How Deportation Became the Core of Europe's Migration Policy

By Daiva Repeckaite, Jacobin

28 July 20

In recent years, the European Union’s member states have built their migration policies around an evermore elaborate system of filtering people and finding ways to expel them. This effort to put up obstacles isn’t just expensive or inefficient, but outright antihuman — subjecting migrants’ lives to the whims of recruiters and opaque bureaucratic processes.

ailed asylum-seekers are devilishly difficult to deport,” the Economist wrote in January 2017, analyzing Malta’s ambition to use its spell in the presidency of the European Union to curb migration by sea. As leaders debated how to sort and process people, Sarjo Cham from Guinea-Bissau just wanted to play football with his Maltese and international friends. “I have money to go [to tournaments abroad] with them. The only thing I don’t have is a travel document,” he said on a discussion panel in December.

Indeed, rejected asylum seekers and bureaucracies find the absence of documents “devilish” for different reasons. For the latter, the treatment of rejected asylum seekers is about demonstrating control — over borders, movements, and even language.

Coming from a country where international drug lords terrorized the population, Sarjo might have been luckier with his asylum case in Sweden. But if he was rejected there, he would have been barred even from playing football, where sports clubs, too, exclude people without an ID number.

Conversely, in 2018 Malta created a residency scheme for rejected asylum seekers who worked and demonstrated “integration efforts” across a number of years — and a similar “lane changing” policy exists in Germany. Some other EU member states like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania offer a formal toleration status, while Greece allows rejected asylum seekers to work only in agriculture, domestic work, and the clothing industry. Some other countries offer temporary residence permits.

Hence, although people with and without a strong asylum case cross the same deserts and board the same ships, their treatment is wildly divergent across the EU. The Returns Directive, adopted in 2008 to ensure basic rights for people with no right to stay in an EU country, only requires countries to provide for their basic survival needs.

In Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and some other states, rejected asylum seekers are not permitted to work. Amid a patchwork of radically different entitlements to health care, education, and social benefits, these individuals are left to rely on informal connections to find housing and a source of income.

What Do We Call Them?

Asylum law is complicated. Go to an NGO roundtable, and you may hear about COI (country of origin information), TCNs (third-country, that is, non-EU nationals), or even NRAS (non-removed rejected asylum seekers). The jargon is difficult to explain to the general public. Repeat “refugees and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection” — two statuses that carry the largest number of rights — a few times in a news article, and it will gobble up the word count. The media thus search for a shorthand and either call them all “refugees” or “migrants.”

As large numbers of people were traversing Europe to claim asylum in 2015, Al Jazeera English explicitly decided that crossing the Mediterranean sea is not an act of free will — as implied in the term “migrant.” To empathize with asylum seekers’ aspirations, liberal German media, too, chose “refugees” (Flüchtlinge) rather than “asylum seekers.”

We see this in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) article reporting on Angela Merkel’s famous 2015 speech where she proclaimed that Germany “can do it” — that is, handle a spike in asylum claims. The speech became the cornerstone of the so-called open-door policy, though few noted that Merkel never promised favorable decisions for everyone.

According to FAZ, “[measures to manage the influx] range from speeding up the asylum process and ‘repatriation’ of such refugees who cannot support their claim of political persecution to accommodation matters.” So, when asylum authorities made their decisions and Germany did, indeed, start deporting  rejected asylum seekers, there was widespread confusion — and glee in the international anti-immigration camp. See? Even Germany changed its mind!

Except, it hadn’t. In fact, European countries have been beefing up their deportation regimes for decades. Before 2015, every sixth asylum applicant in the EU was from the western Balkans, and most were promptly sent back with little mercy. From slashing benefits to creating prison-like conditions, countries hope that migrants without a convincing asylum claim will rationally decide that it’s not worth it.

The Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway are known for particularly elaborate ways to exclude them from formal society — denying them access to employment, benefits, education, and health care. This is old news. But in 2015, the shared plight of people with and without reasonable hopes for protection made sympathetic media feel there should be one word for them all. The BBC, among others insisted on “migrants.” After all, there are other authorities whose job it is to sort them apart from one another.

The Sorting Machine

As people from different continents moved side by side, authorities rushed to centralize the sorting process. “Hotspots” in Italy and Greece, developed in 2015, prepared people with a strong case to move to other countries using the redistribution mechanism. The 2016 EU-Turkey deal stipulated that persons who crossed Turkey into the EU without a strong case will be sent back, and persons with a strong case will be resettled from Turkey. Thus, Mediterranean countries will deal with the rejects, while recognized refugees will move further North.

Around 2014, the Maltese Islands, located between Libya and Sicily, were relieved of sorting duty. Italy would coordinate all sea rescues in the area and direct rescue ships to Italian islands for further processing. Over 2,000 people arrived in Malta by sea in 2013, but only twenty-four in 2016, so Malta’s asylum infrastructure opened to others.

The country fulfilled its EU relocation quota, bringing in asylum seekers from Greek, Italian, and Turkish camps. Hundreds of Libyans received protection. With the number of new sub-Saharan Africans under control, the government started exploring regularization for those already inside. Malta’s booming economy gave people at all stages of their asylum process a chance at finding a job.

Then ships returned. In 2017, Matteo Salvini of Italy’s far-right Lega took to Facebook to promise “mass expulsions, [reception] center closures, and the navy ships [sending] people back after saving them.” The following year he became the interior minister and started refusing entry to rescue ships. Meanwhile, with Donald Trump at the helm, the US refugee resettlement program, which used to accept hundreds from Malta, dried to a few dozens.

Malta found itself with sorting duties again, and the focus shifted from managing to preventing migration. Knowing that people will have rights once they touch the ground, authorities reportedly hired private fleets to drive them back to Libya and kept them in floating prisons. While recognizing, in scores of asylum decisions, that Libya is unsafe for Libyans, Malta’s authorities believe that Libya is perfectly safe for sub-Saharan Africans.

The prevention and deterrence approach flourished alongside the acknowledgement that the archipelago’s voracious economy needs migrant workers. Former prime minister Joseph Muscat famously said he would rather have migrants than native Maltese work hard under the sun. But most importantly, migrants should not come by themselves. Authorities, recruitment agencies and businesses get to choose.

In a glaring paradox, when a rescue ship docked after weeks at sea last year, one of the first announcements was that forty-four Bangladeshis on board will be immediately deported. Meanwhile, recruitment agencies were busy looking for workers in South Asia, including Bangladesh. In 2018, there were over 200 registered Bangladeshi workers. Having taken the dangerous journey by sea rather than paying an agency, the forty-four fell through the cracks.

“Devilishly” Difficult for Whom?

Centralized EU agencies and member states pay thousands to deport unwanted persons. According to the EU border agency’s statistics, authorities sent away just under 139,000 people (especially Ukrainians, Albanians, and Moroccans) in 2019, out of 298,000 “deportable” people. But there is some hope for them: in its Return Handbook — a deportation management guide for member states — the European Commission advocates reconsidering deportations for survivors of torture, rape, or human trafficking.

Why would these survivors be ineligible for asylum? Because they may have experienced this cruelty not in their country of origin, but along the way. This is common. Without safe and legal pathways to work, strong and healthy individuals are eligible to stay in the EU if they arrive broken. And if the desert and the sea didn’t break them enough, the system might. In Switzerland, researchers found that many rejected asylum seekers felt depressed or suicidal.

This regime, when countries open “revolving doors” and let recruitment agencies charge exorbitant fees instead of allowing migrants already on their territories to work and save money, has many critics. In Spain, over 1,100 organizations have signed a call to do away with sorting and categorizing people, and instead adopt a rights-based approach to make sure everyone is safe as the pandemic rages.

Nonetheless, governments and their supporters feel that deportations must continue out of principle, or in the name of discouraging further arrivals. It is all about being in control to choose. Policymakers promised better and faster deportations when, collaborating with religious communities, Italy opened humanitarian corridors to resettle up to 600 people from Ethiopia, Jordan, and Niger. In 2018, the country resettled 400 from Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, and Turkey.

Humanitarian corridors will help refugees avoid the dangerous sea crossing. Citizens of receiving countries approve of them. But it doesn’t solve the problem for people already on the move, but without a convincing claim.

Exclusion Benefits No One

A Dutch research team found that rejected asylum seekers “preferred the curtailed life chances of unauthorized migrants [rather than] return” to their countries of departure. Instead of deterring those still thinking of it, legal uncertainty takes a toll on people who have already arrived, sickening previously healthy and work-ready persons. The prevention and deportation mechanism drains budgets and people’s health.

NGOs advocate for taking a pragmatic and humanitarian approach. The people have already made the journey, and they are willing to stay. Destitution serves no one, and lack of rights drives people into the informal economy. Employers, too, would rather keep the workers they hire and train.

So as national administrations worry about being seen as fully in control, cities find themselves confronted with this population’s very human needs. Pragmatically aware that homelessness, destitution and mental illness is in no one’s interest, cities like Amsterdam and Vienna successfully extended provision of social services and benefits to rejected asylum seekers even as national governments were striving to restrict them. This way governments can flex their punishing muscles while cities quietly care for this vulnerable population.

Still, neither charity nor patchy local service provision offers a sustainable solution to the constant, dangerous, unpredictable movement of people looking to rebuild their lives. Theoretically, the forty-four Bangladeshis brought to Malta by a rescue ship can still raise money and pay an agency to return as guest-workers. However, for people rejected at sorting centers in Agadez (Niger), there is agency to apply. Even for the most qualified Africans, there is no visa-free travel to meet prospective employers. And the ones who most desperately need opportunities are not the most qualified.

Discussions on solutions must start from de-stigmatizing work migration. Governments sign agreements to facilitate migration from some countries in the Global South, after all — just not sub-Saharan Africa. Oxford academics Alexander Betts and Paul Collier suggested several paths: opening up to circular migration (“to come, contribute, earn, learn, and return”) and creating private sponsorship schemes like Canada’s. Loren B. Landau, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, and Hannah Postel advocated for labor migration programs, internships, and a credible visa lottery system. Protected from the informal market’s uncertainty, migrants could send more money to their communities and, if their migration project is financial, save enough money quicker.

Still, to build a fair system, policymakers must acknowledge that migration is not merely a rational calculation. A person who sets off on a journey carries their entire community’s hopes — or, on the contrary, may have severed close but exploitative contacts in their home communities. Very often, new communities, such as sports clubs or voluntary associations, welcome them if given a chance to. Then why are only employers, but not these communities, given a right to vouch for someone’s right to stay?

Shaken up by the pandemic, European welfare systems have expanded their catchment. Welfare is expensive, but so is deportation, detention, and discouragement. Listening to people’s needs would be the first step to redesigning a system that is now based on sorting human beings and cataloging rights. For those who only need money, governments and the International Organization for Migration already provide return grants. For those who need safety and freedom, employers and overpriced agencies should not be the only ones to decide their fate.

Killing Democracy in America: The Military-Industrial Complex as a Cytokine Storm

By William J. Astore, TomDispatch

27 July 20

He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with protesters in Portland, Oregon. Those camouflage-clad federal law enforcement agents were evidently from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service and the Customs and Border Protection agency. Soon, hundreds of them are evidently going to "surge" -- a term that should sound eerily familiar -- into Chicago and other cities run by Democratic mayors. In such a fashion, Donald Trump is quite literally bringing this country’s wars home. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, he recently described everyday violence in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan, by far.” He was talking about the country the U.S. invaded in 2001 and in which it hasn't stopped fighting ever since, a land where more than 100,000 civilians reportedly died violently between 2010 and 2019. By now, violence in Chicago (which is indeed grim) has, in the mind of the Great Confabulator, become “worse than anything anyone has ever seen” and so worthy of yet more militarized chaos.

Of course, in speaking of such violence, the president clearly wasn’t talking about Christopher David’s broken bones. That Navy veteran, having read of unidentified federal agents snatching protesters off Portland’s streets in unmarked vans, took a bus to the city’s nighttime protests. He wanted to ask such agents personally how they could justify their actions in terms of the oath they took to support the Constitution. For doing just that, they beat and pepper-sprayed him. Now, the president who claimed he would end all American wars (but hasn’t faintly done so) has offered a footnote to that promise. Admittedly, he's only recently agreed, so it seems, to leave at least 4,000 American troops (and god knows how many private contractors) in Afghanistan beyond the November election, while U.S. air strikes there continue into what will be their 19th year. Now, however, he’s stoking violence at home as well in search of an issue to mobilize and strengthen his waning support in the upcoming election.

In other words, he’s giving the very idea of our wars coming home new meaning. As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore suggests today, this country’s “forever wars” have become a kind of global pandemic of their own. It tells you all you need to know about this country in July 2020 that, even as congressional Democrats and Republicans fight over what kind of new bill to pass to help coronavirus-riven America, another bill will face no such issues in Congress. I’m thinking of the one that Republican Senator James Inhofe has labeled “the most important bill of the year”: to fund the U.S. military (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it). Oh, wait, unless the president decides to veto it because a mandate may be included in it to remove the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military bases.

Really, can you imagine a world in more of a pandemic mess than this one? Well, let Astore take a shot at it.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

he phrase “thinking about the unthinkable” has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that’s been rolling out in far slower motion: that America’s war on terror never ends because it’s far more convenient for America’s leaders to keep it going -- until, that is, it tears apart anything we ever imagined as democracy.

I fear that it either can’t or won’t end because, as Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed out in 1967 during the Vietnam War, the United States remains the world’s greatest purveyor of violence -- and nothing in this century, the one he didn’t live to see, has faintly proved him wrong. Considered another way, Washington should be classified as the planet’s most committed arsonist, regularly setting or fanning the flames of fires globally from Libya to Iraq, Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria to -- dare I say it -- in some quite imaginable future Iran, even as our leaders invariably boast of having the world’s greatest firefighters (also known as the U.S. military).

Scenarios of perpetual war haunt my thoughts. For a healthy democracy, there should be few things more unthinkable than never-ending conflict, that steady drip-drip of death and destruction that drives militarism, reinforces authoritarianism, and facilitates disaster capitalism. In 1795, James Madison warned Americans that war of that sort would presage the slow death of freedom and representative government. His prediction seems all too relevant in a world in which, year after year, this country continues to engage in needless wars that have nothing to do with national defense.

You Wage War Long, You Wage It Wrong

To cite one example of needless war from the last century, consider America’s horrendous years of fighting in Vietnam and a critical lesson drawn firsthand from that conflict by reporter Jonathan Schell. “In Vietnam,” he noted, “I learned about the capacity of the human mind to build a model of experience that screens out even very dramatic and obvious realities.” As a young journalist covering the war, Schell saw that the U.S. was losing, even as its military was destroying startlingly large areas of South Vietnam in the name of saving it from communism. Yet America’s leaders, the “best and brightest” of the era, almost to a man refused to see that all of what passed for realism in their world, when it came to that war, was nothing short of a first-class lie. 

Why? Because believing is seeing and they desperately wanted to believe that they were the good guys, as well as the most powerful guys on the planet. America was winning, it practically went without saying, because it had to be. They were infected by their own version of an all-American victory culture, blinded by a sense of this country’s obvious destiny: to be the most exceptional and exceptionally triumphant nation on this planet.

As it happened, it was far more difficult for grunts on the ground to deny the reality of what was happening -- that they were fighting and dying in a senseless war. As a result, especially after the shock of the enemy’s Tet Offensive early in 1968, escalating protests within the military (and among veterans at home) together with massive antiwar demonstrations finally helped put the brakes on that war. Not before, however, more than 58,000 American troops died, along with millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.

In the end, the war in Indochina was arguably too costly, messy, and futile to continue. But never underestimate the military-industrial complex, especially when it comes to editing or denying reality, while being eternally over-funded for that very reality. It’s a trait the complex has shared with politicians of both parties. Don’t forget, for instance, the way President Ronald Reagan reedited that disastrous conflict into a “noble cause” in the 1980s. And give him credit! That was no small thing to sell to an American public that had already lived through such a war. By the way, tell me something about that Reaganesque moment doesn’t sound vaguely familiar almost four decades later when our very own “wartime president” long ago declared victory in the “war” on Covid-19, even as the death toll from that virus approaches 150,000 in the homeland.

In the meantime, the military-industrial complex has mastered the long con of the no-win forever war in a genuinely impressive fashion. Consider the war in Afghanistan. In 2021 it will enter its third decade without an end in sight. Even when President Trump makes noises about withdrawing troops from that country, Congress approves an amendment to another massive, record-setting military budget with broad bipartisan support that effectively obstructs any efforts to do so (while the Pentagon continues to bargain Trump down on the subject). 

The Vietnam War, which was destroying the U.S. military, finally ended in an ignominious withdrawal. Almost two decades later, after the 2001 invasion, the war in Afghanistan can now be -- the dream of the Vietnam era -- fought in a "limited" fashion, at least from the point of view of Congress, the Pentagon, and most Americans (who ignore it), even if not the Afghans. The number of American troops being killed is, at this point, acceptably low, almost imperceptible in fact (even if not to Americans who have lost loved ones over there).

More and more, the U.S. military is relying on air power, unmanned drones, mercenaries, local militias, paramilitaries, and private contractors. Minimizing American casualties is an effective way of minimizing negative media coverage here; so, too, are efforts by the Trump administration to classify nearly everything related to that war while denying or downplaying "collateral damage" -- that is, dead civilians -- from it.

Their efforts boil down to a harsh truth: America just plain lies about its forever wars, so that it can keep on killing in lands far from home.

When we as Americans refuse to take in the destruction we cause, we come to passively accept the belief system of the ruling class that what’s still bizarrely called “defense” is a “must have” and that we collectively must spend significantly more than a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and a sprawling network of intelligence agencies, all justified as necessary defenders of America’s freedom. Rarely does the public put much thought into the dangers inherent in a sprawling “defense” network that increasingly invades and dominates our lives.  

Meanwhile, it’s clear that low-cost wars, at least in terms of U.S. troops killed and wounded in action, can essentially be prolonged indefinitely, even when they never result in anything faintly like victory or fulfill any faintly useful American goal. The Afghan War remains the case in point. “Progress” is a concept that only ever fits the enemy -- the Taliban continues to gain ground -- yet, in these years, figures like retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus have continued to call for a “generational” commitment of troops and resources there, akin to U.S. support for South Korea. 

Who says the Pentagon leadership learned nothing from Vietnam? They learned how to wage open-ended wars basically forever, which has proved useful indeed when it comes to justifying and sustaining epic military budgets and the political authority that goes with them. But here’s the thing: in a democracy, if you wage war long, you wage it wrong. Athens and the historian Thucydides learned this the hard way in the struggle against Sparta more than two millennia ago. Why do we insist on forgetting such an obvious lesson?

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”

World War II was arguably the last war Americans truly had to fight. My Uncle Freddie was in the Army and stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked on December 7, 1941. The country then came together and won a global conflict (with lots of help) in 44 months, emerging as the planetary superpower to boot. Now, that superpower is very much on the wane, as Donald Trump recognized in running successfully as a declinist candidate for president in 2016. (Make America Great Again!) And yet, though he ran against this country’s forever wars and is now president, we’re approaching the third decade of a war on terror that has yielded little, spread radical Islamic terror outfits across an expanse of the planet, and still seemingly has no end.

“Great nations do not fight endless wars,” Trump himself claimed only last year. Yet that’s exactly what this country has been doing, regardless of which party ruled the roost in Washington. And here’s where, to give him credit, Trump actually had a certain insight. America is no longer great precisely because of the endless wars we wage and all the largely hidden but associated costs that go with them, including the recently much publicized militarization of the police here at home. Yet, in promising to make America great again, President Trump has failed to end those wars, even as he’s fed the military-industrial complex with even greater piles of cash.

There’s a twisted logic to all this. As the leading purveyor of violence and terror, with its leaders committed to fighting Islamic terrorism across the planet until the phenomenon is vanquished, the U.S. inevitably becomes its own opponent, conducting a perpetual war on itself. Of course, in the process, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Somalis, and Yemenis, among other peoples on this embattled planet of ours, pay big time, but Americans pay, too. (Have you even noticed that high-speed railroad that’s unbuilt, that dam in increasing disrepair, those bridges that need fixing, while money continues to pour into the national security state?) As the cartoon possum Pogo once so classically said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Early in the Iraq War, General Petraeus asked a question that was relevant indeed: “Tell me how this [war] ends.” The answer, obvious to so many who had protested in the global streets over the invasion to come in 2003, was “not well.” Today, another answer should be obvious: never, if the Pentagon and America’s political and national security elite have anything to do with it. In thermodynamics class, I learned that a perpetual motion machine is impossible to create due to entropy. The Pentagon never took that in and has instead been hard at work proving that a perpetual military machine is possible... until, that is, the empire it feeds off of collapses and takes us with it.

America’s Military Complex as a Cytokine Storm

In the era of Covid-19, as cases and deaths from the pandemic continue to soar in America, it’s astonishing that military spending is also soaring to record levels despite a medical emergency and a major recession. 

The reality is that, in the summer of 2020, America faces two deadly viruses. The first is Covid-19. With hard work and some luck, scientists may be able to mass-produce an effective vaccine for it, perhaps by as early as next spring. In the meantime, scientists do have a sense of how to control it, contain it, even neutralize it, as countries from South Korea and New Zealand to Denmark have shown, even if some Americans, encouraged by our president, insist on throwing all caution to the winds in the name of living free. The second virus, however, could prove even more difficult to control, contain, and neutralize: forever war, a pandemic that U.S. military forces, with their global strike missions, continue to spread across the globe.

Sadly, it’s a reasonable bet that in the long run, even with Donald Trump as president, America has a better chance of defeating Covid-19 than the virus of forever war. At least, the first is generally seen as a serious threat (even if not by a president blind to anything but his chances for reelection); the second is, however, still largely seen as evidence of our strength and exceptionalism. Indeed, Americans tend to imagine "our" military not as a dangerous virus but as a set of benevolent antibodies, defending us from global evildoers. 

When it comes to America’s many wars, perhaps there’s something to be learned from the way certain people's immune systems respond to Covid-19. In some cases, the virus sparks an exaggerated immune response that drives the body into a severe inflammatory state known as a cytokine storm. That "storm" can lead to multiple organ failure followed by death, yet it occurs in the cause of defending the body from a viral attack.

In a similar fashion, America's exaggerated response to 19 hijackers on 9/11 and then to perceived threats around the globe, especially the nebulous threat of terror, has led to an analogous (if little noticed) cytokine storm in the American system. Military (and militarized police) antibodies have been sapping our resources, inflaming our body politic, and slowly strangling the vital organs of democracy. Left unchecked, this "storm" of inflammatory militarism will be the death of democracy in America.

To put this country right, what’s needed is not only an effective vaccine for Covid-19 but a way to control the "antibodies" produced by America’s forever wars abroad and, as the years have gone by, at home -- and the ways they’ve attacked and inflamed the collective U.S. political, social, and economic body. Only when we find ways to vaccinate ourselves against the destructive violence of those wars, whether on foreign streets or our own, can we begin to heal as a democratic society.

To survive, the human body needs a healthy immune system, so when it goes haywire, becomes wildly inflamed, and ends up attacking and degrading our vital organs, we’re in trouble deep. It’s a reasonable guess that, in analogous terms, American democracy is already on a ventilator and beginning to feel the effects of multiple organ failure.

Unlike a human patient, doctors can’t put our democracy into a medically induced coma. But collectively we should be working to suppress our overactive immune system before it kills us. In other words, it’s truly time to defund that military machine of ours, as well as the militarized version of the police, and rethink how actual threats can be neutralized without turning every response into an endless war.

So many years later, it's time to think the unthinkable. For the U.S. government that means -- gasp! -- peace. Such a peace would start with imperial retrenchment (bring our troops home!), much reduced military (and police) budgets, and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and any other place associated with that “generational” war on terror. The alternative is a cytokine storm that will, in the end, tear us apart from within.

William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, taught history for 15 years. A TomDispatch regular, he also has a personal blog, Bracing Views.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.