Apr 14, 2021
"Yemen war: Joe Biden ends support for operations in
foreign policy reset," reports the BBC. "Trump: US will be out of
Afghanistan by Christmas 2020," cheered Military Times. "Trump
Orders Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Northern Syria," the
New York Times
told us.
For
decades, the United States has very often appeared to have "ended"
wars that do not, in fact, end at all. Open-ended jargon like
"residual counter terror forces," "Vietnamization," "military
advisors," along with deliberately ambiguous timetables, process
criticisms––all are used to confuse the average media
consumer.
America's politicians know the American public broadly
dislikes war and empire––and thus wants to see it restrained––but
these same politicians don't really want to end wars so they have a
frequent PR problem: How
do you make it look like you’re ending a war or occupation without
really doing so?
To
solve this conundrum, American political leaders have perfected the
art of fake-ending a war. Which is to say, announcing a war is
going to end, typically around election time, only to––once the
headlines make a big splash––backtrack, obfuscate, claim the
"situation on the ground has changed" or the military involvement
will only be in a "limited" or "defensive" capacity, shuffle troops
around or find other thin pretexts to continue the war or
occupation.
In
this episode, we discuss the United States' history of fake-ending
wars, who these pronouncements are meant to please, why troops
levels are often impossible to know, and why so many of our
so-called "wars" are not really wars at all, but military
occupations that are never really meant to end.
Our
guest is Shireen Al-Adeimi, assistant professor at Michigan State
University.