Khury Petersen-Smith – Global Research March 5, 2020
There was this moment during the State of the Union Address that I can’t stop thinking about.
Amy Williams reunited with husband Sgt William at Trump’s State of the Union. Click to enlarge
When President Trump spoke to army wife Amy Williams during his speech and told her he’d arranged her husband’s return home from Afghanistan as a “special surprise,” it was difficult to watch.
Sgt. Townsend Williams then descended the stairs to reunite with his family after seven months of deployment. Congress cheered. A military family’s reunion — with its complicated feelings that are typically handled in private or on a base — was used for an applause line.
That gimmick was the only glimpse many Americans will get of the human reality of our wars overseas. There is no such window into the lives or suffering of people in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, or beyond.
That’s unacceptable. And so is the myth that Trump is actually ending the wars.
The U.S. has reached a deal with the Taliban to remove 3,400 of the 12,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, with the pledge to withdraw more if certain conditions are met. That’s a long overdue first step, as U.S. officials are finally recognizing the war is a disaster and are negotiating an exit.
But taking a step back reveals a bigger picture in which, from West Africa to Central Asia, Trump is expanding and deepening the War on Terror — and making it deadlier.
Far from ending the wars, U.S. airstrikes in Somalia and Syria have skyrocketed under Trump, leading to more civilian casualties in both countries. In Somalia, the forces U.S. operations are supposedly targeting have not been defeated after 18 years of war. It received little coverage in the U.S., but the first week of this year saw a truck bombing in Mogadishu that killed more than 80 people.
Everywhere, ordinary people, people just like us except they happen to live in other countries, pay the price of these wars. Last year saw over 10,000 Afghan civilian casualties — the sixth year in a row to reach those grim heights.
And don’t forget, 2020 opened with Trump bringing the U.S. to the brink of a potentially catastrophic war with Iran. And he continues to escalate punishing sanctions on the country, devastating women, children, the elderly, and other vulnerable people.
Trump is not ending wars, but preparing for more war. Over the past year, he has deployed 14,000 more troops in the Middle East — beyond the tens of thousands already there.
If this seems surprising, it’s in part because the problem has been bipartisan. Indeed, many congressional Democrats have actually supported these escalations.
In December, 188 House Democrats joined Republicans in passing a nearly $740 billion military budget that continues the wars. They passed the budget after abandoning anti-war measures put forward by California Representative Barbara Lee and the precious few others trying to rein in the wars.
It’s worth remembering that State of the Union visual, of Congress rising in unison and joining the president in applause for his stunt with the Williams family. Because there has been nearly that level of consensus year after year in funding, and expanding, the wars.
Ending them will not be easy. Too many powerful interests — from weapons manufacturers to politicians — are too invested. But ending the wars begins with rejecting the idea that real opposition will come from inside the White House.
As with so many other issues — like when Trump first enacted the Muslim Ban and people flocked to airports nationwide in protest, or the outpouring against caging children at the border — those of us who oppose the wars need to raise our voices, and make the leaders follow.
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Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
The original source of this article is OtherWords
Another reason this “Trump is ending the wars” is a myth is because two of the attacks he has launched so far were calculated not to generate a military response. But you can bet had Syria attacked the US with cruise missiles on the pretext of a chemical attack that never happened, or had Iran wiped out a US major-general and his entourage on a diplomatic mission in Iraq, Donald Trollop would have escalated two more wars.
It should surprise me but it doesn’t how most of America’s hard-core war hawks were once its hard-core draft dodgers. Murdering cowards who kill for money too afraid to face their own risks. That’s the kind of gunge we once wiped off our shoes but now we elevate it.
It took me my whole life……..I’m an old man now…….to realise the insanity that runs not just the Western powers, but pretty much the whole world. It’s a dystopia that’s getting worse by the day. As a Christian, I know that Satan is The Prince of This World, but he is cranking up his evil in desperation day by day. I think we have to face up to the fact that it’s going to get worse, before the conclusion. Not a prosperous joy ride that the evangelical mega churches of popularity preach………….do you ever hear them criticising war, whilst bleating on about salvation, even though they profess Jesus Christ ( The Prince of Peace )?
Larry, you are so right. I see the same thing in my RC Church. Other than a fragmented effort on abortion and euthanasia, there is not a peep from the pulpits all the way to Rome, about the insane wars and plundering of our Western nations. It is as if they do not really believe in sin anymore or that huge controlling forces in the world are actually Satanic. None of them dare go too strongly against the group-think brainwashing of the media.
The secular authorities in the West, in much the same way as those in China, have entirely kicked Christianity out of the public square, confining comment and preaching even in the Churches only to those issues which the secular authorities approve. In the RC Church this fact is entirely now proven by the Vatican’s 2018 accord with the anti-Christian, communist government of China, and with its total subservience in Germany to the German cultural- Marxist government. Then we have a totally socialist and globalist pope not willing even to discuss this rising, most-obvious totalitarian, and anti-Christ threat of a globalist government, which movement he and the Vatican are spearheading, following the dictates of the Rothschild cartel.
In the conservative Christian alternate media sites, you tend to get some news, but none of the sites have tackled the US-Israeli destruction of Syria, or the other unjust wars in the area, except for a tidbit on TruNews.
Trump, like all the other so-called “leaders” of the world, is a puppet, a fall guy, a showman..
War? Got no time for it, Too busy lookin goood they say while the west homeland cracks behind the mirror of vanity.
The communitarians are programmed to blame war on the patriarchy so they don’t mind it continuing on, it serves a continual cycle of blame for them.
The right are itching to prove themselves with a war on China in unison with the communitarians so they don’t mind it continuing on.
Millenarian sectarians want their apocalypse they don’t mind it continuing on. Just part of the dystopian era and now expected better learn to adapt to it quicker than its rolling itself out and no I’m not talking of compromising with it.
This bloke Smith has nailed it while so few do, everything other than sustainable development is about the fight for the world island. Central Asia the North West Frontier, Karakoram, the Hindu Cush the Pamirs will be the most highly contested real estate on earth. Yes that and the gateway into north Africa but the world island is the golden prize and now it has come to that time for the banksters to take possession of China’s well earnt trading routes. The Chinese know, the Russians, the Iranians, the non aligned nations know, no use thinking the western public can get us out of it or themselves, hell we could say they had a big hand in getting us all into it.