US Out of Afghanistan, US Bases Out of Everywhere

By Ben Burgis, Jacobin

27 August 21

Some hawkish pundits are asking why must America leave Afghanistan when it has a permanent military presence at over 700 military bases around the world. They’re accidentally suggesting a good point: America should leave Afghanistan, and those 700 bases should go, too.

ow that the long and monstrous war in Afghanistan is finally coming to an end, supporters of the occupation have a problem. Do they claim that if the United States had only stayed in the country for a little while longer, the Taliban could have been decisively defeated, and the troops could have left without the US-installed regime immediately crumbling? Or do they admit that the anti-war movement was right all along, and a “forever war” is exactly what the hawks wanted?

A long series of pundits have settled on the same response to this dilemma: keeping some American troops in Afghanistan long-term would be fine and nothing like a “forever war,” since the United States has permanent military bases all over the world.

Here’s Eli Lake — a columnist for Bloomberg and a “National Security Journalism Fellow” at the Clements Center:

GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini hit a similar note. Bret Stephens said pretty much the same thing in the New York Times, focusing on America’s seventy-one-year presence in Korea. Andrew McCarthy worked a version of the same sneer into the National Review, joking that if we were to keep troops in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, we might as well rebrand World War II as “World Forever War II,” since the United States still has bases in Germany and Japan.

None of these pundits seems to feel any need to explicitly spell out the argument they’re gesturing at with these sneers: that America’s supposedly peaceful long-term military presence in these other countries discredits what the antiwar left says about “forever wars” in the Middle East.

As far as I can tell, their implied line of reasoning goes something like this:

1. The antiwar left claims that indefinitely extending the presence of American troops in Afghanistan would amount to waging a “forever war” in Afghanistan, but this can only be true if maintaining long-term American military presence in any country counts as waging a “forever war” in that country.


2. America has maintained long-term bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other countries without waging a “forever war” in those countries.


3. We can conclude from number two that maintaining long-term American military presence in any country would not count as waging a “forever war” in that country, and thus is no big deal.


4. We can conclude from one and three that the antiwar left is wrong to say that indefinitely extending the presence of American troops in Afghanistan would amount to waging a “forever war” in Afghanistan — and we should keep some troops in Afghanistan.

Number two is true enough if war means an ongoing “hot war” like the one that’s ending in Afghanistan. US troops aren’t in Germany to help Angela Merkel stave off insurgents already in control of large parts of Bavaria and Saxony. No one is getting into any firefights in Okinawa. Korea comes the closest, but even there, none of the occasional flareups of violence between North and South Korea have involved American soldiers shooting or being shot by anyone in decades. Like Germany and Japan, Korea is a stable society where the government enjoys as much internal legitimacy as the American government does within the borders of the United States.

But these disanalogies between the role American troops were playing in Afghanistan and the role they play in countries like Germany also show that number one is absurd. American soldiers might be able to walk around Berlin or Seoul without anyone shooting at them, but that doesn’t mean that if the war had dragged on for another year or another decade, the same kind of tranquility would have reigned in Kabul.

That said, they aren’t entirely wrong to suggest that there’s an analogy between the issue of whether the United States should be waging a “forever war” in Afghanistan and the issue of whether there should be “forever bases” scattered around the world.

For one thing, maintaining this kind of globe-spanning imperial military presence across over seven hundred bases worldwide is incredibly expensive. A report earlier this year found that the United States had spent $34 billion on its bases in two of these countries (Japan and South Korea) between 2016 and 2019. That money can and should be redirected to domestic social programs.

For another, even where local power structures approve of the bases and want them to stay, local populations often have good reasons for bitterly resenting American presence. Crimes committed by Americans stationed in Okinawa, for example, have sparked massive street protests against US presence there in the relatively recent past.

Finally, the bases in these countries aren’t just a potent symbol of America’s military might or an implicit threat to rival powers. They play a practical role in facilitating imperial wars.

Germany was diplomatically opposed to the invasion of Iraq, but when it started, planes regularly departed from US bases there, loaded with troops and weapons, and came back with wounded soldiers treated at base hospitals. Making it logistically easier for the US forces to quickly intervene all around the world in turn makes disastrous future interventions more likely.

The globe-spanning network of American military bases can’t be separated from America’s role as the world’s dominant imperial hegemon. That’s exactly why they need to go.

January 6 Investigators Want Answers From All of Trump's Adult Children (Except Tiffany)

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

27 August 21

Being ignored her whole life has finally paid off.

ike many of the worst people on Earth, Donald Trump should never have been allowed to reproduce. Unfortunately, he famously spawned numerous children with three women, only one of whom he seems to actually like. Ivanka, of course, is the golden child about whom the ex-president has a history of making wildly creepy comments, like that if she wasn’t his daughter he’d probably be dating her. Don Jr. is the fuck up, whose own father reportedly thinks—and tells people—he’s an idiot. Eric is equally dim, but only slightly less shouty about it. Barron is a child so we won’t get into him, though he should probably consider emancipation.

And then there’s Tiffany. Oh, Tiffany! After her parents divorced, she reportedly only saw her father once or twice a year, and in a capacity that sounds stilted at best. “I would bring her into New York a couple times a year and let her go see her dad in the office and let her go have dinner with him,” Marla Maples said in 2016, like she was a company colleague who worked at a regional office and was in town for meetings. When Tiffany gave her speech at the Republican National Convention later that year, the relationship sounded equally distant and awkward; one of the few anecdotes she had to share was that Trump would write notes on her report cards and, tragically, that she held onto them, presumably because they were one of her few connections to the guy. She also claimed that he was good with advice, but she added, “keeps it short,” bringing to mind a biannual phone conversation for which Trump probably allotted 10 minutes on his calendar. According to the ex-president’s former attorney Michael Cohen, the three eldest children referred to Tiffany as the “red-haired stepchild.” In an interview, Cohen’s daughter, Samantha, told Vanity Fair last year: “Tiffany and I had a mutual friend, but she knew who my dad was because Trump never wanted to deal with her, [so] my dad was helpful to her.… [It] can’t be easy being made to feel your entire life like you’re unwanted.” In other words, if the Trump clan were a normal family that did things together, Tiffany would be the one they accidentally left at the rest stop during a road trip, and didn’t realize was missing until they were 100 miles away.

All of which was probably a sad way to grow up. But if Tiffany hasn’t already come to the realization that a lack of a connection with her father was no doubt a blessing in disguise, Wednesday brings some fresh evidence:

Though she may have heard the phrase “all Trump’s...children except Tiffany” many times growing up and been upset, this time it’s objectively great news! She might have wished her father had made it to her dance recitals, and sure, it probably stung the times he ignored her calls, but if distance from him means not being implicated in his crimes, she should be thanking God for all the times he accidentally approached her in the lobby of Trump Tower and said, “What’s your name again?”

Delta Air Lines is taking no prisoners

You want to work for the company and remain unvaccinated? Fine, that’ll be $2,400. Per Bloomberg:

Delta Air Lines Inc. will impose a $200 monthly surcharge on employees who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19, becoming the first major U.S. company to levy a penalty to encourage workers to get protected. The new policy was outlined in a memo from chief executive officer Ed Bastian, who said 75% of the carrier’s workers already are vaccinated. Increasing cases of coronavirus linked to a “very aggressive” variant are driving the push for all employees to get the shots, he said in the note to employees Wednesday. The fee applies to employees in the airline’s health care plan who haven’t received shots by November 1. The company also will require weekly testing for employees who aren’t vaccinated by mid-September.

Delta is confident that its approach will succeed in moving its worker vaccination rate beyond 75%, a spokesman said when asked why the company didn’t impose a mandate. The potential penalty is “well within” legal parameters, he said. While vaccine requirements have increased since Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s vaccine received full Food and Drug Administration approval on Monday, employers are treading carefully for fear they’ll hurt morale and spur defections in a tight labor market. Some consultants doubt that surcharges will be as persuasive as demanding inoculation, though the size of Delta’s surcharge could change that calculus.

While Brian Kropp, chief of human resources research for the Gartner consulting firm, told Bloomberg that “Vaccine hesitant employees are likely to see this as a mandate or a punitive measure, as it creates an additional annual cost of $2,400 for that employee,” Delta is apparently unconcerned. In his memo, Bastian wrote that the fee is to “to address the financial risk” the company is taking on by employing people who refuse to get their shots; the average hospital stay for COVID-19 patients has cost the company $50,000 each, he said.

Well, this is terrifying