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Stillness and a murder of crows. We pass formations of New England stone walls as the the boy tracks behind my trail bound steps. Someone’s sons put them in their place, jealous stewards with calloused hands and sweat-stringed brows. Groaning as they settle into the earth, those ordered stones speak of days and lives passed. Fossilized partitions as frames of poor men’s toil, unrecorded and irreverent. Unrelenting messengers of a forgone age, dotted with hidden passages still legible to contemporaries; stale blood patterned like braille crying foul. Rocks, splattered in memory, are called to be the keepers.

Stains came away from those faces in the following storm, but I can still hear it. Amidst the heaving and gasping of glacial parts now collaborating against their will in a chorus of moss and copperheads, the ancients cry out as best they can. Save yourself.

A mans death is rarely the sight they imagine for themselves; cloaked in glory and courage as they fall alongside brothers, or tucked neatly in the quilts of a flame-lit familiar room. Death is tears and terror and genetic incredulity. Chivalry an incomprehensible flash before their eyes like frantic gunpowder ignitions across the field; there are no more gentle men here. Men’s faces twist like a child’s calling for mother clutching open belly wounds and once useable limbs. Rocks, splattered in memory, are called to be the keepers.

The boy walks silently behind. In wavering trees and the howl of tender quiet he wonders at the stretched stone piles of dead men. He sees himself among them, inadvertent crenellations for cover, splattering memory where grass would one day grow. Childhood imagination a glimpse into the puerile mind of man.

So grandiose are those who wage war behind their eyes, in nutmegger meadows or capital war rooms. How playful are they, the handsome uniform and galant issue. How delightful the cannon and the crew serve to the man who hasn’t smelt them in the dusts of high noon, pouring smoke as signal fires for the rising souls they made. How brave the throat of the television anthem singer. How steadfast the grip of the tuxedo standard bearer. How boastful the dry cheeks of happy mothers. Unturned earth hasn’t forgotten its flavor; one of hearth and home. Of sons.

So let us not forget the torment of the dead amidst their endless fray. Let us remember the commercialized battlements of profiteers flecked in flesh and gravel. Let us examine supposed experts and the planners in their chairs. And let the errant sons learn gently while our lurid men learn rough. For the rocks, splattered in memory, are called to be the keepers. Let us listen.

The 8th International Conference on Cybersecurity has come and gone with little fanfare, and with it, any remaining pretense of federal law enforcement’s respect for privacy.  In a stunningly banal speech, US Attorney General William Barr renewed the Justice Department’s calls for an end to encryption in the name of, wait for it, American security.  

“The deployment of warrant-proof encryption is already imposing huge costs on society. It seriously degrades the ability of law enforcement to detect and prevent crime before it occurs, and after crimes are committed, it is thwarting law enforcement’s ability to identify those responsible or to successfully prosecute the guilty parties.”  

Without any evidence of costs, Barr assures the Fordham University crowd that law enforcement will be effectively defeated by encryption.  “If you remove any possibility that cops are going to be watching a neighborhood, the criminals already in the neighborhood are going to commit a lot more crimes.”  The AG here is taking as much for granted about his audience as he is presupposing about American citizens. How many among us are merely undetected malefactors?

To deliver this speech amidst the greatest era of US mass incarceration requires either piercing tone-deafness or a profound personal cynicism.  With 698 per 100,000 Americans in prison, mostly for victimless crimes, Barr believes there is a seemingly endless tide of criminals to be yanked up, root and stem.

But of course, this speech is not for the two-bit drug dealer, whose home’s next on the whiteboard for battering rams and flashbangs.  The overtures are for the two most-favored flavors of fear-mongering meant for public consumption, cartels and terrorists.

For younger or less interested readers, for whom 9/11 is some platitude to be bandied about for the sake of patriotism or terrorism, I urge reexamination. September 11, 2001 serves as a fully-formed contemporary manifestation of government religiosity, a day of repentance, a turning point.  Whereas American’s of old would pay lip service to the tenets of ethereal individual liberties, today they serve as burnt offerings to be sacrificed for security, each one a pleasing scent to the god of pragmatism.

Indelible human freedoms evidently no longer exist; the best and brightest among us have placed in their stead a carefully constructed existence of legal grants and permissions.  Not even your text messages and search histories may remain unmolested. “There have been enough dogmatic pronouncements that lawful access simply cannot be done. It can be, and it must be”, Barr insisted.  Amazingly, conflating dogma and basic arguments on constitutionalism earns none of the ire that Trump supporters reserve for Obama’s constant line-leaping. 

The decree has been set forth, then.  No longer interested in making a case, Barr is simply demanding obedience to our betters.  Despite the best efforts of the legal apparatus and any willing participants in Silicon Valley, the reality is that technology is making that declaration moot.  Encryption will always exist as long as internet use remains unimpeded by government, as technical ideologues will continue to crop up to fill the void.  

So have hope. The trope of a homeland secured by rifles behind every blade of grass has been revolutionized.  The first front of modernity is the binary code of zeroes and ones, trenches manned by internet pioneers and privacy advocates alike. 

Somehow, the grisly hacking to pieces of Jamal Khashoggi has worked together for some good.  It’s no surprise though, it took in-group blood to ignite the flame necessary to get the Senate vote we saw on 12/13.

In a truly historic move, the US Senate voted for the first time to remove troops from anywhere on the planet using the War Powers Act.  Albeit a tacit consent that the campaign is a horribly unjust one, the vote signals more to the Saudi’s then to the global community about American hegemony.

It took two completely toxic personalities, Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman, to get the senate to move.   And with the protest votes by anti-Trump senators and fellow republicans like Rand Paul, the passage was still largely symbolic, as the house will likely do nothing with it.

If it did pass, it would require the removal of all troops not actively combating Islamic terrorism, so, ostensibly very few.  The refueling of Saudi planes ended last month.

It’s exciting that 56 senators voted to remove any troops from a foreign country though, and that there was a majority who rebuked a presidential administrations war powers.  How that benefits the Yemeni’s tangibly remains to be seen.  It’s just too bad it took the killing of Khashoggi and the radioactive Trump to have this tiny victory.

Alas, so it goes with the empire: blood in, blood out.

David French is one of my least favorite people on Twitter. Former Major in the US Army, Iraq War vet and columnist for National Review, French spends his days online hand wringing about the need for “realism” in foreign policy, ergo an enormous military, all to keep American’s safe at home. Sound familiar?

In his most recent article, French develops the “frustrating” nature of occupying sovereign nations in perpetuity, drone bombing poorly established targets under the auspices of precision, and hemorrhaging trillions of dollars because of an abundantly obvious existential threat to red, white and blue Americanism: radical jihadists.

The idea that radical jihadists are a threat to the American way of life, or the general safety of individual American’s, is simply preposterous. Remember, at the height of ISIS’s “reign” we were warned of sleeper cells and hidden training camps dotting the contiguous United States. All of that turned out to be the fever dreams of corporate hawks, much like the cold warrior warnings of ‘missile gap’ or Ruskie’s in your Cheerio’s. As the Council on Foreign Relations reported, America is an empirically safe place. How many neighbors, coworkers, fellow church goers or friends have you heard stories from about people they know who have been killed by their falling television? None? The probability is equal to that of being killed by a terrorist since 9/11 in the US.

US spearheading combat operations in “far flung” places throughout the world, as Dave puts it, does not elucidate the growth and evolution of our forces through 20 years of a global war on terror, but rather vastly increases the likelihood of domestic terror attacks. This, unlike the following points to be discussed, is abundantly obvious. If you and your family were tortured regularly by the sound of buzzing drones, with the threat of ordinance dropped any moment constantly looming, you’d harbor ill will towards the perpetrators regardless of their justifications. If that ordinance blew up your kid brothers bus, killed your sister and her new husband on their wedding day, or caved in your family room while you were away, it would be no wonder that that person might seek revenge. This concept of “blowback” isn’t a new one, and the seeds of resentment have been sewn in dramatic fashion. Conservative, verifiable estimates place civilian casualties around 500,000, and that’s only in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

French’s First Point

Musa Cerantonio, Australian and IS spokesman

French first asserts that a sect of radical Muslim’s exists for the express purpose of killing American’s and destabilizing the nation “for the emergence of a new jihadist power”. Contrary to unfurling of the “JV team” or “nihilist” banner on their behalf like former President Obama, French does something more insidious rhetorically regarding ISIS. After a cacophony of demands to recognize them as ‘Islamic extremists’, self-aggrandizing “conservative” foreign policy academics reject the existence of the fundamentalist eschatology advanced by Salafist’s like bin Laden and Baghdadi; that the “armies of Rome” will be met in the fields of Dabiq and defeated, ushering in the apocalypse. ISIS has no desire in establishing a ‘jihadist power’, nor the resources. Their greatest windfalls have been directly from US taxpayers through weapon and vehicle cache’s as well as money funneled to them from the “moderates” we sponsor in Syria anyways. They want to draw Western armies (sometimes specifically the Vatican) into battle in Syria, not have us leave.

Al Qaeda recognized the war of attrition they had to fight in occupied regions to expel the Western armies by making the wars expensive and politically untenable, but in a true display of American exceptionalism, we soldiered on. But ISIS wants us to stand and fight, they don’t care about American domestic stability.

French may concede his prognosticating on a “jihadist power” may be deluded, but jihadists have, in fact, killed swathes of American’s. That’s true. It’s also true that they told us why. Osama bin Laden himself spelled out various, tangible grievances with the US, namely, the stationing of troops in their holy Saudi Arabia. He also goaded a western military response to 9/11 thinking it would help his recruitment efforts, something French himself concedes in the piece is one of the many ‘challenges’ to our war making efforts, and left bin Laden looking nearly prophetic.

This ‘chicken or the egg’ question about who started the conflict between al Qaeda and the US is a Sisyphean affair. On September 11, 2001 AQ was something like 200 members relegated to the Afghan/ Pakistan border. Today, there are tens of thousands worldwide. Regardless, then, of who began the fight, the Salafist’s are winning it ideologically through a much better tailored hearts and minds campaign. A basic objective measure for the safety of Americans would be the number of enemies we have, and that number has increased 100-fold in direct response to a US foreign policy trying to combat them.

French warns about lumping the policies of the last three presidencies together. But Bush, Obama and Trump’s administrations have all directly supported Sunni-based insurgencies comprised of jihadists in their fights against various states. The mujahideen in Afghanistan was another such well-known example from the 1980’s. This financial and military support of radical islamist’s for proxy wars and geopolitics is directly bolstering the enemies we are fighting now, and yet David French brains of the world warn of the secular dictatorships of Shiite and Alawite nations that combat Sunni radicals on the ground day in and day out. Obviously, those policies collectively are doing far more to help the perceived existential threat of jihadists than leaving the region entirely ever could.

Second Point

In anticipation of these points he posits that it was not because of sterile US policy drafted by our brightest minds that drives the jihadist of today; rather “an ancient, potent systematic ideology”. He leaves out that a massive caliphate existed for 600 years that didn’t wither and die until the end of World War I, and yet “Muslim extremism” is somehow a phenomenon of the last century. Of course, violence was perpetrated by Muslim states, sometimes with expressly religious ends, but that was not unique to jihadists or Muslim nations. Osama bin Laden had a bit to say about western meddling in the Middle East and the move towards insurgencies and terror after the fall of Ottoman Empire and subsequent drafting of the Sykes-Picot lines. This remaking of the Levant and the wider spread Arab nations was viewed as an oppression of potentially theocratic Muslim states by European powers, a far more relatable axe to grind, however.

Third Point

The safe haven myth and the dangers associated with it is a seemingly evergreen fear tactic. Firstly, the idea that sovereign nations quartering, abetting or simply having within their borders people we consider enemies justifies their occupation in perpetuity is outrageous. In Pakistan we have the tenuous permission to conduct various operations there against supposedly established threats, however, we do not have such permissions in Syria. We invaded a sovereign country hoping to depose their seated government without Congressional approval or the knowledge of the electorate using a small contingent of air power and special operators all while that secular dictator fought against the jihadists French is now warning us about. It’s a fragile sweater he’s wearing, so pull on that thread carefully.

Our policies in Iraq and Syria created the power void and resentment for the rise of ISIS. While collecting our military cache’s left across the Iraqi desert like it was Fortnite, the Islamic State’s war in Syria raged on. DIA documents show the US explicitly backed the rise of an Islamic State against the Assad regime while supplying weapons to Sunni-based insurgencies. Despite that, today ISIS is nearly defeated and the vestiges remaining will be crushed by the victorious Assad coalition.

Meanwhile countries like Afghanistan have endured an 18 year US military occupation and somehow the Taliban controls 55% of territory and rising per the IG. But that is granting too much. “Safe havens” could range from a basement to a 60 acre-beet farm in Scranton, PA and we’d be none the wiser. It’s not as if every terrorist organization raises a black flag and starts streaming work out videos with Kalashnikov’s to liveleaks. The concept of a safe haven is simply a base of operations for a small group looking to do harm. That could be functionally achieved literally anywhere, and much to the chagrin of French, we cannot bring all peoples under our dominion for the sake of national security.

SDF fighters standing guard after Raqqa falls

Even if we were to sate the jihadi bloodlust of French and his NatRev compatriots, that wouldn’t change the disposition of the ideology. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who drafted an early report warning of Osama bin Laden in 1998, says ISIS won’t die, they’ll just shape shift. Sending legions of men to their deaths tends to sew discord, so driving the survivors underground to lick wounds and console their tragedy-struck neighbors won’t serve American interests particularly well either.

It’s also well documented by former CIA officer Robert Grenier who was the oversight for the Pakistan-based drone program that US actions, particularly drone strikes, are working against our long term stated goals of national security because they, “kill too many civilians, provoke anti-American hatred, and could inadvertently create terrorist safe havens.” Again showing our policies work completely contradictory to our stated goals.

What’s Remaining

French goes on to tout “lessons learned” over the last 17 years as having culminated to our lean operation in Syria and Afghanistan today. Certainly US casualties are low and costs are less than the invasions and surges, but civilian casualties are on the rise per the IG report in Afghanistan. Besides, the costs of the invasions can’t simply be strewn aside as being in the distant past and therefore unrelated. It wouldn’t be “throwing it away” to leave these countries today any more than it would be a “waste of all those good years” to leave an abuse relationship. The fact remains that the campaigns are unproductive in maintaining security long-term, cost millions even in their current state and kill a lot of innocent people. That level of collateral damage for a Frankenstein monster we largely built is simply unacceptable.

The most telling aspect of this piece is the conclusion. Framed as an argument from first principles we never hear, French believes we must remain militarily in several sovereign nations until the Salafist’s stop believing, take their ball, and go home. Or forever. He says, “No functioning government that abdicates its duty to protect its citizens from hostile attack can remain legitimate. Preferably self-defense is maintained by deterrence. But when deterrence fails, a failure to engage the enemy doesn’t bring peace, it enables the enemy to kill your people.”

So if we could develop a well thought-out plan to drastically reduce the threat of Islamic extremism occurring at home, it would be in our best interests, no, it would be our duty to oblige?

Then it’s time to bring the troops home and end the wars in the Middle East David.

James Mattis has been engaged in the world of national security for 40 years.

In the run up to the 2016 election, “Chaos” had quite a bit to say on defense (through offense), regardless of the winner.

In a speech in Washington, Mattis said, “The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”

He went on, “For all the talk of ISIS and Al Qaida everywhere right now… they’re a very serious threat. But nothing is as serious in the long term enduring ramifications, in terms of stability and prosperity and some hope for a better future for the young people out there, than Iran.”

Consider the children, he says.

With nearly two decades of the global war on terror behind us, it may be easy to forget that al Qaeda was the original justification for military action in the first place. You know, because those were the guys who hijacked and flew planes into three buildings and crashed a fourth killing nearly 3,000 people.

Interestingly, al Qaeda are ideological counters, religiously speaking, to the Shiite Iranians and more in line with our major regional ally and country of origin for most of the aforementioned hijackers, Saudi Arabia.

In 2003 in Iraq, Mattis commanded the 1 Marine Division in the invasion, overseeing the first Battle of Fallujah and subsequent ‘stability’ operations.  At that time, as documented in 2007 by Seymour Hersh, we were fighting that war on the side of the Iranians, installing a Shiite government with Iranian ties under Maliki, and ultimately bolstering their regional power significantly.

This isn’t finger wagging with the benefit of hindsight. The intelligence community warned the Bush administration of the risks of siding with the Shiite majority in Iraq. Though they were hoping to be their white knight, the oppressed “damsel” Shiites once under Saddam fled not to our arms but to the Ayatollah’s as predicted.

Jim presided over the major combat operations on behalf of Iran, ironically.  According to General McChrystal and common sense, the killings in Fallujah and throughout the global war on terror does far more to benefit the ideological movement than it does to weaken it.  Obviously, the rank and file cannon fodder suffer, but they nor their leadership care a great deal about their earthly fates.  Regardless then, of the cowboy persona and famed quips about having a plan to kill everyone you meet, the actions he oversaw and advocated for do more harm than any possible ‘good’.  Radical Islamist’s are in a far better strategic position today than they were in 2001.

That insight is crucial to understanding the friction between Trump’s unilateral decision to cease combat operations in Syria and the chorus from the national security establishment and their useful idiots.  The tangible results of a given policy are completely divorced from the opining and intentions of Washington’s foreign policy think tanks.

Mattis is deeply entrenched in the Washington machinations and the talking points are clear.  A global American military hegemon is the only way to keep American’s safe at home, no matter the costs. As the corporate media laments his resignation, mainly as opportunists to further damage Trump, a curious theme arises.  James Mattis is the ‘sober’, adult voice in the room.  The wails and gnashing of teeth say that losing him puts us all at risk; even more of an interesting evolution when contrasted with the 2016 warnings that a Trump victory would mean certain death by nuclear hellfire.

The current face of the larger national security apparatus, CHAOS’s entire worldview prescribes the insertion of an American M16 compensator into every conversation.  The failures of three Iraq wars, a counterproductive and bloody campaign in Afghanistan, the creation of the conditions that led to the rise of ISIS and radicals of all stripes across the region, and the haunting of drones in sovereign nations across the globe, all credited to our “adults in the room”.  Yet unironically the gray-faced NPC’s from Mia Farrow and Noam Chomsky to Lindsay Graham all parrot the same thing, that the hill Mattis is choosing to die on is a noble one; that Syrian occupation is necessary for the continued safety of the American people and the preservation of American global credibility.

In the era of Trump, the least drunk drive.  I can’t wait to see who Mattis throws the keys to.

Jim Mattis isn’t “Mad Dog” as he became popularly known in marine circles, but CHAOS: “Colonel Has An Outstanding Suggestion”.

In the marine corps, he is the ‘patron saint of chaos’ and a bona fide cult of personality. Marines love him, and he, to his credit, loves marines.

He’s also a fairly established intellectual, as many generals are.  To young marines like myself, he made reading seem approachable and something I should be looking into.

But reading texts advocating American global hegemony doesn’t ensure a moral, just, or correct policy. Quite the contrary.

Mattis has always been a major fear-mongerer regarding Iran. His entire career, he’s voiced concern over their power in the region and how it threatens our allies (namely Israel) and American lives more broadly.

The conclusion for why he lost his post at CENTCOM under Obama was precisely this issue.  A general told POLITCO he was so bellicose because, “he wanted to get even”.

In fairness, the marines that died at Beirut weighed heavily on him, as did the marine deaths from fighting Shia militias in Iraq.  Those events colored his view of Iran throughout his career.

But Iran is never going to be a legitimate military threat in Jim’s (or my) lifetime. What’s more, it’s rhetoric like his and John Bolton’s that drive the ayatollah further from US interests, setting the stage for future conflict, their supporting of insurgencies, bolstering of perceived threats, etc.

The Iranian boogeyman has already justified further force in a bloody Iraq, a groping President Obama to tread the slope of a slippery Syria, and endless bellicosity towards the nuclear Russia on their behalf.

If the concern of Mattis is truly the preservation of life for his and future marines, the only course is nonintervention for the US.  These conflicts are muddied by decades of politicking and strategic maneuvering, and all for nothing.  Tensions remain high, insurgencies world wide have more support than ever before, and Islamic extremists have a convenient anti-imperial animus to share regarding US foreign policy.

Instead of remaking the world in John McCain or Hillary Clinton’s image, or making it safe for democracy, or preserving the credibility of American hegemony by dropping bombs to prove we will, let’s cease the blood sacrifices of our young men for wars none of them can even rationalize.

Let us celebrate the passing of a harbinger of chaos from the White House: a man serving as a signal that conventional foreign policy bomb throwers have a place in polite society.  Resisting the urge to join the chorus of outlets mourning the loss of a “sober voice“, let us toast to an accidental foreign policy contrarian, President Donald Trump.

In a move guaranteed to get precisely none of the due applaud from respectable opinion molders, President Trump has ordered the full removal of all US troops from Syria within 30 days.

In an age when victory in war can simply be asserted on Twitter by nation’s presidents and no metrics for actually winning could ever possibly exist, Trump announced that ISIS was defeated and the war was over.I like to imagine a Pentagon junior aid at the Presidential Twitter Monitoring desk call out, “sir!”. Jim Mattis walks over , a green glow rising onto his face as he sees the screen for the first time, “mother of God..”

The pentagon did, of course, push back on the decision, warning that leaving now would leave the Kurdish alone to face opposition forces. This, of course citizen, is the concern of ours and requires a blood sacrifice of our young men until democracy is fully established and Islam forever pacified.

What’s most interesting, I think, is how at odd’s with his base this move is, and how easily he could have remained there in perpetuity at the recommendations of the state department and pentagon. Not only is the a vastly less rewarding avenue for any president, it will likely be a black eye on his ‘formal’ legacy as was the Iraq drawn down for W. Bush.

Trump seems to be sticking to his guns on this though, as well as to a seeming instinct to reject the pressures for US global military hegemony from within the military itself. At least in Syria.

My hope now is that this remains a war of historical record, not the justification for future wars because of the Kurdish plight or because of who the dictator is. I wish the media cared at all for peace, and lauded an objectively good move by Trump; though two years too late.

Ultimately, I think we see a president less interested in learning about any particular issue and more interested in optics; as we’re seeing in Syria. Trump has abruptly decided to rebuke popular and ‘expert’ opinion on war making for the route of peace. Moreover, he’s rejected the plan to remake the Middle East in our image and combat ‘Iranian influence’ at every turn. But the tangible effect is a, so, I’ll take it.