Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/war__peace/page/3/)
Trump on the Warpath
Jeffrey Sachs || Sep 27, 2017 || Project Syndicate
The US suffers from an arrogance of military power disconnected from today’s geopolitical realities. The US is on this path again, heading for a collision with a nuclear-armed adversary, and it will remain on it unless other countries, other American leaders, and public opinion block the way.
(Editor’s Note: This article, coming to us from our media ally TomDispatch.com, should give us some perspective on the U.S. military role in the world. Perhaps it might even awaken us to another important question: why exactly are we risking nuclear war with North Korea in order to achieve what end? –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)
Worth Dying For?
When It Comes to the War in the Greater Middle East, Maybe We’re the Bad Guys
By Danny Sjursen
I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011.
[Editor’s Note: We Americans have barely a clue about the mischief the U.S. military has been up to for most of the past decades. It has often been provocative when it hasn’t gone the full length of military interventions, sometimes carefully hidden to the U.S. public. On the other hand, we have no sympathy for the repressive regime in North Korea, which in comparison makes the U.S. regime look almost humane. But before thinking that maybe the U.S. is motivated by good values, remember the massive U.S. sales of arms to Saudi Arabia while it continues its near genocidal war against Yemen, and its attempts to build a justification for a future intervention in Venezuela–and these were both part of U.S. policy under Obama.–Rabbi Michael Lerner]
9/4： What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests
By Mike Whitney
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/04/what-the-media-isnt-telling-you-about-north-koreas-missile-tests/
September 04, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – Here’s what the media isn’t telling you about North Korea’s recent missile tests. Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s Hokkaido Island.
NEVER FORGET VIRTUE, NEVER FORGET HIROSHIMA, NEVER GIVE UP WORKING FOR PEACE
08/08/2017 11:14 pm ET | Updated 1 day ago
There are historical matters toward which our ongoing attention is worthy because of their relevance today. Here are some examples:
1. The courage and benefit of Socrates’ sacrifice to uphold the rule of law demonstrated by his refusal to escape his prison cell and willingness to drink deadly poison, a penalty arising from a trial in which he was unjustly adjudicated guilty. He personally sacrificed his life to highlight forever the importance of the rule of law for his and any society. 2.
Editor’s note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com we present another analysis of American military power–no, not about atomic wars, but about overthrowing governments around the world. Can the Pentagon Win When Putsch Comes to Shove? A Rare Pentagon “Success” Story
By Nick Turse
Winning! It’s the White House watchword when it comes to the U.S. armed forces. “We will give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing — you know what that is?
In November of 1938, the Nazi’s began to fully implement Laughlin’s theory of exterminating anyone deemed “unfit” to exist in the future society of a “Master Race.” The rest is history.
June 5, 2017
America’s Long War or Global War on Terror has taken some ugly turns as the West’s continued war-making in the Muslim world leads to new terrorism against Western targets, with no end in sight, explains Nicolas J S Davies.
By Nicolas J S Davies
The recent news from Kabul (in Afghanistan), from Manchester and London (in England), from Mosul (in Iraq), from Raqqa (in Syria), from Marib (in Yemen) and from too many devastated and traumatized communities to list makes it only too clear that the world is trapped in an unprecedented and intractable cycle of violence. And yet, incredibly, none of the main parties to all this violence are talking seriously about how to end it, let alone taking action to do so. At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.”
After 15 years of ever-spreading conflict has killed two to five million people, the main perpetrators are still getting away with framing their violence entirely as a response to the violence of their enemies. How much violence and chaos will the world accept before people start holding their own leaders morally and legally accountable for decisions and policies that predictably and repeatedly result in massive loss of life, cities reduced to rubble and shattered societies? The neoconservative vision of a “Long War” or “generational conflict” to reshape the Middle East and other parts of the world has, in effect, created its own reality, as its proponents in the Bush II administration promised. The new crony-capitalist order they envisioned has taken root in places where entrenched ruling classes were already predisposed to it, like the Persian Gulf monarchies. But wherever the would-be new rulers of the world – the U.S., NATO and the Arab royals – have made good on their threats to impose their new order by force, the results have only confirmed the soundness of the United Nations Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force and the urgency of actually enforcing it.
Here’s a reasonable question to ask in our unreasonable world: Does Donald Trump even know where North Korea is? The answer matters and if you wonder why I ask, just remember his comment upon landing in Israel after his visit to Saudi Arabia. “We just got back from the Middle East,” he said. In response, reported the Washington Post, “the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, put his forehead in his palm.” Which brings us back to North Korea. As pollsters working for the New York Times recently discovered, were President Trump to have only the foggiest idea of that country’s location, he would be in remarkably good company. Of the 1,746 American adults the polling group Morning Consult queried, only 36% could accurately point to North Korea on a map of Asia.
Whose Children? A World that Cares Little for Civilian Victims of War
www.counterpunch.org
A little over a month ago a suicide car bomb blast hit a convoy of civilians outside of the towns of Fua and Kefraya west of Aleppo in Syria. It is unclear who is responsible for the deaths from th…
Whose Children? A World that Cares Little for Civilian Victims of War
By Howard Lisnoff
June 01, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – A little over a month ago a suicide car bomb blast hit a convoy of civilians outside of the towns of Fua and Kefraya west of Aleppo in Syria. It is unclear who is responsible for the deaths from the bombing of the buses carrying these refugees, among whom were 68 children. A total of 126 people were killed according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (“‘Sixty-eight children among dead’ of suicide bombing attack in Syria,” Guardian, April 16, 2017)Compare the latter to the horrific suicide bombing attack in Manchester, England, where 22 people were ruthlessly killed.
Editor’s Note: Shia and Sunni forces have engaged in sectarian violence long before there was a president Trump. But as the authors suggest, his attempt to put together a Sunni alliance against Iran will likely contribute to an escalation of the struggle between Sunni and Shia, with unpredictable consequences.
MAY 31ST, 2017 6:18 AM
How Trump Instigates Sectarian Warfare
By Dr. Abdul Cader Asmal and Craig Considine
In recent years, President Donald Trump has questioned the legitimacy of Islam as a world religion. His body of work in this regard is impressive. He posed the deliberately ambiguous question, “Why does Islam hate us?”, proposed the creation of a registry for Muslims in the U.S., issued a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries for those returning home, and framed the malignancy of “radical Islamic terrorism” as a hallmark of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for this valuable analysis of US spending for war (consistently and not a product of only one political party).
The American Way of War Is a Budget-Breaker
Never Has a Society Spent More for Less
By William D. Hartung
When Donald Trump wanted to “do something” about the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria, he had the U.S. Navy lob 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield (cost: $89 million). The strike was symbolic at best, as the Assad regime ran bombing missions from the same airfield the very next day, but it did underscore one thing: the immense costs of military action of just about any sort in our era. While $89 million is a rounding error in the Pentagon’s $600 billion budget, it represents real money for other agencies. It’s more than twice the $38 million annual budget of the U.S. Institute of Peace and more than half the $149 million budget of the National Endowment of the Arts, both slated for elimination under Trump’s budget blueprint. If the strikes had somehow made us — or anyone — safer, perhaps they would have been worth it, but they did not.
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The Nuremberg Prosecutor
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When Ben Ferencz met Marlene Dietrich
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Learning history from a man who made it
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Ferencz: Rejecting refugees is a “crime against humanity”
What the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive wants the world to know
At 97, Ben Ferencz is the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive and he has a far-reaching message for today’s world
2017May 07
CORRESPONDENTLesley Stahl
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Twenty-two SS officers responsible for the deaths of 1M+ people would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ben Ferencz. The officers were part of units called Einsatzgruppen, or action groups. Their job was to follow the German army as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and kill Communists, Gypsies and Jews. Ferencz believes “war makes murderers out of otherwise decent people” and has spent his life working to deter war and war crimes.
Ben Ferencz
CBS NEWS
It is not often you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in history like Ben Ferencz. He’s 97 years old, barely 5 feet tall, and he served as prosecutor of what’s been called the biggest murder trial ever.
Our misguided ‘wars of choice’Jeffrey D. SachsThere is one foreign policy goal that matters above all the others, and that is to keep the United States out of a new war, whether in Syria, North Korea, or elsewhere. In recent days, President Trump has struck Syria with Tomahawk missiles, bombed Afghanistan with the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in the US arsenal, and has sent an armada toward nuclear-armed North Korea. We could easily find ourselves in a rapidly escalating war, one that could pit the United States directly against nuclear-armed countries of China, North Korea, and Russia. Such a war, if it turned nuclear and global, could end the world. Even a nonnuclear war could end democracy in the United States, or the United States as a unified nation.
[Tikkun magazine has no staff capable of verifying the accuracy of this article. So we do not print it as a story that we ascertain to be true. Yet we have no reason to doubt it, either. We know that the denial of war crimes is a frequent behavior from national states, and the U.S. has participated in this behavior. And we know that the crimes of the Nazi regimes reach beyond the capacity of most human beings to really come to grips with.
[A note from our friends at Just Foreign Policy]
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently seemed to suggest that a pre-emptive U.S. bombing of North Korea was an option “on the table.” [1] As the Los Angeles Times editorial board stated, such dangerous saber-rattling isn’t the answer to our problems with North Korea. Yet while claiming that “all options are on the table,” Tillerson seemed to be ruling out the only realistic option: negotiations. [2] As the Christian Science Monitor noted, China has made a plausible proposal to re-start negotiations: North Korea would suspend its nuclear and missile tests in return for the U.S. and South Korea halting their annual joint military exercises. Unfortunately, Washington dismissed the Chinese proposal out of hand.