Book chronicles U.S. 'war on terror'

SANDUSKY — The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 is widely seen as a disaster that killed large numbers of people and did little for the security of the U.S. If President Joe Biden sticks to his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, he will end the longest war in U.S. history, one that has left the Taliban still in control of much of the country. But Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only U.S. military interventions that have turned out badly for the U.S., Scott Horton convincingly argues in his new book, "Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror," released earlier this year. Horton also chronicles U.S. misadventures in countries such as Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Mali, Syria and Yemen. And he shows that the U.S. propensity to get involved in unnecessary wars has been bipartisan. It was Republican President George W. Bush who pushed the U.S. into the 2003 Iraq war, but he won the backing of many Democrats. Similarly, President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, can be blamed for destroying Libya, which to this day remains embroiled in civil war and is a haven for terrorists, but few Republicans opposed that war. Many of the facts Horton brings out suggests that many Americans simply prefer not to pay attention to what their government is doing. Somehow, the U.S. wound up supplying arms to Islamic extremists in the Syrian civil war, helping to put Syria's Christians in jeopardy. When Russia's Vladimir Putin intervened to help the other side, part of his motivation was the pressure Putin was under from the Russian Orthodox Church to save Syria's Christian community. Horton did not provide footnotes in the book (his previous book, "Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan" was heavily footnoted) but his text offers enough information to verify many of his claims. For example, in his chapter on Pakistan, Horton writes about how President Obama's policies resulted in many civilians being killed in drone strikes and that the civilian population was terrorized by the drone attacks. He cited a 2012 report by Stanford Law School, "Living Under Drones." I was able to find a copy of the report on the Internet and download it. The details in the report are appalling. Here is a paragraph about a drone strike that killed 42 people, mostly civilians: "At approximately 10:45 am, as the two groups were engaged in discussion, a missile fired from a US drone hovering above struck one of the circles of seated men. Ahmed Jan, who was sitting in one of two circles of roughly 20 men each, told our researchers that he remembered hearing the hissing sound the missiles made just seconds before they slammed into the center of his group. The force of the impact threw Jan's body a significant distance, knocking him unconscious, and killing everyone else sitting in his circle. Several additional missiles were fired, at least one of which hit the second circle. In all, the missiles killed a total of at least 42 people. One of the survivors from the other circle, Mohammad Nazir Khan, told us that many of the dead appeared to have been killed by flying pieces of shattered rocks. Another witness, Idris Farid, recalled that 'everything was devastated. There were pieces—body pieces—lying around. There was lots of flesh and blood'." The report has pages and pages of similar accounts. Your tax dollars at work! Horton's book describes many similar atrocities which the U.S. directly caused or abetted, in countries which were not at war with the U.S. and posed little threat to Americans. His book is a challenge to the apathy many Americans show toward foreign policy.