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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’ve come to that moment again.  You know, the one at year's end when I ask all of you for money to keep this website afloat.  It’s hell to do (and no fun to read I’m sure), but your contributions do truly keep us going.  I’ve written an end-of-year funding letter to all TomDispatch subscribers that begins this way: “If you just heard a deep sigh, that was me.  Right now, if we're not in the world from hell, then where the hell are we?  You know perfectly well what I think about it all, as I write weekly at TomDispatch on that president, those wars, those plutocrats, and the environmental crisis that's going to make our grandchildren's world, the one I will have long left, a potential nightmare of the first order.”  It includes, of course, the necessary plea for donations.  If you’re not a TD subscriber but visit this site regularly, you can click here to read my whole letter.  Or you can just go directly to the TD donation page and contribute if the mood strikes you.  In return for a $100 donation -- $125 if you live outside the U.S. -- you can choose a signed, personalized copy of any volume from a selection of Dispatch Books and others as a token of our thanks.  Tom]

Ambassadors of the traditional kind?  Who needs them?  Diplomats?  What a waste!  The State Department?  Why bother?  Its budget is to be slashed and its senior officials are leaving in droves ever since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office.  Under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, hiring is frozen, which means those officials are generally not being replaced.  (Buyouts of $25,000 are being offered to get yet more of them to jump ship.)  Dozens of key positions have gone unfilled, while the secretary of state reportedly focuses not on global diplomacy or what, in another age, was called “foreign policy,” but on his reorganization (downsizing) of the department and evidently little else.  Across the planet, starting with the A’s (Australia), American embassies lack ambassadors, including South Korea, a country that has been a focus of the Trump administration.  Similarly, at the time of the president’s inflammatory Jerusalem announcement, the U.S. had no ambassadors yet in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, among other Middle Eastern states.  It’s quite a tale and it’s being covered as the news story it certainly is.

All of this could be seen, however, not just as the foibles of one president surrounded by “his” generals, but as the culmination of a post-9/11 process in which American policymaking has increasingly been militarized.  In this context, as the State Department shrinks, don’t think this country has no ambassadors across the planet.   America’s Special Operations forces increasingly act as our “diplomats” globally, training and bolstering allies and attempting to undermine enemies more or less everywhere.  We’ve never seen anything like it and yet, unlike the slashing of the diplomatic corps, it’s a story barely noted in the mainstream. Nick Turse has, however, been covering it for TomDispatch in a groundbreaking way since 2011.  In these years, he’s focused on what should have been seen as one of the major developments of our era: the phenomenal growth and historically unprecedented deployment of this country’s special operators in an atmosphere of permanent war in Washington. 

In the post-9/11 years, the once “elite” units of the U.S. military, perhaps a few thousand Green Berets and other personnel, have become a force of approximately 70,000.  In other words, that secretive crew cocooned inside the U.S. military has grown as large as or larger than the militaries of countries such as Argentina, Canada, Chile, Croatia, South Africa, or Sweden.  Now, imagine that those Special Operations forces, as Turse has again been reporting for years, are not only being dispatched to more countries annually than ever before, but to more countries than any nation has ever deployed its military personnel to. Period. 

Shouldn’t that be a humongous story?  We’re talking, as Turse points out today, about the deployment of special ops teams or personnel to 149 of the 190 (or so) nations on this planet in 2017. You can, of course, find articles about our special operators in the media, but over the years they’ve generally tended to read like so many publicity releases for such forces. The story of how our special operators came to be our “diplomats” of choice and the spearhead for American foreign policy and how expanding wars and spreading terror movements were the apparent result of such moves has yet to be told, except at places like TomDispatch. Tom

Donald Trump’s First Year Sets Record for U.S. Special Ops
Elite Commandos Deployed to 149 Countries in 2017
By Nick Turse

“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.

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Sometimes I wonder what school I went to. I mean, I know perfectly well. I attended a place I never wanted to go: Yale.  But when I was 17 years old, my parents -- and a familial urge to be upwardly mobile -- more than overwhelmed my personal and private desire to go elsewhere. So, in 1962, I ended up at that all-male college in New Haven, Connecticut, and, despite the education I received, much of which I genuinely enjoyed, I’ve regretted it ever since. It was that school’s particular version of all-maleness that did me in -- an elite, powerful style of masculinity that I found painful and eerily shameful even then (though men, or boys pretending to be men, didn’t admit to such feelings in those years or, until recently, in these).

I’ll never forget the bravado, the grim over-the-top bragging about what you had done to women. I remember, for instance, my roommate, a rare working-class kid at Yale in those years who had absorbed the ethos of the place, returning from spring break and shouting -- I was in our room on maybe the third floor and could still hear him from the courtyard of our quad -- that he had done it, lost his virginity, including other grim details of his conquest.  The bragging never seemed to end. I was, in those years, unbearably shy when it came to sex, or perhaps to my own lack of experience and pure ignorance about it, and repelled by the version of it that seemed to be the essence of that world of boys being oh-so-male.  My only recourse -- the only one I could at least imagine then -- was to fall into an expressionless silence when the braggadocio began until I could figure out an excuse to leave the room.  This, however, proved to be another kind of disaster, since it was more than once mistaken for experience, which meant, for instance, that my roommate would later pull me aside and confess that the “conquest” he had just spent the last day bragging about had actually been a total horror show. 

I knew a little of his history before he blew his brains out 40-odd years later and he had, by then, turned into a Roy Moore-style predator, which I always blamed on the world we had both emerged from at Yale.  I’ve never forgotten its style of masculinity or, in a way, recovered from it -- from the feeling, that is, that I wasn’t a man but just some sort of sorry failure.

While I did, in the end, go on to graduate school, I evidently didn’t go to the one that any number of the men of my generation and after seem to have attended -- you know, the one that, as TomDispatch regular Ann Jones explains today, taught you how “manly” and perfectly appropriate it was to enter a bathroom while a woman was in the next room and reappear naked to make grotesque sexual demands.

All I know is that now it’s somewhat easier, thanks to the bursting dam of news about the grotesque (and grotesquely repetitive) experiences that women have had with male predators, to see what that world of supposed maleness was all about and why it felt so shameful to me, even if I then thought that the fault, the lack, was all mine. We are now, it seems, in a different moment.  However, let’s remember that, as Jones suggests today, sometimes such moments -- take, for instance, that of the first black president of the United States -- aren’t followed by a kind of enlightenment but by the angriest of backlashes. Tom

The Fempire Strikes Back
#MeToo
By Ann Jones

First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein: the screenwriter and film director James Toback. As I read now of women he preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that’s bubbled in the back of my brain for decades reaching the boiling point. I should be elated that Toback has been exposed again as the loathsome predator he’s been for half a century. But I’m stuck on the fact of elapsed time, all these decades that male predators roamed at large, efficiently sidelining and silencing women.

Toback could have been picked up by New York’s Finest when he hit on me in or around 1972.  But I didn’t call the cops, knowing it would come to nothing.  Nor did I tell our mutual employer, the City College of the City University of New York. I had no doubt about which one of us our male bosses would believe. I had already been labeled an agitator for campaigning to add a program in women’s studies to the curriculum. Besides, to any normal person, the story of what happened would sound too inconsequential to seem anything but ridiculous: not a crime but a farce.

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It's been going on for so many years -- Predators cruising, looking for their prey. Some attention has since been paid to the phenomenon and to the devastating effect their actions have had on their victims, but it hasn’t really mattered. The predation has only spread. 

Oh, before I go any further, let me clear up one possible bit of confusion. I’m not talking about Charlie Rose, Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, or any of that crew of predators. I’m talking about America’s robotic killers, the drones that long ago were grimly named Predators (retired this year) and their more advanced cousins, the Reapers (as in Grim...), who have taken a once-illegal American activity, political assassination, and made it the well-respected law of the land and increasingly of huge swaths of the globe.

In these years of predation, the president -- any president -- has become an assassin-in-chief.  George W. Bush began the process with 50 drone strikes in the Greater Middle East during his years in office. Barack Obama multiplied those numbers tenfold. He even had his own White House “kill list” and “terror Tuesday” meetings to decide just who should be on it. Donald Trump has simply given the U.S. military and the CIA license to send those drones wherever they please. Such drone strikes are now commonplace from Yemen (almost a strike a day in the months after Trump entered the Oval Office) to Afghanistan (where the CIA has, for the first time, been given license to strike at will), Pakistan (where such strikes have recently intensified) to Somalia (23 of them in 2017), Iraq to... Niger (where U.S. surveillance drones are now being weaponized). In the process, across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the U.S. has taken out not just terror suspects but civilians in significant numbers, including children and American citizens (two of whom were children). The drones, which terrorize the populations under them, have proven to be ferocious assassins, capable of crossing borders without a blink and without respect for national sovereignty, not to speak of remarkable recruitment tools for terror groups.

And keep in mind that these never-ending drone killings are just one small part of America’s wars of the last 16 years that have driven funding for the national security state to new heights and turned Washington into a permanent war capital. Today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, wonders when this country will truly notice America’s Predators abroad the way, in recent weeks, we’ve finally noticed them at home. Tom

Still Waiting
A Harvey Weinstein Moment for America’s Wars?
By Andrew J. Bacevich

What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they were charged at least as reprehensible.

In the relatively recent past, a roster of prominent offenders would include Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and, of course, Donald Trump. Throw in various jocks, maestros, senior military officers, members of the professoriate and you end up with quite a list. Yet in virtually all such cases, the alleged transgressions were treated as instances of individual misconduct, egregious perhaps but possessing at best transitory political resonance.

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Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands.  The U.S. got clobbered.  Three category 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricanes of startling intensity, a record for any single season, whacked the country.  Records were also set for rainfall and destruction.  Two of those mega-storms, Irma and Maria, their power intensified by waters growing ever warmer thanks to fossil fuel emissions that continue to heat the atmosphere and the oceans, hit Puerto Rico, one glancingly, one full force.  Then another hurricane (this time, a mega-storm of incompetence and negligence) completed the job.  That, of course, was Hurricane Donald.  As a result, three months after Irma first knocked out Puerto Rico’s power and two and a half months after Maria completely trashed the place, only 66% of that population has had its electricity restored.  The latest estimate: the whole island won’t have it and other utilities fully up and working until at least February.  (And if recent history is any judge, that’s probably an optimistic estimate.)  The conservative guess is that $94 billion in damage has been done to Puerto Rico, giving the term “the dark ages” a new meaning in the twenty-first century.  All of this should remind us that we're living, as Todd Miller points out today, in an increasingly threatening new era.

Mind you, even as the planet’s temperature rises, humanity continues to set records when it comes to dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  And here’s the grim irony that TomDispatch regular Miller explores in his latest post, as well as in his striking new book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (which Dahr Jamail calls “essential reading” and Kirkus Review says is “a galvanizing forecast of global warming's endgame and a powerful indictment of America's current stance”): those least responsible for the damage, whether living in Bangladesh, Central America, or Syria, are feeling its brunt first.  They're the ones who will be uprooted and turned into climate-change refugees.  Then, in their desperate journeys in search of safety, they'll find doors slammed shut on them, walls built to stop them, and fingers pointed at them as if they were the plague, the worst of the worst.

That disparity in cause and effect can be felt even inside the United States.  After all, Donald Trump would never have treated Hurricane Harvey's flooding in the Houston area the way he did the damage in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, whose governor he identified as its “president.”  (No, Donald, you are the president of the Virgin Islands and it is not a foreign land!)  Behind such reactions lies a deep sense that “those” people are obviously not real Americans.  Consider it an irony, then, that the inability to deal with damaged Puerto Rico like damaged Houston has led to the generation of this country’s first true onslaught of climate refugees (though others have preceded them) -- tens of thousands of desperate islanders fleeing a home that has essentially ceased to function for the mainland U.S., especially Florida.  Consider it a further irony that these are the only kinds of refugees Donald Trump can’t even try to stop from “coming” to this country because, of course, they’re already here.  As for such refugees elsewhere, Todd Miller explains just what kind of dystopian nightmare is in store for them and, in a sense, for us all.  As Bill McKibben says of Storming the Wall, “as this book makes crystal clear, people on the move from rising waters, spreading deserts, and endless storms could profoundly destabilize our civilizations unless we seize the chance to reimagine our relationships to each other.” Tom

The Era of Walls
Greeting Climate-Change Victims With a Man-Made Dystopia
By Todd Miller

When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the Beast”), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north toward the United States.

The men hid momentarily as a Mexican army truck with masked, heavily armed soldiers drove by. Given Washington’s pressure on Mexico to fortify its southern border, U.S. Border Patrol agents might have trained those very soldiers. As soon as they were gone, the Hondurans told me that they had been stuck here for six long days. The night before, they had tried to jump on La Bestia, but it was moving too fast.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams, a new book by TomDispatch regular John Feffer, is just being published.  Of it, Adam Hochschild, another TD favorite, writes, “‘John Feffer brings to this story a traveller’s eye, a rich store of experiences, and a wise perspective. His thoughtful book is a reminder that few nations, anywhere, easily throw off the heritage of tyranny.”  As you’ll see, his new book is related to today’s post and it goes instantly on my must-read list. So pick up a copy yourself.  And remember that, for a $100 contribution to this website ($125 if you live outside the USA), a personalized, signed copy of Feffer's riveting dystopian novel and Dispatch Book, Splinterlands, is still available for anyone in an end-of-year giving mood.  Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]

By the time you read this, the latest brouhaha will undoubtedly be history -- or do I mean “fake history”? -- and largely forgotten.  It will have been replaced by an explosion of media coverage about some other nightmarish set of presidential tweets or comments.  After all, it’s a pattern.  I’m referring to President Trump’s recent retweeting of three videos of purported Islamic mayhem.  They came from the Twitter feed of Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a British ultranationalist group, Britain First, that had previously sparked its own terror incident, the stabbing to death of Labor parliamentarian Jo Cox by a man shouting “Britain First!”  In 2016, Fransen herself was convicted of “religiously aggravated harassment” for abusing a Muslim woman in a hijab in front of her children. One of those videos of hers supposedly showed a “Muslim immigrant” in Holland beating up a boy on crutches.  (The incident actually happened, but the attacker was neither a Muslim nor an immigrant.)

When criticized by British Prime Minister Theresa May for using the fraudulent materials of such an extremist group, our commander-in-tweet lashed out (initially tweeting the wrong Theresa May) and wouldn’t back down or even remove the videos from his Twitter feed.  Fransen, who instantly gained 22,000 new Twitter followers for her fringe positions in England, thanked him fervently. (“God bless you Trump!  God bless America!”)  Meanwhile social media lit up with Islamophobic sentiments both in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Such events are regularly reported as uncontrollable presidential interruptions of other important events on the Trump agenda -- that week, the Republican tax “reform” bill -- which only frustrate his chief of staff, flummox his advisers, and generally distract the administration from everything that truly matters.  Don’t believe it for a minute.  There’s method, however intuitive, in Trump’s madness, in those endless tweetish controversies, in his regular immersion in conspiracies (think: birtherism), implosions that plunge the president and his 43.6 million Twitter followers into a deep, dark world alive with horror and terror, whether of the Muslim or even the football variety. 

As TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the new book Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams, points out today, the “wild conspiracy theories” that go with this sort of politics have lifted not just Trump, but a whole raft of right-wing authoritarian types to power across Eastern Europe in recent years. This sort of thinking, especially with an Islamophobic edge, has helped drive Trump and a whole set of Trump-like Eastern European leaders to unimagined heights of success and has helped them remain there, too.  So don’t expect the president’s outbursts, his Islamophobic tweets, or any of the rest of it to end soon. It rallies the base. It works and he knows it. 

As Feffer explains today, those Eastern Europeans learned all of this long before Donald Trump hit the political stage. So what they’ve done and how they’ve lasted is worth taking a moment to contemplate as you consider Donald Trump’s future (and ours). Think of their examples as warnings not to sell him and the method in that madness of his short. Tom

What’s the Matter with Eastern Europe?
Welcome to the Birthplace of Trumpism
By John Feffer

He was a rich businessman, an outspoken outsider with a love of conspiracy theories. And he was a populist running for president.

In 1990, when Donald Trump was still beyond the furthest outskirts of American politics, Stanislaw Tyminski was trying to become the new president of post-communist Poland.  He shared something else with the future Trump: nobody in the political elite took Tyminski seriously.

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