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It’s gut-wrenching. It’s infuriating. Every ounce of human empathy should be activated by the pictures and stories we are seeing.
The scale of the refugee crisis — millions fleeing into neighboring countries in just a matter of a few weeks — is the worst the European continent has seen since World War II.
Putin’s unknowable endgame, made all the more uncertain as his forces stall and are even pushed back on the battlefield, heightens the stakes of the entire calamity. To even enter into conversations about the prospects of nuclear weapons, well, it’s not a sentence I wish to bring to conclusion.
All of this is to say that the tenor, nature, and scale of concern and attention the global community is paying to Ukraine is warranted (particularly Europe, which has the bloodshed in its own neighborhood). The world will not be the same when this war ends, however and whenever that may be. Whether we are stronger and safer in its aftermath will be a defining question of this era. But along the way to that hypothetical historical record we are left to wonder how many will die? How many will flee? How many will become orphans? How much will be destroyed? These questions haunt us, and they should.
It takes nothing away from the horrors of Ukraine and the bravery of its citizens, however, to broaden our field of vision and ask ourselves another series of difficult and soul-searching questions. What has this war revealed about the way we look at a wider world in need? What biases has it exposed about whom we judge as victims? About whom we view as heroes? About the need for action? About our responsibilities to provide support?
All war is hell.
All war leaves tragedy in its wake.
And right now there are other wars that are killing and maiming people and forcing them to flee: in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, to name a few.
And it's not only outright war that can destabilize human society; oppression comes in many forms. Lawlessness can lead to indiscriminate killings. Minorities are often targeted and scapegoated. And the climate crisis is only exacerbating levels of global misery and desperation.
Part of what has sparked my ruminations is witnessing some of the coverage around the war in Ukraine that has generated criticism as being biased or even racist. Most of the furor centers on the idea that the invasion of Ukraine is different from other recent wars and refugee crises because it is in Europe.
As the host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, put it in a segment on the topic: “I don’t know about you, but I was shocked to see how many reporters — around the world, by the way — seem to think that it’s more of a tragedy when white people have to flee their countries. Because, I guess, what? The ‘darkies’ were built for it?”
I do not want to call out individual reporters for the most egregious statements, because these instances reflect a more pervasive mindset. What is more important is the general discussion it should spur, among journalists, policymakers, and the broader public.
In a piece titled “The biases in coverage of the war in Ukraine” in the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop considers the issue from many vantage points, and includes links to other articles about this issue (it’s a good overview). One of his concluding paragraphs points to a path forward:
The biases that are often present in Western coverage of war and the biases that are making the coverage of this war different both ultimately reflect ingrained assumptions about global power dynamics that are not only morally indefensible, but factually untenable. The war in Ukraine is a tragic opportunity for the Western press to interrogate and shed these assumptions, an act that, done properly, should not distract from the immense suffering of the Ukrainian people but help us see it even more clearly, in a universal context.
We are taught to dehumanize our enemies, to see them as “others.” Doing so has served as a tried-and-true method for those needing to rally nations for the sacrifices of war since probably the beginning of human existence. We can see it now with Putin in Ukraine and his calls for “denazification” — never mind that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and had family killed in the Holocaust. Many have noted that one complicating aspect of the war in Ukraine is that millions of Russians have strong cultural and familial ties with millions of Ukrainians, which of course makes the “othering” more difficult. But it’s not impossible. We can look to examples from civil wars for how people living in one place can be taught to hate each other enough to kill. Often these fault lines are around religion, geography, or language and culture.
It is natural to feel more sympathy for people who seem more similar to you, and that extends to war. During World War II the way the Nazis were portrayed in the United States was different from how Imperial Japan was. Both were horrific, murderous regimes, but one was European, and thus didn’t seem as “foreign” to the majority of Americans at the time. Japanese Americans were put in internment camps. German Americans were not. The Japanese army, and the Japanese people, were portrayed with more distinctly racist caricatures than the Germans.
Of course, the differences that separate us from one another in a biological sense are minimal. We are all one species, bound by a common humanity. We can learn to see the world in ways that highlight and build connectivity, at the level of nations and cultures, and with individuals. To do otherwise, to foster animosity or even antipathy, is not only morally wrong — it is a threat to our own personal health and safety.
We can see that the problems of an interconnected world cannot be isolated. The war in Ukraine, and the level of barbarism we are seeing by Putin, can be found rooted in what he did in Chechnya and Syria, when the world let him get away with it. Those conflicts didn’t get nearly the attention they deserved. Those refugees were not met with the same sympathy. Those cancers were allowed to metastasize.
One strategy that can help is if we diversify our newsrooms. We need more perspectives, more people with different backgrounds, more opportunities for us to report on the world with understanding and empathy. Yes, political talk shows seem to do well on cable news, but we also need to have foreign affairs covered more broadly. And when they are, the public needs to support those efforts. Such coverage is not cheap, and those who report in dangerous places often do so at incredible risk.
What is happening in Ukraine is a tragedy of historic proportions. Its people are brave. Their lives matter. Their stories need to be told. It’s not that we need less Ukraine; it’s that we need more of the rest of the world. Perhaps this moment of shock and self-reflection can yield the impetus for change, hope, and a belated recognition of the plights of so many.
Boris Romantschenko. (photo: Twitter/@Buchenwald_Dora)
ALSO SEE: More Than 900 Civilians Have Died in Ukraine.
The True Number Is Likely Much Higher
Thousands of Donald Trump supporters storm the United States Capitol building following a 'Stop the Steal' rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Trump’s team agreed it would encourage supporters to march, but try to “make it look like they went down there on their own,” Scott Johnston tells Rolling Stone
Trump and his allies have tried to minimize his role in calling his supporters to the Capitol and argue he was simply participating in a lawful, peaceful demonstration.
Scott Johnston — who worked on the team that helped plan the Ellipse rally — says that’s just not so. He claims that leading figures in the Trump administration and campaign deliberately planned to have crowds converge on the Capitol, where the 2020 election was being certified — and “make it look like they went down there on their own.”
Johnston, who says he described the phone call to House select committee investigators, detailed his allegations in a series of conversations with Rolling Stone. Johnston says he overheard Mark Meadows, then-former President Trump’s chief of staff, and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman, talking with Kylie Kremer, the executive director of Women for America First, about plans for a march to the Capitol. Johnston said the conversation was clearly audible to him since it took place on a speakerphone as he drove Kremer between the group’s rallies in the final three days of 2020.
“They were very open about how there was going to be a march,” Johnston says. “Everyone knew there was going to be a march.”
According to Johnston, Meadows, Pierson, and Kremer discussed the possibility of setting up a permit to make the march from the White House to the Capitol official. He says the trio decided against officially permitting the march, citing concerns about security costs and about the optics of a sitting president organizing a push towards Congress as lawmakers certified his loss in the 2020 election. Ultimately, Johnston tells Rolling Stone, they planned to “direct the people down there and make it look like they went down there on their own.”
Kremer’s group, Women for America First, helped lead the Jan. 6 rally at the White House Ellipse, where Trump delivered a speech and told supporters to “fight like hell” and said he expected them to march on the Capitol. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said. As Trump spoke, people began leaving the rally to walk toward the Capitol.
The president’s camp insists this wasn’t part of any pre-planned push. In the book where he recounted his time in the White House, Meadows called the Jan. 6 violence “the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”
Johnston’s account suggests there was a deliberate strategy by Trump’s allies to have supporters descend on the Capitol. Such a connection would implicate top White House and campaign officials in drawing crowds to Congress without a permit — a step that could have required added security and may have allowed law enforcement to better prepare for the day’s events. Those crowds overwhelmed the Capitol police and engaged in an hours-long battle with law enforcement. Four people died during the attack.
According to Johnston, rally organizers were “constantly” using “burner phones” — cheap, prepaid cells that can be harder to trace because they’re not personally identified with a user or a user’s account — “to talk about” potential permits and plans for a march with Trump aides.
Johnston says that, in the key phone conversation he overheard, the group settled on ordering a march without an official permit. “Nobody wanted to do it because they didn’t want to pay for it,” Johnston says of obtaining a permit. “They didn’t want to have to provide security and all the other expenses.”
On Dec. 20, 2021, Johnston testified to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, and he provided Rolling Stone multiple pieces of documentation showing his interactions with the committee. Johnston also says he told investigators that he knew the call took place on a “burner phone” in the final days of 2020 because the discussion came right after Kylie Kremer directed him to purchase three phones for her group.
“I’m the one that bought the burner phones,” Johnston says.
The committee did not respond to an inquiry regarding Johnston’s allegations about the rally organizers and about his testimony. A source familiar tells Rolling Stone that committee investigators have asked Amy Kremer, Kylie’s mother and the chair of Women for America First, about their use of burner phones. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation, said Amy Kremer has denied using the devices. The source did, however, confirm that key phones used by the rally organizers were purchased in California. That corroborates the account from Johnston, who says he told committee investigators that he bought the phones at a CVS in Cathedral City, California.
The committee is also seeking Meadows’ phone records via a subpoena sent to Verizon, but the former White House chief of staff sued to block that subpoena in December. The case is ongoing. A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment.
Rolling Stone reported in November that Kremer and other Jan. 6 rally organizers used burner phones to communicate with White House officials during the planning stages of that event. After that report, Kylie and Amy Kremer denied using burner phones in a statement from their lawyers. Johnston, who was one of the sources for that reporting, says Kylie Kremer directed him to purchase the phones on Dec. 28, 2020, so she could “communicate with high-level people.”
According to Johnston, on the call with Meadows and Pierson, Kylie Kremer was adamant that Women for America First could not be publicly affiliated with the march, even though she privately approved of it. Johnston says Meadows was willing to help secure a permit for the march but was also amenable to Trump supporters converging on the Capitol without one.
Pierson disputed Johnston’s version of events in a text message to Rolling Stone. “No such call took place,” Pierson wrote. Pierson further suggested that she did not know who Johnston was and that “phone records” would disprove his “defamatory claims.”
Asked about Johnson’s allegations, Kylie and Amy Kremer responded through their spokesman, Chris Barron. “The claim regarding the substance of any phone call between Katrina Pierson, Kylie Kremer, and Mark Meadows is absolutely false,” Barron wrote. “If anyone gave testimony to the J6 committee claiming that such a call took place and that was the substance of the call should be incredibly concerned — the last I looked lying to Congress was a crime.”
Organizers of the Ellipse rally told Rolling Stone last year that they participated in “dozens” of meetings with White House staff and pro-Trump Republicans in Congress as they planned protests against Trump’s election loss. And Rolling Stone reviewed text messages among the rally organizers — including Johnston — in which the organizers said they were “following [Trump’s] lead” in planning the Ellipse rally.
While the House select committee is clearly investigating the high-level organization of the Ellipse rally and related efforts to overturn Trump’s election loss, it does not have criminal authority. The congressional committee can, however, make referrals to the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation. Thus far, the FBI has largely focused on militant groups that were present at the Capitol and people involved in the storming of the building, hundreds of whom have been arrested and now face criminal prosecutions, jail time, probation, and fines. While these rank-and-file supporters have suffered criminal consequences, many prominent figures involved in the Jan. 6 rally remain members of good standing within the GOP, where they continue to hold powerful and lucrative positions in and out of government.
Rolling Stone cannot independently verify Johnston’s claim about the December phone conversation. He says he’s unaware of any recording of the call. The only other person Johnston believes may have overheard it is another Ellipse rally planner, Matt McCleskey. Johnston says McCleskey was also in the car when Kylie Kremer spoke about the march with Meadows and Pierson. However, Johnston says it’s unclear if McCleskey would have heard the call, as the staffer often wore headphones as he worked during the long drives.
McCleskey tells Rolling Stone Johnston’s story is “not true” and says he was “never in the presence of a phone call involving Meadows and Pierson.”
The committee has subpoenaed Meadows, Pierson, and Kremer. In a letter that accompanied those subpoenas, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) indicated his interest in communications the Kremers had with Meadows. Thompson also indicated to Meadows that the committee is interested in the role Trump’s former chief of staff played in planning the Jan. 6 events. “It appears that you were with or in the vicinity of President Trump on Jan. 6, had communications with the President and others on Jan. 6 regarding events at the Capitol, and are a witness regarding activities of that day,” Thompson wrote. “Moreover, at least one press report indicates you were in communication with organizers of the Jan. 6 rally, including Amy Kremer.”
Johnston had been volunteering for conservative causes since long before Jan. 6, 2021. In 2015, he worked in Arizona with Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, two right-wing activists who later joined the rally planning team led by the Kremers. Stockton and Lawrence introduced Johnston to the Kremers, and he assisted them during months of rallies they staged in the lead-up to Jan. 6.
With multiple investigations into Jan. 6, cooperating witnesses can have a variety of motivations for coming forward. Some may hope to avoid legal trouble while others could be eager to shape the public narrative or settle scores. Ultimately, Johnston said his relationship with the Kremers soured, in part, because he came to view them as “total grifters.” Johnston claimed he told investigators that the Kremers used donated funds for personal expenses. In text messages reviewed by Rolling Stone from the days after the Capitol attacks, Johnston accused Kylie Kremer of having him accompany her on a “weird and inappropriate” trip to go “bra shopping.” Johnston says he directly witnessed Kylie take cash that was collected at a Women for America First “March for Trump” event for her purchases on that trip.
“She took a handful right out of the donor basket,” Johnston said.
The Ellipse rally was not the only major pro-Trump event that was set to take place in Washington on Jan. 6. There were also plans for a rally called the “Wild Protest” that was to be held alongside the Capitol grounds. One of the organizers of that demonstration, far-right activist Ali Alexander, claimed in a television special produced by Fox News host Tucker Carlson last November that a Trump campaign staffer approached him at the Ellipse Rally and directed him — as well as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — to lead a march to the Wild Protest site. “A Trump campaign staffer walks up to me and says, ‘You know, Ali, there are people leaving the overflow and there are already tens of thousands of people at the U.S. Capitol. With your presence and the presence of Alex Jones, why don’t you guys walk down Pennsylvania, gather people together, and then position them for your rally.'”
Jones made a similar claim in a video that he posted on Jan. 7, 2021. “The White House told me — three days before — we’re going to have you lead the march,” Jones said. “Trump will tell people, ‘Go and I’m going to meet you at the Capitol.”
Alexander and Jones have both been subpoenaed by the House select committee. In letters accompanying those subpoenas, which were sent last year, the committee indicated it was interested in the role both men played in plans to march to the Capitol.
Alexander and Jones — who both have a long history of promoting false conspiracy theories — have not produced any evidence of their claims or named the White House and campaign staffers who they say directed them. The pair have insisted their actions on Jan. 6 were non-violent and law abiding. Jones did not respond to a request for comment. In an email, Alexander, who did not respond to requests to name the alleged staffer, claimed “event planning is not one dimensional.”
“No one instructed anyone to have a structured march (formation, banners, fencing, etc.) that I’m aware of. The walk over was colloquially described as ‘a march’ by some, as ‘a walk over’ by others,” Alexander wrote. “And that was an evolving issue that developed and changed the advertising or characterization of the event as it was quickly planned.”
Stockton and Lawrence have told Rolling Stone they were among a group of Ellipse rally organizers who had concerns about the Wild Protest due to Alexander’s links to militant groups and the rally’s proximity to the Capitol. The pair claimed Amy Kremer brought those concerns to Meadows and that they were under the impression he would resolve the issue. Earlier this month, the committee subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign aide and the fiancée of the former president’s son Don Jr. In a letter accompanying that subpoena, the committee indicated it was interested in “concerns raised” about Alexander’s presence at the Ellipse rally.
Johnston said that, in his committee interview, the investigators were specifically focused on whether Meadows knew about plans to have a march on the Capitol. This questioning left Johnston with the impression that other witnesses testified the former White House chief of staff was involved in plans to have crowds go from the Ellipse to the Capitol. “I don’t think I’m the only one that’s told them that he knew about the march,” Johnston says of Meadows.
“Mark Meadows and Katrina Pierson,” Johnston says of the investigators, “that’s the two they’re going after.”
A firefighter battles the Dixie Fire as it tears through the Greenville community. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
Consider this perhaps the strangest thing of all in our all-too-strange world: the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced essentially never leads the news. Yes, the immediate crises of our world, most recently Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, are 24/7 headlines for weeks at a time. And any set of events that sends millions of us into external or internal exile, as has become all too common on this planet of ours, should indeed be a focus of attention. But to put all of this in context, it’s estimated that within three decades up to a mind-boggling 1.2 billion human beings could be driven from their homes thanks to the burgeoning climate emergency.
Of course, climate change, as TomDispatch regular Jane Braxton Little, who still lives in the fire-devastated northern Californian town of Greenville, reminds us today, is already hard at work wrecking lives across our world. When it hits as fire or flood, as a dramatic weather disaster of some sort, the news often loves to show us the calamity at hand (and the all-too-photogenic weeping survivors). But the cause of it all, climate change itself? No such luck. The ongoing, never-ending, ever-worsening calamity that could someday simply destroy human life as we’ve known it gets remarkably little attention here (unless coal merchant Joe Manchin votes against its solution in some fashion).
Only recently the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest devastating report, produced by 1,000 scientists, on what we’re doing to ourselves. In the midst of the Ukrainian events, it got hardly a moment’s notice. Yet its version of the news to come should have been screaming headlines, given that, if the effects of the overheating of this planet aren’t mitigated soon, by 2050, at least 183 million more people could be going hungry and that’s just to start down a long list of possible nightmares to come. At least climate change makes headlines here at TomDispatch. Today, for instance, you can learn from Little, who has experienced its effects in an up-close-and-personal way, just how we’re going to be “whiplashed” by the weather that our eternally fossil-fuel-burning societies (and the big energy companies that have made their fortunes off it) continue to produce.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Any moisture would have been welcome. Over the seven months since the Dixie fire destroyed Greenville and several other rural communities in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains, the drought that led to the flaming disaster had only deepened. October brought brief, drenching rains, but November and December were dry again. Soil that should have been moist was as desiccated as the air, while the humidity hovered just above single digits. We watched bulldozers move the dilapidated walls — what had not long ago been homes — into gigantic dump trucks in a haze of grime. Even the trees that survived had a withered look. Now, it was snowing — for Christmas! We greeted it with hearts as wide as the open mouths of kids savoring falling flakes.
Greenville, my adopted town of 46 years, had been devastated by a climate-change disaster. Sparked by the negligence of Pacific Gas … Electric (PG…E), the Dixie fire scorched nearly one million acres, the distance, if you care to measure, from Philadelphia to New York City. On August 4th, a pyrocumulus cloud collapsed on the ridge above the tarnished old Gold Rush community where I worked, erupting into red-hot embers that fell over a several square-mile area. Trees were transformed into towering torches. Flames roared down the nearby mountain, racing through overcrowded forests left bone dry (after a century of ill-advised fire suppression) by a third year of drought. It took less than 45 minutes for that inferno to raze the historic 160-year-old downtown, including my journalism office on the second floor of the oldest building around. About 800 homes went up in flames. Over the next four months, we gathered in grief in twos and threes in the post offices and shops of neighboring towns, soothing one another.
Now, it was Christmas and snowing! We relaxed and rejoiced amid the ruins.
Little did we know that, driven by our overheated planet, we were about to be whiplashed from drought to deluge. Hotter days and hotter nights have corkscrewed our weather patterns into spiraling extremes, leaving entire regions around the world jerked from the hottest temperatures they’ve known to the coldest, from devastating fires to disastrous floods. This is uncharted territory and, scientists say, an all-too-grim preview of the future we’re creating for ourselves.
By the fourth day of non-stop snow our euphoria had waned. Electricity was flickering on and off. The Internet was mostly off. We shoveled our steps and then the paths to our cars, only to find them covered all over again. Driveways were challenging and roads treacherous (if open at all). Snow was piling up across the Sierra Nevada, the gigantic tilted block of granite that lies along the state line with Nevada.
At Lake Tahoe, 75 miles to the south, 18 feet of snow was dumped on luxury second homes, collapsing decks, and taxing municipal snow-removal crews gone soft after years of mild winters. Highway 80, the main route over the mountains, was closed for three days by storms that made December the third snowiest month on record and the snowiest December ever. Those storms catapulted the state’s precipitation to 258% of its average for that point in the year. California water officials were giddy with expectation, predicting that our three-year-old drought would be broken.
Then, of course, it ended. Precipitation of any kind simply stopped. January clocked in as the driest ever for some parts of the state, as well as most of Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado. Last month was the driest February in 128 years, according to a multi-agency partnership monitoring drought. And here’s the truth of it: if we keep letting greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, we better get used to this sort of seesaw experience. Scientists say that, by century’s end, such abrupt transitions between wet and dry will increase by another 25% in northern California and possibly double that in southern California.
Weather Whiplash
While California may be a poster child for extreme weather events, they are occurring almost everywhere. Such wild swings from tinder-dry to inundation are known as climate or weather whiplash. What causes them is a matter of scientific speculation and the subject of much cutting-edge research, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some scientists cite a connection between the polar vortex, a wall of wind that circles the Arctic, and jet streams, the bands of strong winds that generally blow from west to east. As the Arctic warms — at as much as triple the average global rate — it seems to be destabilizing those jet streams and so, according to a study published in Environmental Research, provoking abnormal and extreme weather across the planet.
Swain thinks we should imagine it as a colossal tug of war involving complex atmospheric dynamics over the Pacific Ocean. Yes, he says, the world is definitely getting warmer as greenhouse-gas concentrations rise. That, in turn, means wet times will generally be wetter and dry times drier, especially in California. He’s also found emerging evidence, as he told me, of what he calls “a relatively weird” regional effect: the loss of Arctic sea ice might actually be counteracting the drying effect of the expanding subtropical zone, keeping California from becoming more arid still in a warming world.
People in my community know local weather and the land. Ranchers, loggers, and firefighters, they understand storms and seasons, soil, water, and trees in an up close and personal way. I’ve found my place among them over these years, writing about their work and their love of the landscape we share. We here in Greenville may not know anything about what the intersection of the polar vortex and jet streams or atmospheric dynamics are doing to our world, but we certainly know when our environment is off kilter. Being jerked from the drought that provoked the Dixie fire to that historic snowfall and back again has left us with little doubt: something with the weather is seriously bonkers.
The unexpected uncertainty of weather we once took for granted is spawning anxieties that add to the trauma of living through a town-destroying fire. Instead of one disaster and done, weather whiplash threatens us with disaster after disaster. Having somehow survived fire, we’ve been thrust into a deeply uncertain future. The forests we turned to for hiking, fishing, and birdsong no longer promise solace. The natural world that welcomed and kept us in this valley ringed by mountains has become unreliable. What can we trust?
A Is for Anthropocene
When it comes to weather whiplash, Australia is exhibit A for Anthropocene, the current geological epoch dominated by the human impact on the environment. Storms have been pounding that island nation’s southeast coast since late February, earning the moniker “rain bombs” for their severity. In just two days, the town of Doon Doon in New South Wales received 42 inches of rain, roughly Washington, D.C.’s annual precipitation. Flooding has killed 22 people so far, prompting Prime Minister Scott Morrison to declare a national emergency. This round of extreme wet weather follows the catastrophic bushfires of 2020 that killed 28 people and more than a billion animals, while scorching an area nearly the size of Connecticut in a fashion never before seen.
Worse yet, as we in California have discovered, the recovery time for communities between such climate disasters is shrinking. Simon Bradshaw, a researcher at the Australian Climate Council, summed things up simply enough: “New South Wales was hit hard by the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and now it is in the grips of another climate-driven disaster.”
Then there’s Texas. During the last decade that state has reeled from one of the most significant droughts since the 1950s to a series of deluges that have rivaled any period of flooding Texas has ever experienced. Rainfall in 2011 was 25 inches below average, forcing mandatory water restrictions. Meteorologist Jeff Lindner called the heat in Houston that August a 10,000-year event. Over the 2011 Labor Day weekend, vegetation primed by that drought combined with 40 mile-per-hour winds to produce the Bastrop fire, the single most devastating wildfire in that state’s history. It burned more than 35,000 acres and around 1,600 homes, while the Tricounty fire incinerated over 19,000 acres and 100 homes.
Then the weather seesawed. By the time Hurricane Harvey made landfall at Port Aransas on August 27, 2017, the area had rocketed from drought to deluge. Rainfall for the year was nearly 30 inches above the annual average. Netherland, a city on the Gulf of Mexico, recorded more than 60 inches. The devastation Harvey wreaked affected an estimated 13 million people and included at least 107 deaths, nearly 135,000 homes damaged or destroyed (one third of the total number in four counties), and up to a million wrecked cars.
Governor Greg Abbott, a veteran climate-change denier who has threatened to sue President Biden over policies addressing the crisis, conceded that something was changing dramatically. “We need to recognize that this is going to be a new normal. A new and different normal for the entire region,” he said.
Even when such weather swings don’t create disasters, they have tangible consequences. Across the American Midwest, for instance, weather whiplash is driving a decline in municipal water quality. After excessive flooding followed a drought in 2012, researchers at the University of Kansas noticed a nitrogen spike in surface waters in the area. In dry times, the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers put in their fields doesn’t go into the plants it’s intended to enrich. A 2017 study found that the nitrogen stays in the soil, which acts like a sponge, holding it in place. “But as soon as you wet it,” Amy Burgin, one of its authors, points out, “like when you wring a sponge, the nitrogen can flood into the rivers.”
Such increasingly high nitrate levels in drinking water forced the Des Moines Water Works to construct a $4.1 million nitrate removal plant that costs $7,000 a day to operate. As weather whiplash becomes ever more the norm, scientists expect surface-water nitrate spikes to occur throughout the agricultural Midwest.
Elsewhere, the changing patterns of various kinds of wildlife are only exacerbating the problems caused by weird weather. In eastern Oregon, for instance, widespread drought followed by deep snow has caused elk to move out of the hills to feed on the haystacks that are ranchers’ paychecks. Conflicts between wildlife and humans are already common enough, but climate scientists expect them to increase as droughts, floods, and fires push animals off their normal ranges and into agricultural areas.
Who Drives the Climate Train?
As I’ve learned all too personally, climate disasters are profoundly destabilizing. They can wrench communities from their roots and turn them upside down. They are also profoundly unjust. Those with the fewest resources and least responsible for the climate crisis are going to continue to bear the brunt of its impact.
And here’s the only good news: climate change is a problem with a solution. We humans created it, which means it’s solvable. That, however, would require societal and political will of a kind we simply haven’t seen yet. And that’s the bad news. We haven’t mustered anything close to enough determination to halt the relentless increases in temperature driving the weather that’s whiplashing us ever more violently. As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres put it, a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “a damning indictment of failed climate leadership… that reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”
Swain, the UCLA climate scientist, put it this way: “We’re on a train going faster and faster down the tracks with perfectly functional brakes. But the drivers, for whatever reasons, are choosing not to engage the brakes.”
One of the great ironies of experiencing climate-change disaster may be that we are both its victims and its drivers. We could, at least theoretically, apply the brakes of the locomotive. In our fury over the forces of destruction beyond our control — the flames that incinerate and the floods that inundate our lives — perhaps we’ll find the political will and guts to bring meaningful change, at least on a very small scale right here in my town of Greenville.
In its charred devastation, we could now choose solar power over fossil fuels. (And if so, who would blame us for feeling smug about shunning PG…E?) We could choose community gardens over imported produce. All that, however, remains a distant future for a place with a single grocery store, a gas station, and little else. But if we must spend the rest of our lives healing, we can at least invest them in empowering one another and our community in a new way. We have so little left to lose.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Jane Braxton Little, a TomDispatch regular, is an independent journalist who writes about science and natural resources for publications that include the Atlantic, Audubon, National Geographic, and Scientific American. She moved to Plumas County in 1969 for a summer that has yet to end.
A US Army soldier stands guard next to a burning oil well at the Rumayla oil fields in Iraq on March 27, 2003. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Today is the 19th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It was a catastrophic, illegal, murderous war — and Joe Biden was one its most important cheerleaders.
Not only did Biden cast a critical vote to authorize military force; he also played a crucial role in creating the case for war in the first place. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden built support for a bipartisan resolution that ultimately gave George W. Bush’s administration wide discretion to defend the United States from any perceived threat from Iraq. In the years since, Biden has argued that he only voted for the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq to enhance the United States’ bargaining power at the United Nations — as if putting a gun to the head of the international community (what Biden called “tough diplomacy”) represented anything other than a call for war.
Far from the reluctant warrior he’s portrayed himself as, Biden — by rejecting alternative resolutions that would have required the United States to predicate military action on authorization from the United Nations Security Council, and disparaging more progressive Democrats who balked at the prospect of war as purists — ultimately created the very conditions in which opposition to war became untenable in the first place.
Even a series of high-profile hearings Biden held in 2002 — ostensibly an evenhanded attempt to inform the US public of the risks of an invasion — was a ruse: he enlisted a host of pro-war operatives to parrot the Bush administration’s propaganda about Iraq’s mythic weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and alleged ties to al-Qaeda, with nary a skeptical voice among them. According to the chief UN weapons inspector at the time, Scott Ritter, the hearings were a “sham” designed to provide cover for Biden’s “pre-ordained conclusion” that either Saddam Hussein or his weapons had to go — despite the fact that the CIA’s George Tenet had personally told Biden there was no evidence these WMDs even existed.
In fact, Biden had called for war with Iraq for years. In 1998, he warned that the country represented a grave threat to US interests. According to Biden, it was impossible for inspectors to guarantee that Hussein would not develop WMDs in the future (if he didn’t have them already), and that “the only way . . . to get rid of [him]” was to put boots on the ground — sooner or later.
But the rationale that Biden had so diligently crafted for years — that Iraq posed an existential threat to the United States — never materialized. A desperate search for WMDs in the wake of the invasion produced nothing. Within a year, a majority of Americans realized that the invasion had been a mistake. And by the end of 2014, lawmakers and the intelligence community alike conceded that not only did Iraq have no such weapons — biological, chemical, or nuclear — but prewar intelligence had been deeply flawed.
And yet not even during the heated final debate of the primaries in 2020 did Bernie Sanders (who had voted against the invasion in 2002 as a representative of Vermont) make the case — which he had alluded to on the campaign trail more than once — that Biden was unfit to serve as president because of what was, in Sanders’s view, “the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of the United States.”
Elizabeth Warren, another candidate who had called the Iraq War a mistake, also failed to challenge Biden’s historical defense of the invasion — from denying that he had ever believed Hussein possessed WMDs to lamenting that the only mistake he had made was to trust the Bush administration. When asked whether Biden was to blame, Warren — a legal academic who had begun her political career taking on the president over the 2005 bankruptcy bill — demurred.
In fact, the most strenuous criticism against Biden’s role in the Iraq War was leveled in March 2020 by an air force veteran who accused Biden of having the blood of fellow service members on his hands. But despite his overtures that he had come to regret his support for the war — which became increasingly unpopular in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party in subsequent years — Biden never learned from his mistake.
Eleven years after the intervention in Libya’s civil war and twenty thousand deaths later, it’s clear the United States’ seven-month bombing campaign not only suffered from poor planning, no exit strategy, and flawed intelligence — the same faults Biden attributed to the Iraq War — but also had nothing to do with protecting civilians in the first place. Despite Barack Obama’s initial declaration that regime change was out of the question, Biden would come to praise NATO for removing the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Biden’s revelation, years later, that he had opposed the intervention from the beginning again shows how he continues to deny responsibility for the United States’ repeated misadventures in the Middle East — all on his watch.
“The Original Sin of the Twenty-First Century”
The fact that the Iraq War — one of the most heinous acts of aggression in modern times — was not only a complete disaster but an outright crime is seldom acknowledged in mainstream US politics. Since George Bush’s infamous address in May 2003 — in which he declared an end to major combat operations aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln a month after the invasion — hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed, millions have been maimed or injured, and many times more have been displaced.
Within a few years, studies concluded that over a million Iraqis had lost their lives, and, since the fifteenth anniversary of what the scholar Tallha Abdulrazaq calls “the original sin of the 21st century,” it’s estimated that the corpses of 2.4 million people litter the very cradle of civilization. In addition to leading to widespread death and destruction, destabilizing the region, and giving rise to the Islamic State, the war has also had more distant (albeit foreseeable) long-term effects, such as the global refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
American voters used to give a damn about the Iraq War. In 2008, Barack Obama leveraged widespread discontent with the war to secure the Democratic nomination, courting progressives and young people alike. In fact, it’s widely believed that Hillary Clinton lost to the senator from Illinois not just because she had voted for the war — and was instrumental in rallying ambivalent Democrats to the cause — but because Obama had decried the invasion from the start.
In later years, vast swaths of the American public became convinced that the war was a disaster. Bush’s approval rating dropped to an all-time low of 25 percent, based in large part on the widespread belief that the occupation was a mess. By 2016, even Republicans like Donald Trump, who had run on a nihilistic platform of killing the families of purported terrorists and “bringing torture back,” would come to attack Clinton’s lack of foresight from the left.
Obama’s obvious contempt for his predecessor’s war, based on a haphazard and incoherent policy in Iraq, was soon overshadowed by what can only be described as his neglect. Under his leadership, US forces withdrew in 2011, only to return a few years later with a seemingly never-ending mandate to fight ISIS — a creation of the occupation itself that the president not only gravely underestimated as al-Qaeda’s “JV team” but subsequently emboldened, spending billions of dollars more than Bush ever had in the process.
Despite inveighing at length against the Iraq War — calling it a “big fat mistake” — Trump would also come to authorize further troop surges and bombing raids. In July 2017, Trump joined Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi in declaring Mosul free from ISIS control after Iraqi and US forces completely destroyed the city in some of the most horrific violence since the invasion — based in no small part on the fact that Trump had removed restrictions on US military operations designed to reduce civilian casualties. Only in the dying embers of his first and final term did Trump decide to reduce troop levels in Iraq — by a pittance.
By the time the Iraqi people made their first forays into democracy in decades, the war had already faded from the American imagination. Following ISIS’s expulsion from Iraq in December 2017, massive demonstrations rocked the country again and again, with everyday people taking to the streets to protest high unemployment, widespread government corruption, and a lack of basic services like water and electricity. In 2019, Iraqis even burned down the Iranian consulate in the holy city of Najaf and forced the prime minister to resign — a powerful rebuke of an unpopular government that had killed hundreds of protestors.
But the convulsions in Iraq were barely reported in the United States. Media coverage of the war has fallen precipitously for years; even when it is in the news, it’s on the periphery. Trump’s assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 drew censure from Democrats who condemned his failure to obtain congressional authorization for what was called an act of war. But the fact that the strike had taken place at the Baghdad airport, or that Iraqi authorities hadn’t been consulted in advance, wasn’t questioned at all.
During the Trump administration, the twin war in Afghanistan — the longest running armed conflict in US history, also born out of the events of September 11 — gripped the American imagination. Whether it was attempts to thwart the International Criminal Court’s probe into US atrocities, the first use in combat of the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS, or Biden’s mishandled withdrawal from the country last August, the people of Afghanistan continue to suffer from Taliban rule, a massive humanitarian crisis, and ongoing pillage of their own funds by the United States.
The Iraq War made headlines again when, in a desperate response to his electoral loss, Trump declared that all troops in the country would be home by January 2021. But despite Biden’s belated decision to bring the nearly twenty-year conflict to an ignoble end (met with a combination of faux outrage, sentimental nostalgia, and legitimate concern), it’s unclear whether his announcement last December that the United States had concluded the combat mission in Iraq for the umpteenth time amounted to anything more than a verbal sleight of hand.
“The Supreme International Crime”
There’s a reason why Americans have become inured to constant violence in a country their government has been bombing for dozens of years: there has yet to be a shred of accountability. In late 2004, then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan declared that the Iraq War was an outright violation of the UN charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self-defense. What’s more, the belligerents had been warned that invading Iraq would not only be illegal under international law but amount to a criminal act.
Before famously changing his mind, UK attorney general Peter Goldsmith advised Tony Blair on the eve of the invasion that the prime minister would be susceptible to prosecution in UK court for the “crime of aggression” — or what the Allies called “crimes against peace” — an offense established after World War II precisely to impose individual criminal liability on Axis leaders for the sin of having gone to war in the first place. According to the Nuremberg court, the crime of aggression “is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Subsequent calls around the world to bring the perpetrators to justice failed. In June 2008, thirty-five articles of impeachment against Bush were introduced in the House by Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler, fifteen of which had to do with the Iraq War alone. None made it to the floor. Obama, who ran on a campaign of accountability and transparency, later revealed he was reluctant to order an inquiry into the Iraq War in the first place, much less hold perpetrators accountable. In terms pithy and perverse, the president advised Americans that “we need to look forward,” despite his concession that “we tortured some folks.”
On the other side of the pond, Iraqi general Abdul-Wahid Shannan Al-Rabat brought a private prosecution against Blair, Goldsmith, and former foreign secretary Jack Straw in 2016 for the crime of aggression as well, based on the results of a yearslong investigation into the UK’s role in the Iraq War. The High Court subsequently dismissed the case.
For senior members of the Democratic Party, the crimes of the Bush era were largely inconsequential. Despite repeated calls for impeachment among leading Democrats at the time, House Leader Nancy Pelosi made it clear that it was “off the table,” even after the party gained control of Congress in 2006. Years later, she revealed that she knew Bush was lying through his teeth the whole time, and that the Iraq War was a sham — but that, in her view, it didn’t rise to an impeachable offense. Obama echoed this in his latest memoir, in which he praises his predecessor and chastises Americans who condemned Bush as a war criminal.
Republicans have strenuously defended Bush’s legacy as well. In November 2020, in a rare act of defiance, several prominent members of the party condemned Trump’s plans to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump himself granted clemency to US soldiers and contractors for some of the most heinous crimes committed on Iraqi soil, including the infamous massacre of seventeen Iraqis in 2007 by Blackwater mercenaries. And among his own party, Bush remains as popular as ever. As of 2018, his approval rating among Republicans hadn’t dropped below 75 percent in ten years.
The fact that not a single official has been held accountable for the decision to invade Iraq is emblematic of the “war on terror” in general. Whether it’s Abu Ghraib, torture, extraordinary rendition, black sites, secret surveillance, drone strikes, or Guantanamo, the United States has consistently denied responsibility for the crimes of the Bush administration and beyond. Perpetrators like former secretary of state Colin Powell and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld have also escaped justice altogether — in death. Even US allies have taken more responsibility for their respective roles. In recent years, Canada has compensated former detainees at Guantanamo, Italy has convicted CIA agents for torture in absentia, and Australia has concluded a probe into war crimes committed by special forces in Afghanistan.
In contrast, investigations by the United States have probed only the extent to which the Iraq War represented a massive intelligence failure, precisely to avoid implicating the political leadership involved. The Chilcot report, released in 2016, not only laid bare the baseless and confused rationale for the war but placed the blame squarely on Blair’s government. And since taking office, Biden — just like his predecessor — has doggedly pursued whistleblowers like Julian Assange for the audacity of exposing, among other things, US forces murdering Iraqi civilians for sport.
The Forever Wars
Nineteen years later, it’s as if the Iraq War never happened. Following the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the Trump administration did everything short of a declaration of outright war to provoke Iran — including protracted economic warfare, parking aircraft carriers in Iranian waters, and killing the country’s “second most powerful man.” A week before Biden took office, then secretary of state Mike Pompeo even announced that Iranian ties to al-Qaeda had been discovered — the same canard used to justify the Iraq War two decades prior. Biden later withdrew sanctions in the lead-up to diplomatic talks, only to thwart them altogether with strikes on Iranian forces — in a country we are not at war with (Syria), from a country we have no right to be in (Iraq). In recent days, the Biden administration has gone so far as to call President Vladimir Putin’s accusations that Ukraine is harboring bioweapons, a pretext for Russia’s invasion, everything from “disinformation” to outright “malarkey” — without a hint of irony.
Whether it’s proxy wars with neighboring countries or ongoing drone warfare in the region, the US continues to wage forever war against an inchoate enemy — with Iraq as base of operations. There is no indication that Biden intends to deliver any semblance of justice to the Iraqi people either. All eyes are on whether Congress’s decision to finally rescind the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force will bring an end to the carnage once and for all — or merely update it for yet another phase of US interventionism.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee Myanmar since 2017. (photo: KM Asad/ZumaPress/Picture Alliance)
Myanmar’s mass killing of the Rohingya Muslim population was designated as “genocide” by Washington. This is expected to boost international pressure on the country's military-led government.
The evidence shows "a clear intent behind these mass atrocities, the intent to destroy Rohingya, in whole or in part," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday.
Speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Blinken said the attacks against Rohingya was "widespread and systematic."
The museum features an exhibit on the plight of the Rohingya in the country — "Burma's Path to Genocide."
The Buddhist-majority country launched a military crackdown against the mostly Muslim Rohingya community in the western Rakhine state in 2017.
About 850,000 of them were forced to flee their homes and into neighboring Bangladesh, where they recounted mass killings, rape, and arson.
What does this mean for Myanmar?
A genocide determination does not necessarily mean fresh punitive measures against Myanmar.
The country's military leaders have already been hit by a series of sanctions over the brutal campaign against the Rohingya, even before the junta seized power.
The formal declaration of genocide could be followed by further limits on aid and other penalties.
Washington also believes it will bolster international efforts to hold the junta accountable.
"It's going to make it harder for them to commit further abuses," one senior State Department official was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.
Case at World Court
The declaration could also increase the international pressure on Myanmar's military-led government, which was already facing genocide accusations at the United Nation's highest court in The Hague.
Gambia brought the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in 2019.
However, the case has been complicated since the military ousted the country's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and her government in February 2021.
Blinken said the US would hand testimony from victims who had been shot in the head, raped, and tortured to the Gambia to use as further evidence.
A boy who looks after livestock quenches his thirst from a water point near Dertu, Wajir County, Kenya. Millions of people on the continent still do not have enough clean water to drink. (photo: Brian Inganga/AP)
Studies ‘debunk the myth that Africa is running out of water’ but say resource needs to be better managed
Groundwater – found underground in aquifers, rocks and soils – makes up about 99% of all liquid freshwater on earth, and is abundant in much of Africa, but a lack of investment has left it untapped or poorly managed, two major studies have found. The reserves could be used for irrigation and to supply clean and safe water, but there is also a danger that if used unsustainably they could be rapidly depleted or polluted.
Tim Wainwright, the chief executive of WaterAid UK, the charity behind one of the reports, said: “Our findings debunk the myth that Africa is running out of water. But the tragedy is that millions of people on the continent still do not have enough clean water to drink. There are vast reserves of water right under people’s feet, many of which are replenished every year by rainfall and other surface water, but they can’t access it because services are chronically underfunded.”
WaterAid, along with the British Geological Survey, found that most African countries could survive at least five years of drought, and some more than 50 years, on their groundwater reserves. Their study, entitled Groundwater: the world’s neglected defence against climate change, found that every sub-Saharan African country could supply 130 litres a day of drinking water per capita from groundwater without using more than a quarter of what can be renewed, and most using only about 10%.
Separately, the UN’s annual World Water Development Report also concentrated on groundwater this year. It found that only 3% of farmland in sub-Saharan Africa was equipped for irrigation, and only 5% of that area used groundwater, even though groundwater is often abundant in the region.
Richard Connor, lead author and editor of the UN report for Unesco, said groundwater was not being used in Africa because of a lack of investment in equipment and infrastructure, and a shortage of institutions, trained professionals and knowledge of the resource. Developing expertise in mapping and managing groundwater resources would be essential, he said.
There are also dangers to over-exploiting groundwater. Some groundwater is quickly replenished as rain falls, but there are also aquifers that have lain undisturbed for millennia and even millions of years. This “fossil water” is now within reach of modern pumping methods, and has been effectively mined as such, for instance to build cities in the desert in the Middle East. This cannot last, as the water is not replaceable across human timescales.
Connor pointed to other examples around the world of over-exploitation, in south Asia, parts of the US and Australia, where groundwater has been used unsustainably. In India, for instance, more than 30 years of incentives from government to farmers to extract water, without the development of accompanying governance structures to ensure the water was shared equitably and managed for the long-term, has led to rampant over-use, with groundwater depleted beyond its natural ability to recharge. That has left farmers fighting over a dwindling resource, with falling and increasingly polluted water tables.
Connor said public participation was key, with local people being given rights and responsibilities over their resources, and the knowhow to extract and use groundwater efficiently and sustainably. He said this required investment: “It costs money to do it properly, and it can cost more money to manage sustainably than to mis-manage, in the short term. But the returns from good management are huge. Proper management will allow the resource to be available for generations.”
For African countries, a further danger is that other countries may leap in to take advantage first. The Oakland Institute has published a separate study showing that big agricultural commodity companies from overseas are seeing a major opportunity in Africa. Researchers studied 15 cases of large-scale agricultural projects in 11 African countries, where big companies were given rights to land and water extraction.
The report warned that in many cases, far from seeing benefits from the development, local people were often disadvantaged. “When irrigation infrastructure is established, it benefits private firms for large-scale agriculture, often for export crops, instead of local farmers and communities,” the report says. “People living in arid and semi-arid lands are severely impacted by large-scale irrigation projects that reduce available pastures, and prevent flood recession agriculture, while fences and canals cut through traditional routes of people and livestock.”
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