You lie and deceive...
You hide in your mansions
While young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And gets buried in the mud
- Bob Dylan, "Masters of War," 1962
Obama's War
by Jim Hightower
Creators Syndicate: December 2, 2009
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to war we go! Pound the drums loudly, stand with your
country proudly!
Wait, wait, wait — hold it right there. Cut the music, slow the rush, and
let's all ponder what Barack Obama, Roberts Gates, Stanley McChrystal and
Co. are getting us into ... and whether we really want to go there. After
all, just because the White House and the Pentagon brass are waving the flag
and insisting that a major escalation of America's military mission in
Afghanistan is a "necessity" doesn't mean it is ... or that We the People
must accept it.
Remember the wisdom of Mark Twain about war-whooping generals and
politicians: "Loyalty to the country, always. Loyalty to the government when
it deserves it."
How many more dead and mangled American soldiers does the government's "new"
Afghan policy deserve? How many more tens of billions of dollars should we
let them siphon from our public treasury to fuel their war policy? How much
more of our country's good name will they squander on what is essentially a
civil war?
We've been lied to for nearly a decade about "success" in Iraq and
Afghanistan — why do the hawks deserve our trust that this time will be
different?
Their rationales for escalation are hardly confidence boosters. The goal,
we're told, is to defeat the al-Qaida terrorist network that threatens our
national security. Yes, but al-Qaida is not in Afghanistan! Nor is it one
network. It has metastasized, with strongholds now in Pakistan, Indonesia,
Morocco, Yemen and Somalia, plus even having enclaves in England and France.
Well, claims Obama himself, we must protect the democratic process in
Afghanistan. Does he think we have suckerwrappers around our heads?
America's chosen leader over there is President Hamid Karzai — a preening
incompetent who was "elected" this year only through flagrant fraud and
whose government is controlled by warlords, rife with corruption and opposed
by the great majority of Afghans.
During the election campaign from July through October, 195 Americans were
killed and more than 1,000 wounded to protect this guy's "democratic
process." Why should even one more American die for Karzai?
Finally, Washington's war establishment asserts that adding some 30,000 more
troops will let us greatly expand and train the Afghan army and police force
during the next couple of years so they can secure their own country and we
can leave.
Mission accomplished!
Nearly every independent military analyst, however, says this assertion is
not just fantasy, it's delusional — it'll take at least 10 years to raise
Afghanistan's largely illiterate and corrupt security forces to a level of
barely adequate, costing us taxpayers more than $4 billion a year to train
and support them.
Obama has been taken over by the military industrial hawks and national
security theorists who play war games with other people's lives and money. I
had hoped Obama might be a more forceful leader who would reject the same
old interventionist mindset of those who profit from permanent war. But his
newly announced Afghan policy shows he is not that leader.
So, we must look elsewhere, starting with ourselves. The first job of a
citizen is to keep your mouth open. Obama is wrong on his policy — deadly
wrong — and those of you who see this have both a moral and patriotic duty
to reach out to others to inform, organize and mobilize our grassroots
objections, taking common sense to high places.
Also, look to leaders in Congress who are standing up against Obama's war
and finally beginning to reassert the legislative branch's constitutional
responsibility to oversee and direct military policy. For example, Rep. Jim
McGovern is pushing for a specific, congressionally mandated exit strategy;
Rep. Barbara Lee wants to use Congress' control of the public purse strings
to stop Obama's escalation; and Rep. David Obey is calling for a war tax on
the richest Americans to put any escalation on-budget, rather than on a
credit card for China to finance and future generations to pay.
This is no time to be deferential to executive authority. Stand up. Speak
out. It's our country, not theirs. We are America — ultimately, we have the
power and the responsibility.
Copyright 2009 Creators.com
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book,
Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim
Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of
the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families,
environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/here_we_go_again_20091202/
Here We Go Again
By Robert Scheer
Ttuthdig: December 2, 2009
It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to
the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan
war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama's own
top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100
al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching
attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops
to contain them.
The president handled that absurdity by conflating al-Qaida, which he
admitted is holed up in Pakistan, with the Taliban and denying the
McChrystal report's basic assumption that the enemy in Afghanistan is local
in both origin and focus. Obama stated Tuesday in a speech announcing a
major escalation of the war, "It's important to recall why America and our
allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place." But
he then cut off any serious consideration of that question with the bald
assertion that "we did not ask for this fight."
Of course we did. The Islamic fanatics who seized power in Afghanistan were
previously backed by the U.S. as "freedom fighters" in what was once
marketed as a bold adventure in Cold War one-upmanship against the Soviets.
It was President Jimmy Carter, aided by a young liberal hawk named Richard
Holbrooke, now Obama's civilian point man on Afghanistan, who decided to
support Muslim fanatics there. Holbrooke began his government service as one
of the "Best and the Brightest" in Vietnam and was involved with the rural
pacification and Phoenix assassination program in that country, and he is
now a big advocate of the counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley
A. McChrystal to once again win the hearts and minds of locals who want none
of it.
The current president's military point man, Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
served in Carter's National Security Council and knows that Obama is
speaking falsely when he asserts it was the Soviet occupation that gave rise
to the Muslim insurgency that we abetted. Gates wrote a memoir in 1996
which, as his publisher proclaimed, exposed "Carter's never-before-revealed
covert support to Afghan mujahedeen-six months before the Soviets invaded."
Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asked in a 1998
interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted
"having given arms and advice to future terrorists," and he answered, "What
is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse
of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Brzezinski made that statement three
years before the 9/11 attack by those "stirred-up Muslims."
So here we go again, selling firewater to the natives and calling it
salvation. We have decided to prop up a hopelessly corrupt Afghan government
because, as Obama argued in one of the more disgraceful passages of
Tuesday's West Point speech, "although it was marred by fraud, [the recent]
election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan's laws
and constitution."
To suggest that the Afghan government will be in seriously better shape 18
months after 30,000 additional U.S. and perhaps 5,000 more NATO troops are
dispatched is bizarrely out of touch with the strategy of the McChrystal
report, which calls for American troops to restructure life down to the
level of the most forlorn village. Surely the civilian and military
supporters of that approach who are cheering Obama on have been giving
assurances that he will not be held to such an unrealistically short
timeline. Evidence of this was offered in the president's speech when he
said of the planned withdrawal of some forces by July of 2011: "Just as we
have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into
account conditions on the ground. We'll continue to advise and assist
Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long
haul."
A very long haul indeed, if one checks the experience of Matthew Hoh, the
former Marine captain who was credited with being as successful as anyone in
implementing the counterinsurgency strategy now in vogue. In his letter of
resignation as a foreign service officer in charge of one of the most hotly
contested areas, Hoh wrote: "In the course of my five months of service in
Afghanistan . I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic
purpose of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. . I have observed
that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the
Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes
imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."
Maybe they should have given Capt. Hoh the Noble Peace Prize.
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