[PAA-Discuss] Liberals Get a War President of Their Very Own
Zhaleh
zch6402 at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 10 20:36:50 EST 2010
Liberals Get a
War President of Their Very Own
By Murray
Polner
February 08, 2010 "HNN" -- Suddenly and surprisingly,
we have a Bush-like Obama Doctrine. To the applause of liberal
hawks and formerly critical neocons, the president declared in
his Nobel Peace Prize speech that the U.S. will continue to
wage war—though naturally, only “just” war—anywhere and
against anyone it chooses in a never-ending struggle against
the forces of evil. His antiwar supporters can take seats on
the sidelines. It’s all reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and the
prescient George Ball, and afterward Ball and Lyndon Johnson.
In the early ’60s, JFK—reluctantly, we are told by his
admirers—decided to send 16,000 “trainers” to Vietnam to teach
the South Vietnamese how to play soldier and to stop the
Communists from sweeping over Southeast Asia. Vast quantities
of money and assorted advisers were shipped without
accountability to the corrupt gang of thugs running and
ruining that country.
Ball, the one dissenter in Kennedy’s
entourage, pleaded with JFK to recall France’s devastating
defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and throughout Indochina.
“Within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and
jungles and never find them again,” he warned the liberal icon
in the White House. But JFK thought he knew better,
caustically answering, “George, you’re crazier than hell. That
just isn’t going to happen.” Ball would also press Lyndon
Johnson to stand down in Vietnam before he destroyed his
presidency, domestic agenda, and more importantly the lives of
tens of thousands of American soldiers and their families, not
to mention a few million Southeast Asians. But LBJ wasn’t
going to be the first president to lose a war and be blasted
by pugnacious home-front warriors. Failing to stop the North
Vietnamese would sooner or later have us fighting them on
Waikiki Beach, or so the Cold War line went. Ever since then,
we have continued to hear about regional menaces that
supposedly, if left unchecked, will threaten vital U.S.
interests or even Americans at home. Ronald Reagan employed
that rationale in defending the proxy war in Central America
waged by U.S.-backed Contras. George H.W. Bush and Bill
Clinton extended the tradition of intervention, sending troops
to theaters of combat as far-flung as Panama, Kuwait, and the
Balkans, while the second Bush launched invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan. They have all been war presidents.
But
Barack Obama was going to be different, or so my fellow
antiwar liberals— and a few antiwar conservatives— hoped. He
was to herald the end of that uncompromising and unilateral
era of preventive war. The hundreds of thousands who joyously
greeted the president- elect in Grant Park or the 1.5 million
at his inauguration were ecstatic with anticipation. Left-wing
pundits wrote excitedly about FDR’s One Hundred Days and
projected great plans onto the new Man From Illinois. In
countless articles, Republicans were declared brain dead, and
the Bush- Cheney policies that got us into Iraq, Afghanistan,
and the torture business were buried.
One year after
those celebrations, it’s the neocons cheering, seeing in
Obama’s policies a vindication of the late administration. Who
would have dreamed that following Obama’s West Point speech
announcing 30,000 more troops destined for Afghanistan,
William Kristol would laud Obama in the pages of the
Washington Post, writing, “the rationale for this surge is
identical to Bush’s,” and praise the Democratic president for
having “embraced the use of military force as a key instrument
of national power”? War makes strange bedfellows. Michèle
Flournoy, Obama’s under secretary of defense for policy, has
been invited to speak about the president’s hopes for a new
Afghanistan on a panel led by Frederick W. Kagan at the
American Enterprise Institute, the heart of
neoconservatism.
Why did Obama buy what the hawks sold
him? What if he had leveled with the nation and acknowledged
that, however obnoxious and cruel the Taliban may be, they
pose no danger to the United States? What if he had vowed that
we would not dispatch tens of thousands of additional troops
to a civil war in an agrarian, impoverished, largely
illiterate country divided by tribal loyalties?
It was
not to be. Instead, as New York Times columnist David Brooks
stated approvingly, “With his two surges, Obama will more than
double the number of American troops in Afghanistan.” Charles
Krauthammer was direct and sharp: “most supporters of the
Afghanistan war were satisfied. They got the policy; the
liberals got the speech”—and no say in the construction of
that policy.
After West Point and Oslo, neocons saw
Obama as a more coherent Bush, an electrifying orator who had
dazzled antiwar Democrats and independents and then promptly
dumped them. When the New York Times printed a photo of the
men and women who helped Obama reach his decision to escalate,
not one dove was present.
Were there no alternatives?
In this huge country, could he not find a handful of realists,
whether Left or Right, to supply some workable ideas for
eliminating third and fourth tours for our overextended troops
and the resulting suicides, amputations, epidemics of
post-traumatic stress disorder, and legions of weeping
relatives at gravesides?
Hold on, Obama’s loyal
liberal defenders counter, shuddering at the memory of Bush.
Why blame him for the miserable decisions he has to make based
on impossible situations he did not create? They would prefer
not to explain why they and their allies in the think tanks
and Congress have so little influence.
Granted, some
of Obama’s base reacted negatively. In December, MoveOn .org
sent its millions of members a scorching email denouncing
Obama’s troop escalation for “deepen[ing] our involvement in a
quagmire.” Anti-Vietnam War rebel Tom Hayden removed the Obama
sticker from his car. United for Peace and Justice, the main
organizer of mass peace rallies around the country, announced,
“It’s Obama’s War, and We Will Stop it.” The widely read
liberal TomDispatch.com dubbed its former champion the
“Commanded-in- Chief” for giving way to the hardball pressures
exerted by the generals. Matthew Rothschild of The
Progressive, founded by the fabled anti-militarist Robert M.
LaFollette Sr. in 1909, compared Bush and Obama’s rhetoric and
wrote an article called “Obama Steals Bush’s Speechwriters.”
But these protests notwithstanding, we remain—and will
throughout Obama’s presidency—an empire of military
colonization, the goal for decades of neoconservatives and
assorted liberal hawks. In anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s
wonderfully evocative words, “The U.S. is to military bases as
Heinz is to ketchup.” American forces are stationed at
approximately 1,000 military bases in 120 countries at a cost
topping $100 billion annually. Diego Garcia, a remote island
in the Indian Ocean midway between Africa and Indonesia, is
apparently so essential a base that 5,000 locals were thrown
out of their homes so the U.S. could have yet another
top-secret facility from which to conduct its perpetual wars.
Far from being a consensus-seeking peacenik, Obama
would not even sign the Landmine Ban Treaty, which Bush also
refused to endorse, thus leaving the U.S. the only NATO nation
unwilling to participate. Said Steve Goose of Human Rights
Watch’s Arms Division, “they have simply decided to allow the
Pentagon to dictate terms.” A shocked Bill Moyers pointed out
that 5,000 people died from mine explosions in 2008, noting
the disconnect between Obama’s refusal to enlist the support
of the government he leads and the Oslo speech in which he
maintained, “I am convinced that adhering to standards,
international standards, strengthens those who do and isolates
and weakens those who don’t.”
In another instance of
history repeating, the first Obama defense budget has been
virtually the same as Bush’s military appropriations. Obama
has reduced spending on Cold War weapons such as the F-22
fighter, but he reportedly plans to ask Congress for an extra
$33 billion for the ongoing wars in the Middle East and
Central Asia. To his credit, the president is trying to
negotiate a new nuclear-arms reduction pact with Russia and
close a few of the CIA’s clandestine prisons. But in many
other vital areas of defense and national security, like
warrantless wiretaps and renewal of much of the Patriot Act,
he persists in activities that violate fundamental freedoms.
He has also refused to hold anyone from the Bush-Cheney era
accountable.
There’s more: his administration has just
signed an accord with Colombia granting the U.S. a ten-year
right to use seven of its bases, including the centerpiece of
the agreement, Palanquero AFB. Take heed, any leftist South
American government that dares defy Uncle Sam. At the same
time, Obama blinked at the coup d’état in Honduras. “They
really thought he was different,” said Julia Sweig of the
Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Latin America’s
opinion of Obama. “But those hopes were dashed over the course
of the summer.”
So what happened?
Barack Obama
happened. More eloquence than substance happened. More
time-honored political caution than audacity or hope. Liberal
and conservative Cold Warriors as key advisers. A reluctance
to cross wartime profiteers. A recognition by his
poll-counters that, with future elections in mind, it was best
to govern from some ill-defined center, acting tough abroad to
keep the neocons off his back while throwing an occasional
bone to his left.
That strategy may buy him a second
term as fruitless as his first—or it could render him
indistinguishable from his deservedly maligned predecessor and
cost him re-election in 2012. The Left howls now, but from the
very start, Obama signaled his lack of interest in McGovernite
ideas of change in foreign policy. There was a time when he
talked about pressing Israel to dismantle its settlements. But
thus far he has been cowed by Netanyahu and his American
backers, betraying any hope for a genuinely independent
Palestinian state. There was that stirring speech in Cairo and
then silence. There was talk about closing Guantanamo but no
mention of the much larger Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
The sad truth is everything we are seeing we have
already seen. Despite presidents who come and go, permanent
war is a hallowed American institution. Start if you will with
the War of 1812, the invasion of Mexico, and the carnage of a
Civil War. Move to the mass murder of Native Americans and
theft of their property, the killing, torture, and prison
camps in the Philippines, then the blood-drenched 20th
century. The 21st likewise dawns red. It never changes. Doves
protest, hawks rule, ordinary people pay the penalty. All wars
are “just.”
As surely as the bloodletting persists, so
does the opposition. The old chestnut that liberals have
always stood for peace and conservatives for war is
historically false. In fact, our past is rich with
anti-militarist heroes of surprisingly varied political
colors. Daniel Webster opposed the War Hawks and the draft
they proposed in 1812. Abolitionist Theodore Parker denounced
the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847
“to protest against this most infamous war.” Henry Van Dyke, a
Presbyterian minister and ardent foe of the annexation of the
Philippines, told his congregation in 1898, “If we enter the
course of foreign conquest, the day is not far distant when we
must spend in annual preparation for wars more than the
$180,000,000 that we now spend every year in the education of
our children for peace.” Socialist and labor leader Eugene
Debs received a ten-year prison sentence for daring to tell
potential draftees in 1918 that it was “the working class who
fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme
sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and
furnish the corpses.” Against U.S. entry into World War I,
Republican Sen. George Norris of Nebraska asked, “To whom does
this war bring prosperity? Not to the soldier … not to the
brokenhearted widow … not to the mother who weeps at the death
of her baby boy … . War brings no prosperity to the great mass
of common and patriotic citizens … .War brings prosperity to
the stock gambler on Wall Street.” Rep. Barbara Lee
(D-Calif.), the only member of Congress in 2001 who voted
against George W. Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan,
warned her colleagues to be “careful not to embark on an
open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused
target.” Conservative Russell Kirk laid out a post-World War
II program for conservatives by reminding them, “A handful of
individuals, some of them quite unused to moral
responsibilities on such a scale, made it their business to
extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; we must
make it our business to curtail the possibility of such snap
decisions.”
Anti-militarism is very much an American
tradition, but it has never been a majority position. Who now
reads Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago newspaperman who
invented the brogish bartender Mr. Dooley speaking to his
customer, Mr. Hennessey, while deriding American excesses and
the national passion for imperial expansion? He wondered why
many leaders and everyday Americans passively embraced,
without much knowledge, our devotion to world
hegemony—specifically in his time, the decision to invade and
occupy the Philippines. “’Tis not more than two months,” he
told his pro-annexation readers, “ye larned whether they were
islands or canned goods.”
Yet just as certain as
opposition to foreign adventuring arises, again it goes
unheeded. As we begin President Obama’s second year in office,
of this we can be certain: in global affairs, but for a few
crumbs here and there, antiwar views will rarely be welcomed
by this White House. And when these marginalized voters
complain, all the president’s men will remind them that they
were told Afghanistan was a “necessary war” and “national
security” is everything. I can imagine Obama’s advisers
confidently telling him that however many troops he ships to
these and future wars, however much money he spends on
military hardware, his anguished allies have no place else to
go. Plus ça change.
Murray Polner is the author of
No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and is
co-editor, with Thomas E. Woods Jr., of We Who Dared Say No to
War.
The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.
Leon Trotsky
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