Friday, October 9, 2009

Good War vs. Great Society, Margolis: America Has Been Here Before

I am literally stunned by the Nobel peace prize being awarded
to President Obama, which I learned about while hearing it
being discussed on Democracy Now. I could go on, but Naomi
Klein and now Tariq Ali are in a discussion which I'll send you
tomorrow. Were it a prize for great speeches, I'd be applauding,
but this?! Anyway, the articles herein accidently provide almost
a perfect intro for tomorrow's emailing.
Ed

http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/6433

Good War vs. Great Society

by JOHN FEFFER
Foreign Policy in Focus: September 22, 2009

The Vietnam War ruined everything. It not only destroyed Vietnam and killed
a huge number of its inhabitants. It not only killed so many American
soldiers and destroyed the futures of so many veterans. It not only spread
into Cambodia and Laos and wrecked those countries for generations.

The Vietnam War also killed the Great Society. President Lyndon Johnson,
with a large Democratic majority in Congress after the 1964 elections,
enacted sweeping reforms in education, health care, and transportation,
along with landmark civil rights legislation. But the pressure of spending
on the Vietnam War - the guns vs. butter debate of the 1960s - eventually
brought this last, great program of genuine American liberalism to a halt
and scuttled the hopes of its architect for a second presidential term.

Will the Afghanistan War drive a similar stake through the heart of
President Barack Obama's ambitious domestic program?

The two major issues currently on the public agenda are health care and the
war in Afghanistan: the guns vs. butter debate of the 21st century. This
year, the annual cost of the Afghan War has jumped to $60 billion. In total,
we've spent over $220 billion on the nearly eight-year conflict. If General
McChrystal gets his way and the administration sends even more troops, the
bill will only grow. Meanwhile, Obama has his own version of Great Society
reform on the table in the form of an ambitious health care initiative. It
won't come cheap. The president has promised to cap the costs of his plan,
the Holy Grail of liberal reformers since FDR's time, at $900 billion over
10 years.

The question is: Can Obama have his guns and eat his butter too? We've
already laid out huge chunks of money for the financial sector bailout
followed by the economic stimulus package. The Pentagon is continuing to
spend as though we aren't facing a $1.6 trillion government deficit for
2009. The military budget for 2010, 4% larger than last year, clocks in at
$636 billion.

Johnson believed that he could have both guns and butter. "We are a country
which was built by pioneers who had a rifle in one hand and an ax in the
other," he proclaimed. "We can do both. And as long as I am president we
will do both." His hubris was not unprecedented. The other great liberal
reformers, Woodrow Wilson and FDR, also tried to balance their ambitious
domestic programs with military engagements overseas.

Johnson, of course, did not remain president for long. He pushed through
most of his Great Society reforms in his first two years in office, when he
had large Democratic majorities in Congress. By 1968, the war in Vietnam had
led to considerable criticism of the president's record and a major drop in
his popularity, and Johnson decided not to run for reelection. As Irving
Bernstein writes in his probing study of the era, Guns or Butter: The
Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, "One may speculate over what might have been
if the country had remained at peace. Economic policy was working superbly
in 1965 and it is likely that prosperity would have continued into 1968. In
Chicago the Democrats would have renominated the Johnson-Humphrey ticket and
it would have won easily. This might have launched a long period of
Democratic control of the White House and the Congress. The Great Society
would have survived and might have been expanded."

This expansion might well have been global. A few years after the end of the
Vietnam War, ministers from 134 countries gathered in Kazakhstan and issued
a declaration calling on the international community to reduce the gap in
health care between the industrialized and developing worlds. "They
considered the slogan 'Health for All by the Year 2000' as a laudable and
achievable goal," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Adam
Parsons in The Global Health Debate. "Not only did it involve guaranteeing
access to essential health care at a community level for all people of the
world, but primary health care services were to work closely with
health-related sectors responsible for other essential needs including
education, safe water, sanitation, and food security." This attempt at a
Global Great Society foundered with the rise of neoliberal economic programs
in the late 1970s.

History could have marched down a different path in 1965. After all, as a
candidate in 1964, Johnson argued that "we don't want to get involved in a
nation with 700 million people [China] and get tied down in a land war in
Asia." As president, however, Johnson did exactly that: committing U.S.
ground forces to Vietnam in 1965. This decision ultimately doomed his
presidency and the Great Society. We've been living with the
Considerably-Less-Than-Great Society of the neoliberals and neoconservatives
ever since.

Obama, as a candidate in 2008, promised to refocus the U.S. military on
Afghanistan. As president, he now has a chance to reverse himself and end
the war. According to some recent indications, the president is willing to
rethink his approach to Afghanistan. If he does, he can rescue his own Great
Society ambitions, secure himself a second term of office, and acquire an
enduring legacy as the first president to resolve the guns vs. butter
dilemma in the only sustainable way possible.

***

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23548.htm

America Has Been Here Before

By Eric Margolis

September 20, 2009 " The Toronto Sun" -- "We should hang a huge neon
sign over Afghanistan: "CAUTION: DEJA VU."

Afghanistan's much ballyhooed recent election staged by its foreign
occupiers turned out to be a fraud wrapped up in a farce -- as this column
predicted a month ago. It was as phony and meaningless as U.S.-run elections
in Vietnam in the 1970s.

Canada played a shameful role in facilitating this obviously rigged
vote.

Meanwhile, American and NATO generals running the Afghan war amazingly
warn they risk being beaten by Taliban tribesmen in spite of their 107,000
soldiers, B-1 heavy bombers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Apache and AC-130
gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs,
white phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillance.

Washington has spent some $250 billion in Afghanistan since 2001.
Canada won't even reveal how many billions it has spent. Each time the U.S.
sent more troops and bombed more villages, Afghan resistance sharply
intensified and Taliban expanded its control, today over 55% of the country.

Now, U.S. commanders are begging for at least 40,000 more U.S.
troops -- after President Barack Obama just tripled the number of American
soldiers there. Shades of Vietnam-style "mission creep." Ghost of Gen.
William Westmoreland, rattle your chains.

The director of U.S. national intelligence just revealed Washington
spent $75 billion US last year on intelligence, employing 200,000 people.
Embarrassingly, the U.S. still can't find Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar
after hunting them for eight years. Washington now fears Taliban will launch
a Vietnam-style Tet offensive against major cities.

This week, in a wildly overdue observation, U.S. military chief Adm.
Mike Mullen told Congress, we must rapidly build the Afghan army and
police."

'Vietnamization'

But the U.S. record in foreign army-building is not encouraging.
Remember "Vietnamization?" That was the Pentagon's effort to build a South
Vietnamese army that could stand on its own, without U.S. air cover,
supplies, and "advisers." In early 1975, it collapsed and ran.

Any student of Imperialism 101 knows that after invading a
resource-rich or strategic nation you immediately put a local stooge in
power, use disaffected minorities to run the government (divide and
conquer), and build a native mercenary army. Such troops, commanded by white
officers, were called "sepoys" in the British Indian Army and "askaris" in
British East Africa.

America's attempts to build an Afghan sepoy army of 250,000 failed
miserably. The 80,000 men raised to date are 95% illiterate and only on the
job for money to feed their families. They have no loyalty to the corrupt
western-installed government in Kabul. CIA's 74,000 "contractors" (read
mercenaries) in Afghanistan are more reliable.

But the biggest problem in Afghanistan, as always, is tribalism. Many
of the U.S.-raised Afghan army troops are minority Tajiks, Uzbeks, and
Hazara who used to collaborate with the Soviets. They are scorned by the
majority Pashtun tribes as enemies and foreign stooges. These U.S.-paid
troops also know they will face death when the U.S. and its western allies
eventually quit Afghanistan.

The Soviets had a much better understanding of Afghanistan than the
American military, which one senior British general recently called,
"culturally ignorant." Moscow built an Afghan government army of around
240,000 men. Many were loyal Communists. They sometimes fought well, as I
experienced in combat against them near Jalalabad. But, in the end, they
smelled defeat and crumbled. The Soviet-backed strongman, Mohammad
Najibullah, was castrated and slowly hanged from a crane.

The American command, deprived of men and resources by the Bush
administration, only managed to cobble together an armed rabble of 80,000
Afghans. The Afghan army, like the post-Saddam Iraqi army, is led by white
officers -- in this case, Americans designated "trainers" or "advisers."

Afghanistan keeps giving me deja vu back to the old British Empire,
and flashbacks to those wonderful epic films of the Raj, Drums, Lives of a
Bengal Lancer, and Kim. The British imperialists did it much, much better,
and with a lot more style. Many of their imperial subjects even admired and
liked them.

Copyright © 2009 Toronto Sun

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