By Norman Solomon

Labels are central to the politics of media. And no label has been more powerful than “terrorist.”

A single standard of language should accompany a consistent standard of human rights, which the world desperately needs. “If thought corrupts language,” George Orwell wrote, “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

No amount of rhetoric from its defenders and apologists can change the reality that Hamas engaged in mass murder. What Hamas horrifically did to more than 1,000 Israeli civilians of all ages two weeks ago meets the dictionary definition of terrorism.

And no amount of rhetoric can change the reality that the Israeli government has engaged in mass murder during the last two weeks. What Israel’s military is horrifically doing in Gaza, already killing several thousand Palestinian civilians of all ages, also meets the definition of terrorism.

But U.S. media outlets dodge being evenhanded with the “terrorist” label — applying it to organized Palestinian killers of Israelis and not to organized Israeli killers of Palestinians.

The routine media bias does not in any way mitigate the horrendous crimes committed by Hamas in Israel. And that media bias does not in any way mitigate the horrendous crimes that are being committed — on an even larger scale, increasing daily — by the Israeli government in Gaza.

By any consistent standard, if referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization, then the same description fits the Israeli government. But such balanced candor is absolutely intolerable in the mainstream media and politics of the United States. It would be too honest. Too real.

Terrorists and their defenders always have excuses when tactics include ruthlessly killing civilians. But we’re choking on a nonstop supply of smoke-blowing rhetoric — what Orwell called political language “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Some have contended that the word “terrorist” should be excluded from news accounts because it can be subjective. Although ignored or derided soon after 9/11, Reuters news service explained its policy this way: “Throughout this difficult time we have strictly adhered to our 150-year-old tradition of factual, unbiased reporting and upheld our long-standing policy against the use of emotive terms, including the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter.’ We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, identity or background.”

But that media stance is an outlier. We seem to be stuck with the “terrorist” word. Ending the routinely slanted, selective use of the “t” word would be a real improvement; more realistically, we should recognize and reject its flagrantly skewed usage. It functions in sync with an array of tilted reporting patterns.

Since the latest Israeli assault on Gaza began, U.S. news outlets have constantly used euphemistic words like “strike,” “hammer,” “pressure” and “retaliate” to blur the real meaning of what it has meant to human beings when a very densely populated area is attacked with thousands of large bombs. Vivid reporting has occurred at times, but the overwhelming bulk of coverage of the Israeli government’s wide-ranging terrorism has been abstracted in ways that coverage of the Hamas terrorism has not been.

One factor that makes the blurring easier: The Hamas atrocities were mostly up close, with the murderers and murdered often facing each other, whereas the Israeli atrocities have been committed from high in the air, as if above it all. While international media outlets like Al Jazeera English and the U.S.-based program Democracy Now! have consistently provided extraordinary, high-quality, heart-rending reportage about the carnage and terror in Gaza as well as in Israel, such humanely equitable reporting has been extremely rare in mainline U.S. media outlets.

Americans have been acculturated to assume, consciously or not, that killing people with high-tech weaponry from the air is a civilized way to go about the business of war, if the U.S. or its allies are doing it, in sharp contrast to low-tech efforts of adversaries. This is an outlook from a privileged vantage point, far from those on the receiving end of “sophisticated” firepower coming from, or backed by, the U.S. government.

Apologists for Israel point out that Hamas targets civilians and Israel does not. That is a distinction without a difference for the people killed, maimed and terrorized by the Israeli military — commanded by leaders who know damn well that Palestinian civilians will be massacred. The cover story of not “targeting” civilians is a comfortable rationalization for the slaughter of civilians while righteously denying the reality.

Overall — given the extreme pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian spin of U.S. mass media — evenhanded use of the “terrorist” label is highly unlikely. But we should strive to challenge the biases at work and the deadly consequences.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

When Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations spoke outside the Security Council on Sunday, he said: “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS NewsHour interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States said: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

While the phrase might seem logical, “Israel’s 9/11” is already being used as a huge propaganda weapon by Israel’s government — now engaged in massive war crimes against civilians in Gaza, after mass murder of Israelis by Hamas last weekend.

On the surface, an analogy between the atrocities just suffered by Israelis and what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 might seem to justify calls for unequivocal solidarity with Israel. But horrific actions are in process from an Israeli government that has long maintained a system of apartheid while crushing basic human rights of Palestinian people.

What is very sinister about trumpeting “Israel’s 9/11” is what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the shroud of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy suffered inside its own borders as a license to kill vast numbers of people in the name of retaliation, righteousness and, of course, the “war on terror.”

It’s a playbook that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is currently adapting and implementing with a vengeance. Now underway, Israel’s collective punishment of 2.3 million people in Gaza is an intensification of what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades. But Israel’s extremism, more than ever touting itself as a matter of self-defense, is at new racist depths of willingness to treat human beings as suitable for extermination.

On Monday, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “beastly people” and said: “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.”

Indiscriminate bombing is now happening along with a cutoff of food, water, electricity and fuel. Noting that “even before the latest restrictions, residents of Gaza already faced widespread food insecurity, restrictions on movement and water shortages,” the BBC reported that a UN official said people in Gaza “were ‘terrified’ by the current situation and worried for their safety — as well as that of their children and families.”

This is a terrible echo from the post-9/11 approach of the U.S. government, which from the outset after Sept. 11, 2001 conferred advance absolution on itself for any and all of its future crimes against humanity.

In the name of fighting terrorism, the United States inflicted collective punishment on huge numbers of people who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The Costs of War project at Brown University calculates more than 400,000 direct civilian deaths “in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.”

Early in the “war on terror,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had fashioned a template to provide approval for virtually any killing by the U.S. military. “We did not start this war,” he said at a news briefing in December 2001, two months into the Afghanistan war. “So understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Rumsfeld was showered with acclaim from the U.S. media establishment, while he not only insisted that the U.S. government had no responsibility for the deaths caused by its armed forces; he also attested to the American military’s notable decency. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld said. He lauded “the care that goes into it, the humanity that goes into it.”

Even before its current high-tech attack on Gaza, Israel had amassed a long track record of killing civilians there, while denying it every step of the way. For instance, the United Nations found that during Israel’s 2014 “Operation Protective Edge” assault, 1,462 Palestinian civilians died, including 495 children.

There’s no reason to doubt that the civilian death toll from the present Israeli military actions in Gaza will soon climb far above the number of people killed by the Hamas assault days ago. As in the aftermath of 9/11, official claims to be only fighting terrorism will continue to serve as PR smokescreens for a government terrorizing and inflicting mass carnage on Palestinians. Deserving only unequivocal condemnation, Hamas’s killing and abduction of civilians set the stage for Israel’s slaughter of civilians now underway in Gaza.

Absent from the New York Times home page Monday night and relegated to page 9 of the newspaper’s print edition on Tuesday, a grisly news story began this way: “Israeli airstrikes pounded Gaza on Monday, flattening mosques over the heads of worshipers, wiping away a busy marketplace full of shoppers and killing entire families, witnesses and authorities in Gaza said. Five Israeli airstrikes ripped through the marketplace in the Jabaliya refugee camp, reducing it to rubble and killing dozens, the authorities said. Other strikes hit four mosques in the Shati refugee camp and killed people worshiping inside, they said. Witnesses said boys had been playing soccer outside one of the mosques when it was struck.”

Along with releasing a statement about the latest tragic turn of events, at RootsAction.org we’ve offered supporters of a just peace a quick way to email their members of Congress and President Biden. The gist of the message is that “the horrific cycle of violence in the Middle East will not end until the Israeli occupation ends — and a huge obstacle to ending the occupation has been the U.S. government.”

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. follows through on his apparent plans to run for president in the fall 2024 general election, that will make it all the more important for progressives to have a clear understanding of who Kennedy is and what he really stands for.

In advance of announcing that he’ll run as an independent, according to Mediaite, the Kennedy campaign will deploy “attack ads” against the Democratic National Committee for preventing an open primary process. The DNC’s shenanigans deserve to be condemned, and we’ve repeatedly done so, including here, here and here.

Kennedy can be forceful in denouncing aspects of U.S. militarism – making valid points about hawkish foreign policies that shun diplomacy while enriching military contractors. But a closer look at his overall views is needed, lest progressives follow Kennedy into his often inaccurate – and sometimes demagogic – rabbit hole.

Any serious progressive critique of U.S. foreign policy must include a challenge to our country’s one-sided position on Israel/Palestine – which leads to other dangerous policies, such as supporting the Saudi dictatorship (and its horrific Yemen war), while eternally polarizing with and threatening Iran.

Kennedy seems to believe that Washington has not been one-sided enough in support of Israel. He pledged in a mid-July interview: “There’s nobody who’s running for president right now in either party who will be a better friend to Israel than me as president.” Kennedy followed up by saying: “Progressive Democrats have become outspoken opponents of Israel. That’s the worst outcome of woke culture.”

And he added: “The criticism of Israel is a false narrative. Israel is a shining star on human rights in the Middle East.”

If you are a progressive who is leaning toward RFK Jr. but cares about Palestinian rights and Middle East peace, you should watch the recent interview with him conducted by Israel-can-do-no-wrong Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Kennedy questions the “narrative” of Palestinians as “oppressed,” applauds the Israeli military for consistently “avoiding civilian casualties,” says he doesn't want the Biden administration to make a nuclear agreement with Iran, and agrees with Rabbi Shmuley’s characterization of Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib as “anti-Semitic.”

In that July 16 interview, RFK Jr. was evidently trying to do damage control after the discovery of a video from this summer in which he made bizarre comments suggesting that Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are the most immune. But Kennedy’s extreme support of Israel and his closeness with Rabbi Shmuley predate those comments. In June, he waved Israeli flags side-by-side with Shmuley in Manhattan’s “Celebrate Israel 75th” parade and declared in a column for Jewish Journal: “I support Israel because I share Israel’s values.” 

Kennedy’s positions on domestic policies – from the climate crisis to economics to his extreme anti-vaccination views – are often at odds with progressivism. In a thorough critique, Naomi Klein exposes his faux populism and support from high-tech billionaires. Besides debunking many of his claims about vaccines, Klein points out that Kennedy asserts the climate crisis is being overhyped by “totalitarian elements in our society” and has said that he’d leave energy policy to market forces.

Klein makes clear that RFK Jr. is no economic populist: “On Fox, he would not even come out in favor of a wealth tax; he has brushed off universal public health care as not ‘politically realistic’; and I have heard nothing about raising the minimum wage.” 

Kennedy does not have a systemic, class analysis of what’s wrong in U.S. society. Instead, he has a conspiratorial view. And through his use of social media and other outreach, he’s attracted considerable support from the conspiracy-minded right wing. In April, Steve Bannon – seen as the brains behind Donald Trump – commented that “Bobby Kennedy would be an excellent choice for Trump to consider” as a VP running-mate. Both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump acolyte Roger Stone said in late July that it might be good to put Kennedy in the next Republican cabinet.

While running for president as a Democrat, RFK Jr. gave friendly interviews to corporate libertarian outlets. That coziness and his consultation with the chair of the Libertarian Party have led to speculation that he’ll end up as the candidate of the Libertarians, whose party was on the ballot in almost every state in 2020. (Going it alone, RFK Jr. would likely not qualify for many state ballots, given the undemocratic hurdles.)

It’s unclear what RFK Jr.’s strategy is. What is clear is that his campaign may end up helping the neo-fascist Republicans win in November 2024. Back in 2016, Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton after both major parties nominated very unpopular candidates. Eight percent of young voters – a demographic that leans heavily Democratic – voted for either the Libertarian or Green parties, a percentage that was much higher in some swing states.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offers progressives a mishmash of appealing statements, “free market” corporatism and assorted political toxins. Not a good deal.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

Recent news reports have been filled with results of one poll after another after another showing that President Biden continues to weaken as a candidate for re-election. With an overall approval rating now 21 points underwater, polling shows he has lost support among key demographics that made his 2020 victory possible – especially the young and people of color. Alarm bells among pro-Biden pundits have finally begun to break the political sound barrier.

But on Capitol Hill, all’s quiet on the Democratic front.

A gap has grown vast between current assessments from media, largely based on voter opinion data, and current public claims from congressional Democrats who keep their nose to the talking-points grindstone. An effect is that party leaders and backbenchers alike are losing credibility with the party’s base.

The gap is so lopsided that a poll this month found 67 percent of “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters” said they don’t want Biden to run again. Meanwhile, no more than 1 percent of Democrats in Congress are willing to say so in public. By any measure, a disconnect between 67 and 1 percent is, uh, substantial.

For Democratic lawmakers to be so untethered from the people who elected them tells you a lot about the compliant relationship that usually prevails among elected Democrats toward President Biden. And it signifies an unhealthy relationship between Democrats in office and the party’s activist base.

While supposedly representing a progressive grassroots base to the political establishment, some members of Congress end up routinely representing the political establishment to the progressive grassroots base.

The dire need for progressive advances in government policies is undermined when elected Democrats reflexively echo the Biden 2024 campaign line and pretend that he’s a sufficiently strong candidate to defeat the neofascist Republican Party next year. When deferring to congressional Democrats who in turn defer to the man in the Oval Office, progressive activists and organizations end up functioning more like supplicants than constituents in a representative democracy.

Top Democrats and their allies have publicly touted the canard that cast Joe Biden as a hero of last year’s midterms. The intoxication from that messaging was in sharp contrast to the sober clarity from a re-elected House Democrat who spoke to the New York Times “on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the White House.” The newspaper reported that the congressmember said “Biden’s numbers were ‘a huge drag’ on Democratic candidates, who won in spite of the president not thanks to him.”

Polling in the 10 months since then indicates that Biden would likely be an even huger drag on Democratic candidates a year from now. But hope springs eternal, and so does fear of angering the White House. With the start of presidential primaries just a few months away, the crux of the matter is that Democrats in Congress are opting for self-focused, risk-averse conformity rather than visionary leadership.

Now — while even pro-Biden media like CNN and MSNBC are, at last, sounding more realistic about Biden’s severe electoral deficits — prominent Democrats are either keeping quiet about the grim odds of a 2024 political train wreck or are spouting feel-good nonsense worthy of the myopic Mr. Magoo. The more that Democrats in the House and Senate declare how great Biden will be as the party’s standard-bearer next year, the more it seems they’ve been swallowed up by a Capitol Hill bubble.

Yet mainstream media outlets are now underscoring the wide distance between the Democratic players on the Hill and the Democratic voters who’ve put them there. NBC News brought it all into focus, summing up: “When party elites look at President Joe Biden, they see the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. When voters view the president, many see an old man.”

More importantly, many hear timeworn ideas and promises that ring hollow. Working-class voters can see and hear a president who has refused to really fight for their economic interests, while corporate greed has been raising prices. It’s an invitation to eye-rolling from core Democratic constituencies when Biden and his advocates proclaim how he’s going to go all-out to fight for their interests in the second term after he hasn’t done so in the first.

To Democratic officeholders, worried about retaining the presidency and their own seats, such matters might seem relatively unimportant. But bleak electoral consequences are foreseeable. Biden has declined to use the bully pulpit to battle for progressive measures that are poll-tested and popular with the electorate.

Democrats in Congress have ample reasons to be apprehensive about next year. But their silences and spin increasingly make them look more like PR specialists than leaders. The more they prop up Joe Biden to run for re-election, the better Donald Trump likes the odds he’ll return to the White House.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon / FAIR.org

For the New York Times news department, cluster munitions fall into two categories—clearly wrong or complexly controversial—depending on who uses them.

There was no ambiguity when Russia apparently started using cluster weapons during the invasion of Ukraine. Five days after the invasion began, the Times (3/1/22) front-paged a story that described them in the second paragraph as “internationally banned” and went on to report: "Neither Russia nor Ukraine is a member of the treaty that bans cluster munitions, which can be a variety of weapons—rockets, bombs, missiles and artillery projectiles—that disperse lethal bomblets in midair over a wide area, hitting military targets and civilians alike."

Given that the Times is a US-based outlet, the long article unduly detoured around some basic facts—notably, that the United States is also not “a member of the treaty that bans cluster munitions.” And the 1,570-word piece failed to mention anything about the US military’s firing of cluster munitions during its own invasions and other military interventions, including Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Congressional Research Service has noted that “US and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003.”

When the Times (3/5/22) followed up a few days later with a piece headlined “NATO Accuses Russia of Using Cluster Bombs in Ukraine,” the ostensible paper of record still did not mention Washington’s refusal to sign the treaty banning cluster munitions. As for US use of those weapons, the piece buried a single sentence with a deficient summary at the end of the 24-paragraph article, telling readers: "NATO forces used cluster bombs during the Kosovo war in 1999, and the United States dropped more than 1,000 cluster bombs in Afghanistan from October 2001 to March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report."

The Pentagon’s massive use of cluster munitions during the invasion of Iraq went unmentioned. So did a Tomahawk missile attack with a cluster bomb, launched from a US Navy warship, that killed 14 women and 21 children in Yemen a week before Christmas in 2009.

[To continue reading, on the FAIR website, click here.]

By Norman Solomon

When Joe Biden flew out of Hanoi last week, he was leaving a country where U.S. warfare caused roughly 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths. But, like every other president since the Vietnam War, he gave no sign of remorse. In fact, Biden led up to his visit by presiding over a White House ceremony that glorified the war as a noble effort.

Presenting the Medal of Honor to former Army pilot Larry L. Taylor for bravery during combat, Biden praised the veteran with effusive accolades for risking his life in Vietnam to rescue fellow soldiers from “the enemy.” But that heroism was 55 years ago. Why present the medal on national television just days before traveling to Vietnam?

The timing reaffirmed the shameless pride in the U.S. war on Vietnam that one president after another has tried to render as history. You might think that — after killing such a vast number of people in a war of aggression based on continuous deceptions — some humility and even penance would be in order.

But no. As George Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And a government that intends to continue its might-makes-right use of military power needs leaders who do their best to distort history with foggy rhetoric and purposeful omissions. Lies and evasions about past wars are prefigurative for future wars.

And so, at a press conference in Hanoi, the closest Biden came to acknowledging the slaughter and devastation inflicted on Vietnam by the U.S. military was this sentence: “I’m incredibly proud of how our nations and our people have built trust and understanding over the decades and worked to repair the painful legacy the war left on both our nations.”

In the process, Biden was pretending an equivalency of suffering and culpability for both countries — a popular pretense for commanders in chief ever since the first new one after the Vietnam War ended.

Two months into his presidency in early 1977, Jimmy Carter was asked at a news conference if he felt “any moral obligation to help rebuild that country.” Carter replied firmly: “Well, the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

And, Carter added, “I don’t feel that we owe a debt, nor that we should be forced to pay reparations at all.”

In other words, no matter how many lies it tells or how many people it kills, being the United States government means never having to say you’re sorry.

When President George H.W. Bush celebrated the U.S. victory in the 1991 Gulf War, he proclaimed: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Bush meant that the triumphant killing of Iraqi people — estimated at 100,000 in six weeks — had ushered in American euphoria about military action that promised to wipe away hesitation to launch future wars.

From Carter to Biden, presidents have never come anywhere near providing an honest account of the Vietnam War. None could imagine engaging in the kind of candor that Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provided when he said: “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”

Mainstream political discourse has paid scant attention to the deaths and injuries of Vietnamese people. Likewise the horrendous ecological damage and effects of poisons from the Pentagon’s arsenal have gotten very short shrift in U.S. media and politics.

Does such history really matter now? Absolutely. Efforts to portray the U.S. government’s military actions as well-meaning and virtuous are incessant. The pretenses that falsify the past are foreshadowing excuses for future warfare.

Telling central truths about the Vietnam War is a basic threat to the U.S. war machine. No wonder the leaders of the warfare state would rather keep pretending.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

America’s Response to 9/11 in the Lens of History

By Norman Solomon

[Adapted from the introduction to Norman Solomon’s book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2023).]

The day after the U.S. government began routinely bombing faraway places, the lead editorial in the New York Times expressed some gratification. Nearly four weeks had passed since 9/11, the newspaper noted, and America had finally stepped up its “counterattack against terrorism” by launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda training camps and Taliban military targets in Afghanistan. “It was a moment we have expected ever since September 11,” the editorial said. “The American people, despite their grief and anger, have been patient as they waited for action. Now that it has begun, they will support whatever efforts it takes to carry out this mission properly.”

As the United States continued to drop bombs in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s daily briefings catapulted him into a stratosphere of national adulation. As the Washington Post’s media reporter put it: “Everyone is genuflecting before the Pentagon powerhouse… America’s new rock star.” That winter, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert, told Rumsfeld: “Sixty-nine years old and you’re America’s stud.”

The televised briefings that brought such adoration included claims of deep-seated decency in what was by then already known as the Global War on Terror. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld asserted. And he added, “The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.”

Whatever their degree of precision, American weapons were, in fact, killing a lot of Afghan civilians. The Project on Defense Alternatives concluded that American air strikes had killed more than 1,000 civilians during the last three months of 2001. By mid-spring 2002, the Guardian reported, “as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the U.S. intervention.”

Eight weeks after the intensive bombing had begun, however, Rumsfeld dismissed any concerns about casualties: “We did not start this war. So understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” In the aftermath of 9/11, the process was fueling a kind of perpetual emotion machine without an off switch.

Under the “war on terror” rubric, open-ended warfare was well underway — “as if terror were a state and not a technique,” as Joan Didion wrote in 2003 (two months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq). “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”

In a single sentence, Didion had captured the essence of a quickly calcified set of assumptions that few mainstream journalists were willing to question. Those assumptions were catnip for the lions of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. After all, the budgets at “national security” agencies (both long-standing and newly created) had begun to soar with similar vast outlays going to military contractors. Worse yet, there was no end in sight as mission creep accelerated into a dash for cash.

For the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress, the war on terror offered a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries. The resulting carnage often included civilians. The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds. And as the years went by, the point seemed to be not winning that multicontinental war but continuing to wage it, a means with no plausible end. Stopping, in fact, became essentially unthinkable. No wonder Americans couldn’t be heard wondering aloud when the “war on terror” would end. It wasn’t supposed to.

[To continue reading, on the TomDispatch website, click here.]

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

August 30, 2023

As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, candid public discourse about the “war on terror” is long overdue. Hindsight offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the official pronouncements and unheeded dissent that came soon after September 11, 2001. The outlooks that prevailed at the time set the stage for historic disasters.

“Our responsibility to history is already clear — to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil,” President George W. Bush said in a speech at the Washington National Cathedral three days after terrorists took nearly 3,000 lives. A week later, he told a joint session of Congress that the impending war “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

Such resolve was inspiring to many. But the president’s vow to “rid the world of evil” was an announcement of an absurd goal, and it amounted to declaring endless war on an inexhaustible supply of enemies. Yet in a suddenly traumatized nation, suffused with grief, any concerns about such rhetoric were apt to seem beside the point; they got short shrift in the nation’s capital and news media.

[To continue reading, click here.]

By Norman Solomon

Ever since Donald Trump became a former president, news outlets and commentators have cited polls showing that many Republicans believe violence might be needed to save the country. As Trump’s legal woes increase, so do mainstream media alarms about the specter of violent responses. But we’ve heard virtually nothing about connections between two decades of nonstop U.S. warfare overseas and attitudes favoring political violence at home.

For more than 20 years, a bipartisan approach in Congress and the Oval Office has made sure that the United States uses enormous and lethal violence abroad. Stripped of the usual noble rhetoric, that approach amounts to might-makes-right, an easy conceit when the U.S. military is by far the most powerful in the world. Reinforced in the name of a “war on terror,” the righteous posturing has made perpetual war seem normal.

When Trump loyalists attacked the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, a disproportionately high number of those who led and participated in the assault were military veterans. By then, two decades of ongoing U.S. warfare had fueled the presumption that using deadly force is justified when all else fails.

War is all about inflicting sufficient violence to achieve goals. That was the basic method of the pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol in a desperate attempt to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president.

Those who laid siege to the Capitol two and half years ago were responding to what they understood as an order from commander in chief Trump. And many of the assault’s leaders drew on their military training and know-how to pull off the successful breach of security on Capitol Hill.

“It was like a war zone,” some House and Senate members have recalled, using identical words to describe and deplore what they saw that day. But Congress actually likes — and lavishly subsidizes — real war zones. Hefty majorities of Democrats and Republicans keep approving huge appropriations to create faraway war zones or make them more deadly.

As a result — along with several million deaths inside attacked countries as well as terrible injuries to bodies and minds — the still-continuing “war on terror” has meant large numbers of violence-traumatized veterans. “Between 1.9 and 3 million service members have served in post-9/11 war operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and over half of them have deployed more than once,” the Costs of War project at Brown University reports. “Many times that number of Americans have borne the costs of war as spouses, parents, children, and friends cope with their loved ones’ absence, mourn their deaths, or greet the changed person who often returns.”

All along the way, the U.S. media and political establishment has glorified the ostensibly heroic exploits of the Pentagon’s forces as they’ve implemented vast violence. War-making is routinely equated with ultimate patriotism.

The war machine does not have an automatic “off” switch when soldiers return home. Military drills can morph into political maneuvers. And some key takeaways from the rigidly authoritarian structure of the military are well-suited for MAGA forces.

“With thresholds of acceptability declining in domestic political life, the Trump frenzy came more and more to resemble the mentalities of warfare,” I wrote in the new book “War Made Invisible.” And “the insurrectionists, exhibiting loyalty to the man at the top of the command structure, escalated to violence when all else had failed. . . . Trump was drawing on a deeply militaristic cultural mentality, fueled by nearly 20 years of nonstop war at that point; the ‘training’ of his militant and dangerous supporters was most importantly about mindsets.”

The classic military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote two centuries ago that “war is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Now, some of Trump’s true believers are eager to adapt the violent precepts of perpetual war to American politics.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.