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Saturday, February 18, 2023

10 Reasons To Avoid The Next World War

PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE OR DOWNLOAD TO ENLARGE

Conflicting parties must recognize the following facts:

1. The pace of technology, communication and weapons has now outpaced the necessity for war as a means of advancing progress. The threat is too great for mutually assured destruction.

2. We are on new ground, never experienced before in terms of being "Wired" as a world - economically, socially, environmentally and scientifically

3. Recent events involving US war "Interventions" and the incredibly out of control nature of the Military Industrial Complex have demonstrated their danger, their folly and their contribution to the largest national debt ever to grace the face of the earth.

4. Alternatives to war in terms of scientific advancement not only are required, but are in progress.

5. The war makers are operating on world credit subject to world approval.

6. The environment is screaming for protection and we will get on with it.

7. Conflicting ideas, if managed constructively, can yield a hybrid solution to a challenge that is a better product or service than either side of the initial equation.

8. The key to managing international relations constructively is fostering an environment respectful of all points of view but led by individuals who are driving to fulfilling peaceful, progressive objectives as a first priority and who blend differences of opinion decisively.

9. Winning and losing are being redefined by the above.

10. We can no longer as a world community continue the present course of wars.

We must intuitively arrive at the conclusion that war is a waste and avoid it for reasons that are becoming more obvious everyday around the globe and are addressed in each of these 10 points. 

If we do not intuitively arrive at this conclusion, war will continue and it will destroy us.



Friday, February 10, 2023

The Deeper Lasting Costs Of War

Marine John Thomas Doody, (Chris O’Meara/AP)
   

CLICK IMAGES TO VIEW OR ENLARGE  - Video and Chart Brown University “Costs of War”


MILITARY TIMES
A new collection of studies reveals at the often unseen effects of those wars both at home and abroad ranging from fractured families, strained caregivers, increased cancer rates to mistrust of health workers, demolished infrastructure and military suicides.
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“Impact from the past two decades of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen in dollars spent, lives shattered by injury or trauma and dead service members carried home.
“War and Health” is a collection of ethnographies covering a range of people affected from the wars beginnings, current day and likely long-term future ripples.
In it researchers have found correlations between areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan with higher number of drone strikes are also less likely to accept polio vaccinations and other medical assistance due to mistrust of government aid.
They’ve seen increased rates of behavior incidents and low school performance among children of frequently-deployed military parents.
The reports show waves of Iraqis seeking medical care in Beirut, Lebanon with late-stage cancers because they couldn’t get early screening in Iraq, which previously boasted the leading medical care in the region.
Researchers found military suicides, increased family violence and higher numbers of substance abuse and DUIs even among non-combat service members correlated with faster-paced deployment schedules and training.
While half of all caregivers for veterans are spouses, parents or immediate family, a full one-third of caregivers are friends or neighbors who don’t qualify to receive financial compensation created in recent years to ease the burden that caregivers for vets can face.
Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino edited the collection as part of their work with the “Costs of War Project,” out of Brown University.
The project collects information on war dead, military and civilian casualties, budget figures and other measures of the costs of the conflicts in the Global War on Terror. The project began in 2011 and recently kicked off a new effort to update past reports and develop new measures by 2021, the 20th anniversary of the start of the wars.
The same project recently released and updated notice on the fiscal costs of the Global War on Terror. The release noted that an estimated $6.4 trillion had been spent between late 2001 and today, a large portion of which has been financed through deficit spending.
But, those numbers can be difficult to nail down, as noted in the report, which quotes Christopher Mann of the Congressional Research Service.
“No government-wide reporting consistently accounts for both DOD and non-DOD war costs,” he said.
Part of the Costs of War Project’s work is to pull together disparate sources to find the tally of the wars.
Their research has found that that a growing cost will be medical care.
One example included 10-year costs estimates for post-9/11 veterans with traumatic brain injuries is expected to cost $2.4 billion from 2020 to 2029.
Mazzarino spoke with Military Times about the nature of the project and what she and its contributors hope it will accomplish.
She and others have participated in media interviews and, through the Costs of War Project, have been in touch with Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT and hope to testify before Congress on their findings.
“The whole point of the project is to move beyond the academy to influencing advocacy and public policy,” Mazzarino said.
That’s not an easy task. Data-driven studies such as past reports on increasing servicemember suicides and strains on military families garnered political and public attention, but that took years and resulted in some changes in programs.
What Mazzarino and her colleagues are working with is less black-and-white and more focused on the second- and third-order effects of having a military at war on a daily basis for decades.
But, it may be that what they’re finding will have as much a long-term impact as other major war-related concerns.
“People who were serving when the war started, they’re entering old age soon,” Mazzarino said. “That’s going to come with all kinds of financial burdens to the U.S. government, especially with care for those veterans.”
And overseas, the imprint of decades of combat leave their own kind of toll.
“There are subtle and unexpected ways that the destruction of infrastructure has affected public health,” she said.
The Costs of War Project website has compiled estimates that a many as 480,000 people have died in direct war violence. They estimate far more have died due to “indirect” war violence such as when access to food, water and medical care was restricted or unavailable due to combat.
Their research estimates that more than 244,000 civilians have been killed in connection to the wars and as many as 21 million have been displaced and many are now war refugees, with substandard living conditions away from their native lands.
One harder to measure item is how the estimated $5.9 trillion spent on the wars could have been spent, the report notes. What healthcare, infrastructure or education projects were curtailed, limited or ended as a result in budget priorities to fight the wars instead?
Mazzarino has seen firsthand some of the effects of the wartime military. Her husband serves as a submariner in the Navy. That’s meant more frequent and unexpected deployments that his predecessors faced.
And she’s seen that strain on fellow military families, members and commanders.
Some similar experiences were reflected in a section titled, “It’s Not Okay: War’s Toll on Health Brought Home to Communities and Environments.”
One vignette profiled Dolores, the young wife of an infantry sergeant whose unit had seen a number of murders committed by soldiers back home and increases in domestic violence.
Those experiences had weighed heavily on her husband who returned and completed another Iraq deployment, this time being injured and later diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Six years after he had returned from theater, she had become his main caregiver and had to quit her job to do that work and to advocate for his care.
The section’s authors, Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger, wrote that many of the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan they interviewed still saw themselves as deeply entangled in what had happened during their deployments.
“Assessing war’s toll on health requires that we consider the ways we all become entangled in wars seemingly distant, and how war particularly erodes wellness in domestic military communities,” they wrote.”




































Friday, February 03, 2023

THE LIES THAT KILL

 


(Please click on image to enlarge)

“THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT”

“The public must become more skeptical of government claims about the use of military force, Congress must reassert its authority over war making, liars must be held accountable, and whistle blowers must be celebrated as patriotic truth tellers. These changes are key to ending the cycle of war lies and death.

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The government lies. Anyone who paid attention to the last 20 years of war knows something about that. Deadly lies aren’t new, of course. “Remember the Maine!” — the rallying cry that led to the Spanish-American War — was based on a military claim that a Spanish mine had sunk the U.S.S. Maine, when a coal bunker fire was later shown to be the most likely cause.

Then there was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who sounded sincere when he claimed the North Vietnamese launched unprovoked attacks on the U.S.S. Maddox and other U.S. Navy ships. Congress raced to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in response, giving the president nearly unfettered discretion to wage war in Vietnam. LBJ loved that resolution, reportedly saying that, “like Grandma’s nightshirt, it covered everything.”

But LBJ deceived us about the attacks. The Navy provoked the first one by conducting surveillance near the coastline as South Vietnamese troops carried out sabotage missions. Then, LBJ positioned the Navy’s ships near land in a deliberate attempt to provoke a second attack. Conflicting information from the Navy’s ships left doubt about whether a second attack occurred, but the White House doubled down on the claim that it had. The war escalated after that, leaving nearly 60,000 Americans dead and hundreds of thousands wounded.

POGO tackles the lies that kill in the second episode of its new podcast, The Continuous Action, which Virginia Heffernan and I host. If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to take a listen. We discuss how the government manipulated intelligence information to justify the war in Iraq, and how the government misled the nation about the success (or lack thereof) of the war in Afghanistan.

In the podcast, we hear a recording of Ron Ridenhour, the whistleblower who exposed the My Lai massacre. Ridenhour talked about how mass killings in Vietnam were a result of policy choices the government hid from the public. He also discussed how this attitude extended beyond Vietnam. While speaking on the U.S. involvement in Latin America in the 1980s, Ridenhour said that the only thing “that was not American provided, planned for, were the bodies of the people who were pulling the triggers — everything else was ours; it was our strategy; it was our money; it was our training; it was our supplies; it was our guns, our bullets.” The use of proxies (other military forces) provided cover for the United States.

Our government trained some of those proxies in Georgia at the secretive School of the Americas, also known as “School of the Dictators” — more recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The school notoriously taught dictators and military personnel how to wage counter-insurgency efforts that included torture and other brutal tactics. (The renamed school continues to operate and has added U.S. Border Patrol personnel to its roster of students.) The school claims it has cleaned up its act, and that’s the story the government is sticking to.

The government hasn’t lifted its veil of secrecy or stopped lying in the two decades since Ridenhour passed away. As recently as this past December, the New York Times published a shocking report on a secret U.S. strike force that, in its zeal to kill ISIS fighters, stopped caring how many civilians it killed. The victims included “people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.” And the military concealed these dire consequences from the public.

Much the same can be said about the U.S. support for Saudi atrocities in Yemen. Our government quietly facilitated the Saudi effort by selling weapons and planes, refueling planes, and delivering logistical and intelligence support.

Something must be done to stop the deadly lies. For one thing, POGO had been pushing lawmakers to strengthen the laws that protect federal whistleblowers. More broadly, change is possible if the public becomes more skeptical of government claims about the use of military force, Congress reasserts its authority over war making, liars are held accountable, and whistleblowers are celebrated as patriotic truth tellers. These changes are key to ending the cycle of lies and death.”

https://pod.link/1616746820?emci=bda6d3a9-4bc6-ec11-997e-281878b83d8a&emdi=ab510c56-0cc7-ec11-997e-281878b83d8a&ceid=81