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TechnoratiA Tough Week for the Antiwar Movement
The upbeat response to Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize welcomes it as a boost toward a gentler world, one that Obama is striving for. You might call it something of a faith or hope-based response. The gloomier reaction is a more fact-based one -- at least in the eyes of those who share it -- the central facts being Obama's actual conduct of the wars he inherited.
George W. Bush left the White House with 173, 000 US troops deployed in the two principal US wars (142,000 in Iraq and 31,000 in Afghanistan). By the end of Barack Obama's first year in office, there are expected to be 178,000 deployed -- 120,000 in Iraq and 68,000 in Afghanistan. (The numbers would grow if Obama agreed to General McChrystal's current request for still more troops.).
Whatever else you might think about the award, the fact that having
only 5,000 more troops deployed in foreign wars a year after taking
office will get a US president the Peace Prize, at least suggests that when it
comes to American presidents, the Nobel Committee does not seem to be setting
the bar too high. In fact, it appears that simply not being George Bush
may be decisive. (And with Al Gore having won as well, you kind of have to
feel bad for John Kerry.)
Now, it's not that Obama's unfit for the award, or anything like
that. After all, Henry Kissinger got one too. But even though
Richard Nixon's then-Secretary of State still ought to worry about what might
happen if this international war crimes tribunal thing ever got serious, there
was nonetheless an undeniable rationale for his sharing the Nobel Peace Prize
with Le Duc Tho, who headed the Vietnamese delegation at the prolonged talks to
end America's war in Vietnam. Peace is, after all, made by enemies.
(Le Duc Tho declined the award on the grounds that his country was not actually
at peace.)
But it is hard to see how this apparent endorsement of hope over
experience doesn't add to the difficulty of getting America to confront the wars
Washington has run in our name -- and at this point, particularly the one in
Afghanistan. The first line of defense of the Obama Administration on this
front is that the President has needed time to figure what to do with this
situation that was not of his making. It seems, though, there may not be a
limit to how much time he needs, given that the Administration has refused to
accede to a proposal -- supported by a majority of House Democrats -- that it
provide an Afghanistan "exit strategy" by the end of this year and, instead,
defeated it with the support of House Republicans -- and the House Democrats'
leadership.
What better endorsement could there be for the President settling
into a policy of seemingly permanent war than receiving the world's most
prominent peacemaker award? Somehow, I don't think the Nobel people gave
too much thought to any effect this might have on grassroots American would-be
peacemakers trying to persuade their peers to get out on the street, pick up the
phone, or even tap a keyboard to protest the Afghanistan War. Hey,
don't mess with the man -- he's got a track record. If this is the road to
peace, maybe McChrystal's additional 40,000 troops can get us there even
quicker.
And this little setback from Norway came right on the heels of the
report that "Code Pink rethinks its call for Afghanistan pullout." The
story wasn't actually as dramatic as it first seemed, in that Code Pink,
although arguably the nation's steadiest antiwar organization, was formed in
response to the Iraq invasion and does not appear to have ever called for
immediate withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
After a visit there, Medea Benjamin, a Code Pink cofounder and its
most prominent spokeswoman, told the Christian Science Monitor that
rather than call for complete US troop withdrawal in two years, "We would leave
with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more
flexible about a timeline." She cited the fact that "So many people [in
Afghanistan] are saying that, 'If the US troops left, the country would
collapse. We'd go into civil war'" -- presumably somehow worse than the current
war.
Elaborating her position in a subsequent radio interview, Benjamin
said, "We're against sending in more troops, we're against troops being visibly
present in the villages because we think their presence is more of a threat to
people there and puts them at risk. And we want our troops to pull out. We just
want to do it in a way that is not going to lead to a Taliban takeover that will
put women back inside the home."
Here she unquestionably hits upon the point that gives more people
pause in calling for a complete Afghanistan withdrawal than any other -- the
Taliban and women. And there's no talking your away around this being a
problem. Although proto-taliban sorts were welcome proxies when
Washington's enemy in Afghanistan was the Soviet Union, the Taliban has never
had many sympathizers in the US -- or anywhere else outside the immediate
neighborhood, for that matter. And so, anything Code Pink does to
emphasize the importance of the rights of Afghan women in any negotiations that
might occur is obviously to the good.
The temporizing position does have a down side, though. By not
having "troops being visibly present in the villages," the already limited reach
of the Kabul government would presumably grow even lesser. (Code Pink was
only able to meet people in Kabul, since leaving the capital was considered too
dangerous.) And then, the more the US military refrains from air strikes,
the greater the push back there will be for a more aggressive approach.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently noted that not only has McChrystal
"changed the rules in terms of air power," but "he has issued a directive that
convoys obey Afghan traffic laws and, in fact, that our troops take some
additional risk to themselves to avoid innocent Afghan casualties." Sen.
Susan Collins (R-ME) has responded with a sentiment we will hear frequently: "I
am troubled if we are putting our troops at greater risk in order to go to such
extremes to avoid Afghan casualties,"
And behind Collins' reaction are constituents like retired Marine
Corps 1st Sgt. John Bernard, whose son was recently killed in Afghanistan and
who complains of "the insanity of the current situation and the suicidal
position this administration has placed these warriors in." He concludes that
"We've hamstrung ourselves in fear of angering a population that hates us
anyway."
Ultimately, there is probably as much truth and logic behind John Bernard's position as there is behind Medea Benjamin's. Expanding women's rights in foreign countries via military occupation is not a sane approach -- and that's not what this war is about. And so, while it may have been a bit surprising to see an organization so prominent as Code Pink seem to flounder a bit on the Afghanistan War, it only reflects a nation that has never really focused on the whys and wherefores of an eight year-long war, which a new Administration seems on the verge of signing on to for another eight. So perhaps the organization's trip to Kabul will have the virtue of focusing a few more Americans on the reality of our being an occupying power.
And as for this Obama prize thing, you've got to wonder whether the College of Cardinals are getting any ideas. After all, even after eight years, he'd still be pretty young for a Pope.
15 Comments so far
Show AllAh, yes - MORE TROOPS! Considering that 99.9999% of all American personnel in Afghanistan couldn't ask for directions to the nearest restroom in any of the Afghan dialects, yet the US is expected to easily and efficiently rebuild a country and culture. Let's try finishing NOLA first.
Obama and the Peace Prize
There is a self-defeating regressive and infantilizing naivete in our species-specific pathology of every type of leader-fetish transference when our own dreamy wishful emotions and yearnings are projected onto an idol or hero or great hope for our redemption from suffering, personal insignificance and inescapable personal death.
The industries of artful hope-creation evolved thousands of years ago when clever primitive shaman incorporated themselves with powerful chiefs to orchestrate tribal life-passions in rituals of group redemption and transcendence of terrifying inescapable personal death.
Today,the cultural communities and mass media of our species-dominant nation seem to be performing rational and life-improving functions that protect and sustain the civilization we naively assume will be permanently operative for ourselves and our progeny.
To reduce our anxieties about the progressive competitiveness and fagility of human life, most of us cling to delusions that our national leaders are not consciously risking total annihilation of our nation, our eco-systems, and our species.
When empirically scientific and brilliantly diagnostic/prognostic investigative Cassandresque realists reach us with their well researched and documented discoveries showing that in our comfortable assumptions about surviving life and death, we desperately crave the calming and reassuring optimism of shaman like Obama, Reagan and FDR.
The natural tendencies of adult humans to regress to the immature emotional stages of frightened followers pushes their leaders into policies of dishing out a steady diet of "stay the course" false reassurance.
Our current policy-age of Terror-obsessiveness may have been contrived intuitively or deliberately by hyper-ambitious pugilistic leaders to achieve war-time control of the naive and psychologically aversive and unsophisticated majority of our citizens.
The deus ex machina of this natural drama of reactive-authoritarian acculturation is to stage a false fall-back and award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Idol of Cool.
Because in mass/democratic culture the dominant drama focuses on great personalities (good and bad), the process in national crises is historically and psychoanalytically very regressive.
These are dangerous emotional dynamics in a nuclear-dominant global super-power that has had thousands of holocaustal weapons on many trigger-fingers alerts since the term of President Eisenhower.
Read and open up your emotions to the realities of what is revealed in Ellsberg's "The American Doomsday Machine" on line as it appears.
Kick the adolescent "celebrities habit" for good, for the survival of us all!
Robert MacDonald www.psycho-imperialism.com
thanks robert, nice to knqw there is somebody else out there..
The war to end all wars has not been fought yet.
Because the Nobel prize was for "peace" it should have been given to one or more people like Daniel Ellsberg (for his terrifying memoir on truthdig and CD),Helen Caldicott, Cindy Sheehan, or Scott Ritter.
It should definitely not been given to the chief executive of America's 2009 escalation of permanent "de facto" racist/genocidal wars and military occupations designed and conducted to brutally take over the Muslim oil and gas of West Asia.
These wars are likely to lead to nuclear wars and nuclear winters that will destroy our eco-system and most of the human species.
Crusaders like our evangelicals and national chauvinists never think much about the damage they have done and may do because of their power-lust, myopic arrogance and dominionism. Our Gator Nation mania may lead to Doomsday.
The Peace Prize should not have been given to a Commander in Chief of 2000 imperialist military bases, 800 of which are in foreign nations, often against the will of the natives who are victims of the trillion-dollar U.S. policies of global conquest for predatory profiteering and terrifying intimidation of critics here at home and around the world.
The award should not have been given to a president who has continued, expanded and covered up for most of the horrendous policies of President G.W.Bush and his mentors Cheney and Rumsfeld.
It should not have been given to a president who has spent most of his term so far kissing up to the enemies of peace in the Military-Terrorism Complex and the crusading Republican/Democratic Blue Dog parties.
The main reason that the words "Tough Week for the Anti-War Movement" have a much needed ring of realism to them is that most anti-war liberals are still delusionally expecting a narcissistic celebrity figure to triumph over the militaristic corporate Leviathan that has dominated our nation and the world since the dawn of the Nuclear Age.
Robert MacDonald www.psycho-imperialism.com
We should start a list of progressive causes that the Obama Administration has damaged. The peace movement, environmentalism, election financing, human rights--you name it, the Bamanator has messed it up. It's hard to believe the left was full of hope just a few months ago.
In the second paragraph, Tom Gallagher lists the current number of US troops as 120,000 in Iraq, and 68,000 in Afghanistan. He adds these two numbers and gets 178,000, compared to 173,000 that Bush had.
When I add 120,000 and 68,000 I get 188,000.
Tom Gallagher marvels that Obama, after a year in office, as "only" 5,000 more troops than his predecessor, George W. Bush. And for that, Obama gets a Nobel Peace Prize.
By my calculations, Obama has 15,000 more troops than Bush.
Something is wrong with the arithmetic here.
There IS a way to talk one's way around the Taliban-women problem. First, take care of women in the United States. Second, get the troops out and help Greg Mortenson and other interested civilians to build massive numbers of new girls' schools-- something they clearly do better without polarization, even when there is Taliban around. (Remember, the Taliban captured Mortenson but let him go according to the book THREE CUPS OF TEA.) Finally, stop thinking of the Taliban as just this or just that.
Beyond the fact that there is absolutely no concrete evidence that these American incursions and bloodbaths have any positive impact on the lives of women (and in Iraq, it seems to be much to the contrary), the propensity to mask and falsify the actual stream of events through inspiring speeches and Nobel prizes has become epidemic and, perhaps, is an indication of the way the dystopian future will unfold.
We will be inspired to hope, while we pay for carnage and brutal resource thievery. We will be told we must save the richest to preserve the services to the poorest, so the richest get our taxes in addition to the payments we have been duped into paying them for any number of financial schemes, while we plan for the gradual defunding and further privatization and profiteering of the public service sector.
Upper level bankers, who delivered the country to the brink of ruin, get record breaking bonuses, while schools, mental health services supplied by Medicaid and Medicare, and social security recipients pay for this boondoggle with cold houses and more macaroni and cheese.
We are induced and seduced into hopefulness while we are simultaneously bought and suckered into delaying any expectation of any real action that would bring the changes that are obviously needed, simply because those who are largely responsible for this world on the brink can't imagine sacrificing any part of their lion's share of the human race's suicidal gluttony.
We are worked into a frenzy of militarism for one war after another by making the prospects for our sons and daughters so bleak as to make enlistment into our expeditionary forces in other parts of the world their most attractive option, so that when scores of them are forced to choose between black-market drug-running in their impoverished neighborhoods and towns and the military we cannot feel righteously indignant about their role in the murder, impoverishment and torture of similar communities on the other side of the world that happen to be in the way of our covetous thirst for oil. Then we can move on, forget the ruins we have left, suck up what resources the richest of us can profit from, and start another bloodbath.
And health care? While hundreds of thousands die or are bankrupted and still not even given the care that is available to prevent and or forestall gruesome deaths from common diseases of old age, we cannot even convince our elected officials of our wrath and disdain at their utter refusal to see how utterly divorced they have become from the needs and basic levels of comfort and security that their so-called constituencies are gradually giving away so that they and their benefactors can continue to consume far much more than the rest of us combined.
So bomb away. Make all the excuses you want. Say that war is indeed good for women, no matter how many corpses of some mothers’ children and girls you stumble over with your bizarrely configured reasons to keep a war going that only benefits the tiniest percentage of those who want it. Pay off the warlords who would just as soon spit in any female's face than to allow them an equal place at the table, just to say that someone is on our side. Give out your prizes to the biggest warlords as they pepper the schools and mosques with armament. Let these wars spread far and wide, and keep talking about hope and change while you support the rape and draping of women and the lynching of gays and lesbians. Lie to yourself all you want. War is Peace! After all: Work Will Set You Free!
All you have to do to assess the reality of the Afghanistan situation is refer to the decades-long posts of RAWA (The Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan). Females have become a political pawn in this "war." It's pretense, as, it seems, are all justifications for killing people virtuously.
Stop the war. Now.
America has shown it can easily smash a middle eastern country, but can't govern one. Perhaps instead of wasting more resources there, we ought to declare "victory", immediately pull out and simply promise to be back if they ever scare us again. Frankly, it is the only credible threat we have left. We damn well better do it before we get told to leave or forced by circumstances to leave with our tales between our legs. But regardless of whether we do it on our own or are coerced into it, I am tired of losing men, resources, treasury, and trust in a pointless, embarrassing, endless war. It is not worth the continued blatant degradation and violations of the Constitution we once stood for. It is not worth throwing away the moral high ground. It is not worth a single additional dollar. It is not worth a single additional bandage on a wound, let alone another life. It is not even worth the lives of the Middle Easterners, especially the innocent women and infants you callously blow up and dismiss as mere “collateral damage.”
There are worthwhile wars and national defense should always remain a priority, but you know damned well, none of the current “wars” we are fighting either deserve the name or deserve the effort.
As to the fears that we will be shown to be a paper tiger, that already happened. As to the fears they will then come over and attack us here, how many Viet Cong followed us home after the war to blow things up? How are they different? They were equally fanatic, equally willing to blow themselves up, and equally intelligent. Hell, once we finally left, Bush made them favored nation trade partners.
Signed:
A FORMER STAFF SERGEANT WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE
who enlisted voluntarily in the military and earned my combat infantry badge under fire in Vietnam, so don’t you dare call ME coward, traitor or defeatist!
America has shown it can easily smash a middle eastern country, but can't govern one. Perhaps instead of wasting more resources there, we ought to declare "victory", immediately pull out and simply promise to be back if they ever scare us again. Frankly, it is the only credible threat we have left. We damn well better do it before we get told to leave or forced by circumstances to leave with our tales between our legs. But regardless of whether we do it on our own or are coerced into it, I am tired of losing men, resources, treasury, and trust in a pointless, embarrassing, endless war. It is not worth the continued blatant degradation and violations of the Constitution we once stood for. It is not worth throwing away the moral high ground. It is not worth a single additional dollar. It is not worth a single additional bandage on a wound, let alone another life. It is not even worth the lives of the Middle Easterners, especially the innocent women and infants you callously blow up and dismiss as mere “collateral damage.”
There are worthwhile wars and national defense should always remain a priority, but you know damned well, none of the current “wars” we are fighting either deserve the name or deserve the effort.
As to the fears that we will be shown to be a paper tiger, that already happened. As to the fears they will then come over and attack us here, how many Viet Cong followed us home after the war to blow things up? How are they different? They were equally fanatic, equally willing to blow themselves up, and equally intelligent. Hell, once we finally left, Bush made them favored nation trade partners.
Signed:
A FORMER STAFF SERGEANT WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE
who enlisted voluntarily in the military and earned my combat infantry badge under fire in Vietnam, so don’t you dare call ME coward, traitor or defeatist!
The domestic political dynamic Gallagher describes is what you predictably get once active duty military commanders and spies are invited to take part in partisan politicking. Once the camel's nose gets inside the pup tent, it's hard as hell to keep the whole beast from coming inside, especially when one of the two major parties inside wants the camel to join in.
McChrystal leaks his assessment that 40,000 more troops are needed at a minimum, or else defeat will all be Obama's fault. McCain and the usual GOP suspects promptly echo the call for escalation, darkly hinting that anything less will be a stab in the back of our brave troops already on the ground in the Af/Pak theatre of the global war on terror. Obama is then caught in a trap, largely of his own creation, by having taken withdrawal "off the table" as a responsible policy option and having characterized Bush's Afghanistan occupation as a "good" war compared to Iraq, a "war of necessity" rather than a war of choice.
Personally, I don't see this as all that tough a week for the antiwar movement. The Nobel Prize was awarded the President for his anti-Bush stands on nuclear disarmament, the use of international law and bilateral diplomacy (talk talk is better than war war), and for seeking dialogue between America and the Muslim world. It was not awarded for Iraq disengagement, or for US policy shifts in Afghanistan, or for any other stated reasons of the Nobel Committee that I'm aware of. The bar for getting the Peace Prize has already been set pretty low when you are joining Henry Kissinger, Yassir Arafat, and TR the old big stick Rough Rider as a laureate recipient.
Let's give credit where credit is due. But then let's insist on assertive, creative civilian control over the Pentagon and the CIA, renouncing the self defeating pipedream of full spectrum dominance as the goal of US foreign policy.
Barack Obama did not get nominated and elected in order to fight two wars. He got nominated and elected to end two wars. There is more than just a semantic difference there. If Obama doesn't grasp that, he'll go the way of LBJ.
Bill from Saginaw
The problem with peace organizations like Code Pink and United for Peace and Justice, is that they have allied themselves too closely with the Democratic Party. This has colored their analysis, and effectively made their actions impotent. As they represent the most prominent of national peace organizations, they have led the US peace movement down a blind alley.
Highly recommended is the lecture given by Arun Gupta, "Where is the anti-war movement":
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/9/24/arun_gupta_asks_where_is_the_anti_war_movement
And Jesus said: Kill all the dark-skinned foreigners over there so you don't have to kill them over here. I think it was Jesus W. that said that. Amazing. Well anyway, one cannot judge a person by the color of his skin. Judge them by the colors of their lapel pin. Obama now looks like a Repug War-Preznit. Kill Baby, Kill!