Surprise! - Andrew Bacevich, It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over - Guest Post

Surprise! - TomDispatch.com Andrew Bacevich, It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over January 16, 2025 As one politician, all too sadly, returns to Washington -- and you know just who I mean -- another, all too sadly, is leaving. Call it, if not the end of history, then at least the end of something that matters (and, of course, the beginning of who knows what else). Departing is Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She will be remembered forever (at least by me) for, in the immediate wake (and that's an all-too-appropriate word) of the 9/11 attacks, casting the only vote in Congress -- yes, the only one! -- against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that the rest of the House and Senate passed (420 to 1). It essentially turned the constitutional right to war-making over to the president just as what came to be known as the Global War on Terror began. For refusing to give George W. Bush and the presidents who followed him a blank check when it came to disastrous rounds of future war-making, she suffered much criticism and abuse. She was called a traitor, even a terrorist. One newspaper labeled her “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.” As she said, looking back years later, "It was a very difficult decision, but I knew that I couldn't vote for that. And also I knew that, based on my background in psychology, you don't make hard decisions when you're upset, when you're in mourning. You have to think through the implications of any type of major decision. And then I was concerned about the issue of forever wars. It set the stage, and I knew it was going to do that. The military option could be the first option before we tried any other option to settle disputes, to respond to terrorist attacks." In some sense, you might say that the vote to send us into that Global War on Terror would end the moment in history following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, when American officials came to consider the U.S. the "sole superpower" on Planet Earth. And you might even say that, so many years later, it also helped set the stage for Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement and his first presidency. With the departure of an antiwar congressional great and the return of Trump to the White House -- you know, the man who, on January 6, 2020, tweeted to his followers, who had stormed Congress in the wake of his electoral loss, "We love you. You're very special!," then adding, "Remember this day forever!" -- let TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of the novel Ravens on a Wire (a vivid look at the post-Vietnam American military), consider what History may now be signaling to us. Tom