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Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Epic Fail - TomDispatch.com

Epic Fail - TomDispatch.com Nick Turse, The Forever Failure of America’s Failed Forever Wars April 2, 2024 TomDispatch is distinctly a forever-war creation. When I began it almost 23 years ago, the U.S. had just invaded Afghanistan and, of course, there wasn't the faintest sense that what had been launched then, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on this country, would still be going on globally so many years later, or that, in all those years, the best-funded military on the planet would achieve so remarkably little (except perhaps in getting itself funded at ever more astronomical levels). If, in fact, you had told me then that, by March 2024, the U.S. military would have been decisively defeated in Afghanistan, largely defeated in Iraq, and would never have managed to come anywhere close to eradicating the still-expanding terror groups on this planet in what was already (all too ominously) known then as the Global War on Terror, I doubt I would have believed you. If you had told me that, in March 2024, a newly formed junta in Niger (a country I then knew nothing about), five of whose members had been trained by the U.S. military, would be threatening to kick our forces out of their country because our war on terror had failed so dismally in the region, leaving behind an airbase built there for a genuine fortune, I would have thought you nuts. And yet, here we are. As TomDispatch's Nick Turse -- who, in all these years, has followed the grim war on terror into Africa in a way no other journalist has -- suggests, it's another one down for the home team (which has been all too far from home all too regularly since September 11, 2001). Consider his striking report just one more nightmare in the Global War That Never Ends, or GWTNE. Tom

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