We Need To Up Our War Crimes Game, Plus

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An insufficiency of dead people (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

We Need To Improve On Our War Crimes

Lots of people still hold some belief in the capacity of our armed forces to blunt the worst instincts of our civilian leadership. These people are on crack. One need only look, for instance, at retired Army general and Biden war secretary Lloyd Austin, to whom we’ll return in a bit.

Quite a lot of people protested the current regime’s decision to start referring to the defense department as the war department. That, though, is what it should always have been, and what it was until 1947, when it was reorganized into the National Military Establishment, which was itself reorganized into the defense department two years later.

Subsequently the defense department attacked or materially supported attacks on Albania, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, Dominica, Angola (twice), Laos, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran, Lebanon (again), Grenada, Iran (again), Libya, Libya (again), Panama, Nicaragua (again), Iran (again), Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Afghanistan (again), Iraq, Libya (again), Syria, Yemen, the genocide in Gaza, Iran (again), Iran (again), and more.

We also backed Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor under two presidents, one Republican and one Democratic.

All of these conflicts involved US war crimes and/or crimes against humanity or the same committed by forces we materially supported, which, you know, accessories before, during, and after the fact. Most of them were illegal under international law. And, again, that’s only post-World War Two. What we got up to before then, well, sweet jesus we’re going to hell.

Our current commander in chief and war department head are now threatening a new phase in the (illegal) war on Iran consisting entirely of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and they’re doing so in starkly fanatical religious terms.

This is alarming! But not so much, it seems, to Lloyd Austin, who committed an appalling, nauseating, horrifying op-ed in the New York Times this morning.

Speaking in his capacity as a 40-year Army veteran and a four-year war department honcho, Austin went into considerable detail on how we can destroy countries like Iran better in future. What’s missing is any comment on the illegality of the war, the religion-fueled threat of war crimes coming from the two top civilian military leaders in the country, the previous acquiescence of serving officers—among them his fellow generals, some of whom he undoubtedly promoted—to illegal orders, and reports of strenuous efforts by some of those same officers to fabricate some legal justification for the threatened crimes.

No: What concerns him is that we learn the necessary lessons of asymmetrical warfare. You’d think we’d have learned these lessons during our 70 years or so of post-World War Two experience getting our asses kicked in asymmetrical conflicts, but it’s, you know, a constant evolutionary process.

“Our military,” says Austin, “never stops learning and never stops asking: What worked, what didn’t, and how do we get better? That ensures America’s military remains the best and deadliest fighting force in the world.”

Shades of Whisky Pete and his “lethality” fixation, and his conviction that that’s ultimately what matters, to the apparent exclusion, evidently in Austin’s mind as well, of any enfeebling niceties.

Austin is alarmed by the depletion of both our multi-million dollar “defensive” munitions and the offensive ones we use to commit our war crimes. So along with adapting to the new warfare by mimicking the wily oriental reliance on relatively cheap and easily manufactured drones and missiles that can be continuously resupplied, we need to reinvigorate our conventional war crimes industries—the missile-makers, the fighter/bomber builders and all the other high-tech shit that may not necessarily work well but obviously outclass anything our asymmetric enemies can put in the air or drop from it, all while funneling literally trillions of dollars into merchant of death coffers.

Coincidentally, Austin joined the board of war crimes powerhouse Raytheon upon retiring as a four-star general, and now serves as a both a “consultant” and a principal in a military-oriented pirate equity firm which also employs fellow war criminal and Biden alum Anthony Blinken.

We also need wider and deeper stockpiles of munitions and the industrial capacity to rapidly replenish them under pressure. The Ukraine war showed that missiles and interceptors can be burned through faster than anticipated. The Iran war has confirmed that. Boosting production takes more resources, but also deeper partnership with allies: co-producing weapons, sharing production lines and aligning procurement so that the free world’s collective arsenal can be sustained in a prolonged fight. No one country, not even America, can carry that burden alone.

Finally, the Iran war has quickly demonstrated that the economic dimension of modern conflict cannot be treated as secondary. Iran does not need to defeat our outstanding military to impose enormous costs; it only needs to make the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous for tankers to transit.
. . .
We must think seriously about how to deepen our strategic resilience and keep the global economy functioning when an adversary’s strategy hinges on disrupting it. That question is even more urgent when one considers the possibility of a major conflict in the Indo-Pacific, where China’s capacity to impose economic pain far exceeds Iran’s.

You can see a hint of criticism of the regime’s failure to anticipate any of the bad shit that Iran is doing to us, and the failure to line up an Iraq-style coalition to help mitigate the bad shit, along with a hefty dose of exculpation for military leaders who did anticipate the bad shit but whaddaya gonna do. The chain of command is the chain of command.

But mostly it’s a call for investments in the kind of murderous businesses his pirate equity firm finances and his consultancy serves. It is most definitely not a condemnation of what the regime has done in Iran and what it is threatening to do, or a warning to his former comrades to step back from committing crimes against humanity. The chain of command remains the chain of command.

Fuck this guy. He’s gargantuan, as hefty as a lot of the munitions we’re dropping on Iran. Let’s launch him at a drone platform or something.

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