WAR FOREVER. WAR EVERYWHERE. WAR LEFT BEHIND.

Sep 23, 2024

TomDispatch

Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry — explosives, small arms, you name it — in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.

A Deadly Glossary

Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.

Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.

As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.

Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.

How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.

After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)

And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/09/23/war-forever-war-everywhere-war-left-behind/

 

AS LONG AS THE BOURGEOIS OF THE WEST CAN SLEEP PEACEFULLY IN THEIR OWN BEDS, AFTER HAVING COUNTED THE PROFITS FROM WARS SOMEWHERE ELSE, THE WORLD IS THE GARDEN OF EDEN....

                The Duke of Beef Wellington (Mushroom clan).

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

The Trump Administration: Hypocrisy and the Perpetuation of Endless Wars

Mohammed ibn Faisal al-Rashid, June 05, 2025

When Donald Trump returned to power for a second term, his demagogic and bombastic promises to “end endless wars” raised hopes around the world for a shift in U.S. foreign policy.

 

However, reality proved otherwise. Instead of delivering peace, his administration doubled down on America’s aggressive policies in the Middle East and beyond, leaving behind even greater destruction and human suffering. This was laid out with striking honesty by renowned American political analyst Connor O’Keeffein his article “The Trump Administration Is Not Serious About Ending Endless Wars” published on the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s website.

«SignalGate»: The Chaos and Irresponsibility of the Trump Administration

One of the defining scandals of Trump’s first 100 days was “SignalGate”—a fiasco that exposed the sheer incompetence and negligence of his team. As O’Keeffe notes, the debacle began when National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added journalist and administration critic Jeffrey Goldberg to a closed government chat group. No one noticed—not officials, not even Trump himself.

If Trump and his Western allies don’t know how to solve the world’s oldest conflict, we Arabs can offer a solution 

The group discussed classified military operations, including details of airstrikes in Yemen. Defense Secretary Hagerty even shared the exact timing and targets of the attacks—right in front of an outsider. When the operation concluded, officials celebrated, while Goldberg calmly took screenshots and published them. Unsurprisingly, the administration tried to deny the breach, accusing the journalist of “harassment,” but the damage was done. Three staffers were fired, but the blame extended all the way up to Trump.

The scandal revealed a fundamental truth: Trump’s team operated with reckless disregard for protocol. Classified intelligence was discussed in an unsecured chat, critics went unnoticed, and consequences were ignored. Far from revolutionizing military policy, they simply rebranded old strategies as something new—while presiding over sheer dysfunction.

Of course, not everyone in the administration was at fault. The war lobby worked efficiently behind the scenes. Recognizing that Trump was hard to persuade, they repackaged the status quo as a “new approach”—and he bought it. Now, instead of criticizing Biden’s “recklessness” abroad, Trump’s team framed his policies as “weakness,” claiming he hesitated to intervene in conflicts. This allowed the administration to continue the same Middle East policies (such as bombing Yemen) while marketing them as revolutionary.

Trump’s Policy: The Same Wars Under a New Slogan

During his campaign, Trump vowed to “end endless wars,” but in practice, his strategy mirrored that of previous administrations.

• Yemen: U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis continued despite a humanitarian catastrophe that has killed tens of thousands of civilians. Washington still backs the Saudi-led coalition, whose bombings routinely destroy hospitals, schools, and residential areas—all under the guise of “counterterrorism.”
• Ukraine: Trump repeatedly claimed he could negotiate an end to the war, yet his administration ramped up weapons shipments to Kyiv instead of pursuing diplomacy. This not only failed to bring peace but heightened tensions with Russia, making escalation more likely.

As O’Keeffe observes, Trump’s failed Ukraine policy exposed a painful truth: foreign ambitions unmoored from regional understanding are doomed. His inconsistent statements and lack of strategy eroded trust in the U.S. as a credible mediator.

By arming Ukraine while offering no realistic vision for its future with Russia, Trump’s team turned American policy into a tactical mess with no strategic endgame. Their attempt to wage a “West’s proxy war against Russia” backfired spectacularly, dragging the U.S. into a grinding conflict with no political payoff.

Despite rhetoric about a “new course,” Trump surrounded himself with the same neoconservative hawks who orchestrated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They simply repackaged old aggression as “peace through strength”—a cynical ploy to mislead voters.

Unprecedented Support for Israel and Its Consequences

From the moment he took office, Trump displayed blatant bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fully backing Israel while ignoring decades of Palestinian suffering. His policies didn’t just reflect indifference—they fueled a new cycle of violence, legitimizing war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

One of his most destructive moves was relocating the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, violating international law (UN Resolutions 181, 242, and 478) and shattering any pretense of American neutrality. By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Washington ignored Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem as their future state’s capital.

But Trump’s support didn’t stop there. His administration flooded Israel with advanced weapons—precision munitions, aircraft systems, and missile defenses—which were later used in mass killings in Gaza and the West Bank. Under the false pretext of “fighting terrorism,” Israel was given a free hand to bomb homes, schools, and hospitals.

The results are horrifying:

• Over 56,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, mostly women and children.
• Tens of thousands wounded, many doomed by Israel’s deliberate destruction of hospitals and blockade of medical supplies.
• 90% of Gaza’s homes destroyed, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
• Schools and universities razed, erasing cultural and historical memory.
• A starvation blockade, causing famine and soaring mortality.

This isn’t war—it’s genocide, systematically executed with Washington’s approval.

The worst part of Trump’s stance? His complete dehumanization of Palestinians. He doesn’t see them as people deserving statehood or basic rights. Instead, he endorsed Israel’s colonial expansion, including West Bank settlements that make a Palestinian state impossible. His so-called “peace plan” (2020) was a sham—offering Palestinians fragmented land without sovereignty, resources, or control.

Western Silence = Complicity in Crimes

Shame not just on Trump, but on the entire Western world for turning a blind eye to genocide. The U.S. and EU have armed and funded Israel for decades, knowing those weapons kill civilians.

This conflict won’t end with one-sided support for the aggressor. Until the U.S. and its allies recognize Palestinian rights to land, life, and dignity, the bloodshed will continue.

If Trump and his Western allies don’t know how to solve the world’s oldest conflict, we Arabs can offer a solution:

1. Cut all military aid to Israel—not one U.S. tax dollar should fund child killings.
2. Recognize Palestine within 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
3. Sanction Israeli officials responsible for war crimes.
4. Launch an international investigation into Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Trump and his enablers must be held accountable for aiding genocide. History will condemn them—and those who stayed silent. This slaughter must end now—before it’s too late.

Why Doesn’t America Want Peace?

As O’Keeffe clearly explains, U.S. foreign policy is driven by three key factors:

1. Military-industrial profits—War is a trillion-dollar businessfor arms dealers, who bribe officials to keep conflicts raging.
2. Geopolitical control—Chaos weakens independent states like Iran, Syria, and Yemen, making them easier to dominate.
3. Media propaganda—American outlets frame aggression as “defending democracy,” hiding the real goal: global domination.

It’s time to expose U.S. lies and its neo-colonial agenda of stoking global hatred and war. The Trump administration proved that its “peace” slogans were just a smokescreen for brute force. Rather than ending conflicts, it recycled old wars with new rhetoric—leaving chaos in its wake.

The Arab world must fight back:

• Demand an end to U.S. interference.
• Expose Washington’s hypocrisy.
• Strengthen ties with independent powers—Russia, China, and Iran.

Only by resisting U.S. hegemony can we secure freedom, independence, and a future of peace. Many nations have already joined BRICS—a coalition for sovereign development beyond Western control.

Enough lies! Enough wars! The crimes of Washington in the Middle East—and across the globe—must end now.

 

Muhammad ibn Faisal al-Rashid, Political Analyst & Middle East Expert

 

https://journal-neo.su/2025/06/05/the-trump-administration-hypocrisy-and-the-perpetuation-of-endless-wars/