TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Ukraine has become a graveyard for Russians — and for modern weapons systems

Lucian K. Truscott IV,

 Salon
April 02, 2022

Ukraine Defense Ministry handout

The word "miscalculation" has been thrown around a lot to describe Vladimir Putin's attempt to annex Ukraine, but perhaps his biggest miscalculation lay in thinking he could do it using tanks as his primary weapon. It's clear as the sixth week of the war begins that his apparent plan was to send a column of tanks rumbling into Kyiv, blow up a few things, send Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government scampering away in fear, declare victory, install a puppet president and go home. Evidence that his plan was a strategic, tactical and political failure is showing on your television screens around the clock. If there is one image that will symbolize forever this war, it will be a blown-up Russian tank, its treads sagging and its turret tilted, rusting by the side of the road in Ukraine.

Thirty years ago, this country used two armored cavalry regiments, a mechanized infantry division and a 400 helicopter-strong air assault to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. Huge formations of tanks crossed the border from Saudi Arabia following massive airstrikes on Iraqi positions. During the assault, three epic tank battles were fought in the desert of Kuwait, one of which is thought to have been the largest tank battle in American history. In less than 100 hours of fighting, U.S. forces destroyed 1,350 Iraqi tanks and 1,224 armored personnel carriers (APCs). In all, some 5,000 Iraqi armored combat vehicles were destroyed, damaged or captured. The U.S. military lost a single Bradley fighting vehicle. What is now known as the first Gulf War was the most celebrated and successful use of armored weaponry in modern history. It seemed as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles rolled to victory in Kuwait City that powerful armored vehicles had proved their worth as weapons of modern war.

RELATED: Putin's massive miscalculation: Echoes of George W. Bush — and a lesson for America's elites

Putin's attempt to take that lesson and apply it to Ukraine has failed abjectly, and it's not just because the deserts of a Kuwait winter are more amenable to tank battles than the muddy flatlands of an Eastern European spring. Yes, 30 years have passed, and Russia has not kept up with modern technology and tactics, but it's more than that. The fierce determination of Ukraine's fighters has played an outsized role throwing Russian forces into disarray, but size and money and ease of use have played large roles, too.

Russian tanks have met their match because of two Western-made rockets, the U.S. Javelin and the British Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW). Both are lightweight, easily portable, deadly accurate, relatively inexpensive and designed to get around every attempt of modern armor design to defeat them. Lightly armored Russian personnel carriers, constructed mostly of aluminum, can be destroyed using Russia's own RPG-7 rocket launcher, which was designed and deployed more than 60 years ago.

Ukrainian forces have expertly used the Javelin and the NLAW to destroy Russian tanks as they have moved in convoys and deployed in combat to assault Ukrainian cities and towns. The weapons are carried by infantry soldiers on foot and can be fired from positions of cover and concealment. Both are "fire and forget" weapons, meaning that once they have been aimed at a target and tracked for a short period, they can be fired by the user, who is then able to drop the weapon and move away to safety. The NLAW is disposable. The weapon is meant to fire a single missile and then be discarded. The American Javelin can be reloaded and used to fire multiple missiles, but in an emergency can be discarded if the soldier using it has come under fire and must retreat from his or her position. Both weapons are designed to use high-tech location systems to hit the tops of tank turrets where they are lightly armored and highly vulnerable.

But here is the real deal: The NLAW disposable missile costs around $25,000, and the Javelin rocket launcher system costs about $180,000 and fires a missile that costs around $75,000. Both rocket launchers are being used in Ukraine to destroy tanks that cost upwards of $2 million each. The cost differential is obvious. It's even better when you consider the RPG-7, which costs around $1,000 and fires missiles that can cost as little as $100 each. (Costs can go up to as much as $500 for RPG warheads when they use armor piercing or air-burst technology.) Their cost-effectiveness is amazing when you consider that they're being used to knock out Russian APCs costing more than $1 million each. In Iraq, the same RPGs were used by insurgents to bring down American Apache and Blackhawk helicopters that cost between $6 million and $13 million each, depending on the model and year of manufacture.

Ukraine has also made use of armed drones against Russia's heavy armor, such as the T-72 tank. The drones were acquired from Turkey and fire "smart" bombs that are much more expensive than Javelin rounds but have been extremely effective, especially when used to destroy tanks in convoys, where even one disabled tank becomes an obstacle to every vehicle behind it. The infamous 40-mile Russian convoy that moved slowly from the Belarus border to positions around Kyiv was stalled repeatedly by Ukrainian drones and anti-tank weapons fired by infantry. RPGs were also used to take out Russian ammunition and fuel trucks, making the units they were meant to serve less combat-effective.

In fact, Russia's use of armored weapons like tanks and APCs has been a bust. The only thing the Russian military has been effective at doing is standing back from Ukrainian cities and shelling civilian areas with artillery and rocket launchers, which is to say the one thing they've been really good at is committing war crimes. Russia has also been very reluctant to employ its helicopters for both air-mobile infantry and gunship use because the Ukrainian military has been supplied with Stinger and other anti-aircraft missiles, which have been used to take down Russian helicopters as well as fighter-bomber jet aircraft. The cost differential between the ground-based Stingers and expensive Russian air force jets is enormous, which is why Russia has failed to achieve air superiority despite its far better equipped air force and army helicopter units. They have been reluctant to put them in the air, knowing Ukrainians with Stingers are waiting for them on the ground.

The Pentagon has for several decades had a team of military officers from the three major services, along with civilian defense experts and scientists, whose task is to look 25 years ahead, constantly trying to predict what the warfare of the future will look like and prepare for it. Thirty years ago, when the U.S. drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait, we didn't face anti-tank weapons like the Javelin and NLAW. The technology of that time was the plain and simple LAW, a disposable anti-tank weapon that fired an inaccurate unguided warhead that wasn't capable of penetrating American armor, much less the enemy armor of that time.

The Pentagon doesn't talk much about what its seers into warfare's future are up to, but they must be studying what has happened to Russian armor faced with the much smaller and less well-equipped Ukrainian army. Russia has had major problems moving its armored units from their positions across the border before the war into Ukraine, even more problems supplying their tanks and APCs with fuel once they were underway, and problems after that resupplying and refueling tanks once they reached positions where they could be used in combat to invade Ukrainian cities and take territory. Tanks have historically been one of an army's weapons of terror. Their fearsome appearance and firepower has had an understandably intimidating effect on both infantry soldiers and defenses in place.

But tanks sitting still on a road, packed closely together, like those we saw in the infamous 40-mile convoy at the beginning of the war aren't intimidating at all. They are targets, and now many of them are scrap heaps of twisted steel and limp tracks and crooked turrets, all because a foot soldier carrying a 25-pound missile launcher was able to sneak up close enough to fire a warhead that cost less than one percent of the cost of the tank. Those kinds of figures, as they say, are not sustainable. Nor is the tank as a weapon of modern war.

Bombed out: Why we keep on making war, and tolerating it

War is brand new every time it happens, and it's one of our oldest ideas. We claim to hate it, but it's part of us

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
PUBLISHED MARCH 19, 2022

A man walks amid debris in front of a residential apartment complex that was heavily damaged by a Russian attack on March 18, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Russian forces remain on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, but their advance has stalled in recent days, even while Russian strikes - and pieces of intercepted missiles - have hit residential areas in the north of Kyiv. An estimated half of Kyiv's population has fled to other parts of the country, or abroad, since Russia invaded on February 24. 

(Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

The hardest thing I do as a writer is trying to find words to describe the indescribable. It doesn't matter what it is — beauty or bliss or sadness or tragedy or dullness or despair or horror or ecstasy or the ordinary — it's the writer's job. I remember as a young man having a dream that someday I might come up with one great idea. Just one would do it, but that was my goal. Now I realize what I've been doing for more than 50 years is excavating old ideas and finding new ways to express them.

We are witnessing one of man's very oldest ideas in Ukraine. Call it the will to power or the urge to take what is not yours or the wrath of ignorance and pride, every time war is waged it is the same. War is man's inhumanity to man on a mass scale.

Perhaps that is why we become so readily inured to images of war. We have seen them all before — the anguished, bleeding faces of the wounded, the bleakly inert limbs of the dead, the angry fire of explosions, the darkness and sameness of destruction — to borrow Hannah Arendt's term, the sheer banality of it all.
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RELATED: Ukraine and the dark lessons of war: What does it mean to "take" a country or a city?

War is brand new when it first happens, yet after only a day it is already old to us because it has been headlined on the front pages of newspapers, featured on the covers of magazines, flickered across our televisions, splashed on the big screen of movies in Technicolor, engraved in the text of great novels and first-person reports from the front. The most extraordinary scene in the 1970 movie "Patton," the one that I believe gives it staying power, comes when Gen. George S. Patton is on a bluff in North Africa or Sicily seeming to reminisce about having been at that exact spot before during ancient battles. He ends his oration by saying this about war: "I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life."

I don't know if Patton ever said the lines from the movie in real life, but I do know that after I took my grandmother, Sara Randolph Truscott, to see "Patton" the week it came out, I asked her what she thought, and she turned to me and answered with a little smile, "Why, it was just like being in the room with Georgie," calling him by a nickname only his family and close friends used.

Her late husband and my grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., knew Patton and served on the same cavalry posts with him between the wars. It's safe to assume she would have known what the man was like, so that's probably as good an assessment we'll ever get of the movie's essence. In Patton's rumination on war, he is saying the unsayable out loud. It makes him seem like a monster, but we are all monsters, we humans who love war, or at least tolerate it such that we keep waging it over and over and over again.

It chills the soul to think that he might be right, but here we are again, 52 years after "Patton" was released, bearing witness to yet another war being fought over the same ground, in the same cities, for largely the same reasons as the war against the Nazis that Ukraine (and Russia) fought 81 years ago. It's tempting to ask why nothing is ever new, but I'm afraid we know the answer all too well.

There is one image of war we haven't yet seen in the coverage of Russia's war against Ukraine. We've seen people sheltering in subway stations and basements and people traveling by train or by car to get to western Ukraine or Poland to escape the bombing and shelling. But we haven't seen the people left behind who don't have the wherewithal or money or even the energy to escape the cities and towns being bombed, and who end up stuck trying to survive in the ruins. I saw an interview with an expert on Ukraine this week who said that 10 percent of the population already lived below the poverty line of about $5 or $6 a day, even before the war began. It won't take long for as many as 90 percent of Ukrainians to be in the same position, he said.

I am certain that there are already people in Ukraine living in the bombed-out ruins of rural homes and urban apartment buildings with no electricity, heat, source of food or water — just existing on nothing. Because I haven't traveled to Ukraine to cover this war, and because all wars are essentially the same, I'll tell you what I saw in Afghanistan in March of 2004 in the ruins of some old apartment complexes and office buildings on the edge of Kabul.

It was like a landscape out of a near-future movie about the world after the Big Bomb, but it was real: Families had fashioned shelters out of the rubble of the buildings, using scrap wood and metal for roofs and more wood scraps and piles of rubble and cheap carpets and blankets for walls, and they were living in the midst of this horrific destruction without electricity or water and only small cooking fires for heat. Here and there, I could see pits that had been dug out of the dirt and sealed with mud walls to make bread ovens, where they could bake flatbread by slapping dough on the curved walls of the pits. But none of the ovens had fires going, because the families didn't have any flour and water to make dough.

I had stopped at a small bakery next door to the Mustafa Hotel, where I was staying in Kabul, and picked up a bag of sugar cookies that I planned on eating as snacks later in my room. I had the bag stashed in a kilim shoulder bag I was carrying, but almost immediately upon entering the ruins, I was surrounded by a crowd of starving children. Their faces were dirty from having not been washed in weeks, and many of them had open infections oozing pus on their legs and arms. They were pawing at me and chattering in Dari and my translator told me they were asking for food and water, so I took out the bag of cookies and began handing them out. It was like being set upon by a pack of wolves, their fingers were tugging and scratching at my pant legs and arms as I tried to spread the cookies evenly between the children. Within a minute or two, they were all gone and the children disappeared into gaps in the rubble and behind the thin rugs where their mothers huddled in the cold.

With my translator, I tried to talk to a few of the women to get their stories: How they had ended up in these ruins in Kabul, how long they had been there, the usual questions a reporter asks in a war. Their husbands, the fathers of the children, had all been killed in fighting between Afghan factions or by the Taliban or by U.S. soldiers, so there were no men in the ruins. My translator explained that widowed women with children were undesirable and were shunned in their villages, which was why they had traveled from distant areas looking for shelter and work and aid from NGOs in Kabul. They had noplace else to go; that's why they were living in the ruins among the detritus of war.

I went back to the ruins once more before I left Afghanistan and handed out flatbread and some bottled water this time. The scene was the same. The children clawed at me desperately. It was all I could do not to throw down the bag of bread and the water bottles and run.

When I returned to L.A. a week or so later, there was a sore on my left forefinger that wouldn't heal. I went to my GP. He examined my finger and took a swab and asked me to wait while he had it tested. A couple of hours later the test came back. It was an MRSA infection. He asked me what I had come in contact with in Afghanistan that might have caused it, and I thought immediately of the children in Kabul with their open sores and cracked lips and desperate eyes. I had touched them repeatedly while handing out cookies and bread in the ruins.

The doctor gave me a big shot of antibiotics and put me on the only pill known to knock down MRSA infections. The sore got worse for a couple of days and then began to heal. The doctor told me that if I had waited to get it treated for even a day longer, I would probably have lost my finger. If I had neglected the infection longer, I could have lost my hand.

This is one of the very old ideas about war I have excavated: After the bombs have fallen and the artillery shells have exploded and the missiles have found their targets, what is left are women and children with no money, no food, no water, living in bombed-out ruins with no place else to go. That was what happened in Afghanistan, and it happened in Sicily and Vietnam and Korea and Iraq and Aleppo and Rome and Jerusalem and Cairo and Mogadishu, and now it is happening in Ukraine. History becomes present becomes future and nothing changes. The thing that is forever is war.


LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. You can read his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Read more on the Ukraine war and its consequences:
Endless war is back — as the merchants of death waltz us toward Armageddon
Putin's invasion of Ukraine exposes the Fox News-QAnon feedback loop
Why I'm going to Ukraine: We deserve the truth — and that's my job

THEY STILL DO
Opinion | Poison Pills and Deadly Powders: When Presidents Ordered Assassinations

Amid calls to target Putin, it’s worth recalling why the U.S. has stopped trying to kill foreign heads of state.


President Eisenhower at his desk on March 16, 1959. | Bob Schutz/AP Photo

Opinion by STEPHEN KINZER
03/13/2022 
Stephen Kinzer's new book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

America’s rage at a foreign demon has rarely been as intense as our current fixation on Vladimir Putin. He is this generation’s Mao or Castro, its Gadhafi or Saddam or Khomeini, the rampaging and perhaps deranged foreign tyrant who personifies everything we hate and fear. Many in Washington see last month’s invasion of Ukraine as entirely his doing. Some believe the world will never be at peace as long as he lives and rules. From there it’s a short step to wishing him “sawed off” — as Dwight Eisenhower put it when he ordered Fidel Castro’s assassination in 1960.

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” Sen. Lindsey Graham mused recently. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

In some circles it might be considered imprudent for a leading political figure to urge the murder of a foreign leader. Graham, however, was only expressing publicly what some of his colleagues may wish privately. The reasoning is simple. If Putin is the problem, “eliminate” Putin and the problem disappears.

Such open calls for political murder are rare. The Fox News host Sean Hannity jumped aboard, reasoning that “You cut off the head of the snake and you kill the snake. Right now, the snake is Vladimir Putin.” Others are less explicit about their wishes for Putin’s death or overthrow. When a spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was struck by an attack of honesty and admitted that sanctions on Russia are intended “to bring down the Putin regime,” she was quickly corrected. Yet when senators including Graham, Cory Booker, Marco Rubio and Amy Klobuchar co-sponsor a resolution accusing Russia of “flagrant acts of aggression and other atrocities rising to the level of crimes against humanity and war crimes,” they are clearly putting a target on his chest.

Two deep fallacies undermine this argument. First is the premise itself — that a different Russian leader might seek an accord to withdraw troops from Ukraine. No one who hopes to secure power in Moscow, however, could ever accept Ukraine’s entry into NATO or the presence of hostile troops on Ukrainian soil. Any Russian president who did so would be seen as exposing his country to mortal danger and quickly deposed. Removing Putin would not alter Russia’s determination never to tolerate an enemy army on another of its borders.

The second and more illuminating argument against killing foreign leaders is the poor record we have in past attempts. We’ve tried it repeatedly. Often we have failed, but even when we seem to have succeeded, the long-term consequences have been terrible. An order from the Oval Office to assassinate a foreign leader would not break a taboo. It would only be the latest in a series of self-defeating blunders.

So far as is known, Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to order such assassinations. He began by targeting Premier Zhou Enlai of China. During the 1950s, Eisenhower and nearly every other policymaker in Washington considered the “Red Chinese” to be maniacal fanatics bent on world conquest. When Zhou announced in 1955 that he would travel to Bandung, Indonesia, for a momentous conference of Asian and African leaders, the CIA saw a chance to kill him. Zhou chartered an Air India jet for his flight to Bandung. It exploded in midair, killing 16 passengers. But Zhou had not boarded. China called it “murder by the special service organizations of the United States.”

After Zhou landed safely on another flight, CIA Director Allen Dulles decided to try again. He directed the chief of the CIA’s chemical division, Sidney Gottlieb, to prepare poison. Gottlieb made one that would kill Zhou 48 hours after it was dropped into his rice bowl — presumably after he was back home in China, giving the Americans plausible deniability. This plot was aborted at the last moment when Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., then serving as a deputy CIA director, learned of it and exploded in anger. Fearing that CIA involvement would become known, according to his biographer, he “confronted Dulles and forced him to cancel the operation.”

Gottlieb destroyed all his files upon leaving the CIA in 1973. As a result — and because of the tradition that assassination orders must never be explicit — no details of the Zhou Enlai plot have been discovered. It was the strict policy of the CIA, however, never to embark on something as serious as assassinating a head of government without presidential approval.

Evidence ties Eisenhower more directly to other plots. During the summer of 1960, he was preoccupied by political murders. His main target was the demon who would obsess American leaders for generations and still does today, even though he is dead: Fidel Castro. On May 13, 1960, after receiving a briefing from Allen Dulles, he ordered Castro “sawed off.”

“In that period of history, its meaning would have been clear,” Richard Bissell, then the CIA’s covert action chief, testified years later. “Eisenhower was a tough man behind that smile.”

Eisenhower’s order set off a wild series of assassination attempts. For more than three years, CIA planners considered plots ranging from a sniper shot to an exploding seashell. The most elaborate ones involved toxins or devices designed by Sidney Gottlieb. They included, according to a later Senate report, “poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.”

While waiting for news of success in his plot against Castro — which never came — Eisenhower ordered another assassination. His victim was to be Patrice Lumumba, a defiant nationalist who was elected prime minister of the Congo in May 1960. Eisenhower feared Lumumba’s challenge to Western power in a huge African country that controls vast mineral riches.

On the morning of Aug. 18, 1960, Allen Dulles received an electrifying cable from the CIA station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin. “Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government,” it said. “Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba.” Dulles took the cable to the Oval Office.

From 11:10 to 11:23 that morning, according to Eisenhower’s official calendar, he held an “off the record meeting” with Dulles and other CIA officers. After hearing their report, the note-taker wrote, the president “turned to Dulles and said something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated. There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds, and the meeting continued.” Senate investigators later pinpointed this moment as the point when Eisenhower “circumlocutiously” ordered Lumumba’s assassination.

What does a president do after giving such an order? Eisenhower posed for a photo with the departing Ecuadorian ambassador, had lunch, and then decamped to Bethesda for an afternoon of golf at Burning Tree Club. In case anyone missed the point, he sent his national security adviser, Gordon Grey, to the next meeting of the CIA’s covert action “special group” with instructions to convey “top-level feeling in Washington that vigorous action would not be amiss.”

A couple of weeks later, Devlin received a cable from CIA headquarters telling him to expect a visit from an officer who would identify himself as “Joe from Paris.” When the officer arrived, Devlin recognized him as Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s poison-maker. Gottlieb handed him a packet containing a vial of liquid botulinum and told him he was to use it to kill Lumumba.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin cried. “Who authorized this operation?”

“President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb told him. “I wasn’t there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.” Then he helpfully added: “With the stuff that’s in here, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.”

Devlin managed to organize a coup in which Lumumba was overthrown but not killed. He remained immensely popular both at home and abroad. Devlin’s efforts to penetrate his security ring and poison him, including an attempt to slip him a tube of tainted toothpaste, all failed. That didn’t discourage Allen Dulles. “We wish to give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming government position,” he wrote in one cable. At one point Devlin and his officers considered using a “commando type group” to capture him. Then they asked if a sharpshooter with a “high powered foreign made rifle” could be found.

“Hunting good here when light’s right,” one CIA officer observed in a cable to headquarters.

The CIA’s poison ultimately went unused, but Devlin found another way to complete his mission. On November 27, Lumumba slipped out of the home where he was being held under Congolese and United Nations guard. Devlin set out to find and capture him. His key partners were intelligence officers from Belgium, the former colonial power, which had become fabulously wealthy by exploiting the Congo’s mineral wealth. Together, they had Lumumba tracked, seized, tortured and delivered to his most murderous local enemies. A Congolese squad executed him under watchful Belgian eyes. No American was present.

Years later, an interviewer asked Allen Dulles if he regretted any of his operations. “I think that we overrated the danger in, let’s say, the Congo,” he replied. Devlin agreed.

“None of us had any real concept of what he stood for,” Devlin later wrote of Lumumba. “He was simply an unstable former postal clerk with great political charisma, who was leaning toward the Communist bloc. In Cold War terms, he represented the other side. The fact that he was first and foremost an African nationalist who was using the East-West rivalry to advance his cause was played down by the Belgians, who greatly feared him.”

When Eisenhower left office in January 1961, he could count one successful assassination — Lumumba, in concert with the Belgians — and two failures: Zhou Enlai and Castro. His successor, John F. Kennedy, focused intently on Castro. Especially after the spectacular failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, he absorbed Eisenhower’s view that Castro must be “sawed off.”

“There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the president, Bobby Kennedy — who after all was his right-hand man — to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found,” former CIA director Richard Helms later told congressional investigators. The Kennedy administration sought relentlessly to kill Castro, even as it sent peace feelers to him through secret channels. On the very day President Kennedy was assassinated, a CIA officer in Paris passed a poison device to an operative who was to use it to kill Castro.

Kennedy also embraced another of Eisenhower’s Caribbean plots, aimed at the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Both presidents detested Trujillo and feared that his brutal rule might produce a Castro-style revolution. In July 1960, while Eisenhower was in office, the CIA delivered 12 “sterile” rifles with telescopic sights to anti-Trujillo plotters. Nine months later, with Kennedy in the White House, it delivered three carbines. The plotters carried out their tyrannicide on May 30, 1961. Democracy emerged a couple of years later, but the United States decided it could not tolerate that democracy because President Juan Bosch seemed too leftist and sympathetic to Castro. That led the United States to launch its 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic and to stage-manage the election of a former Trujillo ally, Joaquin Balaguer, who went on to dominate the country for much of the next 30 years.

The assassination that most tormented Kennedy was one that he set in motion but did not realize he had ordered. In a jumble of diplomatic missteps, and without a direct presidential command, the Kennedy administration authorized the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. On Nov. 1, 1963, assured of U.S. support, plotters carried out their coup and then assassinated Diem.

“Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, later wrote of the moment when news of Diem’s death landed in the Oval Office. “He had always insisted Diem must never suffer more than exile, and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.” This killing, the historian Staley Karnow wrote, “haunted US leaders during the years ahead, prompting them to assume a larger burden in Vietnam.”

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, embraced covert action, as have all modern American presidents, but did not emulate his two predecessors by authorizing assassination. The day after Kennedy was killed, he showed a visitor a portrait of Diem and said, “We had a hand in murdering him. Now it’s happening here.” Later Johnson wondered if Kennedy’s assassination was “divine retribution.” He also expressed disgust for the plots against Castro and Trujillo: “We were running a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

Americans are impatient by nature. We want quick solutions, even to complex problems. That makes killing a foreign leader seem like a good way to end a war. Every time we have tried it, though, we’ve failed — whether or not the target falls. Morality and legality aside, it doesn’t work. Castro thrived on his ability to survive American plots. In the Congo, almost everything that has happened since Lumumba’s murder has been awful.

Our record in carrying out regime change short of murder is hardly better. The CIA-directed overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 cast Iran into a political whirlwind from which it still has not escaped. A year later, the CIA coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala aborted a ten-year democratic experiment and set that country on a path toward civil war and genocide.

Soon after the Guatemala coup, Eisenhower invited Allen Dulles and other CIA officers to the White House for official congratulations. They presented an elaborate account of their operation, complete with charts, slides, and film clips. Eisenhower had one question.

“Why the hell didn’t you catch Arbenz?” he asked.

“Mr. President,” came the reply, “that would have set a very dangerous precedent for you.”

Ukraine and the dark lessons of war: What does it mean to 'take' a country or a city?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
March 05, 2022

Ukraine Rebel troops (AFP)

Kherson, a port city in the south of Ukraine, has fallen to Russian forces. It is an important port on the Dnieper River delta, and military strategists say that now that the Russians have taken Kherson, they can turn their attention to Odessa to the west, Ukraine's third largest city, a major port and a center of tourism on the Black Sea.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Meanwhile to the north, Ukraine's two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, remain under siege, with Russian forces targeting civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately. According to the UN, the number of civilians killed by Russian bombs and shelling is approaching 1,000, but judging from what I've seen in television coverage, it's likely much higher. A video on the website of the New York Times on Thursday showed what appear to be projectiles fired from a Russian rocket launcher hitting a civilian neighborhood in Chernihiv, a city to the east and north of Kyiv. You can see civilian pedestrians on the street near where the rockets were about to hit, and then you can't see them. The video has red circles picking out six rocket warheads as they fly in and strike the street and surrounding buildings.

I've also seen a video showing cluster munitions striking an apartment complex in Kharkiv. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons that are banned under international agreements that Russia and the U.S., among others, have not signed. There are no concentrations of Ukrainian army forces on battlefields in this war against which cluster munitions could legitimately be used. The fact that these bombs are landing in neighborhoods populated entirely by civilians suggests that Russian forces have been issued the munitions specifically to target civilian human beings.

Numerous photographs emerged this week of extensive damage to civilian neighborhoods in various cities in Ukraine showing the faces of apartment complexes entirely blown off, fires in what appear to be office and apartment buildings, and other damage to civilian areas.

What does it mean to "take" a city like Kyiv or Kharkiv or Kherson? Russian military commanders have clearly been ordered to "take" these Ukrainian population centers in the process of conquering and occupying the entire country. But from video footage of this war — and from the evidence of every other war in history — "taking" a city pretty much means destroying it, as in the famous GI saying that became a symbol of the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

What is the purpose of an aggressor "taking" a city, or even the entire country, if in the process you are destroying the thing you say you want? If you are the one who ordered the invasion — in this case, Vladimir Putin — what do you do after you have "taken" a country you have destroyed, and how do you plan to deal with a population you have devastated by intentionally killing them with your military forces?

The contrast between "taking" a city or a country and what happens after that defines the essence of war. Look at Aleppo, for example, one of the Syrian cities the Russian air force was credited with helping to "take" from rebel forces opposing the Assad regime. Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and one of the capitals of the cradle of civilization. It has a history that goes back to a time before the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Dozens if not hundreds of wars were fought over thousands of years between rulers of Aleppo and the kings and potentates of Ur and Babylon, in what is now Iraq, and the Egyptian empire. Aleppo was destroyed and rebuilt again and again. The ruins of Assad's and Russia's war on Aleppo sit on top of the ruins of one king's destroyed empire after another.

In the modern context, that's exactly what is happening today in Ukraine. The Russian army has been ordered to "take" Ukraine, and in so doing it is destroying Ukraine's cities and killing its citizens. In the coming days, we will no doubt see the ruins of onion-domed Orthodox cathedrals that have been destroyed in Kyiv and Kharkiv. I looked at Google Maps to check out Chernihiv, the city mentioned above that was hit hard by Russian rockets and artillery on Wednesday and Thursday. Along with several elaborate Orthodox cathedrals, there is something called the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv located next to the Hypermarket Vena and the city's Hospital No. 2. Already we are seeing videos and reading reports of hospitals and schools destroyed in Kyiv, and I expect that soon we will see the ruins of the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv alongside a hospital battered by Russian artillery shells and rockets.

There is a contradiction between the orders given in wars and what those orders accomplish. When armies of aggression invade foreign nations, the homes and apartment buildings and hospitals and grocery stores don't belong to those armies, so they just follow orders and destroy them. Sometimes the destruction occurs by accident, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is being done on purpose on the orders of the Russian president.

You don't have to take the Ukrainians' word to understand that this is Putin's intent. All you have to do is see that he has issued rocket launchers with thermobaric missiles to his army, with the apparent intention of using them against Ukrainian cities. Thermobaric warheads, also known as "vacuum bombs," are not intended to destroy military fortifications. They have one purpose, and that is to kill human beings by exploding a gas cloud that sucks the oxygen from the air around the explosion, collapsing the lungs of anyone near it. There has been video footage that appears to show these missiles landing in civilian neighborhoods where people are walking down the street. The Russians are not even trying to hide what they're doing. They've allowed American TV reporters to film TOS-1 rocket launchers mounted on T-72 tank chassis as they cross the border into Ukraine on their way to Kharkiv. The only purpose of these rocket launchers is to fire thermobaric warheads.

The defenders of cities and countries under attack by invaders have only one order that they must follow: Defend their land and their homes and their country's treasures at all costs, with their lives if necessary. Their orders contain no contradictions at all. The cities and their buildings and their cathedrals and their homes belong to them. That's why they fight so hard, as the Ukrainians appear to be doing at this very moment. And that's why almost every time the invaders end up being driven away. In Aleppo, that's been going on for thousands of years. The people who live there today are descended from the ancient civilizations that defended the city from Hittites and Assyrians and Phrygians and Babylonians and Persians, and eventually the Macedonians and Byzantines. Now they are rebuilding their city, but if any lesson at all can be learned from history, they will one day be doing it again.

I've been watching the coverage of the war in Ukraine on MSNBC with great interest. One of the sharpest commentators has turned out to be Gen. David Petraeus, who had various commands in both Iraq and Afghanistan and was credited with the "surge" in Iraq that supposedly "won" that war, until it didn't.

As a reporter in Iraq in 2003, I was embedded in the unit Petraeus commanded, the 101st Airborne Division, in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. Mosul incorporates Nineveh, the ancient city that was first settled in 6000 B.C. and was the center of the Assyrian Empire around 2000 B.C. — yes, the same Assyrian Empire that included Aleppo. Mosul, which succeeded Nineveh, was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. and was conquered by other armies along the way. When I was with Petraeus and his division in 2003, they were only the latest in that very, very long line of conquerors.

Petraeus was helpful to me as a reporter. He gave me the run of the region his division had "taken," including Mosul and Tal Afar and other towns his division "held." After I had been there for a while, I discovered something curious. Neither Petraeus nor his brigade commanders — three very talented West Point colonels — seemed to know what they were doing there. They established various base camps, both large and small, their units drove around in Humvees and the commanders flew around in helicopters, but they weren't really doing anything.

One day, when I was in Petraeus' headquarters in a former Saddam Hussein palace in Mosul (where I had gone to take a shower, because the palace had hot water), I asked the general what he was doing in Mosul. The way I put the question was, "General, what were your orders before you left Baghdad for Mosul?" He gave me a blank look, as if he had never been asked that question before. I then asked him, "Were you ordered to 'take Mosul,' for example?" He again looked at me blankly. It wasn't like I was asking him to divulge some top-secret piece of information. His entire division was up there in northern Iraq, right out in the open. The war was being widely covered on television and by newspapers. Everybody knew where the 101st Airborne was in Iraq. I was wondering what they were doing there, so I asked him a third time: "Were your orders, 'Go to Mosul?'" He didn't answer the question directly, but there was enough of a flicker of recognition on his face that I realized I had hit pretty close to the nub of it.

RELATED: Lt. Col. Alex Vindman: How Trump's coup attempt encouraged Putin's Ukraine invasion

An entire American infantry division had been ordered to go to Mosul and not told what to do when they got there, other than to do what they were now doing, which was driving around and defending themselves from insurgent attacks, but basically occupying space. Being there. You might say they were engaged in the occupation of Mosul, but that wasn't true, because you can't occupy a city or a country unless you've conquered it, and that wasn't what had happened with the 101st and Mosul.

Petraeus and his soldiers faced different reactions from the citizens of Mosul and northern Iraq. The Kurds were happy they were there. I visited a Kurdish unit at an outpost near the Turkish border, and they couldn't have been nicer to the brigade commander I was with. They served us a lavish lunch and took us all around and showed us their fortifications and told us what they were doing. The Shiites were less happy, but they weren't what you would call angry with Petraeus and his army, because they had been second-class citizens under Saddam and now that the Americans had come, they saw an opportunity to take over from the hated Baath Party of the Sunni tribes loyal to Saddam, who had run the country before the Americans got there. And then there were the former Baath party officials and Sunni commanders and soldiers of Saddam's army. They weren't happy at all, because they had been deposed from power, and they were probably the ones who were laying IEDs and shooting at American soldiers every time they got a chance.

And then it came to me: Petraeus and his division were waiting to be relieved by another American unit so they could go home. I soon discovered they were scheduled to return to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about a month later. I asked who was coming to replace them and discovered it was a "Stryker" brigade from the 9th Infantry Division, which was downright astounding. Petraeus had about 30,000 troops spread over an area the size of Pennsylvania, and even he admitted he didn't have a large enough force to occupy this area that was full of insurgents who were fighting his soldiers and killing them. And now a unit one-third the size of his division was coming in.

I asked one of the brigade commanders who gave that order, and he answered, "General Rove." He was referring to Karl Rove, the Republican consultant who had run George W. Bush's campaign and was now a senior adviser to the president. The sarcastic referral to Rove as a "general" was because everything coming out of Washington to the American forces in Iraq was being done with an eye to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Orders had come down for the 101st and other units in Iraq to lower their casualty rates, because dead American bodies weren't exactly selling well to voters back home. Now "General Rove" was going to send a much smaller force into Mosul, perhaps in hopes that with fewer soldiers, they would suffer fewer casualties. Which was upside down and backward, of course, but then Rove wasn't really a general, so how the hell would he know?

The story of Petraeus and the 101st was essentially the story of America's war in Iraq. Units were sent over there and given tasks like occupying cities and training Iraq's reconstituted army while suffering as few casualties as possible, which was a contradiction in terms because they were in a war. And then those units were sent back to the U.S. and replaced with new units, and so on and so on.

Petraeus returned several times on other missions, and then he was sent to solve the hellish situation the U.S. had gotten ourselves into by 2007 when it appeared to be losing the war. He came up with the "surge" that suppressed opposition for a time and lowered casualties, but it didn't answer the question that I had way back in 2003, which was what the hell was America doing in Iraq?

Our military was also fighting a war in Afghanistan, and in 2010, Petraeus replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces there. By that time, the U.S. had been rather unsuccessfully occupying Afghanistan for almost 10 years — or doing something anyway.

RELATED: War is the greatest evil: Russia was baited into this crime — but that's no excuse

McChrystal is the other commentator on MSNBC who seems to be on the ball about what is going on over in Ukraine, and it finally dawned on me why these two former American generals understand the situation so well: because they did the same thing to Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. played the role of Russia in those two countries, invading them and trying to occupy them with forces that were too small to accomplish the mission, just as the Russians have. Now Petraeus and McChrystal can sit at home in their studies with a clear understanding of the problems the Russians face in Ukraine — because they faced the same problems themselves. They had to deal with populations that didn't want us there, and were bent on fighting us as fiercely as they could to drive us out. Iraqi and Afghan citizens who didn't want us invading their countries fired RPGs at our vehicles. They set up ambushes to trap our convoys. They fired AK-47s at our soldiers and killed them.

We fought the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but neither Petraeus nor McChrystal nor the soldiers they commanded did what the Russians are doing in Ukraine: purposefully targeting civilians and civilian neighborhoods and hospitals and schools with thermobaric missiles and cluster bombs. But thousands of civilians were killed in both conflicts. The Watson Institute at Brown University has attempted to count civilian deaths in its "Costs of War" study. According to the institute, civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused by airstrikes, crossfire, IEDs, assassinations, bombings, night raids on suspected enemy positions, including civilian homes, and other causes. It is unknown how many civilian deaths are attributable to American forces, but the Watson Institute estimates that 71,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 were killed in Iraq.

When I was in Iraq, I saw the discipline involved in keeping American soldiers who were under attack every day by an enemy they couldn't see from striking out indiscriminately against the neighborhoods from which hostile fire was coming. American forces made mistakes and civilians were killed, but they didn't launch a campaign of terror against a civilian population the way the Russians appear to be doing in Ukraine.

The Russians invaded Ukraine without provocation, and they are attempting to subjugate and occupy it by attacking not just its army, but its entire population. You would think they would have learned from what happened to them in Afghanistan in 1980 when they were driven out of that country in abject defeat, and you would think they would have learned from the way the U.S. lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They obviously haven't.

Petraeus and McChrystal understand exactly what's going to happen to the Russians in Ukraine, because it's the same thing that happened to our army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians will end up being driven out of Ukraine by the people who live there, because the cities the invaders have been ordered to "take" belong to the people who are defending them. Like the Iraqis and the Afghans, the Ukrainians mean it, and that is why they will end up winning the war the Russians have brought to their country.

That is why the city of Mosul is still there and David Petraeus is gone, and it's why Kabul is still there and Stanley McChrystal is gone. The citizens of Mosul and Kabul meant it when they told the Americans to get the hell out of their cities and go home. That's why the city of Aleppo, damaged as it may be, is still there and will be rebuilt as it has been for thousands of years, and that's why the Russians who bombed it are now bombing other cities in another country. Aleppo has been destroyed and rebuilt for millennia by the people who fought to defend it and those who are descended from the defenders of the past. One of the apparent lessons of history is that wars will never stop being fought over land that one group holds and another group wants.

Wars and the reasons they are fought are stupid because the people who order them are stupid, and that truth hasn't changed for thousands of years. The Russian who ordered his army to "take" a neighboring country that doesn't belong to him will end up in his dacha somewhere in the Ural, just as the American who ordered his army to "take" countries far from his shores has ended up on his ranch somewhere in Texas.

It's always men, and they're always egomaniacal and arrogant and stupid. History marches on and there are ruins to prove it that you can visit all around the world, including right here in the good old U.S. of A. Syria has Aleppo and we have Gettysburg, and soon Ukraine will have Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson.

In the coming second American Civil War -- which side are you on?

Chauncey Devega, Salon
November 04, 2021

Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

(Tyler Merbler/WikiMedia Commons)

If there is a second American Civil War, which side would you choose? It may be wise to make that decision now, in the spirit of planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

A recent public opinion poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics finds that a majority of Trump voters want to secede from the Union. Alarmingly, nearly as many Biden voters, 41 percent, also feel it may be "time to split the country." This is part of a larger pattern; other polls and research have come to similar conclusions.

It's important to resist false equivalence and superficial analysis here. It may be true that a large percentage of both Democrats and Republicans are willing to consider seceding from the United States, but their reasons and motivations are very different.

Today's Republican Party has, in practice, largely surrendered to neofascism and white supremacy — currents that were not far below its surface for many years. It has embraced and condoned the violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and has come very close to directly endorsing terrorism against its perceived political enemies.

For Republicans, America's multiracial democracy is anathema to their values and must be destroyed. Public opinion research has shown that tens of millions of white Republicans, especially Trump supporters, view Joe Biden as an illegitimate president who should be removed from power by whatever means necessary.

For decades the right-wing propaganda machine has used stochastic terrorism to radicalize its public toward ever more extreme views. In the Age of Trump, that has devolved into overt and direct appeals to violence in defense of an imagined "real" America. In practice, this has led to hate crimes and other acts of violence against nonwhite people, immigrants and other targeted groups.

This was to be expected: History shows that fascism in its various forms is inherently violent and destructive, both toward its opponents and members of its own movement.

When Democrats or progressives report a desire to secede from the country, they are seeking refuge and self-preservation. To suggest any equivalence between that desire and the overtly violent yearnings of the Republican-fascist movement is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.

The prospect of a second American Civil War may seem wildly unlikely, or not even logistically feasible. But if it were to happen, such an outcome would not be based on empirical facts, reality or the complexities and nuances of public opinion polls.

A large percentage of Republicans and the larger white right actually believe that they are in an existential struggle for survival against Black and brown people and "illegal aliens" who want to "replace them," sinister "secularists" who want to outlaw Christianity, "critical race theory" aimed at brainwashing their children, a "liberal media" that deliberately lies to them, and a cabal of "elites" and "socialists" who are treasonous and determined to destroy the "real" America.

These right-wing white-identity fever dreams show no signs of breaking; if anything, the collective pathology is getting worse. Law enforcement and terrorism experts continue to warn that the country is at great risk of a violent right-wing insurgency inspired by the events of Jan. 6 and the Trump-Republican "Big Lie" about the 2020 election.

Wars begin for a wide range of reasons — often because of some miscalculation by one or more of the leaders and groups involved. Wars and other violent conflicts also happen because political leaders and other elites have talked themselves into a corner, leaving bloodshed as the only way out. Very often, civil war and sectarian violence have seemed impossible — until circumstances radically changed.

In an essay for Foreign Policy, Monica Toft explains how civil wars tend to happen, explaining that various factors are involved, including a history of previous internal conflict, "deepening cleavages" in society and a third element, "a shift from tribalism to sectarianism":
With tribalism, people begin to seriously doubt whether other groups in their country have the larger community's best interests at heart. In sectarian environments though, economic, social, and political elites and those they represent come to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is evil and actively working to destroy the community. Enemies of the state come to displace the loyal opposition, with those having been inside another tribe seen as the most disloyal. It's akin to how some religions treat apostates and infidels. Often, it is apostates, the former adherents of the faith, that are targeted more readily over infidels, those who had always been on the outside. It is hard not to see echoes of this dynamic at play as Republicans condemn other Republicans over their loyalty (or lack thereof) to former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Indeed, the United States now displays all three core elements that can lead to civil breakdown. If one described them — fractured elites with competing narratives, deep-seated identity cleavages, and a politically polarized citizenry — without identifying the United States by name, most scholars of civil war would say, "Hey, that country is on the brink of a civil war."

In a powerful essay published on Substack, Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV offers a scenario for America's second Civil War, observing that the opposing forces "will not be conveniently costumed in blue and gray as they were in the 19th Century ... making it difficult to tell who is actually on which side":
There also won't be a discernible front line or front lines, making it hard to tell which side is holding what territory. This, along with the absence of uniforms, means that a whole lot of people will be killed by mistake. It's probably likely that the MAGA side will dress itself in various camo costumes as many of them did when the mob assaulted the Capitol in January, but Trump followers aren't the only people in this country with camouflage hunting clothing. So if you shoot someone wearing camo assuming he or she is on the MAGA side, you just might be shooting someone on your side. Combatants won't be wearing "dog tags" marking them as on one side or the other, making the identification of dead bodies difficult. Is this guy one of ours, or one of theirs?

Truscott concludes with a series of terrifying possibilities:

Perhaps the grimmest prospect of all will be the sub-wars that break out within the bigger Civil War. Every prejudice will be indulged. Racist whites will target Black people. Fundamentalist Christians might target "heathens" like Muslims and Jews and non-fundamentalist Christians. Ethnic divisions will exist within the greater sides that face-off. ...

A 21st Century American Civil War would make the struggles we are currently suffering over elections and distribution of wealth and between races and ethnicities seem like the good old days when we all got along. An American Civil War will mean that we don't merely disagree with one another or dislike each other. It will mean we kill each other.
None of us, and I mean none of us, has an inkling about how horrible it would be. But if we are to have a future of any kind whatsoever, we'd better get more of a clue than the woman in the MAGA hat in Iowa who seemed to so casually look forward to a Civil War between her side and the side she was told to hate. Who you hated and why will be hard to remember when death comes to your door.

What role would Donald Trump play in such a conflagration? In a recent essay for TomDispatch, historian Alfred McCoy offers these observations:

Whether it's a poor country like the Philippines or a superpower like the United States, democracy is a surprisingly fragile construct. Its worst enemy is often an ousted ex-president, angry over his humiliation and perfectly willing to destroy the constitutional order to regain power.

No matter how angry such an ex-president might be, however, his urge for a political coup can't succeed without the help of raw force, whether from a mob, a disgruntled military, or some combination of the two….
So, in 2024, as the continuing erosion of America's global power creates a crisis of confidence among ordinary Americans, expect Donald Trump to be back, not as the slightly outrageous candidate of 2016 or even as the former president eager to occupy the White House again, but as a militant demagogue with thundering racialist rhetoric, backed by a revanchist Republican Party ready, with absolute moral certainty, to bar voters from the polls, toss ballots out, and litigate any loss until hell freezes over.
And if all that fails, the muscle will be ready for another violent march on Washington. Be prepared, the America we know is worsening by the month.

There are many expert voices who are sounding the alarm about the potential of a second American Civil War, and marshaling reasonably evidence why it likely will not happen.

But even the fact that so many public voices, and so many ordinary Americans, find themselves in a moment where such an eventuality must be seriously considered indicates how dire the country's democracy crisis really is.

At its core, these discussions of a possible second American Civil War reveal that the rise of Trumpism, and the full-on embrace of fascism by the "conservative" movement reflect a nation in existential crisis.

The distinction between "nation" and "country" is critical here. A country is an agreed-upon set of laws and governing institutions, but a nation is the symbols, ideas, stories, shared values and beliefs and other intangibles that give a people a sense of community and shared destiny that is distinct and different from other people in other places.

Trump World and the MAGAverse, and those fellow travelers who have pledged loyalty to the Republican-fascist movement, have a fundamentally different conception of the nation than do other Americans. Who "owns" the country? Who are its rightful heirs? Do some Americans have a special and privileged birthright status as compared to other Americans?

If America succumbs to a second civil war or other widespread political violence, the answers to those questions will become the dividing line. As the truism goes, no one hates like family. The American people — that is, our American family, which has endured, with considerable difficulty, for close to 250 years — may soon be reminded of that truth on a brutal massive scale.

IT ALREADY HAS

Trump's Big Lie is the new Lost Cause — and it may poison the country for decades
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
October 23, 2021

In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters he would bring back jobs to the depressed steel town (AFP)

Perhaps the biggest of many imponderables about Donald Trump has always been the question of what playbook was he following? His 2016 campaign didn't have a plan beyond questioning the manhood of his male primary rivals and ceaseless yapping about Hillary Clinton's "emails." His 2020 campaign never found a focus until October, when he seized upon his victory over his own case of COVID-19 as evidence of his manhood. Remember his return from Walter Reed Medical Center to the White House? Trump was ripping off his mask on the Truman balcony! That'll show 'em!

In between campaigns, Trump's presidency seemed aimless, stumbling vaguely forward from one indictment to another until the time came to issue pardons, which we soon learned was his "favorite" presidential power — not being commander in chief, not ordering up Air Force One to fly him off on his many golf weekends, not even being able to pick up his bedside phone in the middle of the night and order a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. The pardon power was it.

Losing the election in November and having to move out of the White House has given him something to focus on, however. He never cared about governing and didn't have much of an ideology to guide him, but he's finally found something he can believe in and a playbook he can follow: his very own Lost Cause. Trump has embraced with gusto the South's strategy after losing the Civil War: Tell your own people that you didn't really lose, and double down on the nobility and honor of what they still believe in. In the case of the Civil War, it was slavery and the inherent superiority of whiteness and inferiority of blackness. The new Lost Cause is of course Trump himself, to whom his followers attach the same kind of gauzy metaphors that came into use after the Civil War: flags (Trump campaign flags, the Confederate flag and the "Don't Tread on Me" banner are in heavy rotation) songs ("I'm Proud to be an American" by Lee Greenwood and — perhaps not so ironically now — "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones are played at all his rallies) and symbols (Mar-a-Lago has become a kind of antebellum shrine to the garish excess Trump represents).

And of course, most important of all are the lies. The lies told to support the South's Lost Cause were as outrageous as they were numerous: Slaves were well treated by their kind and understanding masters and were far better off than they would have been had they remained with their savage tribes in Africa. The war wasn't fought over slavery, it was fought for the cause of "states' rights." Gender roles were preserved in revanchist amber: Men were the protectors of Southern white women's "honor" and "purity," and women returned the favor by forming the Daughters of the Confederacy and charging themselves with erecting the monuments to Confederate war heroes and the Confederate dead which became ubiquitous throughout the South.

It's hardly necessary to delve into Trump's lies about the election: They have been well documented and confirmed by more than 60 losses in his lawsuits contesting the election's outcome in battleground states. Trump has now launched himself into an adjunct of the Big Lie — the lie that the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 wasn't violent and wasn't an assault, but merely a "tourist visit" by Trump supporters, while outside agitators and antifa infiltrators committed all the violent acts to tarnish the Trump cause. Trump has turned Ashli Babbitt, killed at the head of a mob as she broke through a door into an area of the Capitol where members of Congress were sheltering, into a martyr. And his minions on Capitol Hill have done everything in their power to stymie and tarnish the work of the House committee investigating the assault, including voting en masse against a nonpartisan commission to investigate the Capitol assault and now opposing the move by the House to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a subpoena to provide documents and testify before the House committee.

POSTMODERN CONFEDERATE TRAITOR

Bannon is in the process of transforming himself into a latter-day Robert E. Lee, talking about commanding a 20,000-strong army of "shock troops" he plans to use to intimidate "enemy" voters during the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The centerpiece of Trump's personal Lost Cause is nursing his grudge, and the collective grudge of his followers, against the "elites" they blame for bringing down the dream. Which involves, of course, whipping up the festering sore of resentment and hate that is the Trump "base." The South used the KKK and later the so-called Citizens Councils. Trump has the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. I am certain we're going to learn from the House committee that Trump himself was involved in their deployment on Jan. 6 in the violent assault on the Capitol.

Perhaps the most important way the South promoted its Lost Cause after the Civil War was through electoral and legislative means. The rebellion of Southern states against the Reconstruction laws and the 14th and 15th amendments is instructive. Major figures of the Confederacy took prominent roles in the Democratic Party. The Confederate raider and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and other Confederate veterans attended the Democratic convention of 1868 in New York where one of Forrest's friends, Frank Blair Jr., was nominated as the party's candidate for vice president on a ticket with a former governor of New York. Their campaign slogan was "Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule." Speeches against emancipation of the slaves given by Blair were said to contribute to Ulysses S. Grant's comfortable electoral victory.

Later, Southern states would virtually nullify the 14th and 15th amendments by passing the Jim Crow laws, stripping Black citizens of the right to vote and consigning them to subservient roles in the Southern economy and society little better than those they had held as slaves. The South separated itself from the rest of the country by its continuing adherence to the doctrines and practices of white supremacy in its legal and social systems.

Something very similar is going on right now in Republican-controlled states, including all of those that comprised the Confederacy, with state laws being passed to suppress the votes of minorities and gerrymander legislative districts to limit representation by minorities and the Democratic Party in general. It's a kind of legalized second secession by Republican states and the Republican Party, which has remade itself as the Trump Party, parroting Trump's racism and lies about the election and following his lead in Jan. 6 denial.

The words constitutional crisis and slow-motion Civil War have entered the lexicon. Former Republican writers like David Frum, Robert Kagan, Charlie Sykes, David Brock and Max Boot are all over the op-ed pages, warning that Trump and his allies are preparing to "ensure victory by any means necessary."

"The stage is thus being set for chaos," Robert Kaplan wrote recently in a widely shared op-ed in the Washington Post. "Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn't have."

Donald Trump had to be handed a loss in 2020 in order to begin championing his new Lost Cause. There won't be another one. If he runs and wins in 2024, we will not recognize the smoking ruins left by a second Trump victory. It won't take them long to begin erecting statues to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and renaming public squares after the "Great Replacement." The only question is, what will the Daughters of the New Confederacy call themselves? The Mistresses of Mar-a-Lago?

9/11 and the birth of Trump's Big Lie

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
September 11, 2021

President Bush flashes a "thumbs-up" after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, in this May 1, 2003 file photo. Six months after he spoke on an aircraft carrier deck under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush disavowed any connection with the war message. Later, the White House changed its story and said there was a link.


What drove this country crazy after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11? Was it how vulnerable we had been shown to be, that a group of 19 men armed with nothing more than box-cutters could bring the entire country to a halt? Was it that the attack was aimed primarily against innocent civilians, with nearly 3,000 killed at the Twin Towers alone? Was it that with the 19 hijackers dead in the suicidal attacks, we didn't seem to have anyone to retaliate against? Was it that we had no grasp whatsoever on understanding why our country, the freest and most democratic ever, was hated so much that they would attack us?

I remember how disconnected things felt for days, even weeks, after the attacks. Travelers outside the country didn't have a way to get home because flights had been canceled. People stranded in cities they were visiting within the country couldn't find cars to rent, there were so many trying to get home. Everyone seemed to feel a need to gather with families and friends and hunker down, as if another attack could come at any moment.

The country's leadership was frozen, stunned. Remember the photos of George W. Bush as an aide leaned over his shoulder and whispered the news into his ear? He was the president of the United States, and he looked scared to death. In fact, he was rushed from the school he was visiting in Florida to Air Force One, and his plane took off on what amounted to a flight to nowhere as his administration tried to pull itself together and decide how they would respond. It wasn't until hours later that Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Bush hurriedly addressed the press in a windowless conference room, vowing to "hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts." Three days would pass before the president was flown to New York to appear atop the rubble of the World Trade Center at what became known as Ground Zero to take a bullhorn and make the pledge that would launch the country on a trajectory that has yet to change: "I can hear you!" he shouted to the workers at the site, "The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

A collective madness ensued. A great scrambling began to protect us against … well, against what? Box-cutters first and foremost, it seemed, as a new regime of inspections began at airports everywhere. The initial panic over the hijacked flights would lead to the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, a kind of domestic department of defense which proceeded to put us on what amounted to a wartime footing within our own country that persists even today. How many times have you had to throw a set of fingernail clippers into a bin at airport security because a TSA agent was defending us from terrorism? How about removing your shoes because a lone lunatic made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up an airplane with a "shoe bomb"?


The entire paranoid regimen under which we still live 20 years later grew out of a supposed "war on terror" begun after 9/11 that has never ended. It took a decade to find and kill the actual terrorist who ordered the attacks on 9/11, but in the meantime two shooting wars were launched, only one of which had even the slightest connection to the terrorists who attacked us. There was an elemental problem: The war on terror wasn't against an enemy, it was against an idea, and ideas don't die when you hit them with bombs and bullets.

And so, without a readily definable enemy who could be seen and shot and killed and defeated, which is what wars are usually for, lies were substituted. We were buried with lies, and not just any lies. They had to justify the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops and the expenditure of trillions of dollars in treasure and the loss of thousands more American lives than died on 9/11 and countless more lives — enemies, civilians and, my goodness gracious, even a few real flesh and blood terrorists.

Sept. 11, 2001, was when the Big Lie was born. Or should we say, Big Lies, because they came fast and furious. By now they are known to be so completely without any basis in reality, so wholly bogus, that they hardly bear recounting. Weapons of mass destruction? Connections between Iraq and its government and leaders and the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11? Ha!

And then came new Big Lies to support the earlier Big Lies: that we were "winning" the war on terror. How many times were we reassured that all those lives and all those dollars were not being pissed away for nothing? How many times were we reassured that we were rebuilding the countries that hadn't needed rebuilding until we attacked them? How many times were we told of the miraculous training of the Iraqi and Afghan armies? They even invented a new word that I never learned in the classes I took in military history at West Point, a word to describe the magic bullet that was going to win both wars: the surge. If only we sent 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 more troops, we could win the mythical war on terror.

"Shock and awe" was a lie. "Taking Baghdad was a lie. The army of Iraq just went away. The "surge," each and every one of them, was a lie. "Winning" was a lie, every single time the word was used. Every. Single. Time. The Afghan army was a lie. It didn't even bother surrendering to the Taliban. It just went … poof. The Afghan "government" was a lie. It too went poof. The Iraqi government is a lie. Everything we have done to win the war on terror for two decades, 20 long years, has been a lie. We wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent to, I don't know, feed hungry children in Arkansas? Pay for health care for poor families? Send kids to college? Reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and save our planet?

We wasted all those lives, American and Afghan and Iraqi and German and Australian and Polish and every other soldier from every other NATO country who died fighting "terror." And we killed hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi people for nothing.

For nothing.

The biggest Big Lie of them all was that it had meaning, that we accomplished something, that we somehow won the war on terror. Terror hasn't gone away. Hell, we're growing it ourselves now, right here at home.

I'll tell you another war we lost, maybe even a bigger and more important war than the war on terror. We lost the war on truth. And we were warned. Oh yes, we were warned. Take Donald Trump's first Big Lie right after 9/11 as just one example. He claimed — I hope you're sitting down for this — that he could see from his office window in Trump Tower crowds of Muslims across the Hudson River, several miles away, on the roofs of buildings in Jersey City, cheering as the World Trade Center fell.

Remember that one? It was such a patently outrageous lie that it zoomed right past without anyone noticing as the rest of the Big Lies hit one after another.

But Trump got away with it, and he learned from it. Oh, yes. He learned how the Big Lie worked. He learned from watching Bush get away with lying about WMDs, and he learned from the Big Lies that we were winning in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he started trying out other Big Lies of his own, like the one about how Barack Obama wasn't a citizen of the United States, that he had a fake birth certificate, that he was a "secret Muslim." Remember when Trump was all over the TV for days and days claiming that he had sent detectives to Hawaii? All we had to do was wait and he was going to reveal the "truth" about Obama.

He got away with his "birther" Big Lie, and he learned something that he has used ever since, something that helped him drive us into the ditch of the pandemic he lied about for a year, something that has helped him transform an entire political party, the Republican Party, from one of two normal political parties in this country into an authoritarian cult.

He learned that if he told Big Lies that were big enough, and if he repeated them enough times, that he could get away with it, just like Bush got away with lying about WMDs to get us into Iraq. And his party, the Republican Party, learned right along with him. Look at what they are doing right this minute about the insurrection he incited against the Congress of the United States in his naked attempt to overturn the election he lost. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are on a campaign to deny that it happened. They are trying to make a case that it wasn't Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, it was somebody else, and those who were arrested are political prisoners facing false charges … and on and on and on.

The legacy 9/11 has left us is that there is no common set of facts we can agree on about anything: Not about the COVID pandemic and masks and vaccines; not about the climate change that has killed hundreds and left town after town burned to the ground or under water and destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes. We cannot agree that votes counted amount to elections won or lost. We cannot even agree on the common good of vaccines that will save us, that science is worth studying, that learned experts are worth listening to.

The lies that followed 9/11 have torn us apart as a nation and put our democracy in peril. That's our legacy: Lies are now considered by an entire political party to be legitimate political currency. A man who has told so many lies we have lost count of them is now a legitimate political figure supported for the highest office of the land by one of our two political parties.

Lies began tearing us apart after the attacks on 9/11, and we have not regained our footing as a nation. The question hanging over us now is whether we ever will.

The next insurrection: They don't have the votes, but they've got the guns
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
July 03, 2021




Pro-Trump protesters trying to enter Capitol building. (lev radin / Shutterstock.com)

You want to know what has doomed Nancy Pelosi's attempts to get a bipartisan agreement to investigate the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Every time she has talked about why we need a bipartisan commission or the select committee, she said they were necessary "so nothing like this will ever happen again."

This article first appeared in Salon.

Republicans aren't against investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection because they fear it will make them look bad. They're against doing anything to make sure that such an insurrection doesn't happen again.

The assault on the Capitol is already damaging to the Republican Party image, at least to outsiders. The Capitol was attacked by a violent mob of Trump supporters. It's doubtful there were any Democrats among them. The assault took place immediately after a Trump rally on the Ellipse and was incited by the then-president. Several Republican members of Congress joined Trump in addressing the crowd, along with other famous party stalwarts like Rudy Giuliani. It was a Republican rally with a Republican crowd. So was the mob at the Capitol.

Republican members of Congress know it was their supporters out there beating down the doors of the Capitol, ransacking the well of the Senate and looting congressional offices. Republicans don't want to investigate the violence at the Capitol because they want to leave the door open for it to happen again.

Most of them come from safe seats in Republican-majority congressional districts, many of them in Republican-controlled states. Republican senators, not all of them but most, come from Republican states in the South and Midwest. But every one of them can read census numbers, and every one of them understands that their days are numbered, even in states that have been Republican strongholds for decades, like Arizona and Texas. They saw the Election Day returns which showed previously Republican suburbs falling to the Democrats all over the country. They read the depressing voting numbers for millennials and younger voters that show them strongly leaning Democratic. Even a dull, lumbering beast like the Republican Party can tell when a water hole runs dry.

They can read the polls showing how popular Democratic issues are, including improved access to health care, the pandemic rescue bill, the infrastructure bill and the American Family Plan. How many calls have you heard Republicans make lately for repealing Obamacare? How many speeches have you heard them make saying we don't need to spend money on crumbling bridges, obsolete airports and ancient, failing mass transit like the Long Island Railroad or the Chicago Transit Authority or the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority? They don't dare oppose spending that is in any way grounded in reality. All they can come up with is screaming about "socialism" and "Democratic Party wish-lists," because their constituents drive across cracking bridges and commute on failing transit systems and pay a third of their income on rent and a third on child care and way more than they can afford on health care.

Electorally, Republicans are hanging on by their fingernails. In 2020, in the midst of the worst pandemic since 1918, before a single American had received a life-saving vaccination, with 230,000 already dead from the coronavirus and more deaths on the way, voters turned out in record numbers. And Republicans lost. They lost the White House. They lost the House of Representatives. After a runoff election, they lost control of the Senate. They did well locally in Republican-controlled states, maintaining control of state houses and governorships, but they lost ground in the areas where the country is growing. They lost the big cities. They lost the suburbs. They lost in population centers in the South and Midwest and West. They lost in the places where people are moving, where young people are getting jobs when they graduate from college, where many seniors are choosing to retire.

After the 2020 election, Gallup found in a December poll that 31 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, 25 percent as Republicans and 41 percent as independents. When independents were asked whether they were "Democratic leaners" or "Republican leaners," 50 percent said they leaned Democratic, and 39 percent leaned Republican. These were not good numbers for the Republican Party. Nobody knows better than Republicans that there are fewer of them than there are of us.

You've heard chapter and verse from me and others about how Republicans are passing voter suppression laws to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote. They know they don't have the votes. They don't have them now, and they'll have even fewer of them in the future.

That's why they've started to concentrate their efforts at the state level on laws that change how votes are counted and who counts them, moving the center of power from elected officials like secretaries of state and appointed officials like election administrators to state legislatures, inherently political bodies where the counting can be managed and controlled politically.

It's why they're clinging to Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him, and it's why their own efforts to "audit" the 2020 election results in places like Arizona are so shambolic and absurd. They know that if honest assessments are done of how the election turned out in battleground states, they will come to the same conclusions that a 55-page report by the Michigan state Senate did last week: There was no election fraud in the 2020 election. None. Zero. Nada.

They've been downplaying the assault on the Capitol, calling it "a normal tourist visit" as Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia did during a hearing a few weeks ago. He is among a growing number of Republicans in Congress who are making the case that nothing really bad happened on Jan. 6, so there's no need to investigate it. They blocked the creation of a nonpartisan 9/11 style commission to investigate the insurrection, and they're in the process of undercutting Pelosi's select committee by labeling it as a Democratic exercise in blame-laying.

Furthermore, they're absolutely right. When the select committee issues its report, it's going to lay the blame where Republicans want it least: on Trump for inciting the riot, and on their own constituents for committing insurrection against the government. And the select committee will likely produce evidence that Republicans are not interested in seeing in the light of day: detailed accounts of the violence committed by the mob and reports of the preparations some of the mob had taken that we haven't seen yet, such as evidence of weapons caches — and planning by some insurrectionists to use them.

Republicans don't want a report that basically comes out and says, Here's how close we came to a coup against our government, and here is what they are planning next. Laws that put partisan political bodies like legislatures in charge of counting votes make it much more likely that an upcoming election will end up in a political wrangle — not down in the states where the counting takes place, but in Washington.

Think about it: there were no controls whatsoever on that mob in Washington on Jan. 6. Estimates of the size of the crowd at Trump's rally on the Ellipse ran as high as 30,000. More than 800 rioters are estimated to have broken through police barricades and entered the Capitol, with as many as 10,000 outside. They outnumbered police by the thousands.

What if that crowd had been armed? What if instead of carrying iron pipes and bear spray and flag poles they had been carrying AR-15s and pistols? What if some of them were carrying the kinds of bombs that were found outside the Democratic and Republican headquarters? Capitol police couldn't stop them from overwhelming barricades and gaining entrance to the Capitol. Do you think they could have searched that mob for hidden weapons and bombs?

This is why Republicans don't want to see an intensive investigation of the insurrection on Jan. 6. If an investigation proves how bad the insurrection was this time, it might predict what will be possible if a mob of 100,000 or more assault the Capitol or other governmental buildings in Washington, and what that mob might be capable of if they're organized and armed next time.

The Republican Party has reached the point where it does not recognize the legitimacy of elections unless it wins them. Democratic political victories are per se illegitimate in Republican eyes. Republicans are lapping up their own lawlessness and ramping up the insanity. They are turning right-wing lunatics like Kyle Rittenhouse into folk heroes. He is the shooter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who killed two people and wounded a third during Black Lives Matter protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Republican state legislatures in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed laws granting immunity to drivers who hit protesters with their cars during demonstrations on public streets. Multiple states already have laws allowing both open and concealed carry of firearms without a license, with more such laws on the way.

These are the kinds of laws that not only allow insurrection, but encourage it. The Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers and their ilk aren't the right's political fringe anymore. They are the Republican base — and the Republican future.