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After more than 18 years of war with neither end nor victory in sight, says Tom Engelhardt, absolute failure is the "new success" as Pentagon budgets and arms makers' profits soar while the military-industrial complex enjoys the bounty of endless conflict and blood further than the eye can see. (Photo: Jeff Owens / EyeEm / iStock via Getty Images)
Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country's a nightmare of inequality, and there's a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn't it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.
Oh, you're going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you're right. It's true enough that the U.S. military can't win a war anymore. In this century, it's never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it's set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it's also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.
"In the military of the 21st Century, failure is the new success."
Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don't forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its "caliphate" (it isn't, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.
And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper's reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: "Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was "progress" in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another "corner," admitted to the Inspector General's interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn't exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn't have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed "progress" in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view," a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel."
In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. ("Mission accomplished!")
So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created -- and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.
And just to continue down a list that's little short of endless, don't forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while -- no surprise -- the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.
Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military's footsteps in the region. So, yes, you're right to challenge me with all of that.
How to Run a War of Error
Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you're at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That's so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.
After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it's now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can't find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure -- China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one -- and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there's hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.
Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the "industrial" part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: "Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander." Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it's been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they're used are winnable, as long as they're bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don't believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin's F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn't really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!
And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military's leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you'll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most "confidence" in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn't an accomplishment of the first order.
For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you'll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington's infamous "revolving door" onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You'll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare. You'll be admired by one and all.
Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James "Mad Dog" Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?"
And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America's wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation's fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed "mad dog" and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).
In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine "error," his only true "defeat." Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president's ear -- the magic word "oil," or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields -- to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.
By now, Milley's rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him "a warrior and a statesman." He added, "He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army." Exactly!
Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don't win -- the more you are, in a sense, in error -- the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley's command experience in war and peace gave him "firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities."
In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country's losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America's war of error.
In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan's American-trained and American-supplied security forces: "This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day."
As Tony Karon wrote recently, "Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent." One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably "progress" all the way.
Just in case you don't quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post's Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America's commanders saw little in the way of "progress" in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report's conclusions "mischaracterizations." He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been "honest assessments... never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people."
Oh, and here's a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated -- and not just in Afghanistan either:
"As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley's backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit."
Whatever you do, in other words, don't give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for "success" in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.
Where Defeat Culture Leads
In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam -- though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists -- the men who never for a second figured out how to win "hearts and minds" any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It's a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).
Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, "its graveyard for all to see," as "the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965." Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: "There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident."
Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called "defeat culture" would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn't have been elected to "make America great again" without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.
Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as "the graveyard of empires." The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later. That left the U.S. as the "sole superpower" on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.
And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I've long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn't the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I've since written: "It will undoubtedly be clear enough... that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power's power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism."
The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?
Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military's war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won't be pretty.
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Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country's a nightmare of inequality, and there's a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn't it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.
Oh, you're going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you're right. It's true enough that the U.S. military can't win a war anymore. In this century, it's never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it's set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it's also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.
"In the military of the 21st Century, failure is the new success."
Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don't forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its "caliphate" (it isn't, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.
And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper's reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: "Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was "progress" in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another "corner," admitted to the Inspector General's interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn't exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn't have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed "progress" in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view," a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel."
In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. ("Mission accomplished!")
So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created -- and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.
And just to continue down a list that's little short of endless, don't forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while -- no surprise -- the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.
Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military's footsteps in the region. So, yes, you're right to challenge me with all of that.
How to Run a War of Error
Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you're at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That's so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.
After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it's now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can't find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure -- China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one -- and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there's hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.
Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the "industrial" part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: "Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander." Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it's been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they're used are winnable, as long as they're bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don't believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin's F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn't really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!
And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military's leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you'll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most "confidence" in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn't an accomplishment of the first order.
For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you'll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington's infamous "revolving door" onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You'll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare. You'll be admired by one and all.
Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James "Mad Dog" Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?"
And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America's wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation's fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed "mad dog" and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).
In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine "error," his only true "defeat." Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president's ear -- the magic word "oil," or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields -- to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.
By now, Milley's rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him "a warrior and a statesman." He added, "He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army." Exactly!
Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don't win -- the more you are, in a sense, in error -- the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley's command experience in war and peace gave him "firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities."
In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country's losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America's war of error.
In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan's American-trained and American-supplied security forces: "This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day."
As Tony Karon wrote recently, "Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent." One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably "progress" all the way.
Just in case you don't quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post's Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America's commanders saw little in the way of "progress" in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report's conclusions "mischaracterizations." He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been "honest assessments... never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people."
Oh, and here's a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated -- and not just in Afghanistan either:
"As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley's backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit."
Whatever you do, in other words, don't give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for "success" in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.
Where Defeat Culture Leads
In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam -- though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists -- the men who never for a second figured out how to win "hearts and minds" any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It's a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).
Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, "its graveyard for all to see," as "the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965." Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: "There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident."
Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called "defeat culture" would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn't have been elected to "make America great again" without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.
Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as "the graveyard of empires." The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later. That left the U.S. as the "sole superpower" on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.
And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I've long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn't the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I've since written: "It will undoubtedly be clear enough... that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power's power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism."
The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?
Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military's war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won't be pretty.
Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country's a nightmare of inequality, and there's a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn't it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.
Oh, you're going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you're right. It's true enough that the U.S. military can't win a war anymore. In this century, it's never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it's set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it's also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.
"In the military of the 21st Century, failure is the new success."
Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don't forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its "caliphate" (it isn't, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.
And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper's reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: "Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was "progress" in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another "corner," admitted to the Inspector General's interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn't exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn't have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed "progress" in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view," a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel."
In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. ("Mission accomplished!")
So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created -- and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.
And just to continue down a list that's little short of endless, don't forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while -- no surprise -- the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.
Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military's footsteps in the region. So, yes, you're right to challenge me with all of that.
How to Run a War of Error
Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you're at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That's so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.
After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it's now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can't find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure -- China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one -- and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there's hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.
Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the "industrial" part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: "Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander." Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it's been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they're used are winnable, as long as they're bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don't believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin's F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn't really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!
And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military's leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you'll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most "confidence" in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn't an accomplishment of the first order.
For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you'll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington's infamous "revolving door" onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You'll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare. You'll be admired by one and all.
Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James "Mad Dog" Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?"
And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America's wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation's fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed "mad dog" and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).
In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine "error," his only true "defeat." Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president's ear -- the magic word "oil," or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields -- to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.
By now, Milley's rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him "a warrior and a statesman." He added, "He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army." Exactly!
Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don't win -- the more you are, in a sense, in error -- the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley's command experience in war and peace gave him "firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities."
In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country's losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America's war of error.
In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan's American-trained and American-supplied security forces: "This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day."
As Tony Karon wrote recently, "Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent." One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably "progress" all the way.
Just in case you don't quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post's Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America's commanders saw little in the way of "progress" in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report's conclusions "mischaracterizations." He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been "honest assessments... never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people."
Oh, and here's a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated -- and not just in Afghanistan either:
"As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley's backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit."
Whatever you do, in other words, don't give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for "success" in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.
Where Defeat Culture Leads
In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam -- though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists -- the men who never for a second figured out how to win "hearts and minds" any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It's a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).
Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, "its graveyard for all to see," as "the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965." Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: "There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident."
Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called "defeat culture" would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn't have been elected to "make America great again" without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.
Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as "the graveyard of empires." The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later. That left the U.S. as the "sole superpower" on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.
And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I've long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn't the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I've since written: "It will undoubtedly be clear enough... that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power's power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism."
The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?
Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military's war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won't be pretty.
"Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions," one activist said.
As smoke from Canadian wildfires triggered an air quality alert for New York City and Long Island on Sunday, activists with Climate Defiance disrupted a speech by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in the Hamptons.
The disruption came four days after reports emerged that Zeldin's EPA was set to repeal the 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gas emissions "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." It is this finding that has given the EPA the authority to regulate climate emissions under the Clean Air Act.
"We are in a climate crisis largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels," the first activist to disrupt the speech said, according to video footage shared by Climate Defiance. "And Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions."
Zeldin's speech took place at the Global Breakfast Forum, held at The Hamptons Synagogue.
"What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
Several of the young Jewish activists who disrupted the speech referenced their faith.
"The Torah commands us to be stewards of the Earth, not the oil industry," one activist said.
The audience largely responded with boos and jeers, and one attacked two of the activists with a chair, according to Climate Defiance video footage.
However, the Climate Defiance activists emphasized that Zeldin and the pro-fossil fuel Trump administration were the forces that would ultimately disrupt life and community in the Hamptons.
"History is going to remember you as a monster," one yelled out to Zeldin.
Another said: "Lee Zeldin, you have taken half of a million dollars from fossil fuels. What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
The disrupters also referenced Project 2025 and the broader Trump administration. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, Zeldin's EPA has achieved 57% of the Heritage Foundation road map's objectives.
"Lee Zeldin is carrying out the plans of Project 2025 and fossil fuels to a T," one said. "Your orange overlord does not care about any of you. All of you will be suffering from the rising seas and the worsening climate crisis."
A member of Extinction Rebellion NYC, who assisted with the protest, said in a statement: "Heritage has long been helmed by fossil fuel interests like Koch Industries, which has done some of the heaviest lifting to make sure nothing is done on climate change in the U.S. The majority of these wishes have been executed by Zeldin himself, and through Trump, who asked for $1 billion from oil companies in a dinner at Mar-a-Lago during his campaign. His Big, Beautiful Bill is a wish list directly penned in Project 2025. And when we hit 4°C of warming this century, we will know the true cost of these deadly practices."
Protesters also referenced the repeal of the endangerment finding, climate-fueled extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the smoke pollution clouding the region as Zeldin spoke.
"There is smoke in the air for another summer," one said. "This is only going to get worse and worse."
Both New York City Emergency Management and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued Air Quality Health Advisories through 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Sunday as smoke poured into the region from Canadian wildfires. Air quality was listed as "unhealthy for sensitive groups," and at 11:00 am Eastern Time on Sunday, New York City had the eighth worst air quality of any city on Earth.
The smoke recalled the thick orange haze that blanketed New York and other parts of the Northeast during the record-breaking Canadian wildfire season of 2023. The climate crisis makes wildfires more frequent and extreme.
"There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones," one advocate said.
The Israeli military began instituting tactical pauses in its assault on certain sections of Gaza on Sunday, as part of a plan to allow what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as "minimal humanitarian supplies" to enter the besieged enclave.
Several humanitarian organizations and political leaders described the Israeli approach as vastly insufficient at best and a dangerous distraction at worst, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die of starvation that experts say has been deliberately imposed on them by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
"Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Sunday. "What's needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent cease-fire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture."
Israel announced a plan to institute a daily 10-hour "tactical pause" in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm local time in the populated Gaza localities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Muwasi, as The Associated Press explained.
"These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
However, on Sunday—the first day of the supposed pause—Israeli attacks killed a total of 62 people, Al Jazeera reported, including 34 who were seeking humanitarian relief. Another six people died of hunger, bringing the total death toll from starvation and malnutrition to 133, including 87 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
"The Israeli government's so-called 'tactical pauses' are a cruel and transparent farce," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Sunday. "There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones. These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, called the pause "essential, but long overdue."
"This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza," Lammy said, as The Guardian reported. "We need a cease-fire that can end the war, for hostages to be released, and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered."
The United Nations' World Food Program posted on social media that it welcomed the news of the pause, as well as the creation of more humanitarian corridors for aid, and that it had enough food supplies either in or en route to the area to feed the entire population of Gaza for nearly three months.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will."
Since the border crossings opened on May 27 following nearly three months of total siege, WFP has only been able to bring in 22,000 tons of food aid, about a third of the over 62,000 tons of food aid needed to feed the population of Gaza each month.
While it welcomed the pause, WFP did add that "an agreed cease-fire is the only way for humanitarian assistance to reach the entire civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly, and safe manner—wherever they are across the Gaza Strip."
Joe English, emergency communications specialist for UNICEF, emphasized that the limited pauses proposed by Israel were not the ideal conditions for treating serious malnutrition.
"This is a short turnaround in terms of the notice that we have, and so we cannot work miracles," English told CNN.
English explained that, while UNICEF can treat malnutrition, children who are malnourished require a course of treatments over an extended period of time in order to fully recover, something only truly possible with a cease-fire, which would allow the U.N. to reestablish the 400 aid distribution points it had set up across Gaza before the last cease-fire ended in March.
"We have to be able to reach people and also to reach people where they are," he said. "We can't be expecting people to continue to traverse many miles, often on foot, through militarized areas, to get access to aid."
In addition to bringing in food aid through trucks, Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all began air-dropping aid over the weekend. However, this method has been widely criticized by humanitarian experts as ineffective and even dangerous.
"The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke," U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on social media on Saturday.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates, and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need," Lazzarini wrote.
Palestinians in Gaza also complained about the air drops.
"From 6:00 am until now we didn't eat or drink. We didn't get aid from the trucks. After that, they said that planes will airdrop aid, so we waited for that as well," Massad Ghaban told Reuters. "The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
In a reminder of what is at stake in effectively delivering aid to Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Sunday that "malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July."
WHO continued:
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July—including 24 children under 5, a child over 5, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.
WHO said that the search for lifesaving aid was itself deadly: "Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditions. Since 27 May, more than 1,060 people have been killed and 7,200 injured while trying to access food."
Israeli solders have reported that they had been ordered to fire on Palestinian civilians seeking aid.
In the face of Israel's atrocities, CAIR's Mitchell called for decisive action: "No more statements. Our government, Western nations, and Arab Muslim nations must act immediately to end the genocide, allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza, secure the release of all captives and political prisoners, and hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes. Every moment of inaction contributes to the unimaginable suffering of everyone in Gaza."
"All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful," one organizer said.
Tens of thousands of people in more than 225 towns and cities across the U.S. came out on Saturday as part of the Families First National Day of Action to protest Trump administration and Republican policies that defund the safety net while funneling unprecedented amounts of cash toward immigration enforcement.
The day of action came around three weeks after the U.S. House passed and President Donald Trump signed a budget bill that would strip 17 million of Americans of their health insurance and 2 million of their food aid while making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history.
"Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we are just days away from the 60th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare at the end of this month. These policies represent a promise we made to each other: that no matter the ups and downs of life, our ability to take care of our families, from one generation to the next, should be supported," Ai-jen Poo, executive director of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Common Dreams on Sunday.
"But a big ugly budget bill just passed," Poo continued, "that breaks that promise by making historic cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, by using our tax dollars to stoke fear and rip families apart simply due to their immigration status. This is not what families want, and those who passed it must know that the vast majority of us want our tax dollars to go to healthcare and food, a safety net for families, supporting public funds for families, health, food, and the economic security for all of us, not billionaires."
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country."
Families First is a coalition made up of over 75 organizations including Caring Across Generations, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn, Community Change Action, MomsRising, Planned Parenthood, People's Action Institute, Family Values @ Work, Families Over Billionaires, Fair Share America, Working Families Power, and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Federation of Teachers; and the National Education Association.
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country, hosting over 225 events where we peacefully protested, to show the intergenerational face of those of us prepared to hold the ones who passed this bill accountable every day, and to take action. From spelling out the word 'familia' on the beach in California, taking a Medicaid Motorcade through the state of Indiana, to a rally in D.C. on the National Mall at the seat of power," Poo said.
Here are some highlights from Saturday's day of action.
On the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol building, organizers capped a 60-hour vigil opposing Medicaid cuts with a rally at 12:00 pm ET.
Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change, spoke at the rally on the important role that Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) played in her life.
"I'm here both as an advocate and organizer and as someone who has lived the realities we're fighting to change, as a person who has been directly shaped by the programs that are currently under attack," Wells said. "I was a Medicaid kid, I was a SNAP kid. These programs kept me and my mom and my brother healthy, alive, and moving forward when we had nothing to fall back on."
Families gathered in Newark's Military Park to protest the budget cuts.
"Congress is helping the rich get richer while cutting healthcare, education, and support for working families," New Jersey Citizen Action wrote on social media. "We're making sure everyone knows who's responsible. We're fighting for a country where every child is cared for, no one goes hungry, and we all have access to the healthcare we need to live."
The Indiana Rural Summit planned a "Motorcade for Medicaid" to drive by rural hospitals across the state.
"We're using the event as a touchpoint to demonstrate the importance and value of local hospitals that are at risk of closing because they have historically relied on Medicaid for financial viability," organizer Michelle Higgs told The Republic. "We want to amplify the voices of those who are impacted, whether they're disabled, have a chronic illness, or are elderly."
Union members took to the streets from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington.
SEIU members marched in cities including Tampa; Orlando; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Allentown, Pennsylvania; New York City, Boston; and Las Vegas. Meanwhile, hundreds of union workers protested in downtown Seattle.
In Connecticut, SEIU members marched to the Brennan Rogers Magnet School, which closed due to a state funding shortfall.
"Cleaners, healthcare workers, construction workers, we are the ones that make this country run and we ask for no special privileges in return. but we are under attack," Ciro Gutierrez, a 32BJSEIU Connecticut commercial member, said.
Reflecting on the day of action, Poo concluded: "All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful. When we share our stories, we break through. When we stand side by side—from small towns to big cities—we can't be ignored. And we won't be divided."