Can the World’s “Second Superpower” (Public Opinion) Rise from the Ashes of Twenty Years of War?

Can the World’s “Second Superpower” (Public Opinion) Rise from the Ashes of Twenty Years of War?

By Medea Benjamin POLICEand Nicolas J. S. Davies

Global Research, February 14, 2020

Theme: Police State & Civil Rights, US NATO War Agenda

February 15 marks the day, 17 years ago, when global demonstrations against the pending Iraq invasion were so massive that the New York Times called world public opinion “the second superpower.” But the U.S. ignored it and invaded Iraq anyway. So what has become of the momentous hopes of that day?

The U.S. military has not won a war since 1945, unless you count recovering the tiny colonial outposts of Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, but there is one threat it has consistently outmanoeuvred without firing more than a few deadly rifle shots and some tear gas. Ironically, this existential threat is the very one that could peacefully cut it down to size and take away its most dangerous and expensive weapons: its own peace-loving citizens.

During the Vietnam war, young Americans facing a life-and-death draft lottery built a powerful anti-war movement. President Nixon proposed ending the draft as a way to undermine the peace movement, since he believed that young people would stop protesting the war once they were no longer obligated to fight. In 1973, the draft was ended, leaving a volunteer army that insulated the vast majority of Americans from the deadly impact of America’s wars.

Despite the lack of a draft, a new anti-war movement—this time with global reach—sprung up in the period between the crimes of 9/11 and the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The February 15th, 2003, protests were the largest demonstrations in human history, uniting people around the world in opposition to the unthinkable prospect that the U.S. would actually launch its threatened “shock and awe” assault on Iraq. Some 30 million people in 800 cities took part on every continent, including Antarctica. This massive repudiation of war, memorialized in the documentary We Are Many, led New York Times journalist Patrick E. Tyler to comment that there were now two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

The U.S. war machine demonstrated total disdain for its upstart rival, and unleashed an illegal war based on lies that has now raged on through many phases of violence and chaos for 17 years. With no end in sight to U.S. and allied wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Yemen and West Africa, and Trump’s escalating diplomatic and economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela and North Korea threatening to explode into new wars, where is the second superpower now, when we need it more than ever?

Since the U.S. assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani in Iraq on January 2nd, the peace movement has reemerged onto the streets, including people who marched in February 2003 and new activists too young to remember a time when the U.S. was not at war. There have been three separate days of protest, one on January 4th, another on the 9th and a global day of action on the 25th. The rallies took place in hundreds of cities, but they did not attract nearly the numbers who came out to protest the pending war with Iraq in 2003, or even those of the smaller rallies and vigils that continued as the Iraq war spiralled out of control until at least 2007.

Our failure to stop the U.S. war on Iraq in 2003 was deeply discouraging. But the number of people active in the U.S. anti-war movement shrank even more after the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Many people did not want to protest the nation’s first black president, and many, including the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, really believed he would be a “peace president.”

While Obama reluctantly honored Bush’s agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw US troops from Iraq and he signed the Iran nuclear deal, he was far from a peace president. He oversaw a new doctrine of covert and proxy war that substantially reduced U.S. military casualties, but unleashed an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria that destroyed entire cities, a ten-fold increase in CIA drone strikes on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and bloody proxy wars in Libya and Syria that rage on today. In the end, Obama spent more on the military and dropped more bombs on more countries than Bush did. He also refused to hold Bush and his cronies responsible for their war crimes.

LARRY ROMANOFF -- Economic Upheaval and the Rise of the US Police State

Economic Upheaval and the Rise of the US Police State

By Larry Romanoff

Global Research, November 22, 2019

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy, History, Police State & Civil Rights

 

 

 

By the end of the Vietnam War, US corporations were no longer competitive in the world economy and were losing the bulk of their domestic market to imports, leading to de-industrialisation and the large-scale relocation of manufacturing to Asia, primarily China. Since then, the US has experienced large and increasing trade deficits regardless of currency exchange rates or other external conditions. With its military adventures financed entirely on debt, the US also began running increasingly larger budget deficits, with increasingly fewer funds for public programs like social welfare or education, or to maintain or rebuild its already-dilapidated physical infrastructure.

After the US abandoned the gold standard and unilaterally scuttled the Bretton-Woods agreement, debt financing for the Vietnam War resulted in a massive expansion of the money supply, leading to a decade of ruinous inflation. It doesn’t appear widely known or understood that during that single decade the US dollar depreciated by about 95%. As one measure, in 1971 a typical 3-bedroom home in an attractive suburb cost around $25,000 while ten years or so later that same home was priced at around $250,000.

It was then, at the end of the 1970s, that the US experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history, what James Petras appropriately called “The Great Transformation”. It was during this time under President Ronald Reagan that the invisible elite took the US government and the nation on an alarming ideological turn to the extreme right, and everything changed. In addition to the mass deindustrialisation of the country and the destruction of labor unions and workers’ rights, Reagan opened the doors to deregulation and privatisation, and effectively turned the keys of the country over to the elites and their large corporations and banks. It was this that paved the way for the parade of human, economic, political and military atrocities that continue to this day.

This was when Reagan, under the advice of his handlers, proclaimed at least 200 Presidential Directives designed almost without exception for the benefit of the secret government and their banks and corporations. One need only look at the historical record to prove this point. Reagan was painfully unintelligent, without the mental capacity to have even conceived of such plans for the devastation and cannibalisation of so many nations, all of which were illegal by every measure and concocted solely to satisfy commercial greed. These were primarily private laws dictated by the secret government which authorised the use of the US military and CIA to overthrow dozens of governments and to fund and install dictators that would permit the wholesale plundering of nations with unconscionable civilian repression resulting in at least 10 million deaths.