I have to admit that it couldn't be stranger (or, given this country's history in my lifetime, do I mean less strange?) to be facing yet another all-American war, this time in Iran, fiercely labeled "Operation Epic Fury," and for however long (since President Trump only recently insisted that the U.S. military would "leave" Iran within two or three weeks, possibly by the time this piece comes out). There can be no question anymore that the "president of PEACE," who once upon a time claimed that "regime change is a proven, absolute failure," has a genuine urge to make war in a big-time fashion. As Nick Turse recently wrote all too vividly at The Intercept, "Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations -- including drone strikes, ground raids, proxy wars, 127e programs, and full-scale conflicts -- in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean."
Imagine that! And, of course, none of it was done with the permission of the body -- Congress -- that our Constitution insists must declare war. (The last time Congress officially declared war was in World War II!) And while the war in Iran has at least made headlines, this country's ongoing strife in Somalia isn't considered news at all in the mainstream media, though Dave DeCamp at the website Antiwar.com has been keeping track of it regularly. (As I was writing this, he reported that the U.S. military had launched its 48th airstrike of the year there!)
Of course, who knows what will come next in the increasingly strange era of Donald Trump. And while you're thinking about all that (and so much more), let TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser take you into the unnerving American world that produced him and war, war, war, forever and a day, as well as the profound wounds that our version of imperialism continues to inflict on the homeland. Tom
War, Forever and a Day
Who Gains and Who Loses in Trump's America
By Steve Fraser
War against Iran. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela. Threatening to take over Cuba and Greenland. Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources to feed the insatiable appetite of American capitalism are indeed afoot and, in the age of Donald Trump, U.S. imperialism is back with a particular vengeance. Not, of course, that it ever went away. In fact, it's been there from the beginning.
After all, the United States was launched as an act of settler colonialism, dispossessing the New World's indigenous inhabitants. President James Monroe issued what became known as the "Monroe Doctrine" in 1823, proclaiming the country's exclusive right to determine the fate of the rest of the western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the slave trade and slavery constituted an imperial rape of Africa by America's planter and merchant elites.
And by the turn of the twentieth century, Washington had announced its "Open Door" policy, meaning it intended to compete for access to the world's markets while joining the European race for colonies. It proceeded to do so by brutally taking over the Philippines in 1899, while the U.S. armed forces would make regular incursions into countries in Central America to protect the holdings of American corporations and banks. And the story that began there has never ended with bloody chapters written in Guatemala, Vietnam, most recently Iran, and all too many other places.
As the dispossession of indigenous populations and the enslavement of Africans suggest, the "homeland" (itself an imperial locution) has long been deeply implicated in the imperial project. Indeed, various forms of repressive military and police measures used abroad were first tested out against labor, Black, immigrant, and native insurgents. Rebellious immigrant workers in the nineteenth century were compared to "Indian savages" as local police and federal militia treated them with equal savagery. White supremacist ideology, nurtured at home, would then be exported to the global south to justify U.S. domination there. In fact, this country's vaunted economic prosperity for so much of the last century was premised on its exploitative access to the resources of the global south, as well as its post-World War II hegemony over Western Europe.
Today, Donald Trump's government exercises a reign of terror over our immigrant brothers and sisters, millions of whom are here because their homelands were economically despoiled by this country's business and financial powerhouses. Homegrown resistance to our imperial adventures abroad has always been met by government repression, the stripping away of democratic rights, and the creation of a surveillance state.
In the Beginning
The United States was always conceived as an imperial project, its DNA infected from the outset.
The earliest settlers were simultaneously colonial subjects of the British and other European empires, and themselves colonizers exercising their dominion over indigenous populations. Native Americans -- agrarian communities, hunting and trading tribes, seafaring and fishing societies -- were systematically stripped of their lands, resources, and ways of life (not to speak of their actual lives) by the newly arrived settler colonials.
Sometimes their undoing was left to the silent workings of the marketplace. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the fur trade catered to the appetites of the world's aristocracy -- in Russia, China, and across Europe. Native American fur-trapping and trading societies entered into commercial relations with fur merchants like John Jacob Astor, the country's first millionaire. But the terms of trade were always profoundly unequal and eventually undermined the viability of those fur-trapping communities.
Often enough, however, the colonizers resorted to far less "pacific" kinds of actions: military force, legal legerdemain, illegal land seizures, and even bio-warfare, as European-borne diseases nearly wiped out whole indigenous populations. The social murder of those peoples went on through the nineteenth century, from "the Trail of Tears" (the forced removal of the "five civilized tribes" from Georgia in 1830 on the orders of President Andrew Jackson) to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.
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