On COI #513, Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman discuss Israel’s war on Palestinians.
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Kristin Stewart Promotes New Film Based on Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine
Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
News emerged yesterday, via the Hollywood Reporter, that a feature-length doc based on a book by my late friend Daniel Ellsberg is making progress, now with help from actress Kristin Stewart. The film, titled How to Stop a Nuclear War and based on Dan’s book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (see my take below), was announced one year ago but still seeking backers via a new “sizzle reel.” Emma Thompson will narrate and Paul Jay directs.
Stewart says in the new promo: “We’ve grown so accustomed to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, that it barely registers in our daily lives. But when some new crisis or close call startles out of our slumber for just a brief moment, we truly grasp the insanity of living on a hair trigger to what could be a real-life Armageddon.” Stewart, you might say, has gone from “Twilight” to “Doomsday.”
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Scary: US Presidents Still Have Unchecked Authority To Launch Nuclear First-Strike
Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
There’s an important, if scary, opinion piece today at The Washington Post by Jon Wolfsthal, director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists and former National Security Council senior director under President Barack Obama. He cites the (still) current remnant of Cold War tensions that seemingly allows any U.S. president to start a nuclear war without what you might call checks and balances.
Wolfstahl recalls the dangerous final days of the Nixon and Trump presidency when others did intervene to try to block any nuclear launches ordered from the White House but he insists these roadblocks were not really allowed under present policy. Especially with Trump having a real chance to return to power in January 2025, he calls on President Biden to change policy now. Of course, warning about our “first-use” policy has driven my own writing of three books and hundreds of articles and directing a current PBS movie…
Conflicts of Interest: Zelensky Comes to Washington Begging for More Weapons
On COI #512, Kyle Anzalone discusses the Discord Leaks, the war in Ukraine, and Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
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Our Rotten Foreign Policy Status Quo
Perry Bacon probably speaks for many Americans that don’t follow U.S. foreign policy closely and are then shocked by how terrible it can be:
Like a lot of Americans, I don’t follow foreign affairs as closely as I probably should. I have generally assumed that the United States, particularly with Biden in office, plays a largely positive role abroad. Watching senior US. officials adopt a deeply flawed approach and then make misleading statements about it has made me more worried and skeptical of America’s actions in other parts of the world. If Team Biden is this disingenuous about what’s happening in Gaza, should I trust its words about Ukraine, Sudan or China?
Most Americans pay little attention to how our government acts around the world, but when people in this country are directly confronted with how dangerous and destructive US policies can be they are often appalled. There are many cases where the cruelty of US policies goes unseen by most of the public, and so those policies don’t meet with much criticism and opposition. The frequent use of broad sanctions to attack the people of other countries is one example of this, but we also saw how US backing for the war on Yemen went on for years before there was significant pressure to end our government’s involvement. Greater public scrutiny is no guarantee that monstrous policies will end, but it makes it harder for the government to maintain the status quo.
The war in Gaza is shining a spotlight on just how morally and strategically bankrupt the US approach to Israel and Palestine has been for decades, and it also shines a light on the crimes that our government enables through its support for client governments. It might be too much to hope that this wakes a lot of Americans up to the harm that our foreign policy does around the world every day, but there is no question that it exposes the rottenness of the status quo. There are occasionally moments when the public sees the extent of this rottenness and demands something better, and we may be witnessing something like that with the backlash against this war.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
A Message From Matthew Hoh: Support Antiwar.com
Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Matt is a former Marine Corps captain, a former Afghanistan State Department officer, a disabled Iraq War veteran, and a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for International Policy.
Dear Antiwar.com Reader,
I suppose many of you have noticed something about American public opinion. Previously, US wars would sustain public support for at least a few years until the weight of a war’s accumulated lies, moral and physical atrocities, costs, strategic failures, and counterproductive outcomes caused a collapse of public support. This has been the case for most of our lives, ranging from Vietnam through Central America to Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the last 15 years, we’ve seen a change. No longer can Washington, DC, count on a sizable majority of the US public cheering on American boys and girls to go overseas to kill and be killed. Starting with Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, through the wars in Libya and Syria, and now with the proxy war in Ukraine and the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, both Democratic and Republican administrations bent on war are limited by an American public increasingly set against war. There is no longer enthusiasm, let alone a benefit of the doubt, given to war-making by a large part of the American public, despite the best attempts of the legacy corporate media.
Antiwar.com has been at the vanguard of this shift in public understanding of war and militarism.
The breadth and depth of Antiwar.com’s news and commentary outdo those of any similar resource I know of. That’s why many former colleagues of mine still in the military and government read Antiwar.com every day. It is indispensable, not just for those of us in the anti-war community, but also for anyone who wants a well-balanced and informed understanding of the world.
We still have a long way to go in our fight against war and militarism. While the ability of the US to put troops on the ground has been severely constrained by a public informed because of the likes of Antiwar.com, we are still confronted with the great horrors of proxy wars, the ever-present danger of nuclear annihilation, and an economy hollowed out by a one trillion dollar a year military-industrial complex.
It is through a public that understands the reality of war, its true costs and consequences, that we will put an end to US war-making and militarism. We are seeing this in younger generations. Unique in its mission and purpose, Antiwar.com is at the forefront of this change in the public perception of war. What it provides for our community is irreplaceable. It is invaluable to me, and I believe it is likely the same for you.
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Matthew Hoh
USMC 1998-2008
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