66. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS

Nan Levinson, How (Not) to Stop America's Wars

TomGram, TomDispatch, February 6, 2022

Think of the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex as a remarkably self-contained system. It's capable of funding itself at staggering levels, producing weaponry (however inefficient, ineffective, and anything but inexpensive) largely without oversight, and fighting wars (however disastrous) in a similar fashion -- all of this almost unnoticed in this country much of the time. Sadly enough, this has, in a sense, been the history of America in the twenty-first century.

Whether the public supported or rejected any of it -- and there's polling evidence of rejection finally settling in -- the very idea of this country endlessly warring abroad has mattered remarkably little here much of the time. Yes, there was that moment before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when concerned citizens turned out to protest in remarkable numbers. But most of the time, America's wars (and the overwhelmingly expensive preparations for them) have gone on with the most minimal resistance.

And blame for that, at least in part, can certainly be placed on one key response to the disaster of the Vietnam War and the enormous antiwar movement of those years, which even made its way into the military itself: the ending in 1973 of the draft and the creation of an "all-volunteer" military. That had the effect of locking the troops, too, inside the self-propelled machine with which Washington has tried to make itself the true hyperpower of planet Earth at the point of a bayonet or perhaps, in this century, a drone.

In that context, consider it little short of a miracle -- as TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson, author of War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, [Originally published: November 10, 2014] describes today -- that, while so many Americans ignored our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with the global war on terror more generally, a surprising number of American vets (and sometimes even active-duty soldiers) did try to protest or organize to stop those very wars. Did they succeed? Hardly. Still, it's something of a miracle, under the circumstances, that they even made the attempt.  With that in mind, let Levinson, an expert on the subject, look back on these remarkable years of resistance, even if it was too minimal to be truly effective. Tom

The Antiwar Movement That Wasn't Enough

The Wars We Couldn't End

By Nan Levinson

When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about "disruptive technologies," inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It's the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.)

Certain events function that way, too. After they occur, it's impossible to go back to how things were: World War II for one generation, the Vietnam War for another, and 9/11 for a third. Tell me it isn't hard now to remember what it was like to catch a flight without schlepping down roped-off chutes like cattle to the slaughter, even if for most of the history of air travel, no one worried about underwear bombers or explosive baby formula. Of course, once upon a time, we weren't incessantly at war either.

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