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First, he said that it would a "tough" deadline to keep; then, that it would be "hard to meet." He's evidently considering moving it to at least November, even if he can't quite "picture" relocating it to 2022. We're talking, of course, about President Joe Biden and the May 1st date the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban for the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan. (Note, by the way, that only the troops are ever discussed, not American air power, some of which may not even be stationed in Afghanistan.) More strikingly, as the New York Times reported recently, "some military commanders and administration officials" are using a Trump-era intelligence assessment to fight against any such withdrawal at all. They are suggesting that, should the U.S. do so, the Taliban could triumph "within two or three years" (and, of course, al-Qaeda and ISIS might then return to that country and the next thing you knew, it would be 9/11/2023).
So, this country's longest war of this century - scheduled to start its 20th year in September - just can't be put to bed. Everyone who's anyone knows that the most powerful military on the planet simply can't lose such a war, even if it's been clear for years that it's already lost it. No matter that the Pentagon and the military high command are focusing much of their attention these days on future cold-war options with those "near-peer threats" China and Russia. They still can't admit defeat and simply go home. After all, what about the nearly billion dollars in contracts the Pentagon's already issued to companies for work in Afghanistan well beyond that May 1st withdrawal date, in some cases even into 2022? (Keep in mind that, if those troops withdrew, those companies could sue!) And by the way, what's the withdrawal date for the more than 6,000 contractors still in that country who are U.S. citizens?
All of the above is, of course, just part of the ongoing landscape of this country's twenty-first century "forever wars." Today, TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign Liz Theoharis surveys an even larger American landscape of war and terror, while considering what Martin Luther King, Jr., might make of our eternally fevered country so many years after he gave a sermon on the American war of his moment, the one that never seemed to end in Vietnam. Tom
"The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World"
Living in a Country Haunted by Death
Fifty-four years ago, standing at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his now-famous "Beyond Vietnam" sermon. For the first time in public, he expressed in vehement terms his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He saw clearly that a foreign policy defined by aggression hurt the poor and dispossessed across the planet. But it did more than that. It also drained this country of its moral vitality and the financial resources needed to fight poverty at home. On that early spring day, exactly one year before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King warned that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," a statement that should ring some bells in April 2021.
In his sermon, Dr. King openly wrestled with a thorny problem: how to advance nonviolent struggle among a generation of Black youth whose government had delivered little but pain and empty promises. He told the parishioners of Riverside Church that his years of work, both in the South and the North, had opened his eyes to why, as a practitioner of nonviolence, he had to speak out against violence everywhere - not just in the U.S. - if he expected people to take him at his word. As he explained that day:
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems" But they asked, and rightly so, 'what about Vietnam?' They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
A Global Pandemic Cries Out for Global Cooperation
In 2020, the planet was swept up in a devastating pandemic. Millions died, tens of millions suffered. It was a moment, in Reverend King's spirit, that would have been ideal for imagining new global approaches to America's ongoing wars of the past century. It would similarly have been the perfect moment to begin imagining global cooperative approaches to public health, growing debt and desperation, and intellectual property rights. This especially given that the Covid-19 vaccines had been patented for mega-profits and were available only to some on this suffering planet of ours, a world vulnerable to a common enemy in which the fault lines in any country threaten the safety of many others.
Internationally, at the worst moment imaginable, U.S.-backed institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund continued to demand billions of dollars in debt payments from impoverished countries in the Global South, only forgiving them when their governments fell into step behind the U.S. and Europe, as Sudan has recently done. Moreover, Washington had a golden opportunity when the search for a Covid-19 vaccine threatened to change patent laws and force pharmaceutical companies to work with low-income nations. Instead, the U.S. government backed exclusive deals with Big Pharma, ensuring that vaccine apartheid would become rampant in this country, as well as across the rest of the world. By late March, 90% of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered had gone to people in wealthy or middle-income countries, with vaccine equity within those countries being a concern as well.
Another menacing development is the thematically anti-Chinese legislation being developed in Congress right now. Three weeks ago, just as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was nearly across the finish line, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was quietly laying the groundwork for another major legislative package focused on further inflaming a rising cold war with China. For Republicans, legislative action on China is in theory an absolute bullseye, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already made it clear that his support for Schumer's bill will only come if it includes a large increase - once again - in "defense" spending.
The timing and tenor of this debate, steeped as it is in Sinophobia, economic brinkmanship, and military hawkishness, is more than troublesome. Just a few weeks ago, eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were gunned down in Atlanta by a man plagued by his own toxic mix of religious extremism, white supremacy, and sexism. This followed a year in which there were close to 4,000 documented anti-Asian hate incidents in this country, fueled by a president who blamed the Chinese for Covid-19 and regularly used racist nicknames for the pandemic like the "Chinese virus" and the "kung flu."
In addition, an aggressive and potentially militarized anti-China bill is irresponsible when tens of thousands continue to contract the virus daily here at home and we are only beginning to understand the long-term economic consequences of the pandemic. At a time when there are 140 million poor or low-income people in this country, a fully revived and funded war not against China but against poverty should be seen as both a moral responsibility and a material necessity. At least now, poverty seems to be getting some attention in the pandemic era, but how sad that it took the disastrous toll of Covid-19 on American jobs, housing, and nutrition to put poverty on the national agenda. Now that it's there, though, we can't allow it to be sidelined by short-sighted preparations for a new cold war that could get hot.
Cruel Manipulation of the Poor
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