Michael T. Klare at The Nation writes—In Trump’s Cruise-Missile Diplomacy, Iran and North Korea Could Be Next:
In the few months since he has occupied the White House, moreover, Trump has demonstrated ever-increasing comfort with the use of force, giving his top military officials—“my generals,” as he likes to call them—greater leeway to plan and conduct military actions in active war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. [...]
Officers at the Central Command (Centcom), responsible for US combat operations in Iraq and Syria, have also spoken of the greater flexibility that President Trump has given them. As they prepared for a higher tempo of military operations against ISIS, as demanded by Trump, “We recognized the nature of the fight was going to change and that we had to ensure that authorities [sic] were down to the right level and that we empowered the on-scene commander,” Centcom commander Gen. Joseph Votel said in late March.
This delegation of “authorities” to lower-level commanders resulted in a March decision by Votel to deploy an additional 400 soldiers in Syria without first securing a presidential go-ahead; the White House was reportedly notified of the decision, but only after Secretary Mattis had given his approval and the deployment was in motion. Many observers also believe that this leave-it-to-local-commanders approach was partly responsible for the March 17 air strike on a residential compound in western Mosul that left over 200 Iraqi civilians dead, including many children.
The Tomahawk strikes against Syria on April 7 should be viewed against this backdrop. [...]
TOP COMMENTS
QUOTATION
“They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire.”
~Jackson Browne, "Lives in the Balance," 1986
At this date on Daily Kos in 2010—A Fatal Mischance:
Yesterday, hope for a miracle deep beneath the mountains of West Virginia was extinguished as the bodies of the last four miners were found. The cause of the explosion that took the lives of 29 men has not yet been determined, but from the nature and strength of the explosion, it seems likely that it involved both a build up of methane and an accumulation of coal dust—both of which should have been prevented by adequate supervision and implementation of safety regulations.
The CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, is even more wealthy than [Coal Company magnate Bob] Murray. He donates huge amounts to conservative causes, has funded a good chunk of the Tea Party movement in West Virginia, famously spent over $3 million to get a friendly judge elected to the state Supreme Court, and donated another $3 million in an attempt to fund a Republican takeover of the state legislature. Blankenship regularly engages in calling Democratic leaders "the crazies" and has said that any move to regulate pollution is the first step toward communism. Grist named Blankenship the "scariest polluter" in the country.
Now that Blankenship's disregard for safety has cost the lives of 29 men, what should we expect?
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