What’s at stake: HH Dalai Lama on Violence:   "Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering""  [The attribution to the Dalai Lama seems plausible, but I received this from a stranger via Facebook, without source citation or any attempt to verify its authenticity.   –Dick]

US Imperialism Newsletters

#1 July 3, 2007

#2 Sept. 20, 2007

#3 April 7, 2008

#4  Nov. 30, 2008

#5   September 13, 2011

#6 October 16, 2011

#7  January 16, 2012

#8 June 3, 2012

#9 Oct. 20, 2012

#10 April 5, 2013

#11 June 3, 2013

#12 July 19, 2013

#13 Sept. 3, 2013

#14 March 2, 2014

#15 June 22, 2014

My blog:  It's the War Department

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/ 

 http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/

Index:

http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/ 

See: Afghan/US War, Costs of War, Consequences of War, US Imperialism, US Imperialism Continental Westward Expansion, US Imperial Pacific E. Asia Expansion, US Leaders Imperial Lawlessness, Iraq/US War, McCarthyism Ongoing, US Military Industrial Complex, Militarism, US National Security State, Pentagon, Pentagon: Suicides, Pentagon: Whistleblowing, Torture, War Crimes, and more.

Richard Sanders, US Pretexts for War, 1846-1989

Brumback, America’s Oldest Professions:Warring and Spying

PeaceVoice, Keyel, US Post-9/11 Military Interventions

Rothkopf, Bush and Obama in Post-9/11 Age of Fear

VfP, Stop Illegal Cluster Bombs to Saudi Arabia

Answer Coalition, Afghanistan and Iraq Occupations Permanent

Tom Dispatch:  Chalmers Johnson, Sagging Empire, Chalmers’ last book was a collection of his
    essays, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope.

Tom Dispatch, US Empire on the Psychiatrist’s Couch

Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox People’s Network (SPN)

William Greider:  Hillary Clinton or Jim Webb or Bernie Sanders or ?

Glennon, Double Government

Rowley, FBI Whistleblower (from Sheehan)

Two Articles on Militarizing Public Health Service: US Army and USAF to West Africa for
    Ebola Crisis

C-130 at Little Rock

Drones in Ft. Smith

The Nation, “Machineries of Death”

Missiles in Camden Lockheed

Recent Related Newsletters

Contact President Obama

Contents of Earlier Empire Newsletters

SANDERS, US GOING TO WAR

Here is an improved and expanded version of my article called "How to start a war: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents (1846-1989)" (May 2002).

This new version was published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) in issue #50, of Press for Conversion! (January 2003). For information on obtaining a copy of that issue, which contains 40 pages of articles by numerous authors on US war pretext incidents, between 1846 and the present, please see the information after this article.

Going to War: Unraveling the Tangled Web of American Pretext Stratagems (1846-1989) By Richard Sanders, coordinator, Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, and editor, Press for Conversion!

    "Oh what a tangled web we weave,

    When first we practice to deceive!"

    Sir Walter Scott, Canto vi, Stanza 17, Marmion.

Pretext n. [Latin praetextum, to weave before, pretend, disguise; prae-, before + texere, to weave], a false reason or motive put forth to hide the real one; excuse.

Stratagem [Gr. Strategema, device or act of a general; stratos, army + agein, to lead], a trick or scheme used to deceive an enemy in war.

For more than a year now the U.S. has seemed on the verge of attacking

Iraq.  All that is stopping them is their inability to find a credible

pretext for war.

         Throughout history, war planners have used many forms of deception

to trick their enemies.  Because public support is so crucial to the

process of initiating and waging war, the home population is also subject

to deceitful stratagems. Creating false pretenses to justify war is often a

major step in gaining public support for such deadly ventures.

         Like schoolyard bullies who shout 'He hit me first!', war planners

know that it is irrelevant whether their rival really did 'throw the first

punch.'  As long as the attack can be made to appear unprovoked, the

aggressor can 'respond' with force.  Bullies and war planners are experts

in the art of taunting, teasing and threatening.  If enemies cannot be

goaded into 'firing the first shot,' it is easy enough to fabricate lies

about what happened.  Such lies are used to rationalize schoolyard beatings

or genocidal wars.

         Such expedient artifice has no doubt been used by every military

power in history.  Roman emperors had their cassus belli to conceal real

reasons for waging war.  Over the millenia, although weapons and battle

strategies have changed greatly, the deceitful strategem of using pretext

incidents to ignite war has remained remarkably consistent.  In examining

this history, certain patterns repeatedly emerge, a distinct modus operandi

is detected, and the institutionalized, criminal ploys of war planners can

be seen.

         Perhaps the most commonly used war pretext device is an apparently

unprovoked enemy attack.  Through history, such "attacks" have been

deliberately incited, completely fabricated, allowed to occur, or

engineered and then blamed on the desired enemy.  The event is then

exploited to arouse widespread public sympathy for the victims, to demonise

the attackers and to build widespread support for military "retaliation"

among the general population, as well as among politicians and other

leaders of public opinion.

         War pretext incidents, in themselves, are not sufficient to spark

wars.  Rumours and allegations about the tragic events must also spread

throughout the target population.  Constant repetition of the official

version of what happened, helps to spawn dramatic narratives that are

lodged into public consciousness.  The stories then become accepted without

question and legends are fostered.  The corporate media is central to the

success of such war propaganda.  Politicians rally people around the flag,

lending their special oratory skills to the call for a military

"response."  Demands for "retaliation" then ring out across the land, war

hysteria mounts and, finally, a war is born.

         Every time the U.S. has gone to war, pretext incidents have been

used as triggers to justify military action.  Later, the conventional views

of these controversial events have been challenged and exposed as

untrue.  Historians, investigative journalists and others, have cited

eyewitness accounts, declassified documents and statements made by the

perpetrators themselves to demonstrate that provocative incidents were used

to stage manage the march to war.

         There are dozens of other examples from U.S. history besides those

exposed in these pages.  During the Cold War, dozens of covert and overt

wars were promoted using specific pretext episodes.  However, the crusade

against communism was the generic backdrop for all rationales.

         As the Cold War wound down, the "War on Drugs" was developed as a

new cover story.  Lurking behind U.S. lies about wanting to squash illicit

drug production and trafficking, are the actual reasons for financing and

training so many right-wing, military governments.  The "War on Drugs"

pretext has been used to boost counter-insurgency operations aimed at

destroying those opposed to U.S. corporate profiteering. The CIA has not

only used drugs as a pretext to arm regimes that themselves profit from

illegal drug sales, it has also financed many of its own covert wars using

the highly lucrative trade in heroine and cocaine.

         The latest thematic pretext for war is the so-called "War Against

Terrorism." It is vitally important to expose this latest attempt to

fraudulently conceal the largely economic and geostrategic purposes of

war.  By unraveling the intricate web of pretenses woven to deceive the

public, we can begin to reveal how corporations are the main benefactors of

war.  By throwing light on repeated historical patterns of deception, we

can promote a healthy skepticism about government and corporate media yarns

that are now being spun to promote wars of the future.

         If asked to support wars so that wealthy elites can safely plunder

the natural and human resources of foreign lands, people would likely 'just

say no.' Therefore, over the millennia, war planners have developed a

special martial art - the creation of war pretext incidents.   These

elaborate webs of deceit are woven to create the appearance that wars are

fought for just, moral and humanitarian reasons.

         The knowledge of how people have been repeatedly tricked into

going to war, is like a vaccine.  It can be used to inoculate the public

with healthy doses of distrust for official, war pretext narratives and

other deceptive stratagems.  Through such immunization programs we can help

to counter our society's susceptibility to "war fever" and, hopefully,

prevent the next bout of war from infecting us.

Jim Webb raises deep questions about US militarism.

When Jim Webb announced that he is thinking seriously about running for president in 2016, it didn’t exactly excite hearts and minds in the Beltway. The former senator from Virginia is widely regarded as an odd duck who stubbornly goes his own way. He dropped out of electoral politics after one term in the Senate and resumed his successful career as a writer. Webb’s bestselling novel Fields of Fire captured the reality of the Vietnam War, in which he had fought as a Marine platoon leader.

Wounded twice in battle, Webb was awarded the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism. After the war, he wrote scholarly studies on war and national defense. Ronald Reagan appointed him secretary of the Navy, though Webb is a working-class Democrat, descended from hardscrabble country people in Arkansas.

Instead of becoming more hawkish, as defense intellectuals often do when they acquire status and influence, Webb has become increasingly critical of how US military force is used and misused. His biography is what gives his candidacy potential significance. It is not that he has much likelihood of winning the nomination, but Webb has a chance to do something far greater for the country. Given his résumé and valor in war, Webb has the authority (and the guts) to provoke a profound national debate about the nature of US militarism.

Webb’s unique perspective may be familiar to political insiders or readers of his books, but they probably aren’t to the broad public. Six months before George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Webb prophetically warned against it.“Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade,” Webb wrote in The Washington Post. In 2004, Webb called Bush’s war “the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory.” Ten years later, he is still right.

In 2007, Chris Matthews dubbed him “the antiwar warrior.” That’s a clever label, but it fundamentally misconstrues Webb’s position. He is not a pacifist—that is, he is not against wars fought to defend against real threats to the nation. What Webb opposes are the reckless and limitless interventions that the United States has initiated during the [Cold War and  --D] post–Cold War era of the past decades.

Presidents of both parties, including Barack Obama, have strayed from the old principles. “It is not a healthy thing when the world’s dominant military and economic power has a foreign policy based on vagueness,” Webb observed. He had in mind Bush, but also Obama’s vague purpose in entering the bloody civil war in Syria. “There is no such thing,” Webb has asserted, as “humanitarian war,” a feel-good concept popularized by some of Obama’s national security advisers. Webb has not challenged the president’s authority to bomb Syria, but says “the question of [Obama’s] judgment will remain to be seen.”

Webb has laid down principles for foreign interventions that probably would have kept the United States out of some wars if political and military leaders had listened to him. “An important caveat on how our country should fight the terrorists if they are a direct threat to our national security is: do not occupy foreign territory.” Another Webb warning: “Never get involved in a five-sided argument.” Obama has stumbled into one in the Middle East, unable to state firmly who is our ally and who is our enemy.

A glimpse of Webb’s broader intellectual framework can be found online in the stirring book review he wrote for The American Scholar in praise of historian Andrew Bacevich’s seminal work The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Bacevich and Webb disagree on some points, but they are kindred spirits. Both served in Vietnam, and both have sons who went to war in Iraq (Bacevich’s son was killed there).

Webb saluted Bacevich’s book for describing the confusion and corruption of military values that followed Vietnam and for revealing the profound confrontation within the military institution itself. “One side,” Webb explained, “is represented heavily by those with a classical training in America’s past wars (and frequently with experience in having fought them), who would send American forces into harm’s way only if the nation is directly threatened. The other side is dominated by a group of theorists, most of whom have never seen the inside of a military uniform, who adhere to an essentially Trotskyite notion that America should be exporting its ideology around the world at the point of a gun.”

This buried conflict in national purpose is the essence of America’s dilemma in the world—a self-made trap in which the nation can neither win the endless, borderless conflicts nor get free of the impossible obligations claimed for the US military. As a presidential candidate, Webb would be uniquely positioned to bring this confrontation out of the shadows. He could teach people how to understand the real choices America faces in its foreign policy and national defense.

Webb’s ideas may sound old-fashioned, but they are actually about changing the future. In the broad sweep of American history, this is often how fundamental change has occurred. Disruptive new thinking does not usually come from the top down, but more often is put in play by fearless individuals like Webb who think for themselves and are sure the people will be with them once they understand what’s at stake. This requires political skills that Webb may or may not have. How does he make himself heard if big media ignores his message?

Jim Webb is probably not going to become our next president. But he has the possibility of becoming a pivotal messenger. I think of him as a vanguard politician—that rare type who is way out ahead of conventional wisdom and free to express big ideas the media herd regards as taboo. With luck, the country might have two such characters in the 2016 primaries: Jim Webb and Bernie Sanders. In different ways, both are expressing unsanctioned ideas that Americans need to hear.

If you follow media chatter, the 2016 contest is already decided for Democrats. The people are ready for Hillary, we are told repeatedly. She has staked out a pro-war position more hawkish than the president’s but smartly aligned with the public’s current enthusiasm for continued bombing in the Middle East. But how might folks feel two years from now? Will they turn against war and warrior politicians if this new war also begins to seem interminable?

Albert Hunt of Bloomberg, a wise old head in the Washington press corps, offered this forecast: “Jim Webb could be Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare.”William Greider 

The activation of a unit at the Little Rock Air Force Base today [the 913^th Airlift Group] will bolster the presence of the Air Force Reserve on base and draw more airmen and aircraft to central Arkansas, according to Reserve officials.  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (July 13, 2013) 12A.

“As an aircraft-equipped combat airlift group, the unit will add to the base’s classification as home to the largest fleet of tactical transport aircraft in the Air force.”  And the group (composed of six squadrons) “is expected to grow by 70 percent in the next two years.”  Big deal?  Yes, because LRAFB flies the C-130, not only the C-130H, but the newest model, the C-130J, and these planes are the Pentagon’s flying boxcars.  Without the C-130, the US would be unable to attack and threaten around the world thanks also to its more than 1000 military bases abroad and its many military alliances.  President Obama’s proposed military budget for 2015 includes 10 C-130J aircraft for the 913th, that “has the ability to climb higher and faster and take off and land on shorter runways.”  --Dick

Herman:  the Troops, the Criminals, Lawlessness, Propaganda System, Bush and Obama

Kutler:  McGovern’ Critique of US Foreign Policy

2 on Romney and Obama

US Intervention in Mali 2012

Militarizing Arctic North: Sweden and Finland

San Juan , PNAC Militarist Takeover Remembered

Vlchek, US and USSR Compared

Empire and Social Sciences

Early Years, 2 Books

   McCoy and Scarano, Colonial

    LaFebre, Late 19^th Century

Alternative History:  Zinn and Stone/Kuznick

Dick: The Story of the USat Chrystal Bridges

RESISTANCE TO USEMPIRE

Dick, US Empire Myths Our Troops Die For, Resistance I

Davies, Most Expensive and Powerful Military Does Not Bring Safety

Paul Street, US World’s Worst Menace in Permanent War of Terror

Blum:  Empire, Communism and Other Threats, Vital USInterests, Domino Dogma

Gurman, Counterinsurgency from Malaya and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan

Turse, Special Operations Command, Secret Military

Monbiot, Lawless Double Standards of US Exceptionalism

Hart, US Broadcast Media Supported Attack on Syria

RESISTANCE TO USEMPIRE

Dick, Informed Citizens versus US Perpetual War, Resistance II

Tomgram/Hiro, Global Resistance to the Empire

Articles Via Historians Against War

Dick, Books on US Empire

Contacts for Arkansas Congressional Representatives

Contents to Earlier Empire Newsletters

Credo,  Repealthe 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF)

Nicholas Davies, USCoups Destroying Democracies Since 1953

Davies, US Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords, and Terrorists in 35 Countries

TomGram, Secret Wars, Nick Turse Special Ops in 134 Countries

Bruce Gagnon: Gagnon, Boyle, and Muzaffar on US Machinations

Jimmy Carter: US the Leading War-Monger

Andrew Bacevitch, How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

Cason, FCNL: US War Budget

Chatterjee and Maira,  The ImperialUniversity

Dan Glazebrook, Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy