The End of the American Republic

In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding.
When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be.
I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).
As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.
In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?

The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.
The U.S. is fighting its global war on terror in 40 percent of the world’s nations. (Stephanie Savell, Costs of War Project, originally published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine)
This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.
Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.
Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.
In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.
Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”
Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agentsworked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?
Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.
The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others).
According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”
In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.

A Vast Military Footprint

As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.
Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.
In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.
Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.
To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”

A Better Grand Plan

How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.
After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in AfghanistanSyria, and Yemenrepresents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.
On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has notdebated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddledreactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.
With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.
In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.
All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels “The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates” and “The Bend of the World.” His most recent book is “A Cool Customer: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.” https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-end-of-the-american-republic/




16 thoughts on “The End of the American Republic”

  1. LS…
    Americans are helpless cannon fodder for a Greater Zio Nazi Israeli Empire…
    NOTHING ELS !

    1. Agree and their biggest sins are the diseases of complacency and cognitive dissonance. The truth is always in our face if we confront it.

    1. Maybe to consider the real power elite is the Crown and the Vatican/Jesuits. Read the opening claims of the King of England for his status in the beginning of the 1783 Definitive Treaty of Peace for proof of this.

  2. We never had a Republic. Therefore, you cannot go back to what never was.
    A republic was never described/defined and the responsibilities to it in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence or any other document.
    Remember the 1783 Treaty of Peace made the declaration of Independence a dormant doc.
    The 1789 1st Act of congress made the US Constitution a dormant document as well.
    If we don’t know the actual foundations the America is founded on we will not know what the proper corrective actions are so we may receive what is owed us as remedy.
    Can we agree to start with just a hand full of events that are the cause of all the criminal and deceitful actions perpetrated against all of We the People. Focus on the factual foundations that America was built on and in the words of the government we don’t know we have as proof of their frauds and deceits.. Please take the time to read the following documents for what they state. Clear your mind of what you were taught in school and read their words.
    1783 Definitive Treaty of Peace.
    Ben Franklin, Esquire and Mason acting as lead negotiator for the King of England for developing the Treaty that formally ended the Revolutionary War had agreed the King shall be able to claim the title and status as the Arch-Treasurer and Prince Elector of the Holy Roman Empire and the United States of America. Also, the King and his heirs in perpetuity are to receive a share of all the Gold, Silver and Copper found in America. Protect only the English land owners. The States are recognized as Sovereign entities. (not the People/Colonist). And to think we were taught in school the King lost the war. Yet he was awarded the spoils of the war as controller of the money, banking and body Politic plus other monetary awards in Gold, Silver and Copper. The Colonists were given the rights to fish in certain areas. How can the King award a right that was won by winning the war? Most important is what is not stated as the People are recognized as sovereigns. That means we have no standing against the King’s chosen Rules of Law.
    1787 Constitutional Convention.
    No definition was given/written for what a Republic is and the responsibilities to it for keeping it. Ben Franklin answered the to the question “what do we have” and answered “a Republic if you can keep it”. Remember all the Founders knew what the 1783 Treaty stated.
    1789 First Act of Congress the Oath of Office. I call it their CYA Act.
    All representatives of the people are to for the purposes of taking the oath of office are only allowed to swear an oath repeating the words as a title “the constitution Of the United States” That was actually the United States Inc. the sovereign entity declared by the King i.e. Person/Corporation” NOT swearing to “the Constitution for the United States of America” which was the document given by We the People to those that are to represent We the People as their employment contract. What you think is a state is in reality a corporation, in other words, a Person.
    See “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is Person.” 9 F. Supp 272 “Word “person” does not include state. 12 Op Atty Gen 176.
    There are no states, just corporations. Everybody Politic on this planet is a corporation. A corporation is an artificial entity, a fiction at law. They only exist in your mind. They are images in your mind, that speak to you. We labor, pledge our property and give our children to a fiction in your mind, that speak to you. Again, we labor, pledge our property and give our children to a fiction.
    The Constitution and Declaration of Independence became at best dormant documents.
    1791 George Washington created the War Power Act and never cancelled it.
    This was to enable Washington, at Hamilton’s insistence, to use an existing private bank, controlled by the Crown through its British Board of Trade, to become the first bank of the United States. Jefferson and two other men wrote constantly to Washington telling him that there was no such authority in the Constitution to create a bank. Neither Jefferson nor the other two men could sway Washington.
    At this point We the People began to lose everything they fought for before they came to America and before the War. We the People remained as they were, citizen subjects and debt slaves to the King’s business Ventures. We have no standing if we remain silent to these truths as facts.
    For those that believe we need enforcement of the corrective actions for them to be implemented.
    We should choose to educate our veterans with these truths because it is our veterans of America have sacrificed life, limb and family. This has caused children of past and present generations to suffer without fathers in their life’s day to day, thereby distorting social structures and slowly transforming the foundation that blessed us. Help us help you help the veterans and their families to receive what was promised and what should be to correct the abuse that has been laid upon them by the persons claiming to care aka POLITICIANS.
    What more proof do you need to understand about what the actual founding of America was about.

    1. Military recruitment stations ( public schools with the sphere atop the flagpole ) program the mascuLINEAR numberline:
      …., -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …
      0 and negatives do NOT exist in nature. This is called duality or 2D flatland.
      Nature follows femiNINE math,
      …., 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2/1, 3/1, 4/1, 5/1, ….
      Nature is fractal where all numbers are fractions of the ALL.
      On your computer this is called Vortex Based Math.
      Leading to an awareness of hyperdimensional physics.
      Ternary logic, not binary was used to program Setun-70 in 1958.

  3. NO HUMAN wants Zionist FAKEJOO interference in their lives, when are they going to be thrown out for the deceivers ,cheats and frauds they are, its all just for either resource drug or land grab.
    The last time they were only thrown out of a temple for deceiving this time they need to be irradiated for the evil cult it has become…

  4. WHAT, is Really “Dying” is “White Supremacy” on this planet..Witch INCLUDES THE FAKE JEWS…The Real Jews ARE the Black Race beings…Who will VERY Soon be rescued by the Melanin “Golden Race Beings”.
    So-called “White Supremacy” will be EXPOSED for ALL to SEE, just before they are EXTERMINATED.

  5. The absence here of any recognition and commentary about the despicable crimes and misdemeanours of Jussie Smollett is curious, to say the least…

    1. And I say the absence of any dialog for what allows all these crimes to be continually repeated shows the ignorance of most that comment here. All they want to do is out do each other by posting another crime someone else didn’t.
      No one want to discuss the faulty and deceptive foundations America was built on. The like the fairy tales they were taught in government run schools.

  6. The Information Proving that America “IS” a Stolen Country is out there for ANYONE “Willing” to search for it (Out-side-the-Box)
    The trouble is that this Luciferian/Satanic “System” run by “White Supremacy” Pschopaths controlled by the VATICAN, WON’T let the REAL TRUTH about OUR-Story be found easily.
    Its all over the Internet though.

    1. No need to search. The 1783 Definitive Treaty of Peace and the very 1st ACT of Congress 1789 tells all you need to know for what allowed all future crimes against the people.
      We the People lost everything that was fought for.

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