Those clandestine wars had been in the works for too long without the media or the general public noticing them maybe because those are not always apparent to be conventional wars - using proxies or under the pretense of humanitarian aids...
Washington’s Secret Wars
The Trump White House Monday issued a so-called “War Powers” letter addressed to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and the president pro tempore of the Senate, Orin Hatch, to “keep the Congress informed about deployments of United States Armed Forces equipped for combat.”
In 1973, against the backdrop of the debacle of the Vietnam War, the US Congress, overriding the veto of then-President Richard Nixon,
passed the War Powers Act. The aim of the legislation was to prevent
future presidents from waging undeclared and open-ended wars with little
or no accountability to Congress, which under the US Constitution has
the exclusive power to declare war.
It gave the president the right to use military force at his
discretion for up to 60 days—itself a huge concession of power to the
executive branch—but required withdrawal after a total of 90 days if
Congress failed to vote its approval of military action.
While still on the books, the War Powers Act has long ago been turned
into a dead letter by the quarter century of interrupted US wars of
aggression that have followed the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of
the Soviet Union, all waged without a declaration of war by Congress.
Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have willingly acquiesced
in the de facto concentration of dictatorial power in the hands of the
“commander in chief” in the all-important matter of the waging of
foreign wars.
The latest letter from the Trump administration, however, represents
another qualitative step in this protracted degeneration of American
democracy and the elimination of the last pretenses of civilian control
over the military. Failing to even keep Congress “informed” about US
combat deployments, the document, for the first time, omitted any
information about the number of troops participating in Washington’s
multiple wars and military interventions.
The letter acknowledges that the US is continuing and escalating the
longest war in its history, the 16-year-long intervention in
Afghanistan, stating that the American military is engaged in “active
hostilities” against not only Al Qaeda and ISIS, but also the Taliban
and any forces that “threaten the viability of the Afghan government”
and its security forces. How many troops are engaged in this open-ended
conflict is kept secret.
Similarly, the letter refers to a “systematic campaign of airstrikes”
that have killed and wounded tens of thousands in Iraq and Syria, along
with the deployment of ground troops in both countries. But again,
their number is concealed.
It also mentions, for the first time, that “a small number” are
deployed inside Yemen, where a US-backed Saudi force is carrying out a
near genocidal war that has left millions on the brink of mass
starvation.
It goes on to make reference to US military operations in Libya, East
Africa, Africa’s Lake Chad Basin and Sahel Region and the Philippines,
as well as deployments of forces in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Cuba.
In sync with Trump’s “War Powers letter” the Pentagon has issued a
report listing the current location of fully 44,000 troops deployed
across the globe as “unknown.” During a Pentagon press briefing last
Wednesday, Army Col. Rob Manning declared that the US military’s aim was
to “balance informing the American public with the imperative of
operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.”
This was the same specious argument made by Trump last August when he
announced his plan for an escalation of America’s war in Afghanistan.
“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” he said. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out. I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.”
The Trump White House has removed caps imposed on troop levels under
the Obama administration, leaving it up to the military commanders to
escalate US deployments at will. Obama’s caps themselves were routinely
circumvented through so-called temporary deployments that saw far more
troops sent into US wars than were officially on the books.
The secrecy surrounding troop deployments has been highlighted in
recent months following the October firefight in Niger that killed four
special operations troops and brought out in the open the deployment of
some 1,000 US troops in the central West African country and on its
borders, an intervention about which leading members of the US Senate
claimed to have known nothing. This was followed by the so-called slip
of the tongue by the commander of US special operations forces in Iraq
and Syria who told a Pentagon press conference that 4,000 US troops were
on the ground in Syria. He quickly caught himself and repeated the
official figure of 500. Subsequently, the Pentagon allowed that the real
number was over 2,000.
Meanwhile, figures posted by the Pentagon last month—with little
media attention—revealed that the number of US troops deployed in the
Middle East as a whole had soared by 33 percent over the previous four
months, with the sharpest increases taking place in a number of Persian
Gulf countries, indicating advanced preparations for a new US war
against Iran.
These deployments are kept secret or effectively concealed not out of
any concern about “tipping off the enemy,” which in virtually every
case is well aware of the level of US military aggression against their
countries. Rather, it is aimed at keeping the information from the
American people, which has no interest in continuing the ongoing
military interventions in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, much
less launching new and potentially world catastrophic wars against Iran,
North Korea and even China and Russia.
In terms of the waging of semi-secret wars abroad, as with attacks on
democratic rights and the social conditions of the working class at
home, Trump represents not an aberration, but rather the culmination of
protracted processes that have unfolded under both Democratic and
Republican administrations, which have ceded ever greater power over US
foreign policy to US military commanders. This trend has only deepened
under Trump, with an active duty general serving as national security
advisor, and two recently retired Marine generals filling the posts of
defense secretary and White House chief of staff.
With US forces on the borders of North Korea, China, and Russia on a
hair-trigger, the continuous assertion of ever greater war-making powers
to the military brass massively increases the danger that a
miscalculation, misunderstanding, or accident could quickly lead to
full-scale nuclear war.
Trump’s further assault on the War Powers Act has elicited no protest
from the Democrats in Congress. They are not opposed to the
government’s domination by the military or the drive to war. Their
differences are merely of a tactical character, expressed in a campaign
of anti-Russia hysteria waged in collaboration with sections of the US
military and intelligence apparatus in preparation for a new and far
more terrible conflagration.
Both parties represent a parasitic financial oligarchy that relies
ever more heavily upon militarism and war to defend its wealth and
domination. These parties, along with the other institutions of the US
ruling establishment, have no interest in reining in the generals or
upholding constitutional government and democratic rights. Rather, they
are collaborating in the emergence of a system based upon the unfettered
domination of the military, working in tandem with Wall Street, in
which elections, the Congress and other civilian bodies are becoming
little more than window-dressing.
No comments:
Post a Comment