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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Given my piece today, it seems an appropriate moment to remind TD readers that my new book, A Nation Unmade by War, on the very subject Americans generally prefer to avoid thinking about (see below), is now wandering the universe. I hope you'll consider picking up a copy. In addition, you can always get a signed, personalized copy by going to our donation page, contributing $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), and so help keep this website chugging along in our increasingly strange world. Tom]

The War Piece to End All War Pieces
Or How to Fight a War of Ultimate Repetitiousness
By Tom Engelhardt

Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That was how I inadvertently launched the unnamed listserv that would, a year later, become TomDispatch. Given the website’s continuing focus on America’s forever wars (a phrase I first used in 2010), what choice have I had but to write about Afghanistan ever since?

So think of this as the war piece to end all war pieces. And let the repetition begin!

Here, for instance, is what I wrote about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when the U.S. Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself and at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding. And that would be just one of eight U.S. wedding strikes I toted up by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, that killed almost 300 potential revelers. “We have become a nation of wedding crashers," I wrote, "the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home.”

Here’s what I wrote about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of “a war gone to hell”: “While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we've been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2010, thinking about how “forever war” had entered the bloodstream of the twenty-first-century U.S. military (in a passage in which you’ll notice a name that became more familiar in the Trump era): “And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, ‘Operating Concept, 2016-2028,’ overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus. It opts to ditch ‘Buck Rogers’ visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as ‘wars of exhaustion,’ in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2012, when Afghanistan had superseded Vietnam as the longest war in American history: “Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn’t noticed -- and weirdly enough no one has -- that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2015, thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in the preceding years, gone into Afghan “roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and a $43 million gas station” built in the middle of nowhere, rather than into this country: “Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles.”

And here’s what I wrote last year thinking about the nature of our never-ending war there: “Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians, who exactly will ride to our rescue? Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.”

And that’s just to dip a toe into my writings on America’s all-time most never-ending war.

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When it comes to guns and Americans, here (thanks to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence) are a couple of stats for you: every year an average of 17,102 children and teens and 116,255 Americans overall are shot in “murders, assaults, suicides, and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention.” And this doesn’t happen for no reason. Consider these recent estimates from the Small Arms Survey, a gun research group: “There were approximately 857 million civilian-held firearms in the world at the end of 2017... National ownership rates vary from about 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents in the United States to less than 1 firearm for every 100 residents in countries like Indonesia, Japan, Malawi, and several Pacific island states.” In fact, the U.S. leads the rest of the world by a long shot in gun ownership, with 45% of those 857 million weapons (you do the math) right here in this country. War-torn Yemen comes in a distant second.

In 2017, a Pew Research Center study found that 48% of American white men, 25% of white women, 25% of non-white men, and 16% of non-white women owned guns and, as Margaret Talbot wrote in the New Yorker, “Half of all gun owners say that ownership is essential to their identity.” There’s one catch, though. If you have that primal urge to buy a gun to strengthen your own sense of self-identity, you better set aside a little time to do so. After all, it took a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter all of seven minutes to buy an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle soon after the Parkland, Florida, massacre and it took just 38 minutes, according to the Huffington Post, to buy the same weapon in Orlando two days after an AR-15-style weapon was used in the Pulse nightclub massacre to kill 49 people.

Now, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung reports, Donald Trump and his administration are determined to make this a truly all-American planet by putting real effort into spreading such deadly small arms far and wide. Hey, think of it this way: in the weeks after Apple hit the headlines with a trillion-dollar market valuation, the Trump administration has the hope of hitting the trillion-firearm mark in civilian hands globally. Now that would be an accomplishment! What a boost for our global identity! USA! USA! Tom

Donald Trump, Gunrunner for Hire
The NRA and the Gun Industry in the Global Stratosphere
By William D. Hartung

American weapons makers have dominated the global arms trade for decades. In any given year, they’ve accounted for somewhere between one-third and more than one-half the value of all international weapons sales. It’s hard to imagine things getting much worse -- or better, if you happen to be an arms trader -- but they could, and soon, if a new Trump rule on firearms exports goes through.

But let’s hold off a moment on that and assess just how bad it’s gotten before even worse hits the fan. Until recently, the Trump administration had focused its arms sales policies on the promotion of big-ticket items like fighter planes, tanks, and missile defense systems around the world. Trump himself has loudly touted U.S. weapons systems just about every time he’s had the chance, whether amid insults to allies at the recent NATO summit or at a chummy White House meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose brutal war in Yemen is fueled by U.S.-supplied arms.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: With today’s post, TomDispatch goes on vacation for a week. The next post will be on August 14th. In the meantime, let me thank all of you for your beyond-generous response to my summer appeal for funds. I can’t tell you how deeply appreciated it was. Anyone who meant to contribute but didn’t and still wants my new book, A Nation Unmade by War, signed and personalized, can always go to our donation page and for $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) get a copy with my gratitude -- or choose among any number of other striking books.

One other thing: I want to urge all of you again to think about picking up -- thanks to publisher Haymarket Books -- a half-priced copy of Beverly Gologorsky’s new Dispatch Books novel, Every Body Has a Story, by clicking here. She’s a writer I’ve admired for years. (I’ve read all her books.) And this one, a genuine working-class novel about how the foreclosure crisis of 2007-2009 hit ordinary Americans is simply wonderful. If you don’t believe me, check out Ron Jacobs’s splendid review at Counterpunch (“an emotionally taut tale that is also a specific, personal, and unbending critique of the system of neoliberal capitalism”). See you in a week! Tom]

It looks like TomDispatch may have a few less readers from now on. Perhaps it will surprise you, but judging by the mail I get, some members of the U.S. military do read TomDispatch -- partially to check out the range of military and ex-military critics of America’s wars that this site publishes. Or rather they did read TomDispatch. No longer, it seems, if their computers are operating via Department of Defense (DoD) networks. The DoD, I’ve heard, has blocked the site. You now get this message, I’m told, when you try to go to it: “You have attempted to access a blocked website. Access to this website has been blocked for operational reasons by the DOD Enterprise-Level Protection System.” Oh, and the category that accounts for it being blocked? “Hate and racism.” Mind you, you can evidently still read both Breitbart and Infowars in a beautifully unblocked state via the same networks.

On consideration, however, I’ve concluded that the Department of Defense might have a point. Since this site was launched as a no-name listserv in October 2001 soon after the Afghan War started -- you know, the war that the DoD is still pursuing so successfully almost 17 years later with its 17th commander now in the field, 15,000 American troops still fighting and advising there (and still dying there as well), and the enemy, the Taliban in particular, in control of yet more territory in that country -- TomDispatch has always hated America’s never-ending, ever-spreading, refugee- and terror-producing wars that now extend from South Asia across the Middle East and deep into Africa. So perhaps this site is, after all, a must-block “hate” site.

And among the authors who have spread TomDispatch’s antiwar gospel of hatred -- now so judiciously cut off by the Pentagon -- Nick Turse, in particular, has long grimly tracked the growth and spread of Washington’s forever wars and of the Special Operations forces, the semi-secret military that has become, in these years, their heart and soul. He returns to this sorry tale again today, this time in a unique fashion -- by tracing the careers of those in the military, commanders and commanded, dead and alive, who returned to America’s official and unofficial war zones again and again and yet again. Maybe someone should suggest to the Pentagon that there’s something else out there to block, so that another website, 17 years from now, won’t be writing about Washington’s 34th commander in the field in Afghanistan. Maybe it’s time to block those wars. Tom

The Legacy of Infinite War
Special Ops, Generational Struggle, and the Cooperstown of Commandos
By Nick Turse

Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.)

A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.)

Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.)

While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorism turned World War IV turned the Long War turned “generational struggle” turned “infinite war” seems repetitious, the troops most associated with this conflict -- the U.S. Special Operations forces -- have seen changes galore. As Representative Jim Saxton (R-NJ), chairman of the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, pointed out in 2006, referring to Special Operations Command by its acronym: “For almost five years now, SOCOM has been leading the way in the war on terrorism: defeating the Taliban and eliminating a terrorist safe haven in Afghanistan, removing a truly vicious Iraqi dictator, and combating the terrorists who seek to destabilize the new, democratic Iraq.”

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Two weeks ago, another Trump business went down in flames. Caught in the whirlpool of her father’s presidency, with major department stores and other retail distributors continuing to drop her brand under pressure from consumer boycotts here and in Canada, daughter Ivanka shut down her line of clothes. This should have surprised no one. When it comes to her family, it's the oldest story in the world. Think of it this way: Donald Trump’s greatest con in election 2016 was to convince a majority of Americans (and they remain convinced) that he was a “successful businessman.”

Here’s a simple portrait of his business acumen, as Michael Kruse summed it up at Politico last year:

“He flopped as an owner of a professional football team, effectively killing not only his own franchise but the league as a whole... He bankrupted his casinos five times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous airline existed for less than three years and ended up almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt. And he has slapped his surname on a practically never-ending sequence of duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University -- for which he settled a class-action fraud lawsuit earlier this year for $25 million).”

And Kruse didn’t even mention The Donald’s sixth bankruptcy, the one he filed for the debt-ridden Plaza Hotel in 1992.

But I don’t want to imply that Donald Trump wasn’t successful. He has a skill that needs to be understood, if you want to grasp the nature of his presidency. You can see it in his five Atlantic City casino bankruptcies. They proved to be business disasters, but as the New York Times reported, his true skill was in jumping ship, money in hand, and leaving his financial catastrophes in the laps of “investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.” Think of this as his “art.” (It will undoubtedly be his daughter’s, too.) And as you read the latest piece by TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins, author most recently of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, keep that art of his in mind. Right now, the economy is popping along at an “amazing” 4.1% growth rate for this last quarter and he’s a “successful” businessman-president. But when those bills start coming due (as Prins suggests today), when those bankruptcies start coming in, count on one thing -- call it the art of the Trump -- he and his family will jump ship, money in hand, and the rest of us will be left holding the bag. Tom

The Entropy Wars
Five Financial Uncertainties of 2018 (So Far)
By Nomi Prins

Here we are in the middle of the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and if there’s one thing we know by now, it’s that the leader of the free world can create an instant reality-TV show on geopolitical steroids at will. True, he’s not polished in his demeanor, but he has an unerring way of instilling the most uncertainty in any situation in the least amount of time.

Whether through executive orders, tweets, cable-news interviews, or rallies, he regularly leaves diplomacy in the dust, while allegedly delivering for a faithful base of supporters who voted for him as the ultimate anti-diplomat. And while he’s at it, he continues to take a wrecking ball to the countless political institutions that litter the Acela Corridor. Amid all the tweeted sound and fury, however, the rest of us are going to have to face the consequences of Donald Trump getting his hands on the economy.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, entropy is “a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.” With that in mind, perhaps the best way to predict President Trump’s next action is just to focus on the path of greatest entropy and take it from there.

Let me do just that, while exploring five key economic sallies of the Trump White House since he took office and the bleakness and chaos that may lie ahead as the damage to the economy and our financial future comes into greater focus.

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Here are a couple of questions for you: If, in this country, terrorism is to be fought by travel bans, if (as Donald Trump once tweeted) “we don’t want ‘em here,” then why are all the travel bans aimed at Muslims? If the most threatening terror types shouldn’t be traveling either to or in this country, then why aren’t there travel bans against white Americans? After all, in the United States, terror has actually been a remarkably ashen phenomenon and I’m not just thinking of young white supremacist Dylann Roof, who walked into Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME church and gunned down nine black parishioners in June 2015, or Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old white retiree who slaughtered almost 60 people and wounded hundreds more from a Las Vegas hotel window in November 2017, the largest mass shooting by a single gunman in American history. Between 2008 and 2015, for instance, a majority of the 208 cases defined as terrorism in the United States (115 of them) were perpetrated by right-wing white extremists, almost double the number inspired by Islamic terrorism. Such attacks, the record seems to show, are also more likely to be deadly.

Except in cases like those of Dylann Roof and that Las Vegas massacre, such white acts are often not treated as a form of terror at all, but as so many random incidents of violence and are generally not given the kind of blanket media attention that those of self-proclaimed Islamist terrorists get. As comedian Ken Cheng put it: “Terrorism is one of the only areas where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit.” And of course this has only become more obvious in the age of Trump, years in which, as TomDispatch regular Arnold Isaacs suggests today, a growing crew of Islamophobes, already professionalized and creating a stream of fraudulent propaganda about Islamist terrorism in this country, has become ever more influential in the world of the alt-right and beyond. Isaacs, who has been covering anti-Muslim bigotry in this country for this website, lays out today just how the Islamophobes make their “case.” Tom

American Islamophobia’s Fake Facts
Their "Proof" Is Not What They Say
By Arnold R. Isaacs

Anti-Muslim activists in the United States were operating in a "post-truth era" and putting out "alternative facts" long before those phrases entered the language. For the last decade they have been spreading provable falsehoods through their well-organized network of publications and websites.

A major theme of those falsehoods is telling the U.S. public that Islam is inherently dangerous and that American Muslims, even if they do not embrace extremist religious beliefs or violent actions, are still a threat to national security. To back up that conclusion, the well-funded Islamophobia publicity machine incessantly repeats two specific assertions.

The first is that Muslims in this country have been engaged in a "stealth" or "civilizational jihad" -- a long-term, far-reaching conspiracy to infiltrate the U.S. legal system and other public institutions and bring America under Islamic law. The companion claim is that mainstream Muslim-American organizations are effectively "fronts" for the Muslim Brotherhood and so secretly controlled by international terrorists. In fact, the Brotherhood has not been designated as a terror organization by the U.S. government, and there are not the slightest grounds for thinking it, or any other secret force, controls any national Muslim-American group.

The Islamophobes offer only two pieces of supporting "evidence," one for each of those claims. Exhibit A is a document falsely called the Brotherhood's "master plan" for the clandestine effort to establish Muslim dominance in the United States. Exhibit B is a list of several hundred "unindicted co-conspirators," including the Council on American Islamic Relations and other mainstream national Muslim organizations, that federal prosecutors put into the record during a 2007 terrorism-financing trial in Texas.

If you look at the exhibits themselves, instead of the descriptions of them by anti-Muslim groups, it’s obvious that neither is what the Islamophobes say it is or proves what they allege it proves.

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