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FOCUS: Australia Beckons a War with China |
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Saturday, 15 April 2017 11:01 |
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Pilger writes: “Australia is sleep-walking into a confrontation with China. Wars can happen suddenly in an atmosphere of mistrust and provocation, especially if a minor power, like Australia, abandons its independence for an "alliance" with an unstable superpower.”
A member of the Australian military. (photo: TribunNews)
Australia Beckons a War with China
By John Pilger, johnpilger.com
15 April 17
 ustralia is sleep-walking into a confrontation with China. Wars can happen suddenly in an atmosphere of mistrust and provocation, especially if a minor power, like Australia, abandons its independence for an "alliance" with an unstable superpower.
The United States is at a critical moment. Having exported its all-powerful manufacturing base, run down its industry and reduced millions of its once-hopeful people to poverty, principal American power today is brute force. When Donald Trump launched his missile attack on Syria - following his bombing of a mosque and a school - he was having dinner in Florida with the President of China, Xi Jinping.
Trump's attack on Syria had little to do with chemical weapons. It was, above all, to show his detractors and doubters in Washington's war-making institutions - the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congress - how tough he was and prepared to risk a war with Russia. He had spilled blood in Syria, a Russian protectorate; he was surely now on the team. The attack was also meant to say directly to President Xi, his dinner guest: this is how we deal with those who challenge the top dog.
China has long received this message. In its rise as the world's biggest trader and manufacturer, China has been encircled by 400 US military bases - a provocation described by a former Pentagon strategist as "a perfect noose".
This is not Trump's doing. In 2011, President Barack Obama flew to Australia to declare, in an address to parliament, what became known as the "pivot to Asia": the biggest build-up of US air and naval forces in the Asia Pacific region since the Second World War. The target was China. America had a new and entirely unnecessary enemy. Today, low-draft US warships, missiles, bombers, drones operate on China's doorstep.
In July, one of the biggest US-led naval exercises ever staged, the biennial Operation Talisman Sabre, will rehearse a blockade of the sea lanes through which run China's commercial lifelines. Based on a Air-Sea Battle Plan for war with China, which prescribes a preemptive "blinding" attack, this "war game" will be played by Australia.
This is not urgent news. Rather, the news is the "threat" that China poses to "freedom of navigation" in the South China Sea by building airstrips on disputed reefs and islets. The reason why - the "noose" - is almost never mentioned.
Australia in the 21st century has no enemies. Not even a melancholy colonial imagination that conjured Asia falling down on us as if by the force of gravity can conjure a single contemporary enemy. No one wants to bomb or occupy Australia. Well, not yet.
As Australian political, military and intelligence establishments are integrated into the war plans of a growing American obsession - the shift of trading, banking and development power to the east - Australia is making an enemy it never bargained for. A frontline has already been marked at Pine Gap, the spy base the CIA set up near Alice Springs in the 1960s, which targets America's enemies, beckoning, of course, massive retaliation.
Last October, the opposition Labor Party's defence spokesman, Richard Marles, delighted the US admirals and generals at a conference in Hawaii by demanding that Australian naval commanders should have the authority to provoke nuclear-armed China in the disputed South China Sea. What is it about some Australian politicians whose obsequiousness takes charge of their senses?
While the coalition government of Malcolm Turnbull has resisted such a clear and present danger, at least for now, it is building a $195 billion war arsenal, one of the biggest on earth - including more than $15 billion to be spent on American F-35 fighters already distinguished as hi-tech turkeys. Clearly, this is aimed at China.
This view of Australia's region is shrouded by silence. Dissenters are few, or frightened. Anti-China witch hunts are not uncommon. Indeed, who, apart from former prime minister Paul Keating, speaks out with an unambiguous warning? Who tells Australians that, in response to the "noose" around it, China has almost certainly increased its nuclear weapons posture from low alert to high alert?
And who utters the heresy that Australians should not have to "choose" between America and China: that we should, for the first time in our history, be truly modern and independent of all great power: that we should play a thoughtful, imaginative, non-provocative, diplomatic role to help prevent a catastrophe and so protect "our interests", which are the lives of people.
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Ask Yourself: Will Donald Trump EVER Become President? |
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Saturday, 15 April 2017 08:48 |
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Moyers writes: “It’s been a week now since Donald Trump once again became our president. Here’s how it happened. After he unleashed missiles on a Syrian airfield, members of Washington’s national security establishment and elite pundits swooned.”
Bill Moyers. (photo: PBS)
Ask Yourself: Will Donald Trump EVER Become President?
By Bill Moyers, Billmoyers.com
15 April 17
As our institutions bend and buckle and approach the breaking point, the president bombs Syria and is hailed by an obeisant media.
 t’s been a week now since Donald Trump once again became our president.
Here’s how it happened.
After he unleashed missiles on a Syrian airfield, members of Washington’s national security establishment and elite pundits swooned. Top Democrats and Republicans led the way. Good soldiers all in the military-industrial-political complex, they stood smartly at attention and saluted the commander-in-chief for sending a message to the world, although exactly what the message meant remains far from clear.
The headline above Glenn Greenwald’s story at The Intercept summed up the response: “The Spoils of War — Trump Lavished with Media and Bipartisan Praise for Bombing Syria.” The hawkish Hillary Clinton, who long had been critical of Barack Obama for not bringing Bashar Assad to heel, “appeared at an event” — and this was before the bombing even happened! — “and offered her categorical support for what Trump was planning.”
Up in the choir loft, the media and pundits sang as one from the official hymnal, praising Trump’s “presidential moment” and transforming him from a pathetic dunderhead suffering from narcissistic personality disorder into the Lord of Hosts. It was CNN’s Fareed Zakaria who pronounced the decision to fire away as the “big moment” when “Donald Trump became president of the United States.”
The theatrics were perfect. The Pentagon shopped to the media a video of the missiles as they were lofted up and away. MSNBC’s Brian Williams was among those moved by the aesthetics of violence: “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two Navy vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.’”
When I heard those words, I thought back to that night in 2003 when another president lit up the skies over Baghdad with the “shock and awe” of his air attack on Iraq. Suddenly the press was talking about George W. Bush as if he were George Washington, George Marshall and George Patton rolled into one. A touch of George III came later, as our newly refurbished president donned a flight suit and strutted aboard the aircraft carrier with the banner behind him that read: “Mission Accomplished.” Not quite.
Then a more recent scene and another miraculous moment came to mind, from six weeks ago — Feb. 28, to be exact. Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress. He paused, pointed to the balcony and recognized the widow of the Navy SEAL who was killed during a raid on an alleged terrorist compound in Yemen, the very first military mission dispatched into harm’s way by the brand-new commander-in-chief himself.
That mission went badly, so much so that at least two dozen local civilians, including women and children, were killed. Trump did not mention them. He focused on honoring the grieving widow in the balcony who was trying, unsuccessfully, to hold back her tears as wave after wave of applause rolled across the House chamber and ricocheted from wall to wall.
Time magazine’s White House correspondent tweeted that the speech was the “clearest example Trump is beginning to own and understand the powers of the office.” The next day, The Washington Post’s White House bureau chief tweeted, “This is the best morning of Donald Trump’s presidency. He is basking in positive pundit reviews. All that tumult [of the previous month] feels like yesteryear.” Politico’s man on the scene admiringly described it in a tweet as Trump’s “Reaganesque moment.”
And over at CNN, liberal commentator Van Jones called it
“one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period… And for people who have been hoping that he [Trump] would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment… He did something tonight that you cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States.” [italics mine]
I understand what these people were saying — that although constitutionally Trump had become president when he was inaugurated four weeks earlier, he had not metaphorically made the leap into the persona expected of him. He did not fit the mythical image of a president we prefer over the real thing. Above all, he had yet to put on a sufficiently good show (the crowd at the inauguration was not much larger than his two undersized hands clasped together). Nor had the establishment pundits fully weighed in with any semblance of support, and without their blessing, Trump was obviously just a usurper who could barely read a speech, even with a teleprompter.
But after the dramatic spectacle of that Feb. 28 speech, the white smoke rose from the chimney: America at last had a president who could act the part even if his cronies were ripping out the plumbing, stripping the wiring and carting it all off in Uber cars.
Alas, the euphoria of that night was not to last. Once again it evaporated as fast as the truth on Kellyanne Conway’s lips. Trump quickly returned to governing by anarchy. Chaos again ruled the White House. Wrecking crews installed by Bannon and Priebus at federal agencies continued their bloodbaths. Trump’s state of mind once again became the subject of much speculation. Trump’s health care “reform” went down in flames. His proposed budget exploded on contact with reality. Conflicts of interest littered the city like cow patties in a pasture. The atmosphere stank like a fetid swamp, the one Trump has made no attempt to drain. And his popularity dropped lower than any president so early in the game.
Yet after the bombing a week ago, Trump towers again. Fifty-nine cruise missiles — tomahawks — were all it took.
Mind you, there is little to show for the attack. The airbase was open the very next day. Russia’s Putin and Syria’s Assad may be forced into a tighter embrace as Donald chills on Vladimir — and vice versa.
And really, what was the big deal, anyway? As Glenn Greenwald wrote,
“The CIA has spent more than a billion dollars a year to arm anti-Assad rebels for years, and the US began bombing Syria in 2014 — the seventh predominantly Muslim country bombed by Obama — and never stopped. Trump had already escalated that bombing campaign, culminating in a strike last month that Syrians say destroyed a mosque and killed dozens. What makes this latest attack new is that rather than allegedly targeting terrorist’s sites of ISIS and al-Qaida, it targets the Syrian government — something Obama threatened to do in 2013 but never did.”
Trump will be tempted to do it again, because he likes big booms and especially if such thunderbolts gain him adulation from hard-liners in the national security complex and the press.
There will be opportunities because even if Assad stops using chemical weapons, he will no doubt continue to pummel what remains of Syria’s civilian population. As Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department official, told The Huffington Post: “You’ll see many more pictures of beautiful [Syrian] babies [dying] on TV – specifically to humiliate the United States and show the fecklessness of military action.” In other words, Trump is about to find out why Obama avoided military intervention in Syria.
Meanwhile, here at home, our institutions bend and buckle and approach the breaking point from benign, blind or willful neglect — and above all, from a leadership vacuum.
One example: our transportation infrastructure. A week ago, as Trump & Company plotted the attack on the Syrian airfield, here in the Northeast corridor of America’s vast transportation system a second train derailment in two weeks again plunged hundreds of thousands of commuters into nail-biting, life-upending chaos.
It began as a minor derailment at Penn Station, the hub of our transit network, but like a spider web, everything transit-related is so connected in these parts that the upheaval quickly spread to Long Island and New Jersey and then to the corridor between Boston and Washington, DC. The New York Times called the calamity “another reminder of the decrepit, tenuous state of much of the region’s infrastructure and transit systems.”
You would think this would be a priority of Donald Trump. He grew up in New York. He knows the crucial role of mass transit. He spins a good spiel on infrastructure. Yet for all this, he has rejected an Obama-era program that would have funded long-range improvements to our regional infrastructure, even as he proposes huge tax breaks for builders and real estate developers like himself.
He also wants to increase defense spending by $54 billion and proposes to slash non-military spending by a corresponding amount. This includes slicing funds for Amtrak and transit and commuter rail programs across the country. The National Association of Rail Passengers estimates the cuts of federal funding for Amtrak’s national network of trains would drastically affect service to 23 states and 144 million Americans, many of them in rural towns in the Midwest and the South, including my home town in East Texas which went for Trump by an overwhelming majority — and I mean overwhelming.
How is it Trump seems to care the least for the very folks who voted for him? Not a day passes that he doesn’t betray some of them.
And instead of bombing another country, how about building our own with better bridges, railroads, highways and airports, how about tending to those who need jobs and homes, how about health care that really gets the job done?
Then we might finally achieve the transformative moment when even Donald Trump at last becomes president for real. But don’t hold your breath. It is foolish to expect anything like this from a man-child who plays with America’s destiny as if it were a rag doll in his gilded crib.
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The World Is Getting a Taste of the Trump Doctrine |
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Friday, 14 April 2017 14:13 |
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Dreyfuss writes: "What to make of the sudden jump in 'collateral damage' - i.e., the piling up of dead civilians in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan, thanks to U.S. airstrikes?"
The so-called 'Mother of All Bombs,' which was used in Afghanistan. (photo: Eglin Air Force Base)
The World Is Getting a Taste of the Trump Doctrine
By Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone
14 April 17
Trump's campaign promise to "bomb the sh-t out of ISIS" is starting to become reality
 hat to make of the sudden jump in "collateral damage" – i.e., the piling up of dead civilians in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan, thanks to U.S. airstrikes? Do the out-of-the-blue missile attacks against a Syrian air base last Thursday and this week's deployment of a 21,600-pound, never-before-used "mother of all bombs" in Afghanistan signal that the White House has given the green light for what Donald Trump promised in 2016 – "I would bomb the shit out of ISIS" – with little regard for innocents caught in the blasts?
Based on the results of a lengthy string of attacks, beginning just days after Trump took office in January, it sure looks that way.
Despite his bomb-ISIS outbursts, Trump ran a neo-isolationist electoral campaign, repeatedly slamming Hillary Clinton for her vote in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Thus, his startling bout of muscle-flexing is a sharp departure from his America First posturing. The dropping of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) in eastern Afghanistan, in the remote hills of Achin District in Nangarhar Province, unleashed a weapon of staggering power, one widely described as the largest non-nuclear explosive device in the entire American arsenal. "The after-effect, the shock wave, not only has physical effects but psychological effects," Col. Cedric Leighton (Ret.), told CNN.
"This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons," former Afghan President Hamid Karzai wrote in a series of tweets.
The MOAB is, perhaps, the perfect weapon to symbolize Trump's braggadocio and love for superlatives. More worryingly, however, the MOAB bombing, the Syria strike, and a wave of intense airstrikes from the Horn of Africa to South Asia seem to signal a president dazzled by his generals. Since taking office, it appears that Trump's fallen under the spell of Secretary of Defense Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis and General H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, giving them unprecedented decision-making power to utilize the might of the U.S. armed forces with little or no White House oversight.
"What I do is I authorize my military," Trump said following the MOAB blast, according to the Military Times. "We have the greatest military in the world, and they've done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and that's what they're doing." In other words, unlike President Obama, who micromanaged war, Trump has told the generals, Go do your thing. Total authorization.
Frankly, that's why they've been so successful lately," added Trump, noting the break with Obama's more cautious approach. "If you look at what's happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what has happened over the last eight years, you'll see there is a tremendous difference."
Derek Chollet, assistant secretary of defense for international affairs in the Obama administration, told The New York Times this week that "Trump has ceded responsibilities to his military commanders, and it appears he's paying little attention to operational details."
Making matters ever more concerning, Trump has reportedly returned authority for unrestricted drone warfare to the CIA. Earlier, Obama had ordered control over drones to be centralized under the Pentagon, which operates under stricter oversight. But, according to the Wall Street Journal, last month Trump reversed that order.
The new policies have raised alarm in several quarters.
Back in early March, several dozen former U.S. national security officials, many of whom worked for the Obama administration, sent an urgent letter to Mattis. In it, they expressed concern that President Trump was considering a plan to ease restrictions on the Pentagon's so-called "rules of engagement," potentially making it easier for counterterrorism officers to launch attacks will less concern about civilian casualties.
A lengthy memorandum attached to the letter – signed by top officials from the White House, the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, the Department of Justice and other agencies – warned Mattis not to take any action that could trigger a spike in civilian deaths, warning "even small numbers of unintentional civilian deaths, whether or not legally permitted, can cause significant strategic setbacks."
Translated: Kill innocent men, women and children, and you create a fresh crop of angry recruits for terrorist organizations, while pissing off the local population and alienating our allies and the governments of countries where we're fighting.
And, although many thousands of civilians have been killed by American and allied forces in the eruption of wars across the Middle East and South Asia since 9/11, there are troubling reports that the Trump administration is going to make things a lot uglier. Last month, The Times reported that the White House "is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions." Starting with Yemen and Somalia, where U.S. airstrikes targeting Al Qaeda and Al Shabab cells are routine, the Trump administration made plans to declare parts of those countries free-fire zones, the paper reported. Just five days after his inauguration, at the same dinner with Secretary of Defense Mattis at which the new president approved a deadly raid by U.S. Special Forces into Yemen, Trump also approved loosened rules over airstrikes in a manner that could increase civilian casualties.
For its part, the Trump administration has denied that it has ordered any shift in the war's rules of engagement. But, reality is opaque, since the rules of engagement are classified. Meanwhile, a string of lethal incidents tells another story. A sample:
—The January 29th Yemen raid, during which one U.S. Special Forces member was killed – and which the White House described as a "huge success" – left 14 civilians dead, including nine children, according to Human Rights Watch.
—On February 10th, U.S. airstrikes in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, reportedly killed at least 22 civilians, including women and children.
—On March 16th, a U.S. airstrike in the Al-Jadida district of Mosul, Iraq, struck a building in which numerous civilians were huddled, collapsing it and killing as many as 200. A local official, Bassma Basim, told Al Jazeera that "more than 500" Iraqis died in airstrikes that week alone.
—That same day, 46 civilians died when a U.S. airstrike hit a mosque in Al Jinah, Syria, between Aleppo and the rebel stronghold of Idlib, an attack that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights called a "massacre."
—Five days later, on March 21st, outside Raqqa, Syria, the stronghold and capital of the Islamic State, another U.S. airstrike left 30 dead, after hitting a school in the town of Mansoura. "Coalition warplanes carried out 19 airstrikes [in the area] ... an unusually high number for a single day," reported The New York Times.
In all, in March alone, as many as 3,471 civilians died in Syria and Iraq in U.S. and coalition airstrikes, according to Airwars, a nonprofit that monitors the war against ISIS. Per the group, "Across both Iraq and Syria, Airwars researchers tracked a record 166 incidents of concern allegedly involving coalition warplanes – a 67 percent increase from the 99 events tracked in February. A massive total of 1,782 to 3,471 civilian non-combatants were alleged killed in these March events – numbers not seen from foreign strikes since the worst of Russia's brutal air campaign in 2016."
The point isn't that the Obama administration's War on Terror (which Obama stopped referring to as such) didn't kill and maim many civilians. Back in 2015, an extended aerial attack on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, left 42 dead, including doctors and patients. And just last November, U.S. and Afghan troops engaged in a firefight with the Taliban in northern Kunduz that killed 33 civilians. In 2016, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, civilian deaths in Afghanistan hit an all-time high, with 3,498 killed, including 923 children – an insufficiently covered story, to say the least. Most of those deaths resulted from attacks by the Taliban, but a quarter were caused by pro-government forces, and 250 by U.S. and Afghan airstrikes. "The killing and maiming of thousands of Afghan civilians is deeply harrowing and largely preventable," said Tadamichi Yamamoto, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Afghanistan, in February.
And civilian casualties were rising, too, in the last months of Obama's presidency, as the United States planned parallel attacks on the two urban strongholds of ISIS, Raqqa and Mosul.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, the site of another obscure and often overlooked war, Saudi air attacks supported by the United States left an exceedingly bloody trail of dead innocents, including bombings of schools and hospitals, plus especially deadly airstrikes that killed 131 civilians attending a wedding and another that slaughtered 140 people at a Yemeni funeral.
Yet Obama, especially after 2013, seemed to realize that the awesome power of Predator and Reaper drones and other aircraft needed to be reined in, and to his credit he issued orders seeking to limit civilian casualties. According to many reports since then, some in the military chain of command chafed under those rules. Now, under Trump, they may be feeling that the handcuffs are off.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that under President Trump, the number of civilian casualties is heading skyward.
The Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), a Washington-based nonprofit, issued a warning this week about the increase in civilian deaths. "[W]hen determining whether and how to use military force, the government of the United States and its partners in the international community must consider second- and third-order consequences of their actions including the potential for additional harm to civilians, and how that harm may be prevented or mitigated," the group said.
"The level of human suffering over the past six years in Syria is not only profoundly tragic, it is a stain on human history," said Federico Borello, CIVIC's executive director. "Condemnation is not enough; real action is needed by governments and the UN Security Council to hold those responsible accountable, to put pressure on the warring parties to end the bloodshed, and to end the assault on civilians."
Yet there's little indication, yet, that anyone is being held accountable. "It is no surprise that the Trump administration would cast the removal of President Barack Obama's constraints as lawful," wrote Gabor Rona, head of the Law and Armed Conflict Project at the Cardozo Law Institute on Holocaust and Human Rights. "Bottom line: Look for ever more death and destruction against civilians and the inevitable blowback that sends us into a downward spiral of violence, all accompanied by an increasingly robust offer of 'alternative facts' on civilian casualties."
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As Trump Strikes Syria, We Should Revisit the History Lessons of US Intervention in Central America |
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Friday, 14 April 2017 13:52 |
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Alvarenga writes: "As many try to assuage their fears about Trump's election by suggesting that the US has survived worse - 'we survived Reagan' is a common refrain - we'd do well to remember that hundreds of thousands of people didn't survive Reagan's intervention and proxy wars in Central America."
Manhattan, 1990. Protest in Union Square against U.S. military intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua. (photo: Gabe Kirchheimer)
As Trump Strikes Syria, We Should Revisit the History Lessons of US Intervention in Central America
By Daniel Alvarenga, Remezcla
14 April 17
 ince it began nearly six years ago, the Syrian civil war has prompted difficult foreign policy debates about US interventionism and what our role in the region – and more broadly, in the world – should be. Could the use of direct US military force in Syria help stop the unfolding humanitarian crisis there? Or does military action, (even if we assume the best of intentions), do more harm than good?
While Obama took the latter position during his presidency, Donald Trump has adopted a more hawkish stance, authorizing the launch of 59 cruise Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in Syria last week. The strike, which constitutes the first direct US military action against the President Bashar al-Assad regime, was a response to Assad’s suspected involvement in a chemical weapons attack that killed at least 70 Syrian civilians. In its wake, the world is left wondering how US intervention in Syria and beyond will look under the Trump administration – particularly given that this move directly contradicts Trump’s isolationist campaign rhetoric.
As we look ahead to what Trump may plan for the future, it helps to look back at lessons from the long history of US military intervention. When I first heard about the situation in Syria, it echoed the Salvadoran Civil War my parents and siblings fled in the 1980s. The US was heavily involved in funding that conflict, providing weapons, money and political support to El Salvador’s right-wing government. Today, El Salvador remains the deadliest country in the world after Syria, despite the fact that the war officially ended 25 years ago.
As many try to assuage their fears about Trump’s election by suggesting that the US has survived worse – “we survived Reagan” is a common refrain – we’d do well to remember that hundreds of thousands of people didn’t survive Reagan’s intervention and proxy wars in Central America. If we want more people to survive this new administration, we need to learn from the serious ramifications and unintended consequences that our military interventions have wrought in the past.
With that in mind, here are some of the repercussions of the US’s involvement in Central America that are still relevant in our current political context:
Refugees
The Trump administration has garnered criticism for the hypocrisy of its Syria position – bombing the Assad regime, supposedly in the name of protecting innocent Syrian civilians, while simultaneously refusing to take in refugees. This, however, is not an unprecedented move.
The United States government was instrumental in funding right-wing militaries during the Guatemalan and Salvadoran civil wars that cost hundred of thousand of lives between them. Under the Reagan administration, the innocent people fleeing this warfare weren’t considered refugees, but rather were labeled “economic migrants.” As a result, fewer than three percent of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were approved. This moral failing to protect human life led to the rise of a religious-backed, anti-imperial grassroots movement known as the Sanctuary Movement, which sought to defy the US government and shelter Central American refugees.
We’re in desperate need of second coming of the Sanctuary Movement, as there over 60 million refugees worldwide, more than in any point in history according to the UN Refugee Agency.
Drone Warfare
The development of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, dates back to before World War I, but has become synonymous with the Obama administration’s interventions in the Middle East. It is a little-known fact that Central America was a testing ground for drone technology in the 1980s. According to the Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro, drone spy planes were part of the United States’ counterinsurgency strategy in the region between 1979 and 1992. The drones likely took off from US bases in Honduras and Panama to surveil the movement of guerrilla rebels in El Salvador. A bit later on during the Iraq War, US military strategists employed tactics tested in El Salvador’s civil war – it was dubbed the “Salvador Option.” The plan involved re-creating Salvadoran-style death squads, which were paramilitary groups designed to commit extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances for the purpose of political repression.
Coups
The 2009 Honduran Coup became a talking point during the 2016 campaign season, after the assassination of indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres grabbed international headlines. Before her death, Cáceres condemned Hillary Clinton’s support of the right-wing coup in Honduras, one that led to a surge in violence and the targeting of activists like herself.
The Central American isthmus has had too many coups to list, but one notable example is the 1954 Guatemalan coup that was staged to protect the financial interests of the United Fruit Company. Abrupt regime changes in countries where the US expresses political interests has become a standard practice.
Invasions
Some of the earliest examples of the US flexing its interventionist muscle were the Banana Wars, a series of conflicts from the 1880s to 1930s that spanned the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico. One of those conflicts was the United States invasion of Nicaragua, which led to an occupation from 1912 to 1938. These events would inspire Augusto Nicolás Sandino to stage a rebellion, and solidify him as the international symbol for the Nicaraguan left.
Fast forward to 1989, when failed coup attempts brought 27,000 US troops to invade and bomb Panama in “Operation Just Cause” under George H.W. Bush. The invasion claimed over 2,000 civilian lives according to conservative estimates, and was widely regarded as a move to secure US interests in the Panama Canal. Given the US’s very recent experience with invasion and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, seeing this history repeat itself is a fear in the minds of many.
Arms Trade
It seems that US intervention begets more intervention. When a conflict ends in one part of the world, the weapons that were put down have a way of cropping up as hot commodities elsewhere. Israel, the largest recipient of US military aid for several decades, has been unsurprisingly a major supplier of weapons to all the right-wing militaries in every single Central American country, but especially during the dirty wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. We also cannot forget the Iran-Contra Affair that rocked the Reagan administration, when it was discovered that the US was selling arms to Iran and funneling the profits to fund the counter-insurgency Contra army in Nicaragua. It comes as no surprise that the US has already funded several rebel groups in Syria, and the potential escalation of this involvement is an increasing pressure point under the current administration.
The legacy of war
The Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), the Guatemalan Civil War (1960 – 1996) and the Contra War in Nicaragua (1981 – 1990) were some of the last stages in the Cold War. The United States funded anti-communist right-wing groups in all three of these conflicts; coincidentally these were also the groups that committed the vast majority of the human rights violations during the wars. The recent memory of these violent wars still reverberates in Central America and the respective diasporas’ collective traumas to this day. Even when the Syrian conflict comes to an end, I predict Syrians will be reeling from it for generations to come.
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he unthinkable is upon us.
