No 'Graceful Exit'
By Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed: August 17, 2010
In his book, "The Promise," about President Obama's first year in office,
Jonathan Alter describes a brief conversation between the president and Vice
President Joe Biden that took place last November at the end of Mr. Obama's
long deliberation about what to do in Afghanistan.
Mr. Biden asked whether the new policy of beginning a significant withdrawal
of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2011 was a direct presidential order that
could not be countermanded by the military. The president said yes.
The two men were on their way to a meeting in the Oval Office with members
of the Pentagon brass who would be tasked with carrying out Mr. Obama's
orders. Among those at the meeting was Gen. David Petraeus, then the chief
of the United States Central Command, which included oversight of the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to Mr. Alter, the president said to
General Petraeus:
"David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in
eighteen months?"
Mr. Petraeus replied: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the
A.N.A. [Afghan National Army] in that time frame."
The president went on: "If you can't do the things you say you can in
eighteen months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"
"Yes, sir, in agreement," said General Petraeus.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also at the
meeting, and he added his own crisp, "Yes, sir."
That was then. The brass was just blowing smoke, telling the commander in
chief whatever it was that he wanted to hear. Over the past several days, at
meetings with one news media outlet after another, General Petraeus has been
singing a decidedly different song. The lead headline in The Times on Monday
said: "General Opposes a Rapid Pullout in Afghanistan."
Having taken over command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after the ouster of
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Mr. Petraeus is now saying he did not take that job
in order to preside over a "graceful exit." His goal now appears to be to
rally public opinion against the very orders that President Obama insisted,
as he told Joe Biden, could not be countermanded.
Who's in charge here?
The truth is that we have no idea how the president really feels about the
deadline he imposed for beginning a troop withdrawal. It always seemed
peculiar to telegraph the start of a troop pullout while fighting (in this
case, escalating) a war. And Mr. Obama has always been careful to ratchet up
the ambiguity quotient by saying the start of any withdrawal would depend on
conditions on the ground.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that conditions on the ground
right now are awful, so it looks as though we're going to be there for a
long, long while.
This is a terrible thing to contemplate because in addition to the human
toll (nearly half of all the American troop deaths in Afghanistan have
occurred since Mr. Obama took office), the war is a giant roadblock in the
way of efforts to deal effectively with deteriorating economic and social
conditions here in the United States.
Look around at the economy, the public school system, the federal budget
deficits, the fiscal conditions plaguing America's state and local
governments. We are giving short shrift to all of these problems and more
while pouring staggering amounts of money (the rate is now scores of
billions of dollars a year) into a treacherous, unforgiving and hopelessly
corrupt sinkhole in Afghanistan.
(I stand in awe of the heights of hypocrisy scaled by conservative
politicians and strategists who demand that budget deficits be brought under
control while cheering the escalation in Afghanistan and calling for ever
more tax cuts here at home.)
The reason you hear so little about Lyndon Johnson nowadays despite his
stupendous achievements - Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - is that Vietnam laid his reputation low.
Johnson's war on poverty was derailed by Vietnam, and it was Vietnam that
tragically split the Democratic Party and opened the door to the antiwar
candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The ultimate
beneficiaries, of course, were Richard Nixon and the Republicans.
President Obama does not buy the comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, and
he has a point when he says that the U.S. was not attacked from Vietnam. But
Sept. 11, 2001, was nearly a decade ago, and the war in Afghanistan was
hopelessly bungled by the Bush crowd. There is no upside to President
Obama's
escalation of this world-class fiasco.
We are never going to build a stable, flourishing society in Afghanistan.
What we desperately need is a campaign of nation-building to counteract the
growing instability and deterioration in the United States.
***
http://www.thenation.com/article/37477/grisly-mamas
Grisly Mamas
By Katha Pollitt
In the August 2/9, 2010 edition of The Nation
There are lots of conservative white women voters in America. In 2000, white
women went for Bush by one point; in 2004, 55 percent chose Bush over Kerry;
and in 2008, after all we'd been through, 53 percent chose McCain over
Obama. In a way, when we feminists and progressives talk about "women
voters" in that rah-rah EMILY's List way, we are buying our own propaganda,
because really it's women of color, especially black women, who push "women"
solidly into the Democratic camp. By speaking so generally about
"women"-whom pundits subdivide into silly pseudodemographics like "waitress
moms," "security moms," "Sex and the City voters" and so on, each of which
receives a specially crafted message-we make it hard to see right-wing women
as anything but bizarre exceptions or (more kindly) as women just waiting
for the brilliant appeal to some self-interest they didn't know they had.
This mindset explains why so many are surprised that the Tea Party is full
of women. It's man bites dog, er, make that woman bites cat-females are
supposed to be liberal. A widely cited Quinnipiac University poll reported
that the majority of Tea Partyers-55 percent-were women, and Ruth Rosen
wrote a thoughtful piece setting out possible reasons why. According to
Gallup, women are 45 percent of the Tea Party, but whatever the exact
figure, it's safe to say there are a whole lot of Mama Grizzlies out there.
What's strange about that? Men may control political parties and movements,
but across the political spectrum women are the workhorses. Indeed,
movements have to engage women as well as men or they won't get very far.
White women mobilized against women's suffrage and for the KKK, which had
hundreds of thousands of female auxiliaries back when the KKK was a
respectable family organization. They were grassroots activists in the John
Birch Society and the insurgent Goldwater wing of the Republican Party. Then
as now, women mobilized as mothers, ordinary women reluctantly laying aside
their oven mitts to go out and save America from moral rot. "In the cold war
era," historian Michelle Nickerson, author of the forthcoming Mothers of
Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, told me, "women on the right
were...on the phone, knocking on doors, getting signatures, planning events,
opening bookstores, going to study groups, etc. They were incredibly
effective and they created a powerful anti-statist gender ideology that
fuels conservative women's politics still." (As a housewife quoted in Rick
Perlstein's Before the Storm told Time magazine in 1961, "I just don't have
time for anything. I'm fighting communism three nights a week.")
Sarah Palin appeals to those who think just like her--those who hate the
poor (i.e. don't want to spend 5 cents of their own money on anything
helping them), have no compassion for anyone (although they'll say the
words), are pro-war, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, anti-health access to
health care, and "pro-life" (without considering how oxymoronic that is [if
she can make up words, I can too], and who are racist and homophobic. And
she's Christian, so it makes it all ok.
jeaniemck
Historically, right-wing women were put to organizing one another and kept
away from real power. That's the sad story of Phyllis Schlafly, who had to
concentrate on antifeminism because there was no future for her in foreign
policy. But heck, it's 2010, and right-wing women are tired of licking
envelopes and knocking on doors to elect yet another jowly good ol' boy. Go
Nikki Haley! These days conservative women work, and fundamentalist
stay-home moms want to be in public life. They have the same desire for
power and respect and a place in the sun that liberal women do. The
antiabortion, anti-gay rights and Christian fundamentalist movements
funneled right-wing women into party politics; now the Tea Party adds a note
of faux kitchen-table "common sense": why shouldn't the government have to
balance its budget the way a family does? Why should the virtuous taxpayer
"bail out" the lazy and imprudent? Why is this Muslim Kenyan communist
running the country?
A lot of liberals are making fun of Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" ad for
her SarahPac. Over scenes of white women waving (or wearing) flags, carrying
Tea Party signs (Moms Opposed to Mandates-Unconstitutional), attending
rallies and having photo ops with Palin herself, the weirdly urgent,
electric voice of Palin delivers a speech of apparent contentlessness: women
are going to "get things done for our country," are having "kind of a mom
awakening," "because moms kinda just know when something's wrong." That's
right, sisters: you don't want to mess with Mama Grizzlies when someone's
coming after their cubs! To an outsider the ad looks vacuous and
unprofessional-didn't they know they had to salt the visuals with more black
and brown faces? And how come the only politician you see is Sarah? But the
message couldn't be clearer: white conservative women blah blah blah! Tax
cuts yes, healthcare reform no! We want our country back! In a country where
55 percent tell pollsters Obama is a socialist, that's really all you need.
You can fill in the candidates' names later, when you send in your check.
Are the Tea Party women feminists, as Palin now says she is? The F-word must
be on a roll if this canny opportunist is claiming it, but Susan B. Anthony
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would turn over in their graves at the thought.
Feminism has made it possible for right-wing women to play a bigger role in
politics than their John Birch predecessors-for example, as Nickerson points
out, feminist-driven changes in gender roles have made conservative men more
comfortable working with women. But a feminist is someone who, whatever her
personal choices, actually supports equality for women-all women. It isn't
someone whose main political goal is akin to the notorious Tea Party
declaration, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"-i.e., let's shred
the safety net, except for the bits that help me. When Tea Party darling
Sharron Angle, who wants to criminalize all abortion without exception, says
a 13-year-old raped by her father should turn a "lemon situation into
lemonade" and have the baby, this is not feminism-it's the saccharine
cruelty of the truly oblivious.
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