Tomgram: Eduardo Galeano, Robots, Drugs, and Collateral Damage

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’ve said it before, but do yourself a favor. If you haven’t read Eduardo Galeano, buy his new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, right now. You won’t regret it. And when you’re done, pick up Mirrors, his history of the world in 300-odd fabulous pages, and then the Memory of Fire trilogy, his history of the Americas in three dazzling volumes, and so on.

In the meantime, thanks to Nation Books and Galeano's splendid literary agent Susan Bergholz, TomDispatch is able to take a rare summer second dip into Children of the Days, a kind of prayer book for our time: a page a day for 365 days focused on what’s most human and beautiful, as well as what’s most grasping and exploitative, on this small, crowded planet of ours. Today, the focus is war, American-style.]

It could be any week on that great U.S. military base we know as Planet Earth and here’s the remarkable thing: there’s always news. Something’s always happening somewhere, usually on more than one continent, as befits the largest, most destructive, most technologically advanced (and in many ways least successful) military on the planet. In our time, the U.S. military has been sent into numerous wars, failed to win a single one, and created plenty of blowback. But hey, who has to win a specific war when it’s “wartime” all the time?

These last weeks were the American military equivalent of a no-news period. Nothing really happened. I mean, yes, there was the war in Afghanistan, the usual round of night raids, dead civilians, and insider attacks. Nothing worth spending much time on, other than whether the U.S. might, in frustration over Afghan President Hamid Karzai, exercise the “zero option” after 2014 and leave -- or not. And yes, there was that drone attack last week in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan that killed three “militants” (or so we’re told), despite the complaints of the country’s new government. (I mean, what say should it have in the matter?)

And there was the news that Washington was seeking an “expanded role” for its military in the Philippines, where the question of the month was: Could the Pentagon “position military equipment and rotate more personnel” there, “while avoiding the contentious issue of reestablishing American bases in the country” -- so said “officials from both countries,” according to the New York Times. After all, if we call the places where our troops are stationed “Philippine bases,” what’s the problem? And, believe me, no one wants to hear a lot of whining about it from a bunch of Filipinos either!

And don’t forget about those American drones now flying over Mali from a base recently established in Niger, part of a blowback-generating set of Pentagon operations on the African continent. They got a little attention last week. And one more thing, conveniently on the same continent: since Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey put in calls to their Egyptian counterparts as they were launching a military coup in an ongoing pre-revolutionary situation, the Pentagon has, it seems, never been less than in touch with its Egyptian military pals, a crew significantly trained, advised, and paid for by Washington.

And that’s just what made it into the news in the most humdrum military week of 2013. Today, Eduardo Galeano, one of the great global writers, takes us from 1916 to late tomorrow night via eight little excerpts from his new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, reminding us of what some really newsworthy moments were like. Think of it as a kind of highlight reel from almost a century of the American way of war. Tom

Iraq Invades the United States

And Other Headlines from an Upside Down History of the U.S. Military and the World

By Eduardo Galeano [The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books).] The Day Mexico Invaded the United States

(March 9) On this early morning in 1916, Pancho Villa crossed the border with his horsemen, set fire to the city of Columbus, killed several soldiers, nabbed a few horses and guns, and the following day was back in Mexico to tell the tale. This lightning incursion is the only invasion the United States has suffered since its wars to break free from England. In contrast, the United States has invaded practically every country in the entire world. Since 1947 its Department of War has been called the Department of Defense, and its war budget the defense budget. The names are an enigma as indecipherable as the Holy Trinity.