President Obama did reduce the number of US soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he dramatically expanded the air wars and the use of special operations forces around the globe. In 2016, US special operators could be found in 70% of the world’s nations, 138 countries – a staggering jump of 130% since the days of the Bush administration.
Looking back at President Obama’s legacy, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko added up the defense department’s data on airstrikes and made a startling revelation: in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Iraq
Thousands of US military’s stats on airstrikes have gone unreported
The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed. The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, and calls into question the accuracy of other Defense Department disclosures documenting everything from costs to casualty counts.
In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source database maintained by the U.S. Air Force, information relied on by Congress, American allies, military analysts, academic researchers, the media and independent watchdog groups to assess each war’s expense, manpower requirements and human toll. Those airstrikes were carried out by attack helicopters and armed drones operated by the U.S. Army, metrics quietly excluded from otherwise comprehensive monthly summaries, published online for years, detailing American military activity in all three theaters. Continue reading
Jeffrey Sachs on CIA and Hilary
This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup d’état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime change has been, almost inevitably, a prelude to a bloodbath. How could it be otherwise? Other societies don’t like their countries to be manipulated by U.S. covert operations.
Removing a leader, even if done “successfully,” doesn’t solve any underlying geopolitical problems, much less ecological, social, or economic ones. A coup d’etat invites a civil war, the kind that now wracks Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It invites a hostile international response, such as Russia’s backing of its Syrian ally in the face of the CIA-led operations. The record of misery caused by covert CIA operations literally fills volumes at this point. What surprise, then, the Clinton acknowledges Henry Kissinger as a mentor and guide?
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Congressional Rsearch Service annual report: arms sales 2014
Foreign arms sales by the United States jumped by almost $10 billion in 2014, about 35 percent, even as the global weapons market remained flat and competition among suppliers increased, a new congressional study has found.
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5% Digest (week 30/03/15)
Physicians for Social Responsibility’s (PRS) study concluds that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.
It is heavily critical of the figure most widely cited by mainstream media as authoritative, namely, the Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate of 110,000 dead. According to the PSR study, the much-disputed Lancet study that estimated 655,000 Iraq deaths up to 2006 (and over a million until today by extrapolation) was likely to be far more accurate than IBC’s figures.
total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s – from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation – likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.
5% Digest (Week 23/03/15)
Gregory D. Johnsen wrote a detailed account of the rise of Huthis in Yemen. Adam Baron argued that the power struggle is primarily local and foreign intervention will be a very bad idea.
But what is abundantly clear at the moment is that this remains, by and large, an internal Yemeni political conflict—one that, despite frequent sectarian mischaracterizations and potential regional implications, remains deeply rooted in local Yemeni issues.
And if history is a guide, foreign intervention will only stand to exacerbate the situation. Ironically, talk now centers on a potential Saudi Arabian and Egyptian military intervention in Yemen, a scenario that immediately brought to mind the memory of North Yemen’s 1960s Civil War which saw both sides intervene—albeit on different sides—in a matter which only appeared to draw the conflict out further. This is not to say that there isn’t a place for foreign powers to aid Yemeni factions in negotiating some new political settlement. But any nation that aims to make Yemen’s fight their own is more than likely to come out on the losing side.
The Trillion-Dollar Wars
4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars
Juan Cole, “The American Genocide Against Iraq: 4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars,” 10/17/2013
So the US polished off about a million Iraqis from 1991 through 2011, large numbers of them children. The Iraqi population in that period was roughly 25 million, so the US killed or created the conditions for the killing of 4% of the Iraqi population.
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How the World Health Organisation covered up Iraq’s nuclear nightmare
Nafeez Ahmed, “How the World Health Organisation covered up Iraq’s nuclear nightmare,” The Guardian, 13 October 2013
Ex-UN, WHO officials reveal political interference to suppress scientific evidence of postwar environmental health catastrophe. Continue reading
Kickstarter campaign We Are Many
Nov 7th sees the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for Amir Amirani’s film ‘We Are Many’. The film definitively tells the story of the 30 million worldwide who marched against the Iraq invasion and how it was globally co-ordinated while, at the same time, the few determined to take us to war made their preparation for it.
While the marches didn’t stop the invasion, they did trigger something unexpected. As the Feb 15th global movement (USA, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and Asia) co-ordinated itself, it was giving birth to a whole new global online activist movement – one that created networks and global co-ordinated actions we now take for granted. This legacy reaches as far into the present-day such as the Arab Spring, where stories of activists in Cairo, on seeing the London 2003 Hyde Park marchers, said ‘one day we will have our own Hyde Park’. In 2011, they did.
See trailer here:
Do visit the film’s page on Kickstarter where you can donate online – help us reach the $70k target so that production can begin!
If you need more information about the project, please email info@tippingpointfilmfund.com.
If you donate to the Kickstarter campaign, thank you – and drop us a note so we can keep you up to date on the project.
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