Innehållsförteckning för September 20/27, 2021 från The Nation

The ugly scenes of the taliban takeover and the us retreat from kabul underscored an uncomfortable truth about foreign military adventures: If you bet big, you can lose big—and it had better be worth it. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t. Still, the barrage of indignation from establishment politicians and the mainstream media exposed their continued refusal to confront the real issue: that invasions and occupations invariably provoke resistance, rarely work, and are hardly ever worth the cost. It remains an open question—though historically unlikely—whether Americans will learn from our Afghanistan debacle. The first test has already begun: Will Washington now dismantle the forever wars’ twisted legal architecture and march its remaining boots off Iraqi and Syrian ground? In July, President Biden made the announcement that the United States will soon…

Donald rumsfeld styled himself as the leader of a revolution in military affairs that made the Pentagon ready for quick, punchy interventions. In reality, he was one of the masterminds behind the Global War on Terror—the longest conflict in American history, whose interminable missions are now derided as the forever wars. Although he lived to the ripe age of 88, Rumsfeld didn’t outlast the wars he played so large a role in instigating. Two months before Rumsfeld’s death, Joe Biden announced a drawdown in Afghanistan. But the forever wars aren’t really ending. They’re just being disguised as more politically palatable enterprises, with military contractors taking the role of troops and drone strikes continuing in frontiers like Somalia. Rumsfeld’s death provoked a scorching obituary from George Packer in The Atlantic. “Rumsfeld…

It might feel as if workplace sexual predators are finally getting their due. After New York Attorney General Letitia James meticulously investigated sexual harassment claims against Governor Andrew Cuomo and released a scathing report containing evidence that he harassed 11 women, he resigned from office effective August 24. Cuomo’s resignation came shortly after celebrity chef Mario Batali and his former partner Joe Bastianich reached a $600,000 settlement with James over allegations that they created a workplace rife with sexual harassment, much of it alleged to have been committed by Batali himself. James secured a similar settlement last year with Ken Friedman, the owner of the now-defunct Manhattan restaurant the Spotted Pig, for $240,000 plus a share of his future profits. A month before the Batali story broke, Fox News agreed…

THE TALIBAN OBSERVED THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11 IN STARTLING fashion. Within a week of the United States’ announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan on September 11, the Taliban had taken over large parts of the country, and on August 15, the capital city of Kabul fell. The speed was astonishing, the strategic acumen remarkable: a 20-year occupation rolled up in a week, as the puppet armies disintegrated. The puppet president hopped a helicopter to Uzbekistan, then a jet to the United Arab Emirates. It was a huge blow to the American empire and its underling states. No amount of spin can cover up this debacle. A little more than a year before the 9/11 attacks, Chalmers Johnson, the West Coast historian and onetime supporter of the…

ALL SOCIETIES HAVE A GENRE OF NARRATIVE KNOWN AS the “just-so story,” which exists to furnish a question about the world—“What makes the seasons change?”; “Why is the US military budget so large?”—with a tidy answer: “The seasons change because the god of the underworld kidnapped the harvest goddess’s daughter”; “Our military budget keeps democracy safe around the world.” The point of a just-so story is to explain not only why things are the way they are but also why they couldn’t be any other way. Floating somewhere outside of history, with all of its contingencies and struggles for power, the just-so story sparkles with the structure of myth. A variety of mythic creatures populate Carl Zimmer’s slim volume A Planet of Viruses. Written to accompany the University of Nebraska’s…

Over the past week i’ve been asked constantly about the situation outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. It’s all any TV station, radio, or podcast wants to talk to me about. The grim images of devastation and desperation coming from there have managed finally to gain the attention of people in the West, who for years had ignored the two-decade-long occupation, which was presumably launched for their safety. Or for Afghan women. Or for democracy. Or…something. People are fixated on the horrific images. Young men desperately clinging to a US military plane as it takes off. Taliban and CIA-backed Afghan intelligence forces shooting round after round into the air to disburse hundreds of frantic men, women, and children. Thousands of families squatting in squalor in dirt fields outside the gates…

One of the much-repeated details of the state attorney general’s report on Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment probe is a message sent by one of Cuomo’s longtime apparatchiks, Josh Vlasto. Watching the coverage of his former boss unfold, he observed to an unidentified friend, “It’s not even close to what it was really like to work there day to day.” The “abuse and mind games” were, in fact, “so much worse.” It’s the next line, however—missing from much of the coverage—that surfaces something uniquely revealing about the gendered abuse directed at men: “But for me, it never really bothered me. It was part of the deal.” One of the most damaging effects of Cuomo’s 11 years as New York governor is the way he defined power. Abuse, in his construal of…

In the dark days after the September 11 terror attacks, tens of thousands of people across the country organized and marched for peace. In this image, taken on April 20, 2002, the late Cobie “Kwasi” Harris, a political science professor at San Jose State University, raises his fist after addressing the crowd that had gathered in San Francisco’s UN Plaza to protest the invasion of Afghanistan and the harassment and detention of Muslims in this country.…

One afternoon in July, flanked by about 10 protesters in orange jumpsuits, the lawyer Gary Thompson stood outside the cultural attaché office of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C. Speaking into a microphone, he called on the UAE to stop its apparent plan to send his client, a former Guantánamo detainee, back to Russia, where he would likely be jailed and tortured. Four and a half years ago, the United States released Ravil Mingazov, a Russian national and a Muslim Tatar, and put him on a flight to the UAE, where he expected to start a new life. But when he touched down, he was immediately imprisoned in an undisclosed location along with 18 Yemeni and four Afghan detainees. “We are here to express shock that our country is…

REPARATIONS ARE HAVING A MOMENT. THIS MARCH, Evanston, Ill., became the first government in the United States to attempt to address racial inequality by providing mortgage assistance and $25,000 homeownership and improvement grants to descendants of residents harmed by discriminatory housing policies in the city. Soon afterward, the US House of Representatives began hearings on HR 40, which would create a commission to study reparations for slavery and other forms of discrimination against Black people in the United States. President Biden expressed support for the study and reiterated that support at the commemoration of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla., in May. Meanwhile, California became the first state to initiate an official task force to study and develop a reparations plan for African Americans harmed by slavery and its…

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE O’DONNELL LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE…

REPRESENTATIVE BARBARA LEE WAS IN A HURRY. The house was preparing to advance a multi-trillion-dollar budget blueprint and voting rights bill during a rare August session, ending a standoff with a gang of conservative Democrats threatening to derail President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. A frantic two-day session on Capitol Hill was coming to a close, and the California congresswoman had to go vote. Since Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the US-backed government, Lee has had a lot on her mind. Just three days after 9/11, as the ruins smoldered and the country reeled in shock, Lee had cast the loneliest vote in her political career. She was the sole member of Congress—House and Senate—to vote against a resolution to give President George W. Bush sweeping authorization to…

194M Average number of text messages the NSA collected per day in April 2011 0 Number of terrorist attacks the government could prove were prevented by the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, according to a recent court ruling 18K Minimum number of Facebook users whose private data was given to law enforcement in the last half of 2012 100 Radius in miles from New York City within which every mosque experienced government surveillance after 9/11 $100K Amount government informants can earn per job, excluding “performance” bonuses 357% Percentage by which terrorist attacks committed by Muslims receive more media coverage than attacks by non-Muslims $3.8B Budget for the FBI’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence units…

On September 12, 2001, the day after horrific terrorist attacks shook the country, The New York Times published an editorial titled “The National Defense.” In it, the paper focused on “the urgent work of determining how an open and democratic society can better defend itself” against terrorism. Sandwiched between several security-related policy suggestions, the Times sounded this note of caution: “President Bush and Congress must carefully balance the need for heightened security with the need to protect the constitutional rights of Americans. That includes Americans of Islamic descent, who could now easily become the target for another period of American xenophobia and ethnic discrimination.” The warning was prescient, and we Muslims have indeed been living with dangerous xenophobia and discrimination these past 20 years. But, to be honest, the Times…

A REPUBLIC THAT WAGES UNENDING WAR beyond its frontiers sets itself up for decline and fall. Its intractable military skirmishing is like the drip-drip-drip of water slowly eroding the sturdy foundations of an edifice before it collapses. Buffoons soon take their turns as mob rulers, coarsening and dividing a once-free society, before a barbarian horde tries to topple it. Or so goes the “Roman narrative,” an old story of imperial decline that has instructed generations of politicians and political theorists seeking to stave off a similar fate. If you spend too much time fighting savagery, you become savage as well. “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” warned James Madison in 1795. Added Barack Obama in 2013, in a statement that, in retrospect, seems prophetic:…

Library Science Re “Saving the Library,” by Scott Sherman [August 9/16]: I was a plaintiff in the successful lawsuit to halt the plans to demolish the stacks of the New York Public Library’s main research branch. The stacks, however, remain empty of over 3 million books, now stored off-site. Sherman’s article revives concern—and, we can hope, action—about the state of public libraries in this country. When I receive pleas for money to be applied to the physical plants of libraries in the United States, I respond by suggesting that such funds be directed instead to the remuneration of librarians and to the purchase and maintenance of physical books. One must now hope that the tide is turning on the anti-book trend in libraries, and that physical books and the librarian…