In a World Aflame, an Antiwar Movement Is Needed More Than Ever

In a World Aflame,
an Antiwar Movement Is Needed More Than Ever

A Message From Doug Bandow

Dear Friends,

America's Afghan project, to create a modern, democratic, centralized nation state in Central Asia, is over. What took 20 years, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars to construct disappeared in little more than a week. Only a few days ago administration strategists were debating whether Kabul had three or six months left and imagining an orderly evacuation of thousands of Americans and Afghan friends. Then over a weekend the Taliban occupied the capital and paraded through the offices of President Ashraf Ghani, who abandoned his people and hopped on a plane out of the country.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is not likely to be long remembered. It was essentially a sham state, with a corrupt and incompetent government, which deployed a faux military, most of whose members felt no loyalty to the institutions they swore to defend. But readers of Antiwar.com will not forget. They have been reading multiple authors over multiple years describing the agony and tragedy of Afghanistan; the sufferings of the Afghan people; the lies told to the American people.

Antiwar.com has informed its readers of the follies of all the post 9/11 wars. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Iraq came next. George W. Bush has criticized President Joe Biden for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the war he started, and Republican politicians claim that Biden had blood on his hands. However, it was Bush, with almost lockstep backing from leading GOP politicians, who launched the ill-fated and immeasurably more destructive invasion of Iraq.

As a result, they are awash in blood. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the sectarian war that resulted 400,000 by one estimate, derived from numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count organization. The Iraq war displaced millions of Iraqis and ravaged communities of religious minorities. It also empowered Iranian militias and loosed al-Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into the Islamic State, killing and destroying across Iraq and Syria.

The next wars were products of the Obama administration, pushed and backed by Republican legislators and the succeeding Trump administration. President Barack Obama pioneered techniques to kill many people while putting fewer Americans at risk.

Demanding UN authority to protect civilians in Libya's civil war, the US and Europeans overthrew Muammar Khadafy and left the competing factions and militias to continue fighting off and on for the following decade. Thousands or tens of thousands of Libyans-estimates vary widely-died in a low-tech civil war. Neighboring countries, most American allies and partners, also intervened, inflaming and expanding the conflict.

Even worse was Yemen, in which the US worked through one of the most odious and authoritarian states on earth, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Only in Washington could an administration talk about human rights with seeming sincerity, while selling, arming, and servicing warplanes used to kill civilians and destroying civilian targets in one of the poorest nations on earth, a nation that had not attacked or threatened anyone.

Antiwar.com has extensively covered all these conflicts and many more. It is a unique web community, battling the brutality of wars around the world and over time. And what might come in the future could be even worse. The overworked yet determined crew at Antiwar.com have detailed the horrors of conflicts past, but despite the high price paid America has been lucky in the post-9/11 era. The US wars have been reckless and needless, but not uniquely costly. However, conflict with a great power-especially nuclear conflict with a great power-would be a disaster. Antiwar.com is closely following the reckless escalation of tensions with Russia and China.

But Antiwar.com needs your help. It receives no money from the infamous military-industrial complex. Establishment foundations provide it with no multi-million-dollar donations. No congressmen earmark bountiful federal grants to underwrite Antiwar.com's operations. Washington lobbyists and backroom operators for big corporations do not show up at Antiwar.com's door with bags of cash. Instead, the folks at Antiwar.com rely on you, the readers, to keep the lights on and articles appearing. Do you benefit from peace? If so, please help preserve it by contributing to Antiwar.com.

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Read Doug's full article here.