THE WARRIOR KING   [As ought to be said on an ongoing basis, re reportage of one US atrocity after another ... since time immemorial: "I don't know how Americans can be so stupid. I mean, how can you be so STUPID?!" ~Jose de Jesus Martinez (poet, playwright, philosopher, mathematician, former aide to Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera), re US propaganda of the US invasion of/assault on Panama, in the excellent documentary "Panama Deception" That we might never again have a peacetime president says volumes about us] By Micah Zenko [Zenko is the Douglas Dillon fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, no less] "Isn't this an awful lot of war for President 'Peace in Our Time'? "The bottom line: if Americans are detached from the repercussions, or shielded by executive branch secrecy and a disinterested Congress, it is not war." Foreign Policy February 6, 2013 During his second inaugural address, President Obama offered two aspirational statements that struck many observers as incongruous with administration policies: "A decade of war is now ending" and "We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war." We should question these observations, not least because of the string of U.S. government plans and activities that increasingly blur the conventional definition of war. My own [and very short] list of war-like activities since Obama's inaugural would include: four drone strikes that killed 16 people (all in Yemen); the acknowledgement by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta regarding drones, "We've done that in Pakistan. We're doing it in Yemen and elsewhere. I think the reality is its going to be a continuing tool of national defense in the future"; the announcement that the U.S. military would provide intelligence, transportation, and refueling support for the French intervention in Mali; the signing of a U.S.-Niger status of forces agreement that will likely include a drone base for surveillance missions, although U.S. officials "have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point"; the forthcoming expansion (perhaps quintupling) of U.S. Cyber Command, including "combat mission forces" for offensive cyberattacks; the executive branch's secret legal review determining that Obama "has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad"; the Marine commandant's announcement of a new "crisis response unit" that would be "rapidly employable" to "address crises"; and the revelation that the United States is negotiating to purchase the Sheraton Hotel in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, to house the growing number of embassy staff, troops, and contractors who implement U.S. security force assistance and counterterrorism operations in that country. (For other examples, see the interesting End of War Timeline that Jack Goldsmith and Lawfare created.) Using lethal force against other countries -- and developing and sustaining the capabilities to do so in perpetuity -- are the distinguishing features of a country at war. [when was it that the US wasn't using lethal force against other countries? when?] As Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld, Jr. remarked in November, "We remain a nation at war." In January, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Ted Koppel that even after 2014, "Our war in Afghanistan will be complete, but no one has ever suggested that that will end the war." Last week, Secretary Panetta reminded policymakers and the press, as he often does: "We are in a war. We're in a war on terrorism and we've been in that war since 9/11." Finally, during his grueling confirmation hearing to become the next secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel stated: "We're at war in Afghanistan. We're at war around the world....The fact is we've been at war for 12 years." [12?  what a joke] Most analysts and journalists have focused on President Obama's expanded scope, intensity, and institutionalization of targeted killings against suspected terrorists and militants. However, perhaps the enduring legacy of the Obama administration will be its sustained, rigorous effort to shape and define-down the idea of war. Consider in March 2011, during the NATO-led intervention in Libya, when a reporter asked White House spokesperson Jay Carney, "What is this military action?...Is it a war?" He replied, "It is a time-limited, scope-limited military action, in concert with our international partners." When pressed for more details, Carney added: I'm not going to get into the terminology. I think what it is certainly not is, as others have said, a large-scale military -- open-ended military action -- the kind of which might otherwise be described as a war. There's no ground troops, as the president said. There's no land invasion. After the war in [on] Libya ended with the extrajudicial killing of Muammar Qaddafi, Obama bragged that U.S. involvement "only cost us $1 billion as opposed to $1 trillion," and "not a single U.S. troop [was] on the ground...not a single U.S. troop was killed. That, I think, is a recipe for success in the future." Thus, the strategic objective of military intervention is to minimize the quantifiable costs, not to develop a plausible strategy that achieves some desired outcome. [Let's not forget Hillary Clinton, after the atrocious slaughter of Qaddafi: "we came, we saw, he's dead."] Similarly, White House senior counterterrorism adviser John Brennan defended drone strikes in April 2012 by comparing them to "deploying large armies abroad" and "large, intrusive military deployments." Soon afterward, when Carney was asked if the Obama administration relied on the same "loose definition of the declaration of war that President Bush did" in its use of drone strikes, he noted: "Using some of these tools is preferable when you are concerned about civilian casualties than, say, launching a full-scale invasion by land." (Perhaps unconsciously, senior administration officials always antiseptically refer to drone strikes as "targeted strikes" by "tools of national power" and not targeted killings of people by drones.) This is all part of a systematic effort to remind Americans about the strategic error of invading Iraq, and to create the impression that counterterrorism strategies must incorporate kinetic force. Given the false dichotomy between 170,000 troops in Iraq and drone strikes, who would oppose the latter? Moreover, this implies that military operations involving less than a full-scale invasion or ground troops (which conveniently omits U.S. special operators or private military contractors required) is not considered a "war." This characterization also assumes that war can only occur when it reaches some predetermined threshold of immediate human or financial costs. The president's "recipe for success in the future" is for military operations that are low-cost and low-risk (in the short-term, as it turned out in Libya) for Americans. Not factored into the equation are the impact on the people living in the affected countries (and the global hatred for drone strikes) and "secondary and tertiary effects out here that one day you have to live with," as former CIA director Michael Hayden recently said (most notably the growth of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula over the last two years from "several hundred" to a "few thousand" members). The bottom line: if Americans are detached from the repercussions, or shielded by executive branch secrecy and a disinterested Congress, it is not war. Developments have only further confirmed my November prediction that America will never again have a peacetime president. If America is not engaged in a perpetual war, how else could the White House believe it has the legal authority to authorize an "informed, high-level" government official to order the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen who is not provided the due process protections mandated by the Constitution? Given how U.S. policymakers describe national security threats, and privilege military responses to them, it should not be surprising that the United States finds itself in a state of perpetual war. Isn't this why we spend $633 billion on defense and $75.4 billion on national and military intelligence, not to mention the 134,508 U.S. servicemembers deployed around the world (not including 68,000 in Afghanistan)? [not to mention the 'private armies' we hire; not to mention the $$$$trillions 'gone missing' from the Defense dept and still unaccounted for] War is not only the D-Day invasion of Normandy or Operation Desert Storm. Don't let anyone -- even a Nobel Peace Prize laureate -- tell you otherwise. _ [COMMENTARY: 'America will never again have a peacetime president' Commentary from some of the self-same P&J Industry that helped to anesthetize americans and only now apparently ?? agrees with what some spoke out about from the get-go: "Early on, many Americans supported Barack Obama because they perceived him as an antiwar candidate, but he has acted as a "warrior king," according to a commentary published Wednesday on the website of *Foreign Policy*.[1] -- "[P]erhaps the enduring legacy of the Obama administration will be its sustained, rigorous effort to shape and define-down the idea of war," Micah Zenko said. -- Thus in March 2011, the U.S. did not go to war in Libya, it engaged in "a time-limited, scope-limited military action, in concert with our international partners," in the words of White House spokesperson Jay Carney. -- The goal of the administration seems to be to set up a "false dichotomy between 170,000 troops in Iraq [labeled 'war'] and drone strikes [labeled 'tools']," forcing those who reject the former to embrace the latter. -- The "bottom line" is that "if Americans are detached from the repercussions, or shielded by executive branch secrecy and a disinterested Congress, it is not war." -- Zenko believes that the U.S. is engaged in a "perpetual war." -- "America will never again have a peacetime president." -- "[H]ow else could the White House believe it has the legal authority to authorize an "informed, high-level" government official to order the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen who is not provided the due process protections mandated by the Constitution?" -- COMMENT: Zenko is correct, but he exaggerates Barack Obama's role in instituting perpetual war. -- Fred J. Cook, in the now more than 50-year-old *The Warfare State* (Macmillan, 1962), was among the first to pinpoint the precise moment when U.S. elites embraced perpetual war: the response to the USSR's explosion of a fission bomb on Aug. 29, 1949. -- This is usually attributed to President Truman in January 1950. -- But Cook describes how it was that on Oct. 14, 1949, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met and decided to strongly advocate the development of the H-bomb. -- The scientific community was subsequently split and "[t]he debate was close and bitterly fought," according to Cook (p. 159). -- Atomic Energy Commissioner David Lilienthal advocated "time out for a broad review of military policy," but this desire made him the target of a vicious campaign of character assassination by the advocates of the hydrogen bomb. -- James Carroll, in *House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power* (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), gives a more detailed and more informed account of what happened (one that is all the more gripping in that Carroll's father once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and poignant in that father and son were estranged by the Vietnam war; his history is also his coming to terms with his father). -- But back to our story. -- Under Lilienthal's leadership, the AEC voted 3-2 against the development of the H-bomb, and Lilienthal reported accordingly to Truman in early November 1949. -- Truman formed a special three-member committee of the NSC comprising Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Lilienthal, known as the "Z Committee." -- Since Louis Johnson was a strong advocate of the H-bomb, Acheson held the swing vote. -- Acheson rejected a strong plea from George Kennan, then the State Department's head of policy planning, that nuclear weapons were "instruments of genocide and suicide," later replacing Kennan with Paul Nitze, the architect of the national security state, and supported the H-bomb. -- The Z Committee reported its support of the H-bomb to Truman on Jan. 31, 1950, and the rest, as they say, is history -- history best interpreted as tragedy.] ****************************** The few comments , with different colour in the text, are from my dear friend Pia!! She had send me the article in the first place.Thanks to her. PaYmaN PieDaR