Though I was never in the U.S. military, my life experience has been American wars, wars, wars, and more wars. I was born during World War II. I was in grade school when the Korean War took place. I still have a faint memory of a photo of a gleaming American soldier’s face from that unsettled conflict. (It might have been on the cover of LIFE magazine.) I was a protesting youth in the disastrous Vietnam War years. And that was just the beginning. Skipping over events like the invasions of Panama and Grenada and the first Gulf War of the 1990s, in my years running TomDispatch, I’ve dealt with a seemingly never-ending series of all-American wars (which, by the way, never — no, never — turn out “successfully”). From Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa, America’s post-9/11 war on terror proved to be a genuine hell on Earth. If you don’t believe me, just check out the figures on deaths, direct and indirect, from those decades of horror that the invaluable Costs of War Project has put together.
And what lessons have been drawn from all of that? Only that this country should pour ever more staggering sums into a Pentagon budget that’s already larger than those of the next nine countries combined and still rising, support military bases across the planet, and… well, you get the idea, right?
And it never really ends, does it? In fact, as Tomdispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, points out today, this country could well be on the verge of — yes! — yet another conflict from hell, this one in — would you even believe it? — the Red Sea area. After all, almost unnoticed here, American planes have been unsuccessfully striking at the Houthi rebels in Yemen for months now, while American naval ships continue to patrol that sea (as the disaster in Gaza only grows ever worse). As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian Bill Astore wrote recently at his Bracing Views substack, “How would I feel as a Navy officer covering the flanks of Israel so that the IDF [the Israeli military] can concentrate its forces in murderous assaults on Gaza?” How, indeed? It’s possible that, if things go as they so often have in these years, all too many American naval officers will indeed find out. Now, let Cole take you into another world about which most Americans know next to nothing where, in the months to come, we might indeed find ourselves at war….
https://tomdispatch.com/turning-the-red-sea-redder/
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After the truth-shower 