DO ALL SIGNS POINT TO WORLD WAR III?

we always forget the horror and the lies.

Joe Biden ( I refuse to call him president) and the rest of the global war enthusiasts are gearing up for the next big one. Mark my words. As you heard Jeffrey Sachs say on the show this week — there are no adults left in the West’s diplomacy tool kit who could tamp things down, buy us time — get one of the friendlier Arab states to help.

Here’s how the ceasefire vote went in the UN yesterday with America, Britain and Israel becoming rogue states. Imagine not wanting children to stop dying. Sorry, it is a bit blurry but you get the gist.

Meanwhile Hezbollah has drone-attacked at least two American military bases in Syria — yes, the ones Trump wanted to get rid of to safeguard from this very event. So the ugly sabre rattling by America on Israel’s behalf, as a show of resoluteness, continues without brakes. Night after night on CNN and Fox the drums beat ever louder for war as the so-called defense industry licks its pouty lips watching stock prices rise.

Graphic correction — ripped a newspaper graphic from X that was incorrect. A reader pointed it out - thank you.

Tucker Carlson who schooled the knee-jerks at Fox on the folly of Ukraine and Covid-19 policy is gone and so his moderating influence.

Hosts like Jesse Watters have gone full neocon. This otherwise likeable lightweight is egging on the slaughter of thousands, soon to include American kids from the wrong side of the tracks, in other words — the kids who fight wars — the ones not making millions selling the conflict like Jesse does.

Ironically, Fox is supported by Tunnel to Towers, an admirable organization which funds houses for triple amputees and those brain damaged in the GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terror. With the irony of the damned — their heartbreaking appeals are broadcast between Fox News segments braying for escalation. Even The Five has gone batshit. And I thought, wrongly, that we all agreed, even staunch conservatives, that foreign wars should be avoided at all costs. John Bolton was our laughing stock. Now, he could win the presidency.

When Watters took over Tucker’s slot, he very likely got a massive salary bump which is how the creepy overbelly that rules us gets media hosts to fall in line. And they almost all do. And when they don’t, they are fired. Imagine how the conversation would be different if TC still had a slot.

Axios had a startling piece that reflects my own fears about where this is going. There is actual reporting going on in some places.

Never before have we talked to so many top government officials who, in private, are so worried about so many overseas conflicts at once.

Officials tell us that inside the White House, this was the heaviest, most chilling week since President Biden took office just over 1,000 days ago.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates — who ran the Pentagon under presidents of both parties, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — tells us America is facing the most crises since World War II ended 78 years ago.

He explains the White House's system overload like this: “There’s this gigantic funnel that sits over the table in the Situation Room. And all the problems in the world end up coming through that funnel to the same eight or 10 people. There’s a limit to the bandwidth those eight or 10 people can have.”

Not one of the crises can be solved and checked off. All five could spiral into something much bigger …

My old friend Douglas Macgregor laid it out for Tucker. (video link)

Biden is now downplaying the Gaza casualties, like a good proxy should. If you look at just the destruction itself — whole neighborhoods of mid to semi-high-rise buildings, pancaked into rubble the numbers add up. United Nations, MSF and other agencies support that the totals being reported are accurate and to me, unacceptable, seven thousand and climbing as of this writing. I hope they are wrong. But it’s clear, Biden does what he is told. The question is by whom?

I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed, said the leader of the free world. Well, maybe a ceasefire that he voted against would help him find out. But better for him to not know at this point.

The photo at the top is my young friend Lance Corporal Travis Williams. He is a sweetheart of a guy from Montana who signed up with the Marines and headed to Iraq. He had the bad luck to be posted to the Haditha Dam — a place many troops felt was either haunted or cursed.

On August 3, 2005 —Travis and the rest of Lima Company, First Squad jumped into a track vehicle on a mission but at the last minute, Travis was ordered to ride up front in a Humvee with his superior, Major Toland. Within minutes of rolling outside the wire, a massive explosion ripped the vehicle apart and killed all Marines within it. Eleven friends gone in a blast of fire, smoke and twisted metal.

Travis had to call it in and read every name out loud. He told me his story for my book about the Iraq War and I’ll never forget our time together trying to make sense of his loss. I think of him and all the young people like him who would be called to fight if the ruling class doesn’t have the brains to walk back where we are headed. Every man in the photo below - except Travis, 2nd from right-top, is dead.

In 2006 I was asked by Hunter College in New York to address an auditorium of psyche professionals training to treat troops coming back from war. Here is an edited version of my remarks.

Speech Begins Here:

I’ll begin by saying that after three years of being embedded so-to-speak, in the heads of troops who served in Iraq and then suffering the aftershocks of hearing their stories – I admire you very much. I understand it’s called compassion fatigue when you hear too many grim stories but I don’t like that word because I believe the reason you suffer and I suffer is because we are too compassionate and that compassion doesn’t diminish.  It just gets painful.

I do believe all the folks here who are treating returning veterans or involved in the training of people who will, are on the front lines of what might become a major public health disaster, if it isn’t already. Having said that, when asked about how one copes with the gruesome realities of what I have come to call a body parts war I always say, if it is this difficult for me, hearing it second hand — imagine what it is like for the troops who lived through it. No one knows the answer to that better than the people in this room here today and I am so grateful to have been asked to speak. It is a great, great honor to be with people who are doing so much good for the troops, all of whom deserve our love and care.

I was asked to speak because I have just published a book of interviews with veterans home from the war in Iraq. Helping them tell their stories was a moving and humbling experience. An honor. I’m not quite sure why they opened up the way they did – it didn’t take much except to suggest there was a disconnect between themselves and the country that sent them off to war. 

Specifically, their non-military peers didn’t understand what had happened to them. To a man, (and woman) they had experienced feelings of frustration upon their return while shopping in Walmart or doing some other every day activities but wanting to shout at their oblivious countrymen: Hey – don’t you know there is a war going on –that my buddies are still being blown up – that the trauma wards at Landstuhl are full?  It was becoming apparent to them that the country didn’t want to know the truth about their experiences. 

And so when I asked them to participate, they said yes — even guys who had never told their stories before and might not tell it again.  They just wanted to say it once – just once, so someone would hear them. 

At the risk of sounding political, war can’t continue once the soldiers start telling the truth about it. That might sound like an anti-war statement but even the most battle-hardened officer will agree with that. Some of What Was Asked of Us’ biggest fans are in the military, including Colin Powell’s former 2 IC, Larry Wilkerson who took the time out to track me down and thank me for writing honestly about soldiers’ experiences.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard divinity school and then became a war correspondent, suggests that for conflict to continue, the culture has to buy into the absence of truth-telling: war he says is peddled by mythmakers, historians, war correspondents, film makers, novelists and the state – all of whom endow it with qualities it often does posses: excitement, exoticism, power, the chance to rise above our small station in life. Hedges includes everyone — except the soldiers  — who rarely take part in the mythmaking because it is the soldier who understands the dishonesty better than anyone. When they come home they are the victims of it.

So based on the honesty of the soldiers, marines and navy medics that I have had deep, intimate conversations with – here is what I have learned about the Iraq War experience.

The improvised explosive device and the suicide bombing are the defining weapons of this conflict.  No question at all about that. Here are cheap, nasty, low-tech devices that have brought the world’s most powerful military to a standoff.  It is the weapon that completely, in my mind and in the minds of many of the troops, frames the war experience. It comes from nowhere, it maims and kills in the ugliest ways and there is virtually no way for the soldier to defend against it. Daniel Cotnoir ran the Marine Corps mortuary affairs unit at Camp Taqqadum near Fallujah in 2004.  He was there processing the remains of marines when the main cause of death switched from small arms fire to what it became and is now: explosions.

He told me that unlike a traditional firefight where skill and marksmanship come into play and affect the outcome, the IED and suicide bomber evokes feelings of crazy-making helplessness.  When he attended a scene, they would recover each part, even as small as a fingernail, so it could be returned to loved ones.

This theme was repeated over and over again.  There is Adrian Jones, a double amputee who lost his legs minutes after delivering American donated toys to needy Iraqi children.  There is Jeff Englehart who hyper focuses on a single image – that of an amputated brown foot in a small, girlish-pink sandal.  

These stories are not unusual but rather the norm and express the helplessness and the gruesomeness to just beyond the realm of a horror film according to one marine, that the young people fighting in Iraq experience.

A trauma surgeon at Landstuhl, 72 years-old and from Detroit has done two tours and is heading back for a third. He cannot talk about the nature of the injuries he sees without weeping. There is Adrian Cavazos who witnessed the first suicide bombing of the war – in March of 2003 who tells about praying over the torso of his friend.  There is Maria Kimble, the psyche specialist from Tal Afar, now in Afghanistan, whose critical event debriefings were so traumatic she had to be debriefed herself by the chaplain. She was upset over young men cleaning up after suicide bombings that blew the remains of children onto roofs. Like many in this room who either witnessed these events first hand or heard about them - the image is pernicious – it stays – you can not unknown it once it is known.

These events are reported by the press in Iraq but not described. Rarely are the photographs published, so the moments that dog the veterans mental health are not acknowledged by the country that sent him to war. It is a burden the veterans and their counselors and families, carry virtually alone. 

All of the men and women I spoke to were searching for redemptive meaning. I think nothing is more therapeutic, given the violence they are experiencing, than being able to ascribe some sort of positive result. There was a period of time when some of them made an accommodation in the absence of WMD and Iraq 9/11 connections that helping poverty stricken Iraqis was enough but that seems to have faded as the insurgency has grown and the antipathy toward American troops is rising in the Iraqi people.

Three weeks ago I attended a memorial service for Lima Company of the 3rd battalion, 25th marine in Columbus Ohio.  Travis Williams unit. I have become friendly with some of the families and officers associated with Lima. The event was held at the Rickenbacker Air National Guard base and included many of the families of dead and wounded marines.  As they unveiled the two Obelisks with the names of all Lima company members both living and dead, the Sergeant making the dedication explained that the design was meant to evoke the Twin Towers so everyone would always remember why Lima Company Marines died. I suppressed a gasp over this statement, two years after the Duelfer report exposing the fraudulence of that claim. The mother of a dead marine slumped next to me. 

I made a judgment about the sergeant who made that comment but on thinking it over, given Lima’s massive losses I understood why he would have to ascribe a noble purpose to the meaning of his company’s tragedy. His comment bespoke the need for troops to make sense of their experience — some of whom are on their fifth tours. And for the survivors of Lima company who made it back but still struggle to come home.

Thanks so much for inviting me…..

Speech Ends

For those of you who wonder why I am so aggressively angry at the ongoing violence; fully broken hearted over what happened in Israel on October 7 — and now the bombardments in Gaza - this story is why.

It always starts with a great and noble mission and ends with the ruination of our kids. We’d better have a pretty good idea of what’s happening — beyond the usual propaganda. We need to stop picking a tribe and blindly agreeing with everything our side says and does. This is the road to hell.

I did see some of the atrocity footage provided by the IDF and it’s awful. Brutal and psychopathic, even. And last night, I was scrolling through twitter and came upon a video many people are talking about. It is this war’s version of Johnny Got His Gun but in pediatric form. In Gaza, a child, perhaps four or five, on a gurney, missing limbs and flailing his charred stumps while being attended to by a medical team without much to offer. The child’s body bucks, his head jerking wildly from side to side. From him comes a strange guttural sound, like a keening animal. And in an instant I realize why — he has no mouth, indeed no face, it is completely gone.

Later - it was reported that he died. Thank God.

There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

A very special podcast recording tomorrow. It is the only thing I know how to do at times like these.