2010 will be another year of war for the United States and, from assassination campaigns to new fronts in what is no longer called the Global War on Terror but is no less global or based on terror, it could get a lot uglier. The Obama administration may, from time to time, talk withdrawal, but across the Middle East and Central Asia, the Pentagon and its contractors are digging in. In the meantime, more money, not less, is being put into preparations and planning for future wars. As William Hartung points out, “if the government’s current plans are carried out, there will be yearly increases in military spending for at least another decade.”

When it comes to war, the only questions are: How wide? How much? Not: How long? Washington’s answer to that question has already been given, not in public pronouncements, but in that Pentagon budget and the planning that goes with it: forever and a day.

Of course, only diamonds are forever. Sooner or later, like great imperial powers of the past, we, too, will find that the stress of fighting a continuous string of wars in distant lands in inhospitable climes tells on us. Whether we “win” or not in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Yemen, we lose.

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse | TomDispatch

Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.

This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate.
……..
Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.

Chris Hedges | Truthdig

I have spent enough time inside the American military to have tasted its dark brutality, frequent incompetence and profligate ability to waste human lives and taxpayer dollars. The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to understand—make the American military the gravest threat to our anemic democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.

Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting draped around our vast killing machine as the press, the two main political parties and our entertainment industry, will not halt our doomed imperial projects or renege on the $1 trillion in defense-related spending that is hollowing out the country from the inside. A plague of unchecked militarism has seeped outward from the Pentagon since the end of World War II and is now sucking our marrow dry.

It is a familiar disease in imperial empires. We are in the terminal stage. We spend more on our military—half of all discretionary spending—than all of the other countries on Earth combined, although we face no explicit threat.

Chris Hedges | truthdig

I listened to President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech with the same feeling of growing nausea that I used to get listening to Bush. Yes, hard to believe that the two could ever be compared as public speakers but, with a year’s full of speeches now on the record, the inconvenient truth about Obama is that his actions rarely match his rhetoric.

In each of the four critical areas that define this moment — the crashing global economy, healthcare reform, global climate change, and American militarism — however audacious and stirring his words, Obama’s appointments, policies, and decisions are barely distinguishable from Bush’s.

For the full inside story on the economy, Matt Taibi’s recent piece in Rolling Stone — Obama’s Big Sellout — makes it painfully clear that from the moment Obama took power he turned the economy over to the very same rich scumbags who caused the economic crisis, but who were all major donors to Obama’s campaign.

“This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.”

It is hard to find a single action on the economy that would have been any worse under Bush.

Ditto healthcare reform. Oh, they’re all making noise now about how it’s fine that the public option is dead because we’ll expand Medicare instead, and won’t that be great. Only a) it will never happen, since the same crew of congressional creeps who blocked single payer and the public option are lining up to block this latest plan and b) even if it does happen it is still a massive wealth-producing machine for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Any un- or under-insured folks out there thinking that relief is on the way are seriously deluded. In the end they will change some terminologies and claim some reforms and the system will continue to decline just as it did under Bush.

Climate-change? In advance of the Copenhagen summit, Obama and the American congress did not even address the issue. The strongest message in the American zeitgeist is that climate scientists are crooks and cheaters; Obama made no effort to set the record straight on Climate-gate or to rouse the public for Copenhagen.

Maybe he gets a pass on this one, given that there’s so much on his plate. The sorry fact remains that the state of American environmentalism is as lame and disjointed as if Bush were still in charge.

Finally, as Obama picks up his Peace Prize: I cannot think of single thing that Obama has done — beyond his nifty speechifying — that is in any way better than Bush regarding American militarism and the war on whoever.

The many injustices of Guantanamo; the secret torture prisons and the practice of rendition; rejection of the international treaty banning land mines; sucking up to the Israelis and turning a blind-eye to continued illegal settlements; escalating an unwinnable war that will only destroy more innocent lives and generate new enemies; and through it all, not a hint of the understanding that militarism represents a hellish misappropriation of essential resources.

As during the darkest hours of the Bush administration, we should give up all hope of a peaceful transition to a more humane world. With Obama at the helm things will be getting much, much worse — a total breakdown of the dominant power structure — before there’s any chance of anything getting better.

Michael Sky | ThinkingPeace

Obama has been taken over by the military industrial hawks and national security theorists who play war games with other people’s lives and money. I had hoped Obama might be a more forceful leader who would reject the same old interventionist mindset of those who profit from permanent war. But his newly announced Afghan policy shows he is not that leader.

So, we must look elsewhere, starting with ourselves. The first job of a citizen is to keep your mouth open. Obama is wrong on his policy — deadly wrong — and those of you who see this have both a moral and patriotic duty to reach out to others to inform, organize and mobilize our grassroots objections, taking common sense to high places.

Also, look to leaders in Congress who are standing up against Obama’s war and finally beginning to reassert the legislative branch’s constitutional responsibility to oversee and direct military policy. For example, Rep. Jim McGovern is pushing for a specific, congressionally mandated exit strategy; Rep. Barbara Lee wants to use Congress’ control of the public purse strings to stop Obama’s escalation; and Rep. David Obey is calling for a war tax on the richest Americans to put any escalation on-budget, rather than on a credit card for China to finance and future generations to pay.

This is no time to be deferential to executive authority. Stand up. Speak out. It’s our country, not theirs. We are America — ultimately, we have the power and the responsibility.

Jim Hightower | CREATORS.COM

It was nice while it lasted — the audacious dream, the anti-war President, the brand new way of doing things. Nice to feel like progressives were at last on the side of history. Nice to imagine that America, having made the huge breakthrough of electing an un-white guy, would go on to even more critical breakthroughs.

No more war. Winding down the empire. Shifting military spending to social needs. Environmental action. Universal healthcare…..

True, the wheels have been wobbling and threatening to fly off the wagon from Obama’s very first appointments. But he’s such a charming, likable man, so much better than the last guy!

Just as Bush’s supporters stood by him despite all his failings because he was such a likable man, I just ignored the uneasy feelings and kept hoping that the next big decision would be better.

That will never happen. Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan has confirmed that his presidency is firmly in the hands of the military-industrial-complex. We will continue to flush ever greater sums and precious lives down the sewer of war-mongering and we will have neither money nor will to do any of the other important things.

War trumps everything. Being a war president means that he will never be the people’s president that we worked so hard to elect.

Michael Sky | ThinkingPeace

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the “war president.” Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line — and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

Michael Moore | HuffPost

In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children.

This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects – about 15 times the pre-invasion occurrence of early-life cancers and brain and nervous-system abnormalities, according to the U.K.’s Guardian.

A group of British and Iraqi doctors have petitioned the United Nations to investigate the situation, which is clearly related to the U.S. invasion and occupation. According to their letter: “In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days (and) a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed.” In comparison, the letter said, in August 2002 – before the invasion – 530 babies were born; six of them died within the first week, with a single birth defect reported.

Young women in Fallujah, the doctors wrote, “are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs.”

What might be causing this nightmare? The most likely factors are chemical or radiation poisoning, according to the Nov. 14 Guardian article, which noted: “Abnormal clusters of infant tumors have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.”

Finally, this is just another story about ecocide – the murder of a nation’s ecosystem, both intentionally and as a predictable consequence of military actions – which is the true name for war. When the New York Times and all other mainstream outlets see the need to write about the future ecocide ventures we are now preparing for, or the current ones we are always in the process of throttling down or up, I wish they’d stop using the romantic word “war.” The modern manifestation of this exercise in mutual and collective insanity is so toxic and destructive, its effects cannot simply be absorbed by the human race, the environment in which our lives are possible or even our DNA.

Whatever we think we’re doing – defending ourselves, securing our interests, bringing democracy to the Third World – we are first and foremost committing ecocide, in collusion with our enemies, perhaps, but this hardly reduces our own responsibility for such consequences as widespread PTSD and, oh Lord, birth defects.

Robert C. Koehler | CommonDreams.org

When you start in the center (on, say, healthcare or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease rightwing politicians or lobbyists or Generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.

It’s been a gradual descent from the elation and hope for real change many Americans felt on election night, November 2008. For some of us who’d scrutinized the Clinton White House in the early 1990s, the buzz was killed days after Obama’s election when he chose his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a top Clinton strategist and architect of the GOP alliance that pushed NAFTA through Congress.

If Obama stands tough on more troops to Afghanistan (as Clinton fought ferociously for NAFTA), only an unprecedented mobilization of progressives – including many who worked tirelessly to elect Obama – will be able to stop him. Trust me: The Republicans who yell and scream about Obama budget deficits when they’re obstructing public healthcare will become deficit doves in spending the estimated $1 million per year per new soldier (not to mention private contractors) headed off to Asia.

Jeff Cohen | CommonDreams.org

The American people now oppose the war, and it is folly to keep up a war without support back home. We will hear predictions of dire consequences if we don’t carry out a commitment, and don’t yield to demands of the military to expand forces. We heard that for years about Vietnam. But when we did withdraw, the consequences were not as fatal as those we incurred during the years that saw the deaths of over 50,000 of our soldiers and many more Vietnamese. Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from president to president. Among other things, this will give our military a needed chance to repair the wear and tear on men and equipment that the overstretched regular services and the National Guard have suffered, and to make them ready for other challenges.

It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.

Garry Wills | NY Review of Books