{"id":54229,"date":"2015-02-23T12:47:27","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T12:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=54229"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:03","slug":"alive-and-bleeding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/alive-and-bleeding\/","title":{"rendered":"Alive and Bleeding"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"robert<\/a>Feb 18, 2015<\/em> – Good and evil leap from the headlines: \u201cEgyptian planes pound ISIS in Libya in revenge for mass beheadings of Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nonstop action for the American public. It\u2019s the history of war compressed into a dozen words. It\u2019s Fox News, but it could be just about any mainstream purveyor of current events.<\/p>\n

Once again, I feel a cry of despair tear loose from my soul and spill into the void. Our politics are out of control. There\u2019s no sanity left \u2014 no calmness of strategic assessment, no impulse control. At least none of that stuff is allowed into the mainstream conversation about national security, which amounts to: ISIS is bad. The more of them we (or our allies of the moment) kill, the better. USA! USA!<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in a state of perpetual war and have no intention of escaping it. Certainly we have no intention of critiquing our own actions or \u2014 don\u2019t be silly \u2014 questioning the effectiveness of war, occupation or high-tech terror (think: \u201cshock and awe\u201d) as a means to create a stable, secure world. The interests of war have dug in for the long haul, fortified by the cynicism of the media they own. The voices of reason cry from the margins. When a trickle of sanity finds its way into the mainstream, it\u2019s mocked until it goes away.<\/p>\n

Thus Marie Harf, deputy State Department spokesperson, had her moment of right-wing ridicule when she said of ISIS this week, during an interview on MSNBC with Chris Matthews:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re killing a lot of them, and we\u2019re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians \u2014 they\u2019re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it\u2019s a lack of opportunity for jobs, whether . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

The snort of contempt began immediately, as Matthews interrupted her. It spread through the conservative media, as the Society of Media Chicken Hawks gleefully pecked her words apart, joking that she wanted to defeat ISIS with a jobs program, etc. What fun! \u201cCan political correctness defeat terrorism?\u201d the Wall Street Journal asked. That was it. End of discussion.<\/p>\n

Well, no it\u2019s not. I insist on opening it back up:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot kill our way out of this war. We need . . . to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups…\u201d<\/p>\n

Tepid and tentative as Harf\u2019s words were, the fact that they were either instantly mocked and dismissed as \u201cpolitically correct,\u201d or ignored completely, indicates the extent to which a war mentality has supplanted thought in the mainstream realm of the American empire. Root causes? Come on. Only one side of any war, our own, ever has root causes.<\/p>\n

If Harf\u2019s line of thinking were actually allowed into the discussion, before you know it, people would begin wondering what the Global War on Terror has accomplished and, indeed, the extent to which it has contributed to the root causes in question. Who is ISIS? What\u2019s their agenda? What\u2019s our<\/em> agenda? Unavoidably, marginal voices of dissent would start being heard, such as Glenn Greenwald\u2019s, writing this week at The Intercept:<\/p>\n

\u201cSince 2011, Libya has rapidly unraveled in much the way Iraq did following that invasion: swamped by militia rule, factional warfare, economic devastation, and complete lawlessness. And to their eternal shame, most self-proclaimed \u2018humanitarians\u2019 who advocated the Libya intervention completely ignored the country once the fun parts \u2014 the war victory dances and mocking of war opponents \u2014 were over. The feel-good \u2018humanitarianism\u2019 of war advocates, as usual, extended only to the cheering from a safe distance as bombs dropped. . . .<\/p>\n

\u201cInto the void of Libya\u2019s predictable disintegration has stepped ISIS, among other groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond this, the national security discussion could begin to consider the nature of war and militarism: \u201cThe barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit,\u201d Chris Hedges wrote recently. \u201cThe line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the maw of uncertainty opens. The horror of the ISIS beheadings might become unbearably real to the public at large as people consider the nature of warfare itself and suddenly, my God, get it: We\u2019re doing the same thing, but with technology a thousand times more powerful.<\/p>\n

The \u201cshock and awe\u201d bombing we inflicted on Baghdad in 2003, for instance, was an act of terrorism meant to deliver \u201cincomprehensible levels of massive destruction\u201d and, in the process, shatter a society\u2019s will to resist us, according to Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, who described the concept in a 1996 Defense Department publication. I haven\u2019t heard anyone talk about this bombing campaign recently, but its consequences are nonetheless alive and bleeding.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot kill our way out of this war.\u201d Or the next one. It\u2019s time to stop.<\/p>\n

_________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press), is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a> or visit his website.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Tribune Content Agency, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe\u2019re killing a lot of them, and we\u2019re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians \u2014 they\u2019re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it\u2019s a lack of opportunity for jobs, whether…\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}