Thursday, September 3, 2009

Rally today, Poll: Afghan war-opposition jumps, Quagmire

In the past two weeks I've gotten a dozen emails wondering why there
isn't a mass anti-war movement reflecting the information below. I'm no
insider but believe that the tremendous emotional investment in hopes
for Obama to lead struggles for health, peace and justice engendered
a deep public support, even as a silent suffering disappointment grew.
That's only now beginning to change, appropriately around health as
people are personally affected adversely by the present system while
Obama waffles even on a "public" option, let alone medicare for all,
and the only Republican shock troops come ever closer to calling for
'the blood of tyrants', while identifying Obama as just that. My point
being that unions, organizations and just folks are now astir and
beginning to organize around health care and that spirit will extend
to the Afghan travesty with growing awarness of hundreds of billions
needed for our needs are being squandered over there supporting
death, tyrants and drug dealers.

Today, 5-7pm at the Cornfield, Labor Unions from all over LA are
rallying under the following banner and asking us to join them:

Congressional Send-off & Rally
Thursday, September 3rd @ 5pm
Los Angeles State Historic Park: "The Cornfield"
1245 N. Spring St., Los Angeles 90012

Send a message to our Representatives before they head back to Washington
and vote on healthcare reform. To Support:
· A Public Plan open to all!
· Healthcare for People - Yes!
· Subsidy for Insurance Companies - No!
· The State Option (Kucinich) Amendment
· HR 676 when it's voted on in the House

For more information contact the Labor Task Force for Universal Healthcare:
cate@laborforsinglepayer.com, 213.252.1351
213.252.1351

***

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2009/09/afghan_waropposition_growing_p.html

Poll: Afghan war-opposition jumps:

The share of people saying they oppose the war in Afghanistan has grown to
57 percent in the newest CNN/Opinion Research survey results released
today - from a poll taken Aug. 28-31. That's up from 46 percent in an early
April survey.

by Mark Silva
Sept. 1, 2009

At a time when U.S. and NATO military leaders are calling for a new strategy
for the nearly eight-year-old American war in Afghanistan, a newly released
poll shows growing public opposition to the war launched after the attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001.

The share of people saying they oppose the war in Afghanistan has grown to
57 percent in the newest CNN/Opinion Research survey results released
today - from a poll taken Aug. 28-31. That's up from 46 percent in an early
April survey.

While support for the war has fallen to 42 percent - from 53 in April - a
majority of those surveyed still call the conflict winnable for the U.S.

While 62 percent say the U.S. is not winning the war in Afghanistan -
virtually consistent with the view held in December 2008 - 59 percent of
those surveyed over the weekend say the U.S. can win.

The Obama White House, too, maintains that it is winnable.

Asked how it defines "winnable,'' Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said this
week: "I think the president and his advisors have talked about disrupting,
dismantling, and destroying al Qaeda and its extremist allies. We have to
ensure that... while there are those currently plotting to do our country
harm, that we don't provide them a safe haven to do that, that we have a
government in Afghanistan that is self-sufficient, that we have a security
force in that country that's able to deal with the challenges that are
presented to it. ''

He added this, too: "Our commitment can't be forever.''

The president expects to see the newest recommendation of the commander of
U.S. forces there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as the president heads to Camp
David on Wednesday for a rest carrying him into the Labor Day weekend.

The general's report seeking a new strategy for the war arrives on the heels
of the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan:

"51 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in the little-noticed fighting'' in
August, our colleagues at Top of the Ticket note today. "That's six more
than perished in July, the previous worst month. Or one American soldier's
death every 14 hours or so.In the first eight months of this year, 182 U.S.
personnel have died there, compared with 155 during all of 2008.

The administration lost columnist George Will today, too.

The CNN/Opinion Research survey of 1,010 adults carries a possible margin of
error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

***

http://www.alternet.org/story/142388/obama_is_leading_the_u.s._into_a_hellish_quagmire

Obama Is Leading the U.S. Into a Hellish Quagmire

Obama is doubling down in Afghanistan with more troops deployed now than the
Soviets ever had, at a time when public support for it is sinking like a
rock.

By Mark Ames,
AlterNet: September 3, 2009

America now has more military personnel in Afghanistan than the Red Army had
at the peak of the Soviet invasion and occupation of that country. According
to a Congressional Research Service report, as of March of this year, the
U.S. had 52,000 uniformed personnel and another 68,000 contractors in
Afghanistan -- a number that has likely grown given the blank check
President Obama has written for what's now being called "Obama's War."

That makes 120,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, a
figure higher than the Soviet peak troop figure of 115,000 during their
catastrophic 9-year war. Just this week, General McChrystal, whom Obama
appointed to command American forces in Afghanistan, is talking ofsending
tens of thousands more American troops. At the height of the Soviet
occupation,Western intelligence experts estimated that the Soviets had
115,000 troops in Afghanistan -- but like America, the more troops and the
longer the Soviets stayed, the more doomed their military mission became.

We're also heading into the same casualty trap as the Soviets did. This
summer has been the deadliest in the eight-year war for American troops.
While the number of uniformed Americans killed in combat in Afghanistan may
seem comparatively low -- just over 800, most of those since 2007 -- the
Soviets also suffered relatively light casualties. Between December 1979 and
February 1989, just 13,000 Soviets were killed in Afghanistan, a seemingly
paltry figure when you compare it to the 20 million Soviets killed in World
War Two, and the millions upon millions who died in the Civil War and
Stalin's Terror. Unlike America, Russians have a reputation for tolerating
appalling casualty figures -- and yet the war in Afghanistan destroyed the
Soviet Empire. Which only proves that crude number comparisons explain
nothing at all in warfare today, particularly when that war is an occupation
of an alien environment like Afghanistan.

Why hasn't anyone pointed out that America's troop commitment now exceeds
the Red Army's? For some inexplicable reason the corporate media has decided
to shuffle the figures and exclude the US military contractors from the
total figure of US military personnel. It makes no logical sense -- we still
count the Hessians among the British forces in the War of Independence. It's
as if the only thing left that Americans are capable of is accounting
fraud -- the only talent we perfected over the past decade was how to move
all the bad numbers off the official books, as if it's become an instinctive
reflex.

But just as those accounting tricks didn't change all those banks' and
funds' insolvency, so the American media's troop-counting tricks, in which
contractors are "off books," can't make the disaster in Afghanistan
disappear. We're already more deeply invested in our Afghanistan war than
the Russians were, and as we head into our ninth year -- the magic number
for when the Soviets pulled out and their empire collapsed -- President
Obama is dragging the country deeper into that disaster. (Moreover, if you
add in all the NATO personnel -- useless as they are as a "fighting"
force -- the number of Western troops already far exceeds the number
deployed in the Soviet Union's "unwinnable" war.)

The Afghanistan War has somehow escaped most of America's attention. People
just assumed that since Obama is a decent guy with a sharper mind than
Bush's, he must know what he's doing in Afghanistan, and his intentions
can't be bad -- so why bother paying attention, when we have all these other
problems here at home? Besides, war isn't a fun topic anymore. Thanks to
Bush and Cheney, any talk of war is a total bummer, whether you're from the
right or the left. And Americans don't like bummers -- instead, America is
always "moving on" from its bummers. Nothing bums Americans out more than
losing wars, which helps explain why Afghanistan is the most we've-moved-on
subject of our time. The problem is that you can't move on from something
while it's still a problem -- but try telling that to a nation of
delusionals.

Remember how long after Vietnam it took for for Americans to "move on" and
get their war appetite back on? It took a decade before we could talk about
'Nam again, and that probably would have gone on longer if it wasn't for the
kick-ass performance by Robert Duvall as Col Kilgore stirring a new
generation's blood lust. (For a taste of just how cinematic this budding
tragedy could be,< a

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