From the security of a lecture hall to the security of a nation

Karen sheds light on her commitment to shaping a new generation of thinkers. With a focus on complex summer internships for high school and college students, she imparts the wisdom that while they may “not know everything,” they are certainly “capable of knowing everything.” It’s a powerful reminder of the untapped potential residing in our youth, ready to be harnessed through deep thinking and challenging assignments.

Karen and Rod take a deep dive into the role of civic education in understanding democracy’s vulnerabilities and strengths, as well as the changes and challenges within national security conversations, especially for women. There is a deep disconnect between the chaos felt nationally and taking action through means like voting and education. Karen tells how her two-decade career in writing on these heavy topics has shaped her perspectives.

Rod and Karen also tackle the critical issue of having substantial, unifying conversations in a politically charged climate. They explore the disconnect in national discourse and stress the fragile state of the country’s civil health.

According to Karen, conversations about the country’s future are often siloed, and despite the noise, a powerful silence persists on some issues. Her advice? Engage in meaningful talks that focus on our shared humanity — our planet, our children, and the legacy we’re leaving for future generations.

Check out our previous episode, too! 

Related Reading

A Vietnam Veteran’s Journey From Battle to Humanitarian Efforts

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Karen Greenberg on Empowering the Next Generation of Security Experts appeared first on Fair Observer.

Yes, international terrorism and the threat of such groups persist, but the narrative of American policy as a response to 9/11 seems to have faded away. Two and a half years ago, the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from the 20-year-long Afghanistan War proved to be a last gasp (followed the next summer by the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, successor as al-Qaeda’s leader after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011).

But Guantanamo, a prison that, from its founding, has violated US codes of due process, fair treatment and the promise of justice writ large isn’t the only unnerving legacy of the “war” on terror that still persists. If indefinite detention at Guantanamo was a key pillar of that war, defying longstanding American laws and norms, it was just one of the steps beyond those norms that still persist today.

In the days, weeks and even years following the attacks of September 11, the US government took action to create new powers in the name of keeping the nation safe. Two of them, more than two decades after those attacks, are now rife with calls for change. Congress created the first just a week after 9/11 (with but a single no vote). It authorized unchecked and unending presidentially driven war powers that could be used without specified geographical limits — and, strangely enough, that power still remains in place, despite recent congressional efforts to curtail its authority. The second, the expansive use of secret surveillance powers on Americans, is currently under heated debate.

War powers

The very first new authority created in the name of the war on terror was the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress one week after the 9/11 attacks. It gave the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Unlike past declarations of war or authorizations for war in American history, it was staggeringly vague. It named no actual enemy or geographical locations. It made no reference to what conditions would end the hostilities and the power of that authorization. It was in essence “a blank check” for presidential war powers, as Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), the single member of Congress to vote no on its passage, warned at the time and has reiterated over the years.

It was also a game-changing authorization. Not only did it lack specifics, but it stripped Congress of its constitutionally authorized power to declare war. In the war on terror, Congress would defer to the president who could decide on his own when and where to launch attacks.

Over the course of the last two-plus decades, that 2001 AUMF has been used repeatedly to do exactly what Barbara Lee feared — namely, broaden the president’s power to commit acts of war against not just the terrorist groups who conspired in the 9/11 attacks, but groups in countries far and wide. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, as of 2021, it had been used in at least 22 countries, including Afghanistan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Yemen.

Twenty-two-and-a-half years later, in April 2023, Congressman Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, acknowledged that the 2001 AUMF had indeed become, in the words of fellow Democrat Annie Kuster, “a blank check for presidents from both parties to wage war around the world.”

There have been calls for the repeal of that AUMF over the years, including from — you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn — Lee (repeatedly). This past fall, several such bills were introduced in both the House and Senate, including a bipartisan version by Senator Rand Paul.

In the spring of 2023, Meeks submitted his bill to replace the 2001 AUMF with a new one. In doing so, he sought to reestablish Congress’s constitutionally granted power to declare war, emphasized the statutory obligation of the president to brief Congress after launching any attack and added that the president must brief Congress on a regular basis as to the uses of the AUMF.

In addition, he inserted language aimed at curtailing the act’s expansiveness, including a requirement that the enemies to whom it could be applied be specifically named. He suggested three: the original al-Qaeda; the Islamic State Khorasan, based in Afghanistan and known as IS-K; and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Moreover, his bill called for an annual reconsideration of those enemies and added provisions designed to end the president’s right to authorize the AUMF’s use for new groups by claiming they were just extensions of, or forces associated with, the already named groups.

Furthermore, his bill prohibited its use against any unnamed enemy, “whether or not the entity is involved in an armed conflict against a force of a United States ally or partner or is an affiliate, associated force or successor entity of an entity described in such subsection.” To further constrain the broadness of that 2001 authorization, Meeks included a sunset clause at the end of four years unless it was reauthorized by Congress.

In a world where wars have broken out in Ukraine and now the Middle East, and where additional hostilities are simmering when it comes to the US, Iran, China and Russia, such language would ensure that a separate congressional declaration of war would have to be approved for any enemy the US decided to attack. In these many ways, the new version of the AUMF would rein in the aberration of those war powers that came into being in the aftermath of 9/11.

And yet the time to redesign the authority of presidential war powers, as created more than 22 years ago by the war on terror, has still not arrived. Meeks’s bill, like Rand Paul’s, gained remarkably little traction. Likewise, a bill from those relatively few congressional representatives calling for a full repeal of that AUMF rather than a replacement of it failed to make it to a vote.

Surveillance

In addition to indefinite detention at Guantanamo and the authorization of endless, expansive war-making, ever more expansive intelligence collection, at home as well as abroad, has been a foundational pillar of the war on terror — and, like the AUMF, bringing it under some control has been mired in debate and controversy in recent months. In 2023, some members of Congress tried to put limits on part of a controversial law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, passed in the summer of 2008 in the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency. It authorized the collection and sharing of foreign intelligence for the purpose of deterring national security threats.

The problem was not the stated purpose of Section 702 — to acquire information on foreigners abroad who might pose a threat to the United States — but the domestic uses to which it’s been put. The act allows foreigners abroad to be surveilled without a warrant. But since its inception, it’s also been used for warrantless investigations of Americans whose communications have been caught up in sweeping searches of the communications of foreigners — investigations that have become known as “back-door searches.”

Constitutional scholars and civil liberties advocates have fought against Section 702 from its inception, arguing that such searches violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant based on probable cause of criminal activity. As Elizabeth Gotein of the Brennan Center for Justice explains, “Section 702 lets the government collect the communications of non-Americans located abroad without a warrant. But because Americans talk to people outside the country, the surveillance inevitably sweeps in our private phone calls, emails and text messages, too — information that the government would normally need a warrant to access.”

In addition, experts note that, over time, the broad authority to collect the communications of Americans has been abused in alarming ways by the authorities. Gotein points out that 702-based warrantless searches have scrutinized the “communications of Black Lives Matter protesters, members of Congress, a local political party, a state court judge, journalists and in one case, more than 19,000 contributors to a congressional campaign.” For their part, intelligence officials seeking a continuation of Section 702 point out that recent reforms have led to more responsible use of the authority.

Now, for the third time since its passage, Section 702 is up for renewal. December 31, 2023, was the legal deadline for a vote on it. Unlike the two prior times, however, the renewal date came and went without a vote. Instead, substantial opposition by legal experts and others led to several competing bills calling for Section 702’s reform.

One of the proposed bills, the Government Surveillance Reform Act, introduced by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, as well as representatives Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) in the House, proposed that a warrant requirement be added to the search requirements when looking at the location data of Americans, web browsing and search records, vehicle data, and the like. In Lee’s version, any queries about the communications collected in a 702 search would, in accordance with the Fourth Amendment, require a warrant for material involving Americans. The new bill would amount, in Gotein’s words, to closing “the backdoor search loophole.”

The Biden administration has, however, taken a notably aggressive stance against changes to the law, especially when it comes to the introduction of the warrant requirement. Numerous high-ranking officials have spoken out publicly, insisting that the warrant requirement would imperil their ability to keep the nation safe. In his written testimony before Congress, FBI Director Chris Wray insisted that it was “an essential tool” in the counterterrorism toolbox.

In fact, he told Congress, it was potentially “the critical link that allows us to identify the intended target or build out the network of attackers so we can stop them before they strike and kill Americans.” Andrew McCabe, acting director of the FBI after Donald Trump fired Director Jim Comey, put it even more starkly in a podcast devoted to the issue, labeling Section 702 “arguably the most significant national security tool in the intelligence community.” He then insisted that the requirement for a warrant was “completely unworkable.”

So fraught was the congressional loggerhead over Section 702 that the deadline for a decision proved unworkable. Instead, Congress inserted an extension to mid-April 2024 in this year’s defense spending bill, signed into law by President Biden three days before Christmas.

It’s likely that, as with the 2001 AUMF, the attempt to change Section 702 will fail. Powers once given, it seems, only prove ever harder to relinquish and, all too sadly, the overreach engendered by the war on terror has by now become an accepted part of the American (and congressional) way of life.

Guantanamo

And then there’s the most glaring symbol of the never-ending, often extralegal legacy of the war on terror, the continued existence of that grim prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 22 years ago, the Bush administration set up that offshore detention facility for war-on-terror detainees, placing it beyond the reach of military, federal, or international law. Since then, on numerous occasions, new protections for the rights of prisoners there have been put into place, but none of them have addressed one fundamental wrong — namely, the decision that the federal court system was incapable of prosecuting those accused of engaging in terrorism against the United States, including those who conspired in the 9/11 attacks.

Despite candidate Biden’s assertion that, unlike Donald Trump, he would support the closure of Guantanamo, his appointment of a special representative to oversee the transfer of its prisoners to federal prisons, and the actual transfer of 10 detainees, substantial efforts to finally shut down the prison have been noticeably absent. Once a facility that held 780 men captured in the war on terror, it now holds 30 individuals, 16 of whom have been cleared for transfer elsewhere, pending appropriate security arrangements. Another 10 are scheduled for trial by military commissions but their trials are not expected to begin anytime soon.

Whether it’s an endlessly expansive authorization for eternally conducting war around the world, the redefinition of surveillance powers to include Americans under the guise of a foreign threat, or the seemingly lackadaisical acceptance of Guantanamo as an institution, there is certainly one lasting lesson from the war on terror. Once powers previously outlawed or at least restrained in the name of fair, just and responsible laws and norms become codified and implemented, the road back to normalcy is tantamount to impossible.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that wiser heads will prevail in the days to come. It is, however, a terrifyingly fragile approach, given the outlook for the 2024 election.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post 9/11-Era Laws Remain Stubbornly on the Books appeared first on Fair Observer.

Think of us, the American public, as that blindfolded child when it comes to our government’s torture program that followed the 9/11 disaster and the launching of the ill-fated war on terror. We’ve been left to search in the dark for what so many of us sensed was there.

We’ve been groping for the facts surrounding the torture program created and implemented by the administration of President George W. Bush. For 20 years now, the hunt for its perpetrators, the places where they brutalized detainees, and the techniques they used has been underway. And for 20 years, attempts to keep that blindfold in place in the name of “national security” have helped sustain darkness over light.

From the beginning, the torture program was enveloped in a language of darkness with its secret “black sites” where savage interrogations took place and the endless blacked-out pages of documents that might have revealed more about the horrors being committed in our name. In addition, the destruction of evidence and the squelching of internal reports only expanded that seemingly bottomless abyss that still, in part, confronts us. Meanwhile, the courts and the justice system consistently supported those who insisted on keeping that blindfold in place, claiming, for example, that were defense attorneys to be given details about the interrogations of their clients, national security would somehow be compromised.

Finally, however, more than two decades after it all began, the tide may truly be turning.

Despite fervid attempts to keep that blindfold in place, the search has not been in vain. On the contrary, over these last two decades, its layers have slowly worn away, thread by thread, revealing, if not the full picture of those medieval-style practices, then a damning set of facts and images relating to torture, American-style, in this century. Cumulatively, investigative journalism, government reports, and the testimony of witnesses have revealed a fuller picture of the places, people, nightmarish techniques, and results of that program.

First Findings

The fraying of that blindfold took endless years, starting in December 2002, when Washington Post writers Dana Priest and Barton Gellman reported on the existence of secret detention and interrogation centers in countries around the planet where cruel, unlawful techniques were being used against war-on-terror captives in American custody. Quoting from a 2001 State Department report on the treatment of captives, they wrote, “The most frequently alleged methods of torture include sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted positions and extended solitary confinement.”

Less than a year later, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with other groups, filed a Freedom of Information Act request (the first of many) for records pertaining to detention and interrogation in the war on terror. Their goal was to follow the trail leading to “numerous credible reports recounting the torture and rendition of detainees” and our government’s efforts (or the lack thereof) to comply “with its legal obligations with respect to the infliction of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Then, in 2004, the blindfold began to show some initial signs of wear. That spring, CBS News’s 60 Minutes II showed the first photographs of men held at Abu Ghraib, an American-controlled prison in Iraq. They were, among other things, visibly naked, hooded, shackled, and threatened by dogs. Those pictures sent journalists and legal advocates into a frenzied search for answers to how such a thing had happened in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. By that fall, they had obtained internal government documents exempting any war on terror captives from the usual legal protections from cruelty, abuse, and torture. Documents also appeared in which specific techniques of torture, renamed “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), were authorized by top officials of the Bush administration. They would be used on prisoners in secret CIA locations around the world (119 men in 38 or more countries).

None of this, however, yet added up to “Tag! I found you!”

Senator Feinstein’s Investigation

Before George Bush left office, Senator Dianne Feinstein began a congressional investigation into the CIA interrogation program. In the Obama years, she would battle to mount a full-scale one into the torture program, defying most of her colleagues, who preferred to follow President Obama’s advice to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

But Feinstein refused to back down (and we should honor her courage and dedication, even as we witness the present drama of her insistence on remaining in the Senate despite a devastating process of aging).  Instead of retreating, Feinstein only doubled down and, as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, launched an in-depth investigation into the torture program’s evolution and the grim treatment of those prisoners at what came to be known as “CIA black sites.”

Feinstein’s investigator, Daniel Jones, spent years reading through six million pages of documents. Finally, in December 2014, her committee issued a 525-page “executive summary” of his findings. Yet his full report — 6,700 pages with 35,300 footnotes — remained classified on the grounds that, were the public to see it, national security might be harmed. Still, that summary convincingly laid out not just the widespread use of torture but how it “proved not to be an effective means of obtaining accurate information.” In doing so, it dismantled the CIA’s justification for its EITs which rested on “claims of their effectiveness.”

Meanwhile, Leon Panetta, Obama’s director of the CIA, conducted an internal investigation into torture. Never declassified, the Panetta Review, as it came to be known, reportedly found that the CIA had inflated the value of the information it had gotten with the use of torture techniques. For example, in the brutal interrogation of the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Agency claimed that those techniques had elicited information from him that helped thwart further terrorist plots. In fact, the information had been obtained from other sources. The review reportedly acknowledged that EITs were in no way as effective as the CIA had claimed.

The Cultural Sphere

In those years, bits of light from the cultural world began to illuminate the dark horror of those enhanced interrogation techniques. In 2007, after President Bush had acknowledged the use of just such “techniques” and had moved 14 detainees from the CIA’s black sites to Guantánamo, his infamous offshore prison of injustice in Cuba, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney directed Taxi to the Dark Side. It told the story of Dilawar, a taxi driver in Afghanistan who died in American custody after severe mistreatment. That film would be one of the earliest public exposés of cruelty and mistreatment in the war on terror.

But such films didn’t always yield doses of light. In 2012, for instance, Zero Dark Thirty, a movie heavily influenced by CIA advisers, argued that those harsh interrogations had helped keep America safer — specifically by leading US authorities to bin Laden, a meme often repeated by government officials. In fact, reliable information leading to bin Laden had been obtained without those techniques.

Increasingly, however, films began to highlight the voices of those who had been tortured. The Mauritanian, for example, was based on Guantánamo Diary, a memoir by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a tortured Mauritanian held at that prison for 14 years. Slahi, never charged, was finally released and returned to Mauritania. As New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg summed up his experience, “The confessions he made under duress [were] recanted [and] a proposed case against him [was] deemed by the prosecutor to be worthless in court because of the brutality of the interrogation.”

Abu Zubaydah

Last year, award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney once again gave us a film on torture, The Forever Prisoner, focused on a Guantánamo detainee, Abu Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn. On him, the CIA first tested its harsh interrogation techniques, claiming he was a leading member of al-Qaeda, an assumption later disproved. He remains one of only three Gitmo detainees neither charged by the military commissions at that prison, nor cleared for release.

Nothing captures the futility of the blindfold — or sometimes even the futility of lifting it — more than Zubaydah’s story, which was at the heart of the story of torture in these years. The Senate Select Committee’s 525-page executive summary referred to him no less than 1,343 times.

Captured in Pakistan in 2002 and first taken to a series of black sites for interrogation, Zubaydah was initially believed to be the third highest-ranking member of al-Qaeda, a claim later abandoned, along with the allegation that he had even been a member of that terrorist organization. He was the detainee for whom enhanced interrogation techniques were first authorized by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, relying in part on the Justice Department’s greenlighting of such techniques as “lawful” rather than as torture (legally forbidden under both domestic and international law). Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lawyer, summarized the horrific techniques used on him this way:

“His captors hurled him into walls and crammed him into boxes and suspended him from hooks and twisted him into shapes that no human body can occupy. They kept him awake for seven consecutive days and nights. They locked him, for months, in a freezing room. They left him in a pool of his own urine. They strapped his hands, feet, arms, legs, torso, and head tightly to an inclined board, with his head lower than his feet. They covered his face and poured water up his nose and down his throat until he began to breathe the water, so that he choked and gagged as it filled his lungs. His torturers then left him to strain against the straps as he began to drown. Repeatedly. Until, just when he believed he was about to die, they raised the board long enough for him to vomit the water and retch. Then they lowered the board and did it again. The torturers subjected him to this treatment at least eighty-three times in August 2002 alone. On at least one such occasion, they waited too long and Abu Zubaydah nearly died on the board.”

In addition, as Dexter Filkins reported in the New Yorker in 2016, Zubaydah lost his left eye while in CIA custody.

As the Feinstein committee’s torture report makes clear, CIA personnel present at that black site cabled back to Washington the importance of erasing any information about the nature of Zubaydah’s interrogation, implicitly acknowledging just how wrongful his treatment had been. The July 2002 cable asked for “reasonable assurance that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” CIA higher-ups assured the agents that “all major players are in concurrence that [Abu Zubaydah] should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

Sadly enough, that promise has been kept to this very day. In 2005, CIA officials authorized the destruction of the tapes of Zubaydah’s questioning and, never charged with a crime, he is still in Guantánamo.

And yet, despite the promise that he would remain incommunicado, with each passing year we learn more about what was done to him. In October 2021, in fact, in the United States v. Zubaydah, the justices of the Supreme Court for the first time openly discussed his treatment and Justices Sonia Sotomayer, Neil Gorsuch, and Elena Kagan publicly used the word “torture” to describe what was done to him.

Elsewhere as well, the blindfold has been shredded when it comes to the horror of torture, as ever more of Zubaydah’s story continues to see the light of day. This May, the Guardian published a story about a report done by the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University Law School that included a series of 40 drawings Zubaydah had made and annotated at Guantánamo. In them, he graphically depicted his torture at CIA black sites and at that prison.

The images are beyond grotesque and, like a cacophonous symphony you can’t turn off, it’s hard to witness them without closing your eyes. They show beating, shackling from the ceiling, sexual abuse, waterboarding, confinement in a coffin, and so much more. In one picture that he titled “The Vortex,” the techniques were combined as Zubaydah — in a self-portrait — cries out in agony. Attesting to the accuracy of the scenes he drew, the faces of his torturers have been blacked out by the authorities to protect their identities.

As the Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington reported, Helen Duffy, Mr. Zubaydah’s international legal representative, highlighted how “remarkable” it was that his drawings had ever seen the light of day even though he hasn’t “been able to communicate directly with the outside world” in all these endless years.

Calls for Action

In the years of the Biden presidency, the international community has focused on Guantánamo in unprecedented ways. In January 2022, “after 20 years and well over 100 visits,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (the ICRC) called for the release of as many of the remaining prisoners there as possible and, more recently, raised alarm over the failing health and premature aging of its 30 aging inmates.  

Recently, the United Nations carved out new ground as well. In April, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued an opinion condemning the brutality long used against Mr. Zubaydah and called for his immediate release. That group further noted that the continued detention of the prisoners at Guantánamo could potentially “constitute crimes against humanity.”

With each passing year, ever more details about Washington’s torture programs have come to light. Yet, even now, ferocious attempts are still being made to keep the blindfold in place. As a result, to this day we’re left searching, arms extended, while those who have crucial information about this country’s nightmarish commitment to torture do their best to avoid us, hoping that the endless passage of time will keep them out of reach until we pursuers finally run out of energy.

To this day, much still remains in darkness, while Congress and American policymakers continue to refuse to address the legacy of such wrongdoing. But as the constant dribble of information suggests, the story simply won’t go away until, someday, the United States officially acknowledges what it did — what, if others were now doing it, would be instantly denounced by the same lawmakers and policymakers. That history of torture won’t go away, in fact, until this country apologizes for it, declassifies as much of the Feinstein report as possible, and provides for the rehabilitation of Abu Zubaydah and others whose physical and psychological health was savaged by their mistreatment at American hands.

It’s one thing to say, as Barack Obama told Congress a month into his presidency, that the United States “does not torture.” It’s another to expose the misdeeds of the war on terror and accept the costs as deterrence against it ever happening again.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The US Still Continues its Quest to Hide Torture appeared first on Fair Observer.

A year and a half later, it’s worth reflecting on where the United States stands when it comes to both that forever war against terrorism and war generally. As it happens, the war on terror is anything but ended, even if it’s been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and simmering conflicts around the globe, all too often involving the United States. In fact, it now seems as if this country is moving at breakneck speed out of the era of Forever War and into what might be thought of as the era of Eternal War.

Granted, it’s hard even to keep track of the potential powder kegs that seem all too ready to explode across the globe and are likely to involve the US military in some fashion. Still, at this moment, perhaps it’s worth running through the most likely spots for future conflict.

Russia and China

In Ukraine, as each week passes, the United States only seems to ramp up its commitment to war with Russia, moving the slim line of proxy warfare ever closer to a head-to-head confrontation between the planet’s two great military powers. Although the plan to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia clearly remains in effect, once taboo forms of support for Ukraine have over time become more acceptable.

As of early March, the United States, one of more than 50 countries offering some form of support, had allocated aid to Ukraine on 33 separate occasions, amounting to more than $113 billion worth of humanitarian, military, and financial assistance. In the process, the Biden administration has agreed to provide increasingly lethal weaponry, including Bradley fighting vehicles, Patriot missile batteries, and Abrams tanks, while pressure for even more powerful weaponry like Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMs) and F-16s is only growing. As a recent Council on Foreign Relations report noted, Washington’s aid to Ukraine “far exceeds” that of any other country.

In recent weeks, the theater of tension with Russia has expanded beyond Ukraine, notably to the Arctic, where some experts see potential for direct conflict between Russia and the US, branding that region a “future flashpoint.” Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently raised the possibility of storing tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, perhaps more of a taunt than a meaningful gesture, but nonetheless another point of tension between the two countries. 

Leaving Ukraine aside, China’s presence looms large when it comes to predictions of future war with Washington.  On more than one occasion, Biden has stated publicly that the United States would intervene if China were to launch an invasion of the island of Taiwan. Tellingly, efforts to fortify the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region have ratcheted up in recent months.

In February, for example, Washington unveiled plans to strengthen its military presence in the Philippines by occupying bases in the part of that country nearest to Taiwan. All too ominously, four-star Air Force General Mike Minihan went so far as to suggest that this country might soon be at war with China. “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me [we] will fight in 2025,” he wrote in a memo to the officers he commands in anticipation of a future Chinese move on Taiwan. He also outlined a series of aggressive tactics and weapons training maneuvers in preparation for that day. And the Marines have been outfitting three regiments for a possible future island campaign in the Pacific, while war-gaming such battles in Southern California.  

North Korea, Iran, and the War on Terror

North Korea and Iran are also perceived in Washington as simmering threats.

For months now, North Korea and the US have been playing a game of nuclear chicken in parallel shows of missile strength and submarine maneuvers, including the North’s mid-March launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and, at least theoretically, reaching the US mainland. In its leader Kim Jong-un’s words, it was intended to “strike fear into the enemies” of his country. In the last days of March, his military even launched a reputed underwater nuclear-capable drone, taking the confrontation one step further. Meanwhile, Washington has been intensifying its security commitments to South Korea and Japan, flexing its muscles in the region, and upping the ante with the biggest joint military drills involving the South Korean armed forces in years.

As for Iran, it’s increasingly cooperating with an embattled Russia when it comes both to sending drones there and receiving cyberweapons from that country. And since Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA nuclear treaty with Iran in May 2018, tensions between Washington and Teheran have only intensified. International monitors have recently concluded that Iran may indeed be approaching the brink of being able to produce nuclear-grade enriched uranium. At the same time, Israel has been ramping up its threats to attack Iran and draw the United States into such a crisis.

Meanwhile, smaller conflicts are sizzling around the globe, many seemingly tempting Washington to engage more actively. On President Biden’s agenda in his recent meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for instance, was the possibility of deploying a Canadian-led multinational force to Haiti to help quell the devastating gang violence ravaging that country. “We believe that the situation on the ground will not improve without armed security assistance from international partners,” a National Security Council official told NPR’s Morning Edition ahead of the summit. Trudeau, however, backed away from accepting such a role. What Washington will now do — fearing a wave of new immigrants — remains to be seen.  

And don’t forget that the forever war on terror persists, even if in a somewhat different and more muted form.  Although the US has left Afghanistan, for instance, it still retains the right to conduct “over the horizon” air strikes there. And to this day, it continues to launch targeted strikes against the al-Shabaab terror group in Somalia, even if in far lower numbers than during the Trump years when drone strikes reached an all-time high of more than 200. So far, the Biden administration has launched 29 such strikes in the last two years.

American drone attacks persist in Syria as well. Only recently, in retaliation for a drone attack against US troops there that killed an American contractor and wounded another, as well as five soldiers, the Biden administration carried out strikes against Iranian-backed militias. According to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, President Biden has still not ruled out further retaliatory acts there. As he told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation at the end of March, referring to ISIS in Syria, “We have under 1,000 troops [there] that are going after that network, which is, while greatly diminished, still viable, and still critical. So we’re going to stay at that task.”

Other than Syria and Iraq (where the US still has 2,500 troops), the war on terror is now particularly focused on Africa. In the Sahel region, the swath of that continent just below the Sahara Desert, including Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mauritania, and Sudan, among other countries, the legacies of past terrorism and the war in Ukraine have reportedly converged, creating devastatingly unstable and violent conditions, exacerbating what USAID official Robert Jenkins has called “decades of undelivered promises.”

As journalist Walter Pincus put it recently, “With little public notice, the two-decades-long US war on terrorism continues in the Sahel.” According to the 2023 Global Index for Terrorism, that region is now the “epicenter of terrorism.” The largest US presence in West Africa is in Niger, which, as Nick Turse reports, “hosts the largest and most expensive drone bases run by the US military,” intended primarily to counter terrorist groups like Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. Weapons from the war in Ukraine have found their way to such terrorist groups, while climate-change induced weather nightmares, deepening food insecurity, and ever more dislocated populations have led to an increasingly unstable situation in the region. Complicating things further, the Wagner group, the Russian mercenary paramilitary outfit, has been offering security assistance to countries in the Sahel, intensifying the potential for violence. US military forces and bases in the region have grown apace as the war on terror in Africa intensifies.

Legislative Support for Eternal Warfare

Legislative moves in Congress unabashedly reflect this country’s pivot to Eternal War. Admittedly, the push for an ever-expanding battlefield didn’t start with the great-power conflicts leading today’s headlines. The 2001 congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which paved the way for the invasion of Afghanistan, gave the president essentially unlimited authority to take offensive action in the name of countering terrorism by not naming an enemy or providing any geographical or time limits. Since the fall of 2001, just as Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) predicted while casting the only vote against it, that AUMF has served as a presidential “blank check” when it comes to authorizing the use of force more or less anywhere.

Former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane has pointed out that the perpetuation of “much of the legal, institutional, and physical infrastructure that underpin this decades-long” war on terror is now being extended to the Sahel, no matter the predictable results. As Soufan Group terrorism expert Colin Clarke told me, “A global war on terrorism has never been winnable. Terrorism is a tactic. It can’t be fully defeated, just mitigated and managed.”

Nevertheless, the 2001 AUMF remains on the books, available to be tapped in ever-expansive ways globally. Only this month, Congress once again voted against its repeal.

Admittedly, the Senate did recently repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for the use of force that undergirded the Iraq War of 1991 and the 2002 invasion of that country. Notably, a new amendment proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to also create an AUMF against Iran-backed militias in the region was defeated. As recent military engagements in Syria have shown, new authorizations have proven unnecessary.

Congress seems to be seconding the move from Forever War to Eternal War without significant opposition. In fact, when it comes to funding such a future, its members have been all too enthusiastic. As potential future war scenarios have expanded, so has the Pentagon budget which has grown astronomically over the past two years. In December, President Biden signed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which granted the Pentagon an unprecedented $816.7 billion, 8% more than the year before (with Congress upping the White House’s suggested funding by $45 billion).

And the requests for the 2024 budget are now in. As Pentagon expert William Hartung reports, at $886 billion dollars, $69 billion more than this year’s budget, Congress is on a path to enacting “the first $1 trillion package ever,” a development he labels “madness.” “An open-ended strategy,” Hartung explains, “that seeks to develop capabilities to win a war with Russia or China, fight regional wars against Iran or North Korea, and sustain a global war on terror that includes operations in at least 85 countries is a recipe for endless conflict.”

Whatever Happened to the Idea of Peace?

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, there is a widely shared sense that it’s going to last and last — and last some more. Certain experts see nothing short of years of fighting still on the horizon, especially since there seems to be little appetite for peace among American officials.

While French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to consider peace talks, they seem to have few illusions about how long the war is likely to go on. For his part, Zelensky has made it clear that, when it comes to Russia, “there is nothing to talk about and nobody to talk about over there.” According to Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the mood in both Moscow and Kyiv could be summed up as “give war a chance.”

China is, it seems, an outlier when it comes to accepting a long-term war in Ukraine. Even prior to his visit to Russia in late March, President Xi Jinping offered to broker a ceasefire, while releasing a position paper on the perils of continued warfare and what a negotiated peace might aim to secure, including supply-chain stability, nuclear power plant safety, and the easing of war-caused global humanitarian crises. Reportedly, the summit between Xi and Putin made little headway on any of this.

Here in the US, calls for peace talks have been minimal. Admittedly, last November, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley reportedly told the Economic Club of New York, “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment.” But there has been no obvious drive for diplomatic negotiations of any sort in Washington. In fact, John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, responded to President Xi’s proposal this way: “We don’t support calls for a ceasefire right now.” The Russians, he claimed, would take such an opportunity “to only further entrench their positions in Ukraine… [and] rebuild, refit, and refresh their forces so that they can restart attacks on Ukraine at a time of their choosing.”

Disturbingly, American calls for peace and diplomacy have tended to further embrace the ongoing war. The New York Times editorial board, while plugging future peace diplomacy, suggested that only continued warfare could get us to such a place: “[S]erious diplomacy has a chance only if Russia accepts that it cannot bring Ukraine to its knees. And for that to happen, the United States and its allies cannot waver in their support [of Ukraine].” More war and nothing else, the argument goes, will bring peace. The pressure to provide ever more powerful weapons to Ukraine remains constant on both sides of the aisle. As Robert Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee put it, “[T]his approach of ‘more, better, faster’ would give the Ukrainians a real shot at victory.”

Whether in Ukraine, in the brewing tensions of what’s being called a “new cold war” in Asia, or in this country’s never-ending version of the war on terror, we now live in a world where war is ever more accepted as a permanent condition.  On the legal, legislative, and military fronts, it has become a mainstay for what passes as national security activity. Some of this, as many critics contend, is driven by economic incentives like lining the pockets of the giant weapons-making corporations to the tune of multibillions of dollars annually; some by what passes for ideological fervor with democracy pitched against autocracy; some by the seemingly never-ending legacy of the war on terror.

Sadly enough, all of this prioritizes killing and destruction over life and true security. In none of it do our leaders seem to be able to imagine reaching any kind of peace without yet more weapons, more violence, more conflicts, and more death.

Who even remembers when World War I was known as “the war to end all wars”? Sadly, it seems that the era of Eternal War is now upon us. We should at least acknowledge that reality.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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