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Camp Lessons: Combines, Fighter Jets and Limited Resources

German Tornado jets like this one can reportedly fly 1,490 mph at 30,000 feet. Tornado pilots train to use US B61 hydrogen bombs, 20 of which are still deployed at Germany’s Büchel air base.

By John LaForge

BÜCHEL AIR BASE, Germany — The juxtaposition of nuclear weapons and ordinary farms is the same here as at home in the United States. Just outside this jet fighter base — where a peace camp focused on ridding the site of its US 20 nuclear bombs has been set since March 26 — farmers plant oats, corn and wheat right up to the fences. Likewise in “the states,” nuclear submarine bases, bomber bases, and land-based missiles are placed in farmland too, where the hard-scrabble struggle to produce food is mirrored against the gargantuan waste of limitless military spending — in this case maintaining weapons that can never be legally put to use.

This week, local farmers are harvesting oats, cutting swaths 4 to 6 meters wide with their groaning, screeching combines that look something like giant, hammerhead sharks, or long-extinct dinosaurs. Just like at home, the combines are followed, if the weather holds, by heavy balers that bind up the straw; and just like in the Midwest, jet fighters overhead practice war fighting in the same sky that warms and waters the crops. On the edge of camp, holstein cows meander near the paved bike path, ignoring the spray-painted warning: “Attention! Here Begins the Atomic War Zone.”

The noise of heavy farm machinery is a relief from the howling roar of the German Tornado jet fighter-bombers that scream off the runway most weekdays. The jets shriek like rockets all day long and well past dusk. They reportedly burn through €50,000 ($59,000) every hour they’re airborne. Farmers can rightfully cringe. How many of them can expect to make that much in a year — even though they work harder, longer hours and actually produce something?

The peace camp, with its theme “Büchel is Everywhere,” reflects and teaches these stark contrasts and lost chances every moment of every day. The modest camp has a large cook tent, a kitchen run on bottle gas, tables, chairs and cookware for 40, a makeshift shower, chemical toilets, and a wood fire for evening gatherings. This summer’s climate is just like Wisconsin’s or Minnesota’s — although the local weather includes the “heat” of 20 US Air Force B61 hydrogen bombs deployed in bunkers across right down road. The Bombs make for a sort of raised temperature that permeates the consciousness — unless you’re in denial. Farm machines chug across the fields at a mile-an-hour; the jets howl across the sky at 921 mph — 1,490 mph when up high).

On the edge of camp, cows meander near the paved bike path, ignoring the spray-painted warning: “Attention! Here Begins the Atomic War Zone.”

Political, ethical, and practical opposition to US nuclear weapons in Germany goes back decades. In 1997, peace researchers discovered the deployment of 20 Cold War era B61s here and began raising hell. Legally, the bombs are a clear violation of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) — which is binds both Germany and the United States. Article I prohibits nuclear weapons from being transferred to or the accepted by any other state. The NPT, and Germany’s post-war constitution, have been the legal foundation of anti-nuclear civil resistance actions at Büchel because German law is especially keen about the horrifying results of obeying unlawful orders.

Condemnation of the US H-bombs and Germany’s part in the Tornado’s “nuclear mission” — German pilots train to “deliver” the US Bombs — is nearly universal, crossing party lines and cultural divides. Even skin-head neo-Nazis offered (unsuccessfully) to be part of the “US Nukes Out!” campaign. So hot a potato is the status of illegal US nukes here that the base commander himself, “Oberstleutnant” Gregor Schlemmer, chose to leave of his office and come out to an active blockade of his main entrance July 18 to greet members of our US delegation. NATO ministers, former heads of state, and dozens of retired military officials have all called the US B61s “Cold War relics” that no longer serve any purpose. Almost 90% of German adults what them gone. Perhaps commander Schlemmer feels the weight too, and looks forward to retiring and maybe doing some farming.

Peace camp participants watch the grain being brought in under the harvest moon and recall the hundreds of activists, dozens of nonviolent actions, and scores of news reports that were brought together by the 20-weeks from March to August. Blockades, vigils, concerts, “go-in” actions, and marches have forced the reluctant media to take note of US nukes in Germany.

Of course nuclear weapons are the last thing people want to contemplate, especially in summer, so it takes some focused inventiveness to get the media to face the Bomb. A final blockade is planned for August 9, the anniversary of the US atomic attack on Nagasaki, Japan. Beyond that dreadful consideration, and the close of camp, German abolitionists plan to focus on pushing the ouster of US nukes as an issue in September’s national elections. And from both sides of the Atlantic, organizers are working to cancel US plans to deploy a new B61 in Europe, and to spend $1 trillion over 30 years making new Bombs, rather than retiring them all permanently and getting on with joining the new international treaty ban.

From inside and outside the air base gates, farmers and nuclear war gamers alike, oberstleutnants and agronomists, may agree that ploughshares are needed more today than illegal bombs.

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US Pretext for Hiroshima Insults Veterans

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima Japan Aug. 6, 1945 (pictured above after streets were cleared) incinerated with one device what had taken 464 separate B-29 bombers, using firebombs, to accomplish against Tokyo on April 26 that year. The15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb was crude and tiny compared to today’s nuclear weapons. The smallest warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, the 500-kiloton B61s and the 200-kiloton W80s — what experts now call “small” nuclear warheads — are 33 and 16 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” — Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, WWII Air Force Commander of the 21st Bomber Command, Sept. 20, 1945.

By John LaForge

With President Obama’s 2016 visit to Hiroshima, reporters, columnists and editors generally stuck to the official story that “the atomic bomb…ultimately spared more Japanese civilians from a final invasion,” as Kaimay Yuen Terry wrote last year in the Minneapolis StarTribune, or that, “Without it, more Japanese would have died in a US assault on the islands, as would have tens of thousands of Americans,” as Mike Hashimoto said in the Dallas Morning News.

“The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives,” Harry Truman wrote in Truman Speaks. Oddly, historians have found no record of any memo, cable, projection or study, military or civilian, where this estimate was suggested to him. In his book The Invasion of Japan, historian John Ray Skates says, “… prophecies of extremely high casualties only came to be widely accepted after the war to rationalize the use of the atomic bombs.” Historian Martin J. Sherwin has “cited a ‘considerable body’ of new evidence that suggested the bomb may have cost, rather than saved, American lives. That is, if the US had not been so determined to complete, test, and finally use the bomb, it might have arranged the Japanese surrender weeks earlier, preventing much bloodshed on Okinawa.”

Obama, uttered not a word about the controversy, and merely embraced the rationalization, cover-up, and nostalgia that guarantees the US will never apologize for the needless and experimental massacre of 200,000 Japanese civilians. As Mr. Hashimoto wrote, “No apology [is] needed for sparing lives on both sides…”

The New York Times reported vaguely that, “Many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed.”

Many historians may still believe this, but the majority do not. In 1990, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Chief Historian J. Samuel Walker, wrote, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it,” Walker wrote in Diplomatic History.

Historian Gar Alperovitz wrote in Atomic Diplomacy five years earlier, “[P]resently available evidence shows the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war or to save lives — and that this was understood by American leaders at the time.” Further declassification made Alperovitz’s history, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: and the Architecture of An American Myth (Knopf, 1995) even stronger on this point.

Admirals and Generals Debunk the Myth

Contrary to Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim that Obama’s visit to Hiroshima “insults veterans,” the fiction that the atomic bombs ended the war is the real insult to the veterans who fought and won the war against Japan. The official myth that incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan’s surrender ignores, obscures and dishonors the fact that combat veterans and bomber crews defeated Japan themselves well before August 6, 1945 — by fighting and dying in dangerous bombing raids and in terrible battles for Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere. Dozens of high-level military officers testify to this fact.

Most ranking officers who directed the war in the Pacific agree that the atom bombs were inconclusive. Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, Commander of the 21st Bomber Command, speaking publicly and on the record Sept. 20, 1945, said unequivocally: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” Pressed by a stunned reporter who asked, “Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” Gen. LeMay — who directed the destruction of 67 major Japanese cities using mass incendiary attacks — said flatly, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Likewise, Gen. George Kenny, who commanded parts of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific, when asked in 1969 whether it was wise to use atom bombs, said, “No! I think we had the Japs licked anyhow. I think they would have quit probably within a week or so of when they did quit,” Alperovitz recounts in The Decision.

Alperovitz’s research found that Adm. Lewis Strauss, special assistant to WW II Navy Secretary James Forrestal, wrote to naval historian Robert Albion December 19, 1960: “[F]rom the Navy’s point of view, there are statements by Admiral King, Admiral Halsey, Admiral Radford, Admiral Nimitz and others who expressed themselves to the effect that neither the atomic bomb nor the proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland were necessary to produce the surrender.”

In his book Mandate for Change, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote that when Secretary of War Henry Stimson told him atomic bombs were going to be used, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…”

President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Adm. William Leahy, adamantly agreed. As Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell, report in Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, Leahy said, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons….” Lifton and Mitchell also noted that Henry “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, said in his memoirs, “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

Answers to questions about the use of the atomic bombings were given early on, but some were kept secret. “[T]he US Strategic Bombing Survey published its conclusion that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion,” Alperovitz reports in The Decision. He spent 30 years researching the issue and has revealed that a 1946 study by the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division — discovered in 1989 — “concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war” and “judged that it was ‘almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.’” Russia entered the war the day before the US bombed Nagasaki.

—John LaForge, a staffer with Nukewatch in Wisconsin since 1992, is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of a newly-revised edition of Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the 450 Land-based Missiles of the United States.

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US Delegation to Germany Achieves a Few “Firsts” in Effort to Oust US Nuclear Weapons

“Oberstleutnant” Gregor Schlemmer, commander of the Büchel Air Base, Germany, a deployment site for 20 US nuclear-armed B61 H-bombs, on July 17 just before accepting a copy of the newly adopted UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons from Sister Ardeth Platte, O.P., of Baltimore Maryland. (Photo by Marion Kuepker)

By John LaForge

BÜCHEL, Germany — For the first time in a 21 –year-long effort  to oust the remaining US “B61” nuclear weapons from Germany, a delegation of US peace activists* joined in protests at the Büchel Air Base in west-central Germany between July 12 to 18. Notable among the 11-person delegation were seven participants who have served a combined total of 36 years in US jails and prisons for protests against nuclear weapons and the war system.

The Nukewatch-organized delegation, from seven states and the District of Columbia, was invited by a coalition of 50 German peace groups and organizations that’s taken on Germany’s de-nuclearization as a primary focus, and we were joined in an “International Week” of protests by likeminded activists from Belgium, France, The Netherlands, China, Russia, and Mexico. While the US delegation was a “first” in its own right, our group established a few other firsts in our week of nonviolent confrontations.

On Saturday July 15, Susan Crane, of the Redwood City, Calif. Catholic Worker and a participant in five Plowshares disarmament actions, and I walked through the base’s main gate and talked for 40 minutes with military guards and local police about the question of whether their orders to protect Büchel’s nuclear war planning are lawful. One guard complained to me, “Every time I tell you to leave, you start another conversation.” Although Susan eventually sat down and had to be carried out (I walked), no charges were brought against us for our simple “go-in” demonstration, something unprecedented according to long-time nuclear disarmament activist and peace camp organizer Marion Kuepker.

On Sunday the 16th, a pair of firsts was accomplished when a group of 50 protesters, accompanied by photographers and reporters, walked through the same gate and toward a “hardened” steel inner gate which was for the first time anyone could remember left inexplicably unlocked. At least 30 of us traipsed through the open steel door, fanned out, and began inspecting the otherwise exclusively military surroundings and their gaudy display of three retired war planes on pedestals. All the while, Dominican Sisters Carol Gilbert and Ardeth Platte, of Baltimore, Maryland, read aloud the text of the new international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear weapons and calling for the base commander to come and accept a copy. The Dutch activists, most of them from the Amsterdam Catholic Worker, had gotten exactly what they wanted: to place loaves of “bread not bombs!” — as the old peace slogan goes — around the old “gods of metal.”

Simultaneously, Susan Crane and I took up an idea from Sister Carol, and lowered the US flag. It had occupied a position superior to Germany’s, even at this German base. Having had a lot of experience with flags as a former Boy Scout, the task was done in a blink. But when Susan asked me, “Now what do we do with it?” I had to admit, “I don’t have a lighter,” and could only shout to the other “go-in” activists: “US out of Germany!” (There are some 50,000 US military personnel still occupying the country, 28 years after the end of the Cold War and 72 years after the end of World War II.) Our hosts told us later that no one in Germany would dare to take down the US flag for all the accusations of “anti-Americanism” that would result. Peace activists get called enough names as it is.

Two other shocking first-ever events came on Monday July 17. As I reported last week, a rush-hour blockade of the highway leading to the main gate was interrupted amazingly by the base commander himself, “Oberstleutnant” Gregor Schlemmer, who diplomatically took from Sister Ardeth her copy of the ban treaty. After dark the same day, five of us, four US and one German, got farther into the supposedly high-security base than any others had managed to in two decades of “go-in” protests here. Somehow we crossed lighted fields and roads, tramped noisily through several woodlots, clipped through four chain-link fences, and climbed atop a huge weapons bunker that may have contained nuclear weapons — all without being detected. People bent on hurting others or destroying things instead of simply inspecting could have done terrible damage to this facility.

Our final “go-in” action showed once again that the government’s claims that nuclear weapons keep us safe, and its promises that it can keep its nuclear weapons safe, are fraudulent. Even pacifists with wire cutters showed them to be laughable fairy tales.

The US plans to produce 480 new thermonuclear B61s — the so-called “B61-12”— to replace the current stock and the 180 now deployed in five NATO states — including the 20 at Büchel. Production is not expected to start before 2022, and overall cost of the new bomb is estimated to be at least $12 billion. This program can still be defunded and cancelled, but it take a few more firsts.

*The US delegates were Steve Baggarly, of the Norfolk, Virginia Catholic Worker; Kathy Boylan, of the Washington, DC Catholic Worker; Zara Brown, a Minneapolis, Minn. photographer; Susan Crane; Ralph Hutchison, and Carmella Cole, both of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Knoxville, Tenn.; Sr. Carol and Sr. Ardeth; Leona Morgan, of Diné No Nukes in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Bonnie Urfer and myself, both of Nukewatch in Luck, Wisc.

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Activists Challenge US Nukes In Germany, Occupy Nuclear Weapons Bunker

Activists prepare to enter Büchel Air Base in Büchel, Germany to challenge US nuclear weapons deployment. From left, Bonnie Urfer, Steve Baggarly, Susan Crane, John LaForge, and Gerd Buentzly. (photo by Ralph Hutchison)

By John LaForge

Büchel, Germany — The theory that nuclear weapons provide state security is a fiction believed by millions. Last night Monday, July 17, five of us proved that the story of ”high security” nuclear weapon facilities is just as fictitious.

After nightfall, an international group of five peace activists, me included, got deep inside the Büchel Air Base here, and for the first time in a 21-year long series of protests against its deployment of US nuclear bombs, we occupied the top of one of the large bunkers which stores nuclear weapons. We could scarcely believe we’d reached the inner sanctum of a nuclear war planning zone.

After hiking along two shadowy farm roads, shushing down a dark row of tall corn, crossing a brightly lit air base road, and tramping noisily through a few wooded brambles, our small group cut through two chain-link fences, bumbled past a giant hanger, and under the wing of a jet fighter bomber, to reach a double fence surrounding the giant earth-covered bunkers. After we cut through the two non-electrified exterior fences without tripping a single alarm or even causing the lights to snap on, the five of us scurried up to the top of the sod-padded, wide-topped concrete quonset hut. Totally unnoticed, we spent over an hour chatting, star gazing, checking our radiation monitor, and enjoying being flabbergasted that our implausible plan had worked. This was supposedly one of the most tightly controlled places in the world.

No motion detector or alarm, no Klieg light or guard had noticed our intrusion at all. Then it started getting cold. We’d come prepared for days, weeks or months in jail, but not for being outside all night. So two members of the group climbed down to scratch “DISARM NOW” on the bunker’s giant metal front door, setting off an alarm. They hustled back up to the others and were soon surrounded by vehicle spot lights and guards searching on foot with flashlights. We decided to alert guards to our presence by singing ‘The Vine & Fig Tree,’ prompting them for the first time to look up. We were eventually taken into custody, more than two hours after entering the base. After being detained, searched, photographed for an hour, we were released without charges, although some may be pending.

The five, Baggarly, Susan Crane, 73, of California, Bonnie Urfer, 65, of Wisconsin, Gerd Buentzly, 67, of Germany, and I, said in a prepared statement, “We are nonviolent and have entered Büchel Air Base to denounce the nuclear weapons deployed here. We ask Germany to either disarm the weapons or send them back to the United States for disarming….” The US still deploys up to 20 B61 gravity bombs at the air base and German pilots train to use them in war from their Tornado jet fighter bombers.

The bunker occupation, known as a “go-in” action by German anti-nuclear campaigners, was the fourth act of civil resistance during “international week” at the base, organized by “Non-violent Action to Abolish Nukes” (GAAA). More than 60 people from around the world — Russia, China, Mexico, Germany, Britain, the US, the Netherlands, France and Belgium — participated.  The effort was in turn part of a 20-week-long series of actions — “Twenty Weeks for Twenty Bombs” — that was begun March 26, 2017 by a 50-group Germany-wide coalition called Büchel is Everywhere, Nuclear Weapons Free Now!”

A combination of two earlier actions succeeded in winning a meeting with the base commander ”Oberstleutnant” Gregor Schlemmer. At the site of a base blockade earlier July 17, the commander personally approached the protesters — something unheard of in the United States — and accepted a copy of the newly-adopted UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons from Sister Ardeth Platte, OP, of Baltimore, Maryland. A day earlier, as 25 activists walked through shockingly unlocked main entrance gates, spontaneously lowered the US flag, and ”put bread not bombs” around the retired jet bombers on display, Sr. Platte and Sr. Carol Gilbert, OP also of Baltimore, demanded a meeting with Schlemmer so they could deliver the treaty. The next day’s appearance of the commander made me joke: ”Yesterday we took down the flag, and today the commander surrendered.”

Eleven activists from the United States came to Büchel to put a spotlight on government plans to replace the B61. Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Tennessee — where a new thermonuclear core for the “B61-Model 12” will be manufactured — said, “It is important that we show this is a global movement. The resistance to nuclear weapons is not limited to one country.” The new B61-12 program will cost more than $12 billion, and “when production starts sometime after 2020, Büchel is scheduled to get new nuclear bombs. Nothing could be stupider when Germany wants the out and the world wants to abolish nuclear weapons,” he said.

US delegate Susan Crane, a Plowshares activist and member of the Redwood City, Calif. Catholic Worker, said, “Around 3:00 a.m. while we were detained, Schlemmer the Commander came to meet us and said what we did was very dangerous and that we might have been shot. We believe the greater danger comes from the nuclear bombs that are deployed at the Base.”

 

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Rockets’ Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air

Library image: US Marines fire a Howitzer in northern Syria on March 24th 2017 in support of Coalition operations. (Photo: Airwars.org, via USMC/ Cpl. Zachery C. Laning) 

A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.

With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. US drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from super-carriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Sat., June 24 when US bombs destroyed four houses.

Every child killed or maimed by US-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013 in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “US military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”

Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass US military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.

If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by US drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017 directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.

US offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]

In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a US gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.

The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The US dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.

Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”

Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.

This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as US drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” —John LaForge

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