Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A collection from the Transnational Institute (TNI)

Nathan J. Robinson interviewing Osamah Khalil ,  the author of   A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden “ You do something a little unusual in this book, which is hinted at in the subtitle. We are used to thinking about America's wars abroad and America's wars at home separately, in different domains. We talk about the history, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, or we might talk about the war on drugs, but you put it all together and see it as one kind of unified history, domestic and foreign. Tell us why you think we need to consider America's wars as one category that includes domestic and foreign .” An interesting book, but it seems there is no grounding of 'domestic and foreign policy' in political economy, not even a section or a question in the long interview. Deindustrialisation and inequality, for instance, are part of the ‘domestic war’. 

A massacre and one soldier Wrath of the centurions

The winning side

Indiscriminate airstrikes have been a U.S. hallmark from the “banana wars” to the forever wars. Related Legacy of Violence My Lai 1968 Source: britannica.com

“It took just a few years after the US withdrew from Vietnam for some great films to arrive, including Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978). The Covenant and other tentative responses suggest that while filmmakers are now setting their stories in Afghanistan, coming to grips with that conflict on screen may take a lot longer. The Hollywood landscape is more cautious than ever today, and the US too politically divided for movies to risk alienating half the audience.” State terrorism is represented as a victim or a hero.  Kandahar (released in the US on 26 May) is a Gerard Butler action movie about a CIA operative trapped in a dangerous part of Afghanistan with his interpreter. The trailer shows Butler saying "Nobody's coming to save us", a cue for the two of them to battle the enemies and save each other.” “Most films about battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are determinedly apolitical, praising the heroism of the soldiers as a way of sidestepping deeper issues ab...

“Despite  being funded  in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate).” This is a liberal nationalist view of a former American military professor and Air Force officer. All his emphasis on ‘lies’ by the military and the propaganda of war without mentioning what he calls the ‘truth’ is keeps the reader wondering, bewildered perhaps. Not a single mention of the political economy of war , especially of the nature and functioning of American capital. You just get the impression that a few liars at the top cause wars as if politicians, strategists of empire, ruling classes, advisors, etc think and work outside a socio-political frame work of power structure and power relations domestically and internationally. There is a mention of ‘honour’ a...

A book review.  The full text is subject to subscription, but what is available is enough I think to encourage us to explore the book.  Photography, War and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq

This is a very good novel. Extracts from The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. In those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in his declaration of our country’s independence.  In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin Engl...

The Russian regime refuses to call the invasion of Ukraine a war. It was not until 1999 that the French Assembly designated the Algerian War (1954-62) as a war . The American Congress never designated the war on Vietnam as a war . In October 2002 the American Congress adopted ‘Iraq Resolution’ that would be known as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, and was not designated as a war. ….. 

America must now lift its knee from the world

  From colonialism to Covid-19

 Did America commit war crimes in Vietnam? Related The most notorious war crime of the Vietnam era

 History of Women’s Movements in Asia and the Middle East

A very, very short account that doesn't include economic and cultural aspects. Note that more recent studies put the numbers of Iraqis killed by the sanctions to an estimate between 200 and 300 thousand. Chomsky then was still relying on studies done by journals like The Lancet, for example, which put the number in "the hundreds of thousands".

Nationalism Painted Red

From World War II to Vietnam and Syria, drugs are often as much a part of conflict as bombs and bullets