“When you try to drain a swamp,” cartoonist Scott Adams observed, you get mud on your pants and make the snakes and alligators real angry.
There were many reasons the US Deep State hated President Donald Trump so viscerally, but undoubtedly one of the biggest was that he was putting an end to the biggest racket in America: the Forever Wars.
War is big money in Washington. In just the last few weeks, Joe Biden has promised to hand over $30 billion in weapons to Ukraine alone. The US spends a staggering $780 billion on defence every year: nearly three times as much as closest rival China. That’s an incredible river of gold for the military-industrial complex.
And increasingly hard to justify if the president declines to get the country into any new foreign wars and diligently sets about ending the current ones.
Luckily for the Masters of War, good ol’ “Quid Pro Joe” has galloped to their rescue. Trump forced his hand to end the decades-long wars in the Mid-East, but Joe made sure to comprehensively bollix the whole show – and dump some $80 billion of US weaponry. Which will all have to be replaced: a nice little taxpayer-funded bonus for the Defense lobby. At the same time, he’s done everything but sign the US up in name to the war in Ukraine.
And now he’s revving up one of the long-neglected foreign wars.
In yet another indication that the Biden administration has no intention to bring an end to endless war, the New York Times reported on May 16 that the US Africa Command will be redeploying troops to Somalia, and that the White House has approved the Pentagon’s request for discretionary authority to conduct drone strikes in the country.
Everything’s coming up Brandon!
Of course, Jacobin being Jacobin, they have to misrepresent everything that’s ever happened in Somalia as “imperialism”.
Somalia has been the target of imperial warfare since December 2006, when the US backed an Ethiopian-led invasion that dislodged the first stable government that had emerged in years.
Jacobin
Yep, even the Ethiopians are imperialists, these days. Of course, this simplistic analysis ignores a wickedly complicated situation that includes not only decades of border disputes between Ethiopia and Somalia, but that the Transitional federal parliament of Somalia was weak and brutal – Human Rights Watch documented a litany of war crimes. Bizarrely, it was against a backdrop of internecine power struggles that Somali president Abdullahi Yusuf invited Ethiopian troops in, to quell an Islamist insurgency.
What followed, though, was decades of US meddling, ranging from open invasion early in Obama’s presidency, to the widening of Obama’s favourite proxy war tool, drone strikes. Obama authorised up to 53 drone strikes in Somalia, killing up to 750 people (although, on the plus side that indicates that drone warfare may be one of the most ethical forms of combat, less than three per cent were civilians).
Somalia, it must be said, was one place where Trump didn’t seem inclined to end the Forever Wars. The Trump administration actually escalated drone strikes in Somalia: up to 170 strikes, killing up to 1223 people. But, again, civilian casualties were remarkably low: under five per cent. But, while drone strikes may be the least devastating form of combat for civilians, the fact remains that all this was done without formally declaring war.
And it looks like it’s just going to escalate further under Biden. The president is drafting new laws that will give the military a much freer hand. Consent for strikes will now be granted by the State Department’s chief of mission rather than the White House. There’s good grounds for suspecting that the previous year’s lull in drone strikes is just the calm before the Biden storm.
At $32 million per Reaper, the Masters of War will be clinking their glasses and raising a toast to their demented puppet in the Oval Office.