On 9 August, a Saudi Arabian airstrike against targets in Yemen was carried out. That strike was a joint effort by a coalition that included the United Arab Emirates and the United States as well. However the American Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, maintained that the US is not “engaged” in the civil war that is taking place in Yemen.
Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.)
A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.)
Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.)
— Nick Turse, Chronicles Magazine, July 2018
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
The world of the terrifying hypothetical is programmatically standard in the Trump White House. Periods of tense calm are followed by careless flights of fury, digs and remonstrations. Mortal enemies become amenable comrades; reliable allies turn into irresponsible skinflints who ought to fork out more for their defence.
(ANTIWAR.COM) — Is the United States preparing to attack Iran? On Friday, Defense Secretary James Mattis dismissed this idea as “fiction,” back when the sources were in the Australian military. Yet other US officials have since been quoted as saying the attack is still being considered. The pretext for this war appears to be the ongoing Yemen War. […]
(ANTIWAR.COM) — Much has been made about the Trump Administration’s hostility toward the media, and orders to keep troop levels classified in various war zones. The Pentagon’s lack of candor with the press is now also a growing problem, and is irking reporters who cover Pentagon briefings. Which is to say, the reporters who are supposed to […]
WASHINGTON – Like Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster before him, Secretary of Defense James Mattis – one of the longest-serving members of the Trump cabinet – may soon be out of a job. Just as was the case for the former secretary of state and the former national security adviser, media reports are now asserting that Mattis has been shut out of major White House decisions for months and is increasingly “out of the loop.”
While key members of his administration oppose him, Donald Trump seems intent on forging ahead with plans to create a sixth military branch–in outer space, as Renee Parsons reports. By Renee Parsons At a recent meeting of the newly-revived National Space…Read more →
It failed to make headlines, but the recent change in name of the U.S. Pacific Command is an ominous sign of a coming U.S. confrontation with China, argues Michael T. Klare. By Michael T. Klare U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis…Read more →
(CJ Opinion) — At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America’s moral authority,” and that “his actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut […]
(ANTIWAR.COM) — An unspecified number of French special forces troops have crossed the border into Syria’s Kurdish region Thursday, entering the town of Rmelan. The troops entered from positions they’d previously held in neighboring Iraq. The exact size of the French military presence in Syria is unclear, but Turkish media report French troops are present at five separate […]
