Biden Declares We're "Not At War Anywhere." What?

How Washington avoids telling the truth about our wars

“I'm the first president this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” President Biden said in his Oval Office address on Wednesday.

Malarkey alert

It is a fantastic claim, one that could only come out of the mouth of a decades-long Washington apparatchik for being both technically true on the narrowest of definitions and spectacularly wrong at the same time. In fact, less than one hour before Biden’s address, the Pentagon’s U.S. Central Command announced that it had conducted its latest attack on Houthi targets in Yemen.

The Navy airstrikes were intended to suppress Houthis attacks on ships transiting international waters, which the Houthis have targeted as a result of the Israel-Hamas war. Hey wait, isn’t the U.S. at war there too? Okay, not literally at war, like we are in Yemen, but we are supplying weapons and technical support and intelligence for the Israeli war. And when we’re not doing that, we’re also actively protecting Israel from Iranian attack, while we’re also attacking Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria; that is, when we’re not fighting ISIS in Syria, which has now expanded its franchise into Afghanistan, where the U.S. is still at war — or “over-the-horizon” war, as they call it — against al Qaeda, while we’re also fighting another al Qaeda/ISIS affiliate in Somalia, who we’re also fighting in Yemen when we’re not fighting the Houthis. And that’s just in this corner of the world!

Biden’s outrageous assertion passed virtually without comment, including by the fact checking industrial complex. It’s not like they were busy correcting the record on more important things: the same day as Biden’s address, AP issued a fact check on the pressing matter of an obvious joke meme about JD Vance.

Pulitzer time!

Some argue, as Biden evidently believes, that the U.S. is not at war because Congress hasn’t passed a formal declaration of war. By that technicality, none of this is war. But then, that means that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t wars either, despite the decade-plus of fighting, and the thousands of deaths and injuries suffered by U.S.troops in “combat.” But not war.

The purely Washington definition of war that every think tank dork insists you adhere to isn’t just annoying. It’s insidious in the way that all political euphemisms are — it obscures what’s really going on. According to Washington conventions, none of these qualify as war: defensive responses, retaliatory strikes, targeted attacks, tit-for-tat actions, kinetic engagements, partner efforts, special operations, black special operations, clandestine operations, CIA operations, and so on.

Financing Israel and Ukraine to the tune of many billions of dollars worth of arms isn’t war, because, well, they’re at war and not us. And we’re not engaged in a new Cold War with Russia, or China, which is only a “pacing threat” to the Pentagon to determine how big they can make the defense budget. Those American bombers in Romania this week, and the Russian and Chinese bombers in the news right now, are not war either. Nor are our nuclear weapons pointed at each other: that’s deterrence. Iran? North Korea? Also not at war.

In light of the obfuscation, is it any surprise that public opinion polls show that foreign policy ranks towards the bottom of Americans’ concerns?

Can someone good at math tell me if 3% is a lot?

The public’s indifference isn’t an accident; it’s engineered by political language of the sort I’m describing. And war is so ubiquitous that some (including Biden) don’t even think there’s any there there when the United States is actively bombing another country.

But would any of these “strategic” geniuses say that we are at peace? If the public had the audacity to argue that given that President Biden says we’re not at war, perhaps we should slash the defense budget in celebration, all of officialdom would lose its shit. No, they’d say, because by preparing for war we are preventing war, that peace is our profession, yadda, yadda. They’d say that we attack the Houthis to prevent war, to prevent a regional war, to prevent war with Iran, to prevent World War III, a global war, a nuclear war. That little thing in April, where we shot hundreds of Iranian missiles and drones out of the sky? Not war.

“When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth,” President Biden said in his address explaining his presidency and legacy. “And the truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us.”

Maybe he could start by calling a spade a spade — and a war a war.

— Edited by William M. Arkin