Did Afghanistan War Crimes Contribute to Soldier’s Cybertruck Detonation in Las Vegas? (Director's Cut)

Consider my latest Zeteo column a sequel to Monday's edition on New Orleans. Plus developments from Iraq, Syria and… Greenland

Column edited by Zeteo; pre-paywall text edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING IRON MAN FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PUT IT ON YOUR PULL LIST AT A COMIC STORE (AN ONGOING SUBSCRIPTION WHERE THE STORE RESERVES EACH ISSUE FOR YOU), I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! EMAIL SOME KIND OF RECEIPT TO FOREVERWARS.BULLPEN@GMAIL.COM AND THE SWAG WILL BE YOURS! 

THE COLUMN BELOW started life with the idea that it could cover both the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks from New Year's Day. For reasons both personal and professional, I quickly learned it couldn't. I ended up breaking the first half off and providing it to my Zeteo editor for my January column. The second half you read on Monday. 

Unfortunately, separating them means the same body of text can't compare the two incidents. I was hoping to do so here, in the section before the paywall, but frankly my friend Jonathan Katz did it better than I will. My column, which you'll see below, is quite directly about blowback, in any event. Also, one item I was unable to find a smooth placement for: Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger apparently wanted to get his accounts of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan to Pete Hegseth for redress. Hegseth, however, is a prominent supporter of U.S. war criminals. 

I have an IRON MAN script due very soon, so I'm going to present this column for subscribers and get back to that. Before I get on with it, there are a couple stories I wanted to call to your attention. 

On December 18, Adrian Blomfield of the Daily Telegraph reported that in early November, the U.S. military command in Iraq gathered Syrian militants on its payroll at the al-Tanf base. There it reportedly instructed them to consolidate and take Palmyra so ISIS wouldn't capture the city in the event of the fall of Bashar al-Assad. I have a lot of questions about this, and U.S. Central Command has so far responded to none of them. But if true, Blomfield's report suggests that the U.S. had advance knowledge (cough Turkey cough) of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham's march from Idlib to Damascus. 

My friend Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders' former foreign-policy adviser, has what he describes as a 3000-word piece about the Democrats' status as the party of war. Reader, I have not read Matt's piece yet, but I'm sure it's great, so you should beat me to it. "In foreign policy as elsewhere, Democrats positioned themselves as defenders of a set of ideas and assumptions that most Americans no longer trust. As Trump takes office and Democrats prepare to enter the political wilderness, we need to reckon with how they got this so wrong," he writes. 

Around Thanksgiving, I read Vince Beiser's great new book Power Metal for a narrative-focused tour of the extractive realities of the minerals and metals fueling transitions away from hydrocarbons. Today he's got a quick primer on Greenland's rare-earth-metals bounty. That provides a material basis for Trump's comments about taking Greenland from Denmark—less “odd outburst” and more “classical imperialism.” 

Finally, this week al-Monitor's Amberin Zaman reported that elements of the Iraqi security apparatus want to unravel the U.S. "withdrawal" agreement now that Assad has fallen. We've seen versions of this development many times before, during earlier iterations of planned/forced U.S. departure, from a cohort that the U.S. sponsors, so its interests lie with an indefinite U.S. military presence. 

OK, now the paywall, then the column. Remember that if you subscribe, you get my Zeteo columns for free—what a deal!