can even murder journalists on US soil and get away with it. It’s not actually that complex so long as you don’t believe lies about American democracy, “freedom”, interest in peace, liberal world order, etc.
So when we know that these are the actors and criteria, why some wars and not others? Why not big new wars every 6 months instead of several years? Well, the interests involved are part of global capital, they respond to the rate of profit and crises of capitalism, and politicians are on their side. Both the capitalists and their buddies in Congress know that war is a “stimulus” and they count it as jobs and profits and campaign donations (legalized bribery) and good press. The opportune time is whenever it can be sentimentally capitalized on, whenever they can get away with it. When it’s hurting the “right people” at the time, where they might have to wait for consent to get manufactured first. When times are tough and “jobs” mean particularly more than other people’s lives.
And more deeply and perniciously, capitalism forms society itself, such as the white supremacist settler culture of the United States where it is never that difficult to whip up support against another ethnicity, just requires jumping through a few different hoops depending in which capitalist party you favor. The intense gullibility and susceptibility to propaganda, in part due to schools’ materials being dictated by reactionary school systems that themselves work in concert with large publishers to create verifiably false and simplistic material into history textbooks, lesson plans, etc (see: Texas’ input on other states’ curricula). The precarity forced on so many that they can’t even consider joining an anti-war movement. The normalization of American military violence and widespread societal myths about its impact, its actual activities, its history.
I don’t think any of this is complicated. It is only uncomfortable for some.
-
what is hegemony? what is the balance of power? what is security? why did we need security from iraq? from libya? who or what was this security for? what was wrought by these conflicts that changed the lives of the average american for the better or more secure?
the MIC supported continuation of vietnam, who else supported it? who stood against? why? how was it ultimately settled? what were the consequences? why were these consequences? where are these people and parties today?
Osama bin Laden was found in Pakistan, so maybe they didn’t need to invade Afghanistan at all.
deleted by creator
The United States is a constitutional hipocracy. Chomsky has an interesting style of writing…
But we defeated the Taliban and turned Afghanistan into a thriving democracy, right? Right??
It’s even worse than that, war on terror alone resulted in over 6 million deaths https://bylinetimes.com/2021/09/15/up-to-six-million-people-the-unrecorded-fatalities-of-the-war-on-terror/
deleted by creator
ah gotcha
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/Ix-AMYos0Js?t=110
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Inevitably with the passage of time you move on to other topics and while this is happening you focus on narrower more specific effects. But this is so damn infuriating because it’s exactly what EVERYBODY SAID WOULD HAPPEN. Early 2000s when these American wars of adventure started you had people saying this would be destabilising, encourage the very terror supposedly being fought against, cost the US themselves mountains of treasure, degrade their reputation and put them on a path of decline. In the lead up to Iraq many warned that this would be destabilising for the whole world as well as the nation of Iraq itself, that it would make things more dangerous globally, create power vacuums and breed generations of resentment and hatred and it clearly has. This is not to even mention on top of it all, the absolute monumental human tragedy it has wrought. This was stupid, stupid, stupid decision making.
Sorry, can’t hear you over the sound of all this cheap oil, I mean, freedom! Bringing freedom to these rich oil, I mean freedom starved countries! - 'murica in the 2000s
Thing is, the USA has been pulling this kind of shit for a long time. The Kingdom of Hawaii being overthrown is a very good and old example, dating back to 1893 for the coup and 1898 for the incorporation. The Philippines being denied their independence for almost 50 years after the Spanish sold them out in 1898 is another example. The USA is an unrepenting reoffender when it comes to fucking other countries.
And it was less “stumbling into iraq cause we have no clue what we’re doing” and more “If Halliburton and Raytheon make enough money off of all this they’ll donate enough to my staffers and I that we can all customize our cadillacs” (I recommend season 1 of the podcast Blowback if you wanna take a deeper dive)
All of that as revenge for the death of 2977 victims…
All of that as revenge for Saddam Hussein humiliating an insecure cowboy’s daddy, let’s be honest here.
Don’t forget he used the chemical weapons we sold him to use against Iran against Iran in the 80s.
Pretty sure the US wouldn’t have went to Afghanistan if it wasn’t for 911… It’s this the new thing? Ignoring the invasion of Afghanistan? It’s the second time since I’m on Lemmy that I see people acting like that never happened…
I think most Americans still consider Afghanistan justified, but recognize Iraq as a mistake based on lies. It’s not that they ignore it, it’s just easier to swallow.
Terrorist financed by Saudi Arabia found and killed in Pakistan -> Afghanistan was justified and totally not based on lies!
Not only that, the number of innocent civilians killed by the American forces was totally disproportionate to the American loss.
0.15% of their population vs 0.001% for the US.
Of course. A calculated, targeted attack would have been too effective and wouldn’t generate enough profit for the defense industry. Lucky they pissed off Afghanistan in 1998 with Operation Infinite Reach or the Taliban might have turned him over years before 9/11. That’s just bad business.
9/11 was a coincidence as they were already planning the invasion of Iraq months before this event because Saddam announced that he would trade petrol with EUR instead of USD.
Yeah, I remember them trying to first pin 9/11 on Saddam before it was confirmed to be Al Queda. It was weird. And then of course the made up WMD stuff.
Are we just going to ignore the innocent people that died in Afghanistan?
Whoah whoah whoah. The dollar is perfectly green and any association with oil or bombs is purely coincidental. /s
Noone with power gives a shit about life of a average US citizen.
This has been always about military industrial complex. Currently US spends 186.6 billion dollars a year to combat terrorism. Which means unless US is fighting something, somewhere they are losing money and they can’t have that.
“Rather than teasing apart who, what, or when is to blame, this report shows that the post-9/11 wars are implicated in many kinds of deaths, making clear that the impacts of war’s ongoing violence are so vast and complex that they are unquantifiable.”
Did this writer or anyone in this thread actually read the paper?
It basically repeatedly says every few paragraphs that the numbers quoted are only tip of the iceberg of suffering.
Tell us, what do YOU think this is saying?
It doesn’t matter how complicated shit got, the US still kicked everything off.
deleted by creator
🎼 'Cause I’m proud to be an American 🎵🎶🇺🇲🦅
Look I’m not one to say American invasion was right in any way, but this is a bit of a misleading in title. Most sources in the article reference indirect deaths. If we quantified everything in indirect deaths, death tolls across the board would be inflated in the same proportion. I think it important to keep in mind the U.S. wasn’t fuckin digging mass graves over there. The stated number would mean we would need to kill around 600 people a day for 20+ years. No amount of media corruption in the world could coverup that many deaths. I’ve known and do know people who were natives that served as translators during the war, that’s not how they tell it.
