Tuesday, May 20, 2025

 

 

David Brooks Never Saw This Coming

In recent decades, David Brooks has been one of the great apologists for the U.S. based empire. You may know Brooks from his weekly chinwags on the PBS News Hour or from his regular columns in the New York Times. Anyway, he wrote recently in The Atlantic:

… all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.

 

But since January 20 of this year, Brooks has started to wonder.

as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced.

 In other words, it took Brooks until Trump’s second term to suspect something was amiss. But since then, he says,

 I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.

 

This all strikes me as a large helping of self-delusional sheep dip. If anyone had ever been in a position to “see this coming,” it should have been Brooks.

He might have seen “what was coming” when Congress passed the so-called Patriot Act in 2001, which contributed directly – long before Trump – to the intrusive surveillance apparatus that Brooks is finally noticing.

Or he might have seen what was coming in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. SEC,  “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.”

Or he might have seen it coming in July of 2024 when the Supreme Court declared presidents immune from prosecution for any crimes they might commit as President.

All Those Noble Intentions

Regarding the U.S.’s behavior toward other nations, Brooks seems to be especially aghast at the rude manner in which Trump and Vance berated Ukraine president Zelensky on TV.

But apparently, actually invading third world countries, with the attendant killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the destruction of a nation’s infrastructure, is okay. Visiting terrible misery on the citizens of Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia, Kosovo, Palestine, Somalia, and Syria, to name a few, seems never to have caused Brooks to question the benevolent role of the U.S. in the world.

(We should mention that, after advocating for the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq, Brooks later admitted it was a “mistake.” But he could never get past the official line that the disaster was merely a matter of “bad intelligence” and nothing more sinister. So a half million Iraqis were killed and their country completely destroyed? Oops, sorry Iraq. Our intentions were good.)

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has dropped bombs on a minimum of 32 countries. No other country – not Russia, not China, not North Korea or Iran – has come close to that record.

Speaking of  Korea, Brooks should be aware that, in a kind of dress rehearsal for Viet Nam, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives – including nearly 33,000 tons of napalm -- on Korea in the early 1950s. Both sides in that conflict  committed war crimes. But the United States – the supposed protector of human dignity, "killed off” by one estimate, “20 percent of the population of North Korea.

 That estimate was from General Curtis Lemay, coordinator of the bombing campaign and the prototype for the mad General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. Lemay also added this observation:  

 "we eventually burned down every town in North Korea... and some in South Korea too. We even burned down [the South Korean city of] Pusan -- an accident, but we burned it down anyway."

 

If all of this carnage was, as Brooks claims, with no evil intentions, it’s still hard to explain away the dozens of “regime change” operations the U.S. has conducted all over the world since World War II. One study documented 72 regime change efforts before 2016. Another identified 81 interventions in foreign elections.

In practically all cases, these operations resulted in the installation or protection of psychopathically murderous dictators. One that Brooks must surely be aware of occurred in Chile in 1973. This was the famous military coup, generously funded and carefully orchestrated by the American CIA, in which the legitimately elected president, Salvador Allende, was replaced by the mass murderer and torturer Augusto Pinochet. Henry Kissinger summed up the thinking behind that intervention. Said Henry:

The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.

 

No evil intentions there, of course, although, as later reported by a Chilean human rights group:

What followed was violent repression on a massive scale. Pinochet’s military dictatorship defined segments of the Chilean population as ideological enemies—the “subversives”—and targeted individuals who fit this profile. The Chilean Army detained thousands of individuals at Chile Stadium, tortured and murdered hundreds, and organized death squads that traveled throughout the country executing suspected opponents of the dictatorship.

It should be mentioned also that, with direct guidance and generous financing from the U.S., Pinochet started a program of violent repression way beyond Chile.. It was called Operation Condor, and besides Chile, at least five more of the biggest South American countries signed up: Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil.

It’s been estimated that Condor resulted directly in 60,000 deaths, with as many as 30,000 in Argentina alone. Thus the U.S., as Brooks says, “fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny.”

Reagan Paves the Way

It’s telling that Brooks cites Ronald Reagan in particular as one of the great champions of freedom and human dignity. In his campaign to undermine the leftish government of Nicaragua, Reagan demonstrated a disdain for U.S. and international law much like Donald Trump does today. Reagan’s CIA trained  and outfitted the so-called Contras to the point where, as one ex-Contra wrote, in the New York Times:

…the ''contras'' were, and are, a proxy army controlled by the U.S. Government.

If U.S. support were terminated, they would not only be incapable of conducting any military activities against the Sandinistas, but would also immediately begin to disintegrate. I resigned rather than continue as a Central Intelligence Agency puppet.

In the same piece, the writer, Edgar Chamorro, observed that the Contra’s main strategy was to terrorize civilians:

During my four years as a''contra'' director, it was premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government. Hundreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the ''contra'' leaders and their C.I.A. superiors were well aware.

In 1986 the International Court of Justice ruled that the U.S. was violating international law by bankrolling the Contras, mining Nicaraguan harbors, and attacking Nicaraguan infrastructure. The U.S. was to cease such operations and pay reparations to the Nicaraguan government.

Reagan, however, did not care about international laws that interfered with his vision for the Western Hemisphere. He kept right on with his proxy war and – surprise! – paid no reparations. The U.S still owes Nicaragua the money.

Nor did Reagan care about the laws of his own country as regards Nicaragua. Through a series of legislative amendments known collectively as the Boland Amendment, Congress increasingly limited aid to the Contras and specifically forbade any assistance intended to overthrow the Sandinista government. So Reagan’s people funded them in various illegal ways, including selling weapons parts to Iran and helping the Contras traffic illicit drugs into U,S.

So much for law and order.

The Salvador Option

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, Reagan found another recently begun civil war and made the violence worse. That war, as one writer said, “pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades —with U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished.”

Reagan, naturally enough, backed the oligarchs and generals. He spent four billion U.S. dollars to train and equip death squads whose purpose was to murder and torture peasants who might be even thinking about joining the revolutionaries.

  The war resulted in some 75,000 civilian deaths. A UN inquiry determined that 85 percent of those murders were conducted by the Reagan-backed Salvadoran government.

 In one incident, U.S.-trained Salvadoran forces were sent to terrorize the small town of El Mazote. As one report summarized the action:

They burned houses and animals, separated the women and children from the men and executed them. About one thousand people were massacred, with almost half of the victims being minors. To this day, the El Mozote Massacres mark the largest massacre to occur in Latin America. 

 

Since the 1980s “the Salvador Option” has entered the lexicon of strategists in high places.  Wikipedia defines it as “an approach to counter-insurgency warfare involving the use of death squads.

 

Reaganomics

If Brooks never noticed that the U.S. wasn’t the beacon of hope for humanity he wanted it to be, he ought to have at least noticed the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor here at home. That gap can easily be traced right back to Reagan’s ridiculous “trickle-down” economic approach.

Brooks probably never read an article from 2019 in a publication called Duke [University] Today titled “The Road to Trump Began With Reaganomics & the Loss of the Middle Class, Economist Says”

The economist referred to is one John Komlos, a professor emeritus of economics and economic history at the University of Munich. “[Reaganomics] paved the way for Trumpism,” Komlos told an audience at Duke. “That to me is where our problems started, because it created a great amount of inequality.”

 

As reported by Duke Today, Komlos went on to cite

… a three-decade process that started with Reaganomics and its tax cuts, which [Komlos] says favored the rich by increasing their wealth and political clout. In tax year 1985, for example, he said the top 1 percent gained a $350,000 windfall while the typical household received $3,500, and the poor received a couple of hundred dollars (all in today’s dollars).  

Komlos went on to explain how Reagan further “hollowed out” the middle class and paved the way for what was to come.

And what came included the following:

1)    “financial deregulation and hyper-globalization under President Clinton” as he “continu[ed] to pamper the superrich with his tax policies”;

 

2)     George H. W. Bush ‘continu[ing] to pamper the superrich with his tax policies”and

 

 

3)     “Barack Obama’s bailing out the super-rich and his disregard of Main Street.”

That last item refers to the enormous bailouts to the very banks and finance companies who caused the financial crash of 2008. Komlos sees that event as the last chance to restructure the economy into something less top-heavy.

“The rich and powerful were on their knees, they were bankrupt,” Komlos said. “That’s the only time when you could have really put the economy on a bigger path.”

But instead, the American oligarchs got “the biggest transfer of wealth from bottom to the top in history of mankind.”

Finally

I confess to having relied heavily in that last section on just one reference. A few others I would recommend  are here, here, and here.

You can otherwise find all the praises of Reagan you want without hardly trying, as he has been repackaged by various empire cheerleaders to fit the childish mythology that too often passes for American history.

To return to David Brooks: Yes, David, you sure as hell should have seen this coming. It’s too bad your own columns contributed to the large-scale denial of it.

It is true that Trump has contributed greatly to the takedown of the U.S. Constitution, to the enormous income gap that threatens the stability of the country, and to the U.S.’s contempt for human rights abroad.

But none of that started with him, as Brooks wants to believe, and wants us to believe. Instead, as Christopher Hedges has noted:

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not the cause. He is something vomited up out of [the] decay.

 

 

 

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

 

Mowing the Lawn in Palestine

 

A large explosion in a city

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

 

 I recently came across some telling observations about the murder and destruction in the Gaza Strip. Here’s a small sample:

From an Israeli soldier: “It was total destruction in there – the photos online are child’s play compared to what we saw in reality … I never saw anything like it.”

Another Israeli soldier: “The unfathomable number of dead on one of the sides, the unimaginable level of destruction, the way militant cells and people were regarded as targets and not as living things – that’s something that troubles me.”

Sarah Roy of Harvard University: “In the thirty years I have spent researching and writing about Gaza and her people, I can say without hesitation that I have never seen the kind of human, physical, and psychological destruction that I see here today.”  (1)

 

The quotes are telling because they all refer to the situation in Gaza in 2014, nine years before the current slaughter was supposedly “started” by the Hamas uprising of October 2023.

What the quotes above are describing is an earlier Israeli campaign called Operation Protective Edge, the destruction of which, though seemingly unprecedented at the time, absolutely pales in comparison to the current show of high-tech barbarity.

And Protective Edge was only one in a line of regularly scheduled operations that Israelis call “mowing the grass” –  a metaphor (obviously) for “short, sharp military operations to maintain a certain level of control over the area without committing to a long-term political solution, similar to how one would mow a lawn to keep it neat and tidy.

The lawn-mowing events are conducted in both Palestinian enclaves, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Most are given clever names like Operation Cast Lead and Operation Hot Winter. All involve military sieges extremely disproportionate to the Palestinian crimes they are supposedly in response to.

Each lawn-mowing event also puts the two Palestinian enclaves into a tighter squeeze, their movements increasingly restricted, their access to food, water, medical care, and employment increasingly reduced, their homes and property increasingly destroyed and – in the case of the West Bank – their homes increasingly replaced by government-subsidized modern housing developments for Israeli Jewish “settlers” only.

This all ensures that sooner or later a Palestinian or group of Palestinians will again lash out violently, providing the Israeli military with a new excuse for another lawn mowing.

Recent operations in both Gaza and the West Bank are clearly more devastating than previous lawn-mowing operations. They are more like end games to finish the process of ethnic cleansing begun in 1948.

And this is why the often-parroted question, “does Israel Have a Right to Defend Itself?” is an absurdity.  Norman Finkelstein, an extremely serious scholar who has devoted his life to studying the Israel-Palestine conflict, suggests two other questions that are far more relevant. They are:

1.      “Does Israel have the right to use force to perpetuate an illegal occupation?” (“The answer is no.”) (2)

2.      “Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?” (3)

 

References

(1)   Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.” Oakland, CA, U. of California Press, 2018, pp, 216, 218.

(2)   Finkelstein, p. 235.

(3)   Finkelstein, p. 237