Trump Falls for the Afghanistan Trap

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

23 August 17

onald Trump on Monday evening fell into the same trap that presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama fell into before him. He caved in to his generals, not just to remain in Afghanistan, but to increase the US troop presence by 4,000 soldiers and to waste more billions of US taxpayer dollars. I’ve been in some of those same general officer briefings during my years in the CIA and as a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The generals always say the same thing: “We’re winning this war. We just need a little more time and money and a few thousand more troops. Trust us.”

Trump spoke to the nation on Monday from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, formerly known as Fort Myer, a completely ceremonial base with no combat mission of any kind, and which serves as the home of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the soldiers and sailors who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns. Ironically, Trump was mere yards from the graves of many of the 2,386 US troops killed in Afghanistan since October 2001.

Trump laid out a convoluted, confusing, and contradictory strategy that would keep the US mired in combat in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, he committed untold billions of dollars for the training of Afghan troops as if that hadn’t been thought of before, and he lobbed a verbal grenade into the middle of US relations with Pakistan at the same time. In the end, he will likely accomplish nothing, while more and more US troops are killed in an endless and unwinnable war.

Trump made only a handful of points in the speech. First, he said, he would not be limited by a timetable, but instead would make policy based on developments on the ground. Second, he said that the US would continue to initiate public works projects to put Afghans to work. He added, though, that the US commitment was “not a blank check.” Third, he said that the US would not be in the business of nation-building. Instead, it would be in the business of “killing terrorists.”

Perhaps most importantly, Trump made a direct and threatening challenge to Pakistan, all but declaring that the Pakistani government was at least partly responsible for terrorism in the region. While that may or may not be true, that is language that should be confined to quiet diplomacy. Humiliating an ally in public usually doesn’t give a president the desired result. And to add insult to injury, he suggested that Pakistan’s archenemy, India, should assume a greater role in Afghanistan, a move that would essentially encircle Pakistan. Trump either meant to be provocative and to risk relations with Pakistan or he’s never looked at a map.

So who convinced this president — who has literally no experience whatsoever in foreign, defense, or intelligence policy — to continue the same failed policy that Barack Obama and George W. Bush pursued before him? It was those generals who were supposed to be the adults in the room. It was the generals that the mainstream media hoped would be the ones to moderate this unpredictable president. It was secretary of defense and former Marine Corps general James Mattis, who led the deepest marine assault in American history into Kandahar, Afghanistan, in late 2001. It was National Security Advisor LTG H.R. McMaster, who led an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan in 2010. It was General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was the commanding general in Afghanistan in 2013. It was General John Kelly, the White House chief of staff who lost a son in Afghanistan in 2010.

This is the same Donald Trump who tweeted in 2013, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis [sic] we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” Two months later, he tweeted, “We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.” And all the way back in 2011, he tweeted, “Ron Paul is right when he says we are wasting lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

With these flip-flops in mind, Trump now owns the Afghanistan debacle. And this is despite the fact that he knows that continued US involvement in Afghanistan is a mistake.

I’m not much of a fan of the neoliberal former senator and secretary of state John Kerry, my old boss at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he was right when he asked a Senate subcommittee in 1971, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” How indeed? Those are the words that Trump will have to ask himself for every soldier, sailor, and marine he sends to Afghanistan.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Stop Using Mental Illness to Explain White Supremacy

By Christopher Petrella and Justin Gomer, Yes! Magazine

23 August 17

White supremacy is not an unfortunate stain on an otherwise clean democracy. It’s terribly, terrifyingly normal.

few weeks ago, we convened and moderated a “justice and equity” reading group for students, staff, and faculty at a local college. Our inaugural meeting centered on an essay in which the author calls attention to the shortcomings of organizing racial justice interventions in higher education around the sanitized and depoliticized language of “diversity.”

While nearly every participant agreed that programs and initiatives captured under the banner of “diversity” would fail to remediate historical and contemporary racial wrongs, we quickly noticed something else: A number of white discussants began describing racism as a “disease,” as a “mental illness,” and as a form of “deviant behavior.” In a private conversation after the gathering, one staff member approached us with the suggestion that we should consider “lobotomizing the racists that hold our country back.”

The subtext was palpable: Racism is little more than a behavior-based psychopathology that discloses itself in discrete manifestations of bigotry, prejudice, and misunderstanding. According to such a construction, racism can only be treated with medical intervention. Racial inequity, therefore, is simply the sum of the actions of individual bigots and racial justice can be achieved by “curing” those individuals.

The presumption that one can eliminate racism by snuffing out a few “bad apples” misses the mark. In fact, such a paradigm misdiagnoses the systemic and ideological production of race itself, which is squarely centered in white supremacy.

The “racism as disease” paradigm only seems to make sense if one were also to believe that racism is: 1) a matter of (mis)recognition and (mis)perception meted out in an apolitical and behaviorist colorblind present; 2) an unfortunate holdover from slavery, a past mistake that has yet to be rectified; and 3) an anomaly, a radical deviation from the telos of dominant political institutions and practices.

Such a psychopathological paradigm, however, is not an appendage of 19th century scientific racism, but rather 20th century liberal social science. In An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Swedish Nobel laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal argued that “[racism] is a terrible and inexplicable anomaly stuck in the middle of our liberal democratic ethos.” His popular study—funded by the Carnegie Foundation—provides a forceful, if incomplete, framework for explaining the persistence of racial injustice in the United States. Myrdal’s book quickly became an authoritative text for defenders of racial integration in the postwar period, and his work gained popularity in the U.S. imagination after it was cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Together, Myrdal’s study and the Brown decision helped to shift race discourse away from systemic critiques of white supremacy emblematized by DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to diagnoses based on “psychological knowledge” and personal attitudes. Addressing and eliminating quantifiable racial inequities gave way to treating individual racists (i.e. the few “bad apples”) in an otherwise racially just country. Structural white supremacy, in other words, became conflated with individual bigotry.

Consider the Google Books Ngram depiction above. From 1900 to the mid-century, the terms “white supremacy” and “racism” were both used at a similar rate in popular and scholarly usage. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, “racism” began to surpass “white supremacy” as the preeminent term for marking, diagnosing, and ameliorating various forms of racial injustice. The deficiency of this term rests in its ability to make invisible both its locus and its origin: whiteness. Avoiding the term “white” overlooks the policies, practices, and hierarchies of domination and exclusion that has shaped U.S. and global history.

Myrdal’s study continues to set the parameters of mainstream race discourse in the United States. His anomaly thesis casts racism in the vernacular of deviance and abnormality, providing the discursive basis for thinking about racism as illness or disease.

White supremacy, however, is unexplainable by the anomaly thesis. In School Desegregation (1984), scholar Jennifer Hochschild rightly argues that “racism is not simply an excrescence on a fundamentally healthy liberal democratic body … Liberal democracy and racism in the U.S. are historically, even inherently, reinforcing; American society as we know it exists only because of its foundation in racially based slavery, and it thrives only because racial discrimination continues. The apparent anomaly is an actual symbiosis.” White supremacy is not an unfortunate, anomalous stain on an otherwise virginal tapestry of democracy, but rather, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, it’s terribly, terrifyingly normal.

In fact, the American Psychiatric Association has for decades admitted that racial injustice is too normal to be considered a mental illness or a disease. In 1969, a group of black psychiatrists urged the organization to acknowledge that racism is the “major mental health problem of this country” and to include extreme bigotry as a recognized mental illness in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual. Though the APA endorsed the “general spirit of reform and redress of racial inequities in American psychiatry,” it rejected the psychiatrists’ desire to classify extreme bigotry as a mental illness. In order for racism to be considered a mental illness, the APA declared, racism must deviate from normative behavior. Because racism is ubiquitous, it could not constitute a mental illness. The APA used this rationale to keep racism out of the DSM in 1980, 1987, 1994, and 2013.

The ideology of race itself leads back to whiteness and white supremacy. U.S. immigration and naturalization legislation, race-based marriage statutes, inheritance law, redlining, and the segregation of public facilities are all examples of how whiteness informs policy and practice. They draw, secure, police, and legitimize the parameters of whiteness and non-whiteness.

So-called anti-miscegenation statutes reinforce this argument. From a strictly etymological perspective, “anti-miscegenation” most closely refers to a proscription against “race-mixing” in marriage or conjugal entanglements. The term, however, does not accurately depict the ideological underpinnings of the law. Most anti-miscegenation laws, in fact, did not prohibit marriage or sexual relations between two non-white people. What architects of anti-miscegenation laws feared most was race-mixing between white and non-white people because such a social practice would compromise the prospect of white racial purity, white national purity, and global white supremacy. Similarly, U.S. naturalization law from 1790 to 1952 carried with it an explicit prerequisite of whiteness. For instance, the first U.S. Immigration and Naturalization law, in 1790, restricted naturalized citizenship to “a free white [male], who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years.”

Ultimately, framing white supremacy as exceptional, individualized, and through the language of disease obscures its origins and movements. As George Lipsitz argues, “whiteness has a cash value” that produces advantages and “profits” for white people in virtually all areas of social organization including housing, education, employment, and intergenerational wealth. Lipsitz continues: “White supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility” and access to full and legitimate citizenship.

Those who continue to explain racial injustice through appeals to disease or illness implicitly reinforce a discourse that misdiagnoses the machinations of white supremacy. If we are truly to craft an antiracist politics capable of threatening the endurance of white supremacy, we must reject analyses and interventions that individualize social injustice by relying on notions of disease, mental illness, or deviance.