Tomgram: Nick Turse, America, the Election, and the Dismal Tide
By Nick Turse
Posted on November 15, 2016, Printed on November 15, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176211/ ;
It wasn't to be, but had it been, Hillary Clinton would have become not only
the first woman president, but the first president to enter the Oval Office
as a lame duck. For Republicans in (and out) of a Congress they totally
controlled, it would have been scorched-earth tactics all the way. Not a
law, not a Supreme Court justice, not an achievement would they have allowed
her. The investigations, which never really ended, would have revved up
instantly. Impeachment was already on the table before Election Day. And
yet, in one area she would have been on the job and had a free hand from day
one: foreign policy, especially in America's wars and conflicts in the
Greater Middle East and Africa.
For that, a president no longer really needs a Congress for which "war
powers" are a thing of the past, a Congress that, in twenty-first-century
America, couldn't defund a war if the planet's future depended on it. Wars,
assassination campaigns, military "pivots," and Special Ops raids across
significant parts of the planet are now really just the commander-in-chief's
business. From Washington to Detroit, Kansas City to Portland, Hillary
Clinton would have been dead in the water, but from Syria to Afghanistan,
Yemen to Libya, Iraq to Somalia, the Clinton White House would have been on
the job.
Of course, in Donald Trump's America, in those first 100 days, there will be
no lame ducks. Anything will, after a fashion, be possible. Any corporate
or 1% dream will be imaginable. Taxes? Don't fret for a sec if you're
already raking it in. Environmental protections? What in the world were
they for anyway? Climate change? A footnote at best in a Washington to be
ruled by Big Energy and its lobbyists. The first woman president has already
been obliterated. Domestically speaking, once Trump & Co. have done their
damnedest, the first black president will, in essence, never have existed.
And when it comes to foreign policy, The Donald and his crew will have the
same freedom Clinton would have had to do anything they want and use the
U.S. military any way they please. The difference, as TomDispatch regular
Nick Turse points out today, is that, while we had a pretty clear sense of
what Clinton would do abroad (and the damage it would have caused), we
really have no idea what The Donald's still nonexistent national security
team will do (only, of course, that if you had to put your money down, it's
bound to be grim and chaotic). So take a little trip with Turse into a very
dark place and think about where this country, its wars and policies, may be
heading. Tom
It Did Happen Here
Rebirth of a Nation?
By Nick Turse
"So is he going to win?"
The question washed over me as I slumped in my hard plastic chair. I had
passed the day walking through a town where most homes lay in ruins and
human remains were strewn across a field, a day spent looking over my
shoulder for soldiers and melting in the 110-degree heat. My mind was as
spent as my body.
Under an inky sky ablaze with stars, the type of night you see only in the
rural world, I looked toward the man who asked the question and
half-shrugged. Everyone including me, I said, thought Donald Trump was
going to flame out long ago. And he hadn't. So what did I know?
At that point, I couldn't bear to talk about it anymore, so the two of us
sat speechless for a time. Finally, my companion looked back at me and
broke his silence. "It can't happen, can it?" he asked.
I had no answer then -- March of this year -- sitting in that ruined town in
South Sudan.
I do now.
I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the
New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the
presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump's fortunes
skyrocketed by the minute.
As Clinton's future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of
her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish
policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and
drone strikes she'd preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into
the ether.
With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was
sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous
Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state. So, too, went her
continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant
"gray-zone" conflicts -- marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone
strikes, and bombing campaigns -- and all those munitions she would ship to
Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen.
As the life drained from Clinton's candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a
new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin's rickety
Russian petro-state to Stalin's Soviet Union begin to die. I saw the end,
too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an
alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017.
As Clinton's political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine
policy -- rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests
overlap -- and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable "peace
process." Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support
that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President
Obama's trillion-dollar path to modernizing America's nuclear arsenal. All
that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were
scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.
The Dismal Tide
As I watched CNN, Twitter, and the Times website, what came to mind was that
March night in South Sudan, after that exchange about Donald Trump, when the
camp went quiet and I dragged my reeking body from my tent to the "shower"
-- water in a plastic bucket that I had earlier pumped from a borehole. I
picked my way across the camp with a flashlight so tiny it barely
illuminated one step at a time. It was like driving at night without
headlights, a sojourn into the unknown, a journey into an airless,
enveloping darkness.
All that seemed certain suddenly wasn't. What would come next was a
mystery. That March night, I was trying to avoid falling into an open pit
that was to serve as a shelter if shooting started near the camp. As
election night proceeded, a potentially more dangerous abyss seemed to be
opening in the darkness before me.
Clinton's foreign policy future had been a certainty. Trump's was another
story entirely. He had, for instance, called for a raft of military
spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy
to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating
a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense
boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to
wage cyber war. All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending
unspecified "federal programs," or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither
and yon. But was any of it serious? Was any of it true? Would President
Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump? Or would he
simply bark "Wrong!" when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army
of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships.
Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS -- that
is, "bomb the shit out of them" and then "take the oil" of Iraq? Or was
that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail? Would he be the
reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan
intervention? Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said,
"The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the
day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists."
Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be
secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the
president elect would employ "an international defense strategy that is
driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council...
Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the
National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country
anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot
find it."
Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary
military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama's
plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0. According to some Pentagon-watchers, a
potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a
national security team in a timely fashion.
While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would
be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General
Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump's win, it's unclear
whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more
bloated military spending.
Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on
at least eight nations -- Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen,
Libya, and Syria. A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly
more, of the same -- an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the
late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died." Trump
advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, "Trump does not believe in war. He sees
war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction." Of course, Trump
himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder. He's
also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations --
like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels -- that are currently met
with nothing graver than warning shots.
So there's good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even
worse, but some reason to believe -- due to his propensity for lies,
bluster, and backing down -- that he could also turn out to be less
bellicose.
Given his penchant for running businesses into the ground and for economic
proposals expected to rack up trillions of dollars in debt, it's possible
that, in the end, Trump will inadvertently cripple the U.S. military. And
given that the government is, in many ways, a national security state bonded
with a mass of money and orbited by satellite departments and agencies of
far lesser import, Trump could even kneecap the entire government. If so,
what could be catastrophic for Americans -- a battered, bankrupt United
States -- might, ironically, bode well for the wider world.
In his victory speech, Trump struck a conciliatory note. "I pledge to every
citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans," he intoned.
"Every single American will have the opportunity to realize his or her
fullest potential." This stood at odds with a year and a half of rancid
rhetoric that was denounced far and wide as racist, sexist and xenophobic.
That said, racism, sexism and xenophobia have long been embraced by American
presidents -- anti-immigrant presidents, presidents who oppressed, forcibly
displaced, imprisoned, or killed their fellow men on the basis of race or
ethnicity, presidents who were dismissive when it came to a woman's right to
vote, or even owned women outright.
Such behavior is wired into the DNA of the United States. Indeed, these
traits form the bedrock of a land born of the twin evils of settler
colonialism and slavery. Progress since -- rights movements, strides toward
equal protections under the law, even the notion of the arc of the moral
universe bending toward justice -- may not ultimately be linear or even
lasting. The high-water mark of the American experiment may well have
already been reached. Looking out from this city on a hill, it may soon be
possible to glimpse the spot where the wave crested, before it ebbed and
headed back out to sea. So much that was fought for with such bravery may
be swept away in the dismal tide and drowned in the depths.
Or perhaps not.
What was dragged under may struggle to the surface. Castaways clinging to a
lifeboat in the tempest may, one day, find themselves aboard a sea-splitting
ship -- its sails full, its many-hued flags flying, its decks teeming; its
crew poised to thunder ashore, securing a new American beachhead.
We simply cannot know.
It Can Happen Here
That dark, sultry night in South Sudan, I thought a great deal about rights
and oppression, about what happens when the worst impulses of men are stoked
and sharpened, about what it means when a government turns on its own
people. There, in that ruined town, young girls and women had been
kidnapped and gang-raped with regularity; men and boys had been locked in a
shipping container to wither and die; homes had been razed; corpses
abandoned to snarling, scavenging hyenas; and skeletal remains left
unburied. It was a horrorscape, a place of suffering almost beyond
imagining, one that puts the problems of America's "forgotten men and women"
and their "economic disenfranchisement," as well as the "rage many white
working-class people feel" into perspective.
At the time, I told my questioner just what I thought a Hillary Clinton
presidency might mean for America and the world: more saber-rattling, more
drone strikes, more military interventions, among other things. Our
just-ended election aborted those would-be wars, though Clinton's legacy can
still be seen, among other places, in the rubble of Iraq, the battered
remains of Libya, and the faces of South Sudan's child soldiers. Donald
Trump has the opportunity to forge a new path, one that could be marked by
bombast instead of bombs. If ever there was a politician with the ability
to simply declare victory and go home -- regardless of the facts on the
ground -- it's him. Why go to war when you can simply say that you did, big
league, and you won?
The odds, of course, are against this. The United States has been embroiled
in foreign military actions, almost continuously, since its birth and in 64
conflicts, large and small, according to the military, in the last century
alone. It's a country that, since 9/11, has been remarkably content to wage
winless, endless wars with little debate or popular outcry. It's a country
in which Barack Obama won election, in large measure, due to dissatisfaction
with the prior commander-in-chief's signature war and then, after winning a
Nobel Peace Prize and overseeing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq,
reengaged in an updated version of that very same war -- bequeathing it now
to Donald J. Trump.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" the African aid worker insisted to me that
March night. "He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be
president? Really?" It turns out the answer is yes.
"It can't happen, can it?" That question still echoes in my mind.
I know all the things that now can't happen, Clinton's wars among them. The
Trump era looms ahead like a dark mystery, cold and hard. We may well be
witnessing the rebirth of a bitter nation, the fruit of a land poisoned at
its root by evils too fundamental to overcome; a country exceptional for its
squandered gifts and forsaken providence, its shattered promises and moral
squalor.
"It can't happen, can it?"
Indeed, my friend, it just did.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation
Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His book Tomorrow's
Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa recently received an
American Book Award. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to Count the
Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of
Lannan Foundation.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176211
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America, the Election, and the Dismal Tide
By Nick Turse
Posted on November 15, 2016, Printed on November 15, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176211/ ;
It wasn't to be, but had it been, Hillary Clinton would have become not only
the first woman president, but the first president to enter the Oval Office
as a lame duck. For Republicans in (and out) of a Congress they totally
controlled, it would have been scorched-earth tactics all the way. Not a
law, not a Supreme Court justice, not an achievement would they have allowed
her. The investigations, which never really ended, would have revved up
instantly. Impeachment was already on the table before Election Day. And
yet, in one area she would have been on the job and had a free hand from day
one: foreign policy, especially in America's wars and conflicts in the
Greater Middle East and Africa.
For that, a president no longer really needs a Congress for which "war
powers" are a thing of the past, a Congress that, in twenty-first-century
America, couldn't defund a war if the planet's future depended on it. Wars,
assassination campaigns, military "pivots," and Special Ops raids across
significant parts of the planet are now really just the commander-in-chief's
business. From Washington to Detroit, Kansas City to Portland, Hillary
Clinton would have been dead in the water, but from Syria to Afghanistan,
Yemen to Libya, Iraq to Somalia, the Clinton White House would have been on
the job.
Of course, in Donald Trump's America, in those first 100 days, there will be
no lame ducks. Anything will, after a fashion, be possible. Any corporate or
1% dream will be imaginable. Taxes? Don't fret for a sec if you're already
raking it in. Environmental protections? What in the world were they for
anyway? Climate change? A footnote at best in a Washington to be ruled by
Big Energy and its lobbyists. The first woman president has already been
obliterated. Domestically speaking, once Trump & Co. have done their
damnedest, the first black president will, in essence, never have existed.
And when it comes to foreign policy, The Donald and his crew will have the
same freedom Clinton would have had to do anything they want and use the
U.S. military any way they please. The difference, as TomDispatch regular
Nick Turse points out today, is that, while we had a pretty clear sense of
what Clinton would do abroad (and the damage it would have caused), we
really have no idea what The Donald's still nonexistent national security
team will do (only, of course, that if you had to put your money down, it's
bound to be grim and chaotic). So take a little trip with Turse into a very
dark place and think about where this country, its wars and policies, may be
heading. Tom
It Did Happen Here
Rebirth of a Nation?
By Nick Turse
"So is he going to win?"
The question washed over me as I slumped in my hard plastic chair. I had
passed the day walking through a town where most homes lay in ruins and
human remains were strewn across a field, a day spent looking over my
shoulder for soldiers and melting in the 110-degree heat. My mind was as
spent as my body.
Under an inky sky ablaze with stars, the type of night you see only in the
rural world, I looked toward the man who asked the question and
half-shrugged. Everyone including me, I said, thought Donald Trump was going
to flame out long ago. And he hadn't. So what did I know?
At that point, I couldn't bear to talk about it anymore, so the two of us
sat speechless for a time. Finally, my companion looked back at me and broke
his silence. "It can't happen, can it?" he asked.
I had no answer then -- March of this year -- sitting in that ruined town in
South Sudan.
I do now.
I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the
New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the
presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump's fortunes
skyrocketed by the minute.
As Clinton's future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of
her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish
policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and
drone strikes she'd preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into
the ether.
With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was
sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous
Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state. So, too, went her
continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant
"gray-zone" conflicts -- marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone
strikes, and bombing campaigns -- and all those munitions she would ship to
Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen.
As the life drained from Clinton's candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a
new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin's rickety
Russian petro-state to Stalin's Soviet Union begin to die. I saw the end,
too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an
alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017.
As Clinton's political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine
policy -- rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests
overlap -- and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable "peace
process." Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support
that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President
Obama's trillion-dollar path to modernizing America's nuclear arsenal. All
that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were
scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.
The Dismal Tide
As I watched CNN, Twitter, and the Times website, what came to mind was that
March night in South Sudan, after that exchange about Donald Trump, when the
camp went quiet and I dragged my reeking body from my tent to the "shower"
-- water in a plastic bucket that I had earlier pumped from a borehole. I
picked my way across the camp with a flashlight so tiny it barely
illuminated one step at a time. It was like driving at night without
headlights, a sojourn into the unknown, a journey into an airless,
enveloping darkness.
All that seemed certain suddenly wasn't. What would come next was a mystery.
That March night, I was trying to avoid falling into an open pit that was to
serve as a shelter if shooting started near the camp. As election night
proceeded, a potentially more dangerous abyss seemed to be opening in the
darkness before me.
Clinton's foreign policy future had been a certainty. Trump's was another
story entirely. He had, for instance, called for a raft of military
spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy
to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating
a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense
boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to
wage cyber war. All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending
unspecified "federal programs," or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither
and yon. But was any of it serious? Was any of it true? Would President
Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump? Or would he
simply bark "Wrong!" when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army
of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Would Trump
actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS -- that is, "bomb the
shit out of them" and then "take the oil" of Iraq? Or was that just the
bellicose bluster of the campaign trail? Would he be the reckless hawk
Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention? Or would
he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, "The current strategy of
toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces
power vacuums that are filled by terrorists."
Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be
secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the
president elect would employ "an international defense strategy that is
driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council...
Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the
National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country
anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot
find it."
Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary
military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama's
plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0. According to some Pentagon-watchers, a
potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a
national security team in a timely fashion.
While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would
be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General
Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump's win, it's unclear
whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more
bloated military spending.
Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on
at least eight nations -- Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen,
Libya, and Syria. A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more,
of the same -- an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late
Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died." Trump advisor
Senator Jeff Sessions said, "Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as
bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction." Of course, Trump himself
said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder. He's also
suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations -- like
Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels -- that are currently met with
nothing graver than warning shots.
So there's good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even
worse, but some reason to believe -- due to his propensity for lies,
bluster, and backing down -- that he could also turn out to be less
bellicose.
Given his penchant for running businesses into the ground and for economic
proposals expected to rack up trillions of dollars in debt, it's possible
that, in the end, Trump will inadvertently cripple the U.S. military. And
given that the government is, in many ways, a national security state bonded
with a mass of money and orbited by satellite departments and agencies of
far lesser import, Trump could even kneecap the entire government. If so,
what could be catastrophic for Americans -- a battered, bankrupt United
States -- might, ironically, bode well for the wider world.
In his victory speech, Trump struck a conciliatory note. "I pledge to every
citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans," he intoned.
"Every single American will have the opportunity to realize his or her
fullest potential." This stood at odds with a year and a half of rancid
rhetoric that was denounced far and wide as racist, sexist and xenophobic.
That said, racism, sexism and xenophobia have long been embraced by American
presidents -- anti-immigrant presidents, presidents who oppressed, forcibly
displaced, imprisoned, or killed their fellow men on the basis of race or
ethnicity, presidents who were dismissive when it came to a woman's right to
vote, or even owned women outright.
Such behavior is wired into the DNA of the United States. Indeed, these
traits form the bedrock of a land born of the twin evils of settler
colonialism and slavery. Progress since -- rights movements, strides toward
equal protections under the law, even the notion of the arc of the moral
universe bending toward justice -- may not ultimately be linear or even
lasting. The high-water mark of the American experiment may well have
already been reached. Looking out from this city on a hill, it may soon be
possible to glimpse the spot where the wave crested, before it ebbed and
headed back out to sea. So much that was fought for with such bravery may be
swept away in the dismal tide and drowned in the depths.
Or perhaps not.
What was dragged under may struggle to the surface. Castaways clinging to a
lifeboat in the tempest may, one day, find themselves aboard a sea-splitting
ship -- its sails full, its many-hued flags flying, its decks teeming; its
crew poised to thunder ashore, securing a new American beachhead.
We simply cannot know.
It Can Happen Here
That dark, sultry night in South Sudan, I thought a great deal about rights
and oppression, about what happens when the worst impulses of men are stoked
and sharpened, about what it means when a government turns on its own
people. There, in that ruined town, young girls and women had been kidnapped
and gang-raped with regularity; men and boys had been locked in a shipping
container to wither and die; homes had been razed; corpses abandoned to
snarling, scavenging hyenas; and skeletal remains left unburied. It was a
horrorscape, a place of suffering almost beyond imagining, one that puts the
problems of America's "forgotten men and women" and their "economic
disenfranchisement," as well as the "rage many white working-class people
feel" into perspective.
At the time, I told my questioner just what I thought a Hillary Clinton
presidency might mean for America and the world: more saber-rattling, more
drone strikes, more military interventions, among other things. Our
just-ended election aborted those would-be wars, though Clinton's legacy can
still be seen, among other places, in the rubble of Iraq, the battered
remains of Libya, and the faces of South Sudan's child soldiers. Donald
Trump has the opportunity to forge a new path, one that could be marked by
bombast instead of bombs. If ever there was a politician with the ability to
simply declare victory and go home -- regardless of the facts on the ground
-- it's him. Why go to war when you can simply say that you did, big league,
and you won?
The odds, of course, are against this. The United States has been embroiled
in foreign military actions, almost continuously, since its birth and in 64
conflicts, large and small, according to the military, in the last century
alone. It's a country that, since 9/11, has been remarkably content to wage
winless, endless wars with little debate or popular outcry. It's a country
in which Barack Obama won election, in large measure, due to dissatisfaction
with the prior commander-in-chief's signature war and then, after winning a
Nobel Peace Prize and overseeing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq,
reengaged in an updated version of that very same war -- bequeathing it now
to Donald J. Trump.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" the African aid worker insisted to me that
March night. "He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be
president? Really?" It turns out the answer is yes.
"It can't happen, can it?" That question still echoes in my mind.
I know all the things that now can't happen, Clinton's wars among them. The
Trump era looms ahead like a dark mystery, cold and hard. We may well be
witnessing the rebirth of a bitter nation, the fruit of a land poisoned at
its root by evils too fundamental to overcome; a country exceptional for its
squandered gifts and forsaken providence, its shattered promises and moral
squalor.
"It can't happen, can it?"
Indeed, my friend, it just did.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation
Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His book Tomorrow's
Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa recently received an
American Book Award. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to Count the
Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of
Lannan Foundation.
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