Episode 133: The Art of Fake-Ending Wars
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"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.
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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\\u2013\\u2013all are used to confuse the average media consumer.
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America\'s politicians know the American public broadly dislikes war and empire\\u2013\\u2013and thus wants to see it restrained\\u2013\\u2013but 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\\u2019re ending a war or occupation without really doing so?
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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\\u2013\\u2013once the headlines make a big splash\\u2013\\u2013backtrack, 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.
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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.
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Our guest is Shireen Al-Adeimi, assistant professor at Michigan State University.