BBC reports: “America’s top general has told U.S. troops in Iraq that momentum is turning against Islamic State militants. Gen Martin Dempsey, on an unannounced visit, called the militants ‘midgets’ but said the battle against them was likely to take years.”
DAVID VINE, vine at american.edu
Author of the forthcoming book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, Vine just wrote the piece “The Bases of War in the Middle East,” which states: “With the launch of a new U.S.-led war in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (IS), the United States has engaged in aggressive military action in at least 13 countries in the Greater Middle East since 1980. In that time, every American president has invaded, occupied, bombed, or gone to war in at least one country in the region. The total number of invasions, occupations, bombing operations, drone assassination campaigns, and cruise missile attacks easily runs into the dozens. …
“The rapid disappearance of debate about our newest, possibly illegal war should remind us of just how easy this huge infrastructure of bases has made it for anyone in the Oval Office to launch a war that seems guaranteed, like its predecessors, to set off new cycles of blowback and yet more war. …
“While the Middle Eastern base buildup began in earnest in 1980, Washington had long attempted to use military force to control this swath of resource-rich Eurasia and, with it, the global economy. Since World War II, as the late Chalmers Johnson, an expert on U.S. basing strategy, explained back in 2004, ‘the United States has been inexorably acquiring permanent military enclaves whose sole purpose appears to be the domination of one of the most strategically important areas of the world.’”
Vine, a regular contributor to TomDispatch, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.
See, from FAIR: “No Debate and the New War.”