CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Eyes Open, Minds Wide Shut

Chinatown, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Wargasm, wargasm, one, two, three Tie a yellow ribbon ’round the amputee Masturbate, watch it on TV Crocodile tears for the refugee – Donita Sparks, L7, “Wargasm”

Wargasm, wargasm, one, two, three Tie a yellow ribbon ’round the amputee Masturbate, watch it on TV Crocodile tears for the refugee

Iran has no air defenses left. The US can bomb whatever it wants, whenever it wants. It can bomb military bases and government buildings. It can bomb schools and mosques. It can bomb power plants and sewage treatment systems. It can bomb fire stations and hospitals. It can bomb TV networks, radio stations and newspapers. It can bomb museums, schools and daycares. What it can’t bomb is a revolution into being. It can’t bomb a regime change into being. It can’t bomb new rights for women into being. It can’t bomb the Islamic faith out of the hearts of most Iranians. It can’t bomb Iranians into loving instead of hating the US. In fact, each new bomb does the opposite, bombing new hatreds into being. The blowback is immediate and will last for decades.

In 2002, that quipster Donald Rumsfeld responded to a reporter’s question about the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had given WMDs to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups (or had any WMDs, at all) with his now notorious “unknowns”: 

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Despite the debacle he orchestrated in Iraq, Rumsfeld reiterated the quote years later (he was obviously proud of it) in his memoir The Known and Unknown. The so-called “Rumsfeld Matrix” wasn’t original to Donald Rumsfeld. He later credited the phrase to former NASA Administrator William Graham in the 1990s, who used the phrase to describe the difficulties (still unresolved) of building an effective ballistic missile defense system. But the formulation actually goes back at least to the 1960s when  Lt. Gen. William B. Bunker described the problems encountered when engineering complex weapons systems: “There are two kinds of technical problems: there are the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.”

All of these problems still exist, naturally. But with the Trump administration the most dangerous “unknown” is one that Rumsfeld didn’t think of mentioning: the unknown knows, the known consequences of actions that the leadership of the Trump war machine seem totally unaware of…such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on Gulf oil producing states, the proven inability of airwars to provoke revolutions or install “friendlier” regimes.

On the centenary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Alexander Cockburn and I wrote a reappraisal of the man who got his military briefings in cartoon format: 

When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66, whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces was set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launch-pads, with the minuscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the Joint Chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money”. The president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66, whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.

The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces was set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launch-pads, with the minuscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the Joint Chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money”. The president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

Now it appears that Trump, even farther along than Reagan in the declining arc of his cognitive collapse, is getting his “briefings” on the stumbling progress of his Iran war in the form of two-minute “highlight reels” of US airstrikes “blowing up stuff.” But there’s no evidence that Trump has much of a clue about the stuff Iran is blowing up in response or how difficult it will be to stop them.  

For example, it’s unlikely that Trump was briefed on the significance of Iran’s strike on Israel’s largest chemical weapons plants in the Negev desert, near the Dimona nuclear complex. Iranian missiles hit the Rotem chemical facility, which manufactures white phosphorous, the outlawed chemical bombs that Israel has repeatedly deployed against international law in southern Lebanon and Gaza, a weapon that burns the flesh off of humans and animals.

Nearly a month into Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran, the US has conducted air strikes against more than 10,000 different targets across Iran.

The Israeli Air Force has dropped more than 15,000 bombs on Iran since the start of the war. By comparison, it hit Iran with around 4,000 bombs in last summer’s 12 Day War. 

Iran’s health ministry reports that at least 1,937 people have been killed by US and Israeli missile strikes and more than 24,800 injured. At least 66 children under the age of five have been killed to date. Meanwhile, the Pentagon reported on Tuesday that the US casualty count stands at 303, including 13 killed and 290 injured.

Earlier this week, Iran’s Ministry of Education said that 241 students and teachers have been killed and 183 wounded since the start of the war, with students accounting for 190 of the deaths and 164 of the injuries and teachers totaling 51 deaths and 19 wounded. It reported that at least 644 schools had been damaged or destroyed by US and Israeli airstrikes.

Sen. John Kennedy: “Here’s why we went into Iran: We had no choice. The President didn’t start a war; he was trying to end one.”

Republican members of Congress who received classified briefings on the war had a less confident view than the camera-hungry crank from Louisiana. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), House Armed Services Committee chair, skewered Pentagon officials after a classified briefing on the progress of the Iran failed to answer basic questions about troop deployments and plans for the next phases of the war: “We just wanted them to tell us what’s the plan, and we didn’t get any answers.”  A surprisingly coherent Nancy Mace was more to the point:   “Just walked out of a House Armed Services briefing on Iran. Let me repeat: I will not support troops on the ground in Iran, even more so after this briefing.”

Every time the US goes to war, I pick up Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the first (and still the best) real book I read about the US at war. The weapons have changed, but not the perverted mentalities of those who get us into these bloodbaths or those who run the horror shows on the ground:

That night, I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, ‘Colonel, you’re insane?’ It was like turning up in the middle of some black Looney Tunes where the Duck had all the lines.

That night, I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, ‘Colonel, you’re insane?’ It was like turning up in the middle of some black Looney Tunes where the Duck had all the lines.

My first reading of Dispatches, which I read in one sitting the day it was published, is permanently imprinted on my consciousness the same way every note of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night has been since I ripped the cellophane off the matte black album jacket printed on rough blotter paper and dropped the needle on side one.

Hegseth browbeating Congress to approve $200 billion in extra funding for the Iran war claimed in his typical He-Man bravado: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”

One’s eyes tend to glaze over at these figures, but $200 billion is an enormous amount and is either a shakedown or a sign that the war will go on for many months and involve a ground campaign. How do we know this? Because of the cost of other wars…

Operation Desert Storm (500,000 US troops, 40 days of combat, weeks of bombing, months of deployment): $150 billion Afghan War (2001-2021): $50 billion per year Iraq War (100,000 troops on the ground): $135 billion per year ISIS campaign, 21014-2019: $10 billion per year Kosovo War (78 days of sustained airstrikes): $10 billion Libyan War (March to August, 2011 ): $1.1 billion

Operation Desert Storm (500,000 US troops, 40 days of combat, weeks of bombing, months of deployment): $150 billion

Afghan War (2001-2021): $50 billion per year

Iraq War (100,000 troops on the ground): $135 billion per year ISIS campaign, 21014-2019: $10 billion per year

Kosovo War (78 days of sustained airstrikes): $10 billion

Libyan War (March to August, 2011 ): $1.1 billion

Struggling to meet its recruitment quotas under Hegseth and the deepening Iran war, the U.S. Army has raised its enlistment age limit to 42 and loosened restrictions for people with marijuana convictions (baked ok, as long as you’re not gay or otherwise woke). During the most desperate months of World War II, Stalin raised the age limit for conscription into the Red Army to 45-years-old. But the Soviets were defending themselves from an invasion. Not launching one.

The massive bombing of Iran will have consequences that persist for decades. Recall that the leukemia rates after the US bombing of Iraq were higher than after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: “After the bombing in Japan, the rates of leukemia among those living closest to the detonation increased by a devastating 660%… In Falluja, leukemia rates increased by 2,200% in a much shorter space of time.”

Laleh Khalili in the LRB on the West’s quest to control, one way or another, Iran’s oil:

Oil was a constant presence in my life when I was growing up in Iran. Petroleum was the engine of Iranian history in the 20th (and 21st) century: from the British usurpation of the Iranian national patrimony with the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909, to the British and US-engineered coup that removed Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in 1953, to the Iranian revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war, to current sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil.

Oil was a constant presence in my life when I was growing up in Iran. Petroleum was the engine of Iranian history in the 20th (and 21st) century: from the British usurpation of the Iranian national patrimony with the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909,........

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