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Stumbling About In the Graveyard of Empires
If there was ever a decent justification visible for the American war in Afghanistan, there isn't now.
That doesn't mean that one is impossible to imagine. I'm no fan of the Taliban or al Qaeda, though that alone doesn't justify invading the country. Nor does a military occupation necessarily make things better, even if you assume that a particular regime is noxious enough that a regime decapitation is warranted. Time after time, great powers have learned to their chagrin that the natives don't always necessarily appreciate being invaded, occupied and told who the new boss replacing the old boss will be. People can be odd that way.
But leave all that aside for the moment. Maybe al Qaeda did 9/11, as we were told. Maybe the Taliban were harboring them. Maybe both had a violent, regressive and otherwise just generally ugly agenda. Maybe there was even justification enough for invading in 2001.
I nevertheless meant my initial critique quite literally, however. Whatever may or may not have been the case in 2001, it's now 2010, and any such clarity or justification is now invisible. Indeed, what I find most astonishing about America's latest military adventure is just how much this gravest of national decisions is not being seriously discussed in our national discourse.
Perhaps even more amazing is the degree to which that is true from the bottom of the national security policy process all the way up to the top. The proper way to conceive and consider these issues, I would argue, is in the form of a nested contextual hierarchy, in which each level of policy analysis has to justify decisions to the one, and ones, above it. We, as a body politic, are talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at none of these levels. In fact, of course, we're basically not talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at all.
The lowest level of policy decision-making is the tactical. America has to decide exactly how it is going to prosecute the war. We don't hear very much about that, which is itself more than troubling. Reports are now beginning to show up in the alternative press - but, significantly, not in the mainstream - of tactical operations all too reminiscent of those brutal affairs which have appeared previously in Iraq and Pakistan. Allegations are now surfacing about innocent civilians either being subjected to intentional human rights and war crimes violations, right up to and including murder, or at least wonton disregard for the "collateral damage" caused by battlefield tactics. There is certainly a moral question at stake here, and one that we are just not discussing.
But there is also simply the pragmatic question of whether such tactics properly service our strategy in Afghanistan, the next level up in the hierarchy. But was is American strategy? The latest version seems to be an ‘improvement' over the notion of simply defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda in battlefield engagements. Now the Pentagon brass and theater commanders are talking about following military clearing operations with ‘government-in-a-box' nation-building initiatives, ostensibly for purposes of winning the ubiquitous hearts and minds typically sought by contemporary counterinsurgency occupation forces. Theoretically, providing Afghans with security and with efficient, corruption-free governance will help to win their allegiance to a ‘better' (read American sponsored) way. While the ideas have some merit on paper, they also ignore the historical realities of similar attempts in Vietnam and Iraq, and they require for credibility that we suspend everything we know about America's long-time ongoing national version of the same strategy in Afghanistan, which has witnessed the Karzai puppet regime spending the better part of the last decade demonstrating just how corrupt a government can possibly be, and just how ineffective as well - at least when it comes to everything other than stealing elections or just plain stealing.
But strategy, of course, is not its own end. Strategy is used to achieve certain objectives which form the very purpose for fighting a war. Barack Obama is not quite as lame as George W. Bush in this respect (not exactly a stunning achievement, that), who argued that America should be at war with the weapon terrorism - as opposed to an actual adversary using that weapon. While we can say that Obama is not as deceitful (at least on this score) or idiotic as Bush, that's pretty much true of the entire world, isn't it? More importantly, what are America's aims in massively escalating our presence in Afghanistan? Are we trying to defeat the Taliban? Remove al Qaeda from the country (even though the Pentagon says there's only about a hundred of them left there)? Create a Jeffersonian democracy? Install an ally? Lift the country out of poverty? Again, it astonishes me that one could take a country to war without this most obvious question being part of the national discourse. But it isn't.
And neither is the question of how ‘winning' in Afghanistan, whatever that would actually mean, would effect American national security, just in the short term. If only for the sake of argument, suppose the United States could achieve whatever objectives are entailed by the notion of winning the war there. How long would it take? What would it cost in dollars? How many lives would be lost? What actual, live, current threat would be extinguished, such that America would be safer? What would be traded off, in terms of other uses of the money - from education to infrastructure to paying down the national debt - in order to win this war? What other possible security concerns would go unaddressed because the US took all its armies on the Risk board and moved them from Irkutsk and Yakutsk and Mongolia to Kamchatka? None of these questions have been addressed in the United States, let alone answered. And those just represent short-term security concerns.
As for each level of security policy analysis discussed above, short-term definitions of success should be constructed to give service to the next level up, medium-term ones. If it's true that there is a broader struggle going on against some sort of wider American enemy, of which Afghanistan is simply a single theater of operations, then the medium-term security question one has to ask is whether putting so many resources into that single theater makes sense in the context of the bigger objective. If al Qaeda is located in 60 countries, for example, is it smart to stick 100,000 American troops in just one of them, and spend a trillion bucks hunting down a hundred people, especially when they can just slide over the border into Pakistan almost at will?
Finally, is the medium-term aspiration for the country serving well the long-term foreign policy goals of the United States in which it should be nested? Are these policies likely to leave us better off, somehow, twenty and fifty years from now? Does an American presence in Afghanistan better America's position in the world, both with respect to friendly countries, and with respect to rivals, real and potential? It certainly doesn't seem to be having a positive effect with the former group, as NATO allies appear less and less interested in supporting American efforts in the country, either by being there at all, or by being anywhere near harm's way. As to potential rivals, could anything possibly be more amusing than this war to the grand strategists in Moscow and Beijing, hoping to supercede American as the hegemon of the new century? If there is any such possibility, it could only be the US blunder in Iraq. Either way, America could hardly have given its rivals a greater gift if we had simply wrapped a ribbon around the capitol and stuck a bow on the dome. Yes, as a matter of fact, history's lesson is correct - empires do die from within, not from external assault. Idiocy is more lethal than are Huns.
Like everything in America, both the Afghan war and US foreign policy in general have been relentlessly politicized in the last decades, ever since doing so was discovered as a survival technique for the otherwise completely bankrupt politics of the right. Regressives get more mileage out of knee-jerk reactionary national security fears than anything else they can invent as a reason for their existence. At the same time, pacifists on the left make the mistake of believing that there is no situation for which war is the appropriate response. I wish that that were true, but, unfortunately, it isn't. If I have to choose between World War II and a Thousand-Year Reich of darkness descending over the planet (which would, of course, entail at least as much mass violence, anyhow, to go along with all the repression and civilizational regression), I reluctantly choose war.
The problem for the United States, however, is that it long ago forgot about the reluctant part. We just keep going to war, decade after decade, from Korea to Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq to Panama to Bosnia and back to Iraq and so on. You could make an argument, as regressives often do, that the reason that we are completely unmatched by any other country in the world for the frequency with which we have gone to war over the last century is because we are doing the heavy lifting of international security that others either cannot or will not do. I'd say there's even some truth to that in some cases. By my estimation, about half of America's wars had at least a moderately legitimate casus belli. But that, of course, leaves the other half. When you're talking about the single gravest decision a society can make, it wouldn't hurt to get it right more often than you would by random chance, say by flipping a coin.
Afghanistan is one of the muddier cases, from the perspective of its moral justification. That's true, first, because it is really two cases - then and now. If it was actually true that al Qaeda did 9/11 and that the Taliban refused to give up the perpetrators, then I think invading Afghanistan in order to go after those individuals was an appropriate response, however reluctant I am ever to support violence, especially at the scale of war, and however clear it is that America's policies in the world all too often harm others. (Similarly, I think it equally appropriate that George W. Bush and gang ought to be sitting in an ICC courtroom right now, on trial for their crimes.) But now that first version of the war is long over, yet another botched product of the Bush administration, and al Qaeda has largely been neither captured nor killed, but instead driven into Pakistan. Whatever legitimate justification there was for the first phase of a US war in Afghanistan seems to me completely absent now that we are in the second.
And yet the president (another botch king, of a somewhat different and some similar sort) is dramatically escalating the American military presence there. I do not see any moral justification for that.
But part of why I don't see that is because we basically have not been presented with any justification whatsoever. And the reason that hasn't happened is because we, as a society, are not addressing seriously any of the nested policy questions necessary to an intelligent and just formulation of American foreign policy.
Are we using tactics in Afghanistan that are as humane as possible and that can work?
Do those tactics serve our strategy there, assuming we know what that is?
Does our strategy serve our goals for fighting a war in Afghanistan?
Do those political goals for the war serve a broader short-term American foreign policy outside of Afghanistan?
Do those short-term goals advance medium-term US foreign policy goals?
And do those medium-term goals serve the country's long-term goals?
Most of these questions are almost impossible to answer decisively, for the reason that we don't actually know what the country's tactics or strategy or goals are.
But if one had to try to answer these questions, based on the best information available, you'd probably have to say: No, no, no, no, no, no and no.
Not very impressive. It's one thing for a government to act recklessly with the lives of its citizens and those of other people, elsewhere. In less politically mature countries, like America, that is all too sadly still to be expected.
But where is the public which, in a democracy, can control their government? Where are the fine American citizens, with their "Support the Troops" bumper-stickers cracked and fading on the back of their SUVs? Where are the great advocates of Christian morality, reading about cheek-turning in their bibles at night, and pouring out of churches on Sunday mornings?
Where are they, indeed?
Probably too busy watching American Idol reruns to ask these crucial questions, and to demand legitimate answers to them before they will allow their government to fight an increasingly violent war in Afghanistan.
It's important to keep your priorities straight, you know.
- Posted in
57 Comments so far
Show AllIt's a tightly constructed, well thought out article until about 2/3 of the way through when somebody called, "Breakfast is ready!", and the rest of the argument was sort of hurriedly set down in one pass, ending with the usual vilification of ordinary Americans. (People have reasons for what they do, and discovering those reasons would be much more productive than endlessly flinging ad hominems at fellow citizens.)
I take exception to "If I have to choose between World War II and a Thousand-Year Reich of darkness descending over the planet..." which is not only a false dichotomy, a binary either-or choice, it may well be one of those straw man things.
The range of questions about what our country is doing militarily in our name is very appropriate. The question of why we alone are allowed to roam abroad supposedly exacting justice and being policeman to the world is the larger question, one not addressed. Instead, the author has the hegemonic exceptionalistic view, "If it was actually true that al Qaeda did 9/11 and that the Taliban refused to give up the perpetrators, then I think invading Afghanistan in order to go after those individuals was an appropriate response..."
The world does need 'a policeman', but no single nation can perform this duty. The UN and World Court do not perform well because they are not fully supported, but such entities have legitimacy for the dispensation of justice where the US acting alone does not. This is one of the most important questions we need to address.
Culture and politics affect Americans' relationship with their runaway government and corporate bureaucracy where inclusion of many/most of the world's governments in decision-making produces a much stronger and more balanced view.
dus7:
I had the same sinking feeling about .66 of the way through -- at the moment he raises the cliched specter of Nazism. Take DMG's thoughtful partial essay, end it at the middle, append your comments, and we have an essay every American should read.
Sioux Rose
DUS: Also, it's the "style" of "policeman," as this one has on his record quite a troubling and intensely BRUTAL past. Dropping A-bombs, decimating an entire nation (Iraq), leaving DU with its genetic devastation potentials behind, etc. If that qualifies as a policeman, I'd opt for lawless rebels, to the extent they could be found to serve as substitute.
Funny anecdote in support of my final statement. Many years ago when I liked to go to rock concerts in New York City, on one such occasion I was alone in getting to the home of my Grandmother who lived in Queens. I had to wait for a bus on a street corner that felt very dangerous to me. A creepy guy started walking my way and I played damsel in distress, essentially calling on HIS innate chivalry to keep watch over me until the bus came. The strategy worked. Now, almost 40 years later, the world has altered and such an approach would probably not serve as the wisest way to work such a scene. Perhaps I made this guy feel good about himself for NOT being the villain for once? Perhaps in his mind he thought he fooled me (which gave him a sense of power) that since I trusted him, he could have gotten "over on me." It's possible that many good persons harbor darkness in their hearts, while some who have trained themselves to lives of crime (to survive perhaps very difficult early life circumstances) actually have innocent hearts. Roulette of the spirit.
Better take a real good look at Afghanistan, it's war lords, it's destitute, scared, downtrodden populace because that is what the United States is on the way to becoming. One might as well know where they are headed.
Thanks for the rambling article.
Mr. Green don't you know the objective has never changed in this resource war.
There is gas and oil in Central Asia. The USA corporate owners of our country want to transport the oil from Central Asia to India unimpeded by warlords of the region.
Al Quida has always been a convenient excuse for this military action.
Yes, I mean that the WTC attacks were an inside job. Their corporate agent in Central Asia is OBL, their former CIA man. He provided the stooges to crash planes into WTC I, II; remember the huge skyscrapers which collapsed at near free fall speed because a relatively small fire in their upper floors. Now I am rambling. But you get the idea?
There is nothing complicated here. I just takes a honest, uncompromising eye to see it.
"relatively small fire in the upper floors"......what are you smoking DCH? If those were small fires, i'd hate to see what a large fire looks like.
The fires were indeed small relative to the buildings involved. Furthermore, most of the jet fuel can clearly be seen burning off at impact outside the buildings. None of the fires in any of the buildings ever reached temperatures high enough to significantly soften the steel supports let alone melt all of them, to exactly the same degree, so that they all collapsed simultaneously, in perfect unity, from top to bottom in all three buildings.
Are you totally blind or simply in propaganda driven denial?
Everything you said is proven to be half truth at best to pure propaganda at worst.
You are truly stumbling about in the graveyard.
Read this before you convince me you are not totally blind.
http://www.debunking911.com/
Cold War Kid
You link to a totally anonymous trash site, headlined by a blurb from Alex Jones !!
You are certainly a gullible idiot.
Name calling is the first sign of ignorance.
If you get past the Alex Jones comment you might learn something.
randolfski: I use to think that there is absolutely no way the U.S. Government would intentionally murder thousands of its own citizens, so I understand your skepticism, but I think if you research 911 with an open mind, you will come to the same conclusion that I have. I do not know who was behind 911 but the Governments conspiracy theory, from my perspective and after much researach, is not the correct one.
Paul Revere: Me too, but maybe they would intentionally kill a few dozen. The perps weren't building engineers, and wouldn't know a coefficient of thermal expansion if it bit them. They thought it would be like the B-25 hitting the Empire State Building.
The perps were probably a mixed bag of neocons, Mossad, et al, not exactly 'government' but with overlap. The Arabs were probably told they wouldn't have to make the landings because remote controllers would take over and fly them to Canada or somewhere for the traditional swap of hostages; they were double-crossed, of course, since they could not be allowed to testify.
If only we could know...
Three legged stools don't fall straight down.
They tip over.
The second plane clipped the corner of WTC #1.
Explain WTC #7.
A small wooden item or even a tree doesn't fall the same way a building does.
It can only be the oil and gas
"Like everything in America, both the Afghan war and US foreign policy in general have been relentlessly politicized in the last decades, ever since doing so was discovered as a survival technique for the otherwise completely bankrupt politics of the right."
DMG is a consistently vacuous writer, per the quote above. It's amazing that a PS prof thinks FP has been "politicized" in the last decade. Where to go with an inanity like that? So why does he get published on CD (and Z, Counterpunch, etc.). It's an important question for understanding the liberal/left, and its current state. I also find his style particularly annoying, drawing attention to fake cleverness and away from his lack of anything interesting to say.
I'm a different David Green.
The war is based on a bunch of concepts as outdated as dinosaurs-- 1. that national security can be achieved by displaying military power; 2. that military power can secure oil and other resources; and 3. that military spending (for whatever reason) will drive the economy. Reason #1 is false because by deeply offending everyone on the planet with your brutality you decrease, not increase your security; because overspending on the military hollows out the health and strength of the nation at home, which is the real source of strength; and because heavily borrowing to finance war makes you dangerously dependent on other countries who are not necessarily your best friends. Reason #2 is false because it's based on the idea of the "global chessboard" where by occupying strategic areas we prevent other countries from getting there first (China). However, China is doing a good job securing resources around the world by buying it, a much cheaper and more productive strategy. Reason #3 is false because such a grotesque proportion of our national treasure is being spent on the military that it doesn't leave a balanced amount to see to real security at home --schools, energy infrastructure, alternate energy, supporting manufacturing, transport infrastructure, health care, etc.
Sioux Rose
Good points: Hamster, Rich M, Garlic, and Poet.
In addition to some of the very good points posters bring up, Prof. Green, you are overlooking something: there is no national discourse. People are more interested in getting their March Madness brackets correct, and who will win American Idol, than discussing international politics.
The 9/11 Bankster Gangsters empirePie
The bankster gangsters of 9/11 fame
think we don’t know their game;
the feather nested free fall,
the clouded mushroom trips of dust,..
gather, gelded for another bust,
a tempest for the fiat we don’t trust
Chill out the metal
Chill out the mark
The seals ain’t broken
and we ain’t in the dark.
The bankster gangsters of 9/11 fame
think we don’t know their game
their word became our money
and the truth is out.
Though Mr. Green does lay out some good ideas about the integration of policies and responsibilties, here are a few other contextual thoughts.
While the U.S. talks about freedom and democracy, the most salient actions by this one-sided government, increasingly, especially in the past three decades, have been the opposite.
This is true domestically and in foreign policies.
The only liberty willfully promoted by our corporate government is capitalist greed. It is the state religion and we are all tithing, whether we want to or not. If you are unable or unwilling to "participate", then it is your fault and you are dismissed and/or destroyed as a flawed "product".
It is correct that Obama is not as "lame" as Bush, but I would argue that this makes Obama and the now-blatantly-corrupt democrats much more dangerous because they use the false nostalgia of the people to further implement the same agenda as the rudely stupid republicans.
As loathsome and vicious as the taliban and al Qaeda are, their allegations about the government of the U.S. are being proven by the U.S.
If you want to find the organizers of terrorism, you need to look in Wall Street and Washington, D.C. as much as anywhere else.
When our politicians say that the "terrorists" hate our freedoms, they should know because they do too.
"...it astonishes me that one could take a country to war without this most obvious question [the question of "why"] being part of the national discourse.
It shouldn't astonish you. You don't think those who try to control the national discourse are just forgetful, do you?
The "obvious question" is not answered because it would rip apart the national myths that cover over the real motives and crimes.
"But there is also simply the pragmatic question of whether such tactics properly service our strategy in Afghanistan."
There is no strategy in Afghanistan. That's the point. Afghanistan is the Underwriters' Laboratory of the American Death Machine. New weapons and tactics are being tested there. The Death Machine throws as much shit up against the wall as possible to find out what, in its sick, homicidal mind, will stick. That's all Afghanistan is. This process has no end until the Afghans kick us out which is an eventual slam dunk given the gross-out of American government and military stupidity. Until then, the murdering children will play indefinitely in their blood soaked sandbox.
While I am generally a great admirer of DMG's writing, here he is making the mistake that liberals have been making for years--playing by the rules they write, taking the explanations for government actions as the actual reasons for government actions, and then assuming government is incompetent or stupid when actions don't match reasons, while never for a moment considering that that the justifications are in fact merely lies of convenience.
Look at both Iraq and Afghanistan. In both instances, we are forcibly occupying their territory as "liberators" without any real investment in improving the quality of local lives. But in each country, we have had massive investment in permanent military fortifications disproportionate to existing threats within those countries. Has it occurred to anyone that both Iraq and Afghanistan border Iran? That these conflicts are merely staging points for an all-out war with Iran? We may have changed captains, but the good ship Empire seems to be steaming right along the same course.
I'm not saying this IS what's happening, but it could be, and people should be talking about it. Questions should be raised. We need to stop trusting the official explanations so easily. We've been pointing at government and saying "gee, that's a stupid way to do things" for the past nine years, and it hasn't gotten us anywhere. We need to ask ourselves, what if they're not stupid, just lying? THEN WHAT?
What about the anti-Semitism connected with WWII in Europe? The racism? That war was not just about political power in Europe. What about the humiliation Germany suffered during WWI and the reparations it had to pay? Germans were furious at the rest of Europe. Your analysis of WWII is just as shortsighted as DMG's.
"Maybe al Qaeda did 9/11, as we were told (who told us?). Maybe the Taliban were harboring them. Maybe both had a violent, regressive and otherwise just generally ugly agenda. Maybe there was even justification enough for invading in 2001."
DMG, why would you doubt? Why "maybe"?
1130 architects/engineers, two co-chairs of the 9/11 commission, John Farmer, Senior Counsel, 60% of the commission members all say the report failed.
Scientists say they have proof of military grade explosive residue in WTC dust.
We need certainty.
We need an investigation.
This article sucks. Are you naive or stupid?
"But part of why I don't see that is because we basically have not been presented with any justification whatsoever."
Of course not. Why would these murderous parasites want to tell us what Smedley Butler and Ike told us the justifications were years ago, "War is a Racket" and "the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex."
"By my estimation, about half of America's wars had at least a moderately legitimate casus belli. But that, of course, leaves the other half."
I'd like to know the half that you think had even a slightly legitimate casus belli? Most of them appear to be nothing more than protecting an extortion racket or finding new peoples to extort! If the US were truly a great nation we could have prevented at least half the wars in the last century if not more but you think half may have been legitimate. Simply leaving Iraq, Afghanistan, and Viet Nam alone would have prevented most if not all the war in these places.
"If I have to choose between World War II and a Thousand-Year Reich of darkness descending over the planet... I reluctantly choose war."
What a dumbass! What have you been blinded by? You can't see the darkness that continues to descend over the planet. We just had a president whose grandfather was a money launderer for nazi germany! IBM, GM, Ford, Standard Oil were major war profiteers in support of nazi germany. They loved the fuhrer because he provided them one if not the only place in the 1930's they could make a profit. If these corporations had not been willing to do business with the third reich it's less likely there would have been a World War II. As long as hitler killed socialists and communists he was loved by a lot of the american oligarchy. David Dellinger was smart enough to know that World War II was another racket. He had the courage and decency to go to prison before he would be, in his own words, "a mercenary for IBM or the United Fruit Company." The CIA began as a sanctuary for nazi war criminals. The slave labor using war criminal rocketeer von braun was protected in the "great bastion of democracy called the USA," when Robert Goddard could have done just as well had he been given the support von braun got. Sergei Korolev would have done more had he been supported like von braun. Amerika has a great history of supporting war criminals and brutal tyrants, but you still can't see the darkness that is descending. We've got an oligarchy that is profiting off the death of millions in the Congo and Iraq, thousands in Burma, Afghanistan, and Honduras. An oligarchy that has destroyed democratically elected leaders all over the world resulting in the deaths of millions for at least a hundred years but thankfully we "destroyed" the third reich?
You made me kind of sick with this article.
"what I find most astonishing about America's latest military adventure is just how much this gravest of national decisions is not being seriously discussed in our national discourse."
You think this is bad? Wait till we invade Iran.
I wouldn't worry too much about that, liklier Isreal will Nuc them first. Taking out Tehran as well as the Nuclear testing and manufacturing areas. That will soften'em up so they won't be so hard to manage.
All we have to worry about will be the shocking rise in veterans cancer rates from trapising all over the radioactive ruins.
Here are JOE 2010, The Pentagon's "Joint Operating Environment's" plans for Afghanistan and the Middle East:
"The Middle East and Central Asia
Based on current evidence, a principal nexus of conflict will continue to be the region from Morocco to Pakistan through to Central Asia. Across this part of the globe a number of historical, dormant conflicts between statesand nations over borders, territories, and water rights exist, especially in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Radical extremists will present the first and most obvious challenge. The issue here is not terrorism per se, because terrorism is merely a tactic by which those who lack the technology, weapons systems, and scruples of the modern world can attack their enemies throughout the world. Radical extremists who advocate violence constitute a transnational, theologically-based insurgency that seeks to overthrow regimes in the Islamic world.
They bitterly attack the trappings of modernity as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the West despite the fact their operations could not be conducted without the internet, air travel and globalized financial systems.
At a minimum radical Islam seeks to eliminate U.S. and other foreign presence in the Middle East, a region vital to U.S. and global security, but only as a first step to the creation of a Caliphate stretching from Central Asia in
the East to Spain in the West and extending deeper into Africa.31
The problems in the Arab-Islamic world stem from the past five centuries, during which the rise of the West and the dissemination of Western political and social values paralleled a concomitant decline in the power and appeal of their societies. Today’s Islamic world confronts the choice of either adapting to or escaping
from a globe of interdependence created by the West. Often led by despotic rulers, addicted to the exports of commodities which offered little incentive for more extensive industrialization or modernization, and burdened by cultural and ideological obstacles to education and therefore modernization, many Islamic states have fallen far behind the West, South Asia, and East Asia. The rage of radical Islamists feeds off the lies of their often corrupt leaders, the rhetoric of radical imams, the falsifications of their own media, and resentment of the
far more prosperous developed world. If tensions between the Islamic world’s past and the present were not enough, the Middle East, the Arab heartland of Islam, remains divided by tribal, religious, and political divisions,
making continued instability inevitable.
Iran has an increasingly important role in this center of instability. A society with a long and rich history, Iran has yet to live up to its potential to be a stabilizing force in the region. Although the U.S. has removed Iran’s most powerful adversary (Saddam) and reduced the Taliban, the regime continues to foment instability in areas far from its own borders. Despite a population that remains relatively favorable to the United States, the cleric dominated regime appears ready to continue dedicating its diplomatic and military capabilities to confrontation with the United States and Israel, and to cultivate an array of very
capable proxy forces around the world. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, various groups in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, and the Caucasus, and other client states
will serve to extend and solidify Iranian influence abroad.
Internal dynamics will continue to play a large role in the Iranian leadership’s decision-making calculus.
The intervention by the Iranian Government in the outcome of the June 2009 Presidential elections has reinvigorated the Iranian public’s widespread disillusionment with their ruling class, and the Iranian leadership
will tread an increasingly fine line in maintaining political and social control while satisfying their public’s growing desire for democratization and transparency. As one means of maintaining political support and suppressing
dissension, Iran will continue to frame the nuclear power issue as a matter of nationalist pride and as the “right” of any sovereign country as a means to its own security. However, the Government of Iran will also have to match its nationalist rhetoric with tangible progress on the economic front. Extreme volatility in oil prices is eroding national revenues due to the failure of the regime to diversify the national economy, which stifles the future prosperity of the Iranian people. Iran must create conditions for its economic viability beyond the near term or face insolvency, internal dissension and ferment, and possible upheaval.
The economic importance of the Middle East with its energy supplies hardly needs emphasis. Whatever the outcome of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces will find themselves again employed in the region on numerous missions ranging from regular warfare, counterinsurgency, stability operations, relief and
reconstruction, to engagement operations. The region and its energy supplies are too important for the U.S., China, and other energy importers to allow radical groups to gain dominance or control over any significant portion of the region."
EZ, Thanks for that. The last sentence is especially amusing. In other words, "What's our oil doing under their sand? Can't have little brown people acting like they OWN the place!"
Obama's strategy goes along with the Pentegon's in that he is trying to get the perception of progress in the War so he can use less troops in the future to occupy Afghanistan, Iraq and the others to keep control of the foreign resources.
So far, he keeps needing more troops like all Empires.
""I nevertheless meant my initial critique quite literally, however. Whatever may or may not have been the case in 2001, it's now 2010, and any such clarity or justification is now invisible. Indeed, what I find most astonishing about America's latest military adventure is just how much this gravest of national decisions is not being seriously discussed in our national discourse.""
**********************************
I have the utmost respect of and look forward to reading your 'critiques' including this one where you have touched on, to me, the single biggest issue of what was our democracy and what should be so essential to the maintenance of a democracy, 'the news and discourse'.
Robert Kane Pappas' 'Orwell Rolls in His Grave', of which I am sure you are familiar with that documentary, spells out quite correctly the harm and damage that has been done and is still being perpetrated by having a mainstream media that is conservative owned, operated and controlled for the express reason of making the mainstream people see only one point of view if there is even a point that the conservative elite want that 'dumbstream' people to have and until that is broken up into 50 or 70 or 100 owners of all stripes to view and voice real news and legitimate opinions, then nothing will ever change in this country.
We, the people who are curious or hunger for reality and truth, know how to search it out on sites such as CD or TD or TO or ICH and others to see who has information that contradicts what the msm pumps out for disinformation and/or distraction; but these venues don't reach the dumbstream and they most probably don't give a hoot about seeing a reality that they choose to cover up by being a member of the dumbstream, and besides, those who are so 'comfortably numb' have fallen into that trap of not caring and are quite content on what they use for information to make their beliefs and decisions for everyday life.
Other than forcibly taking the ownership and controls from the murdochs, welches and other conservative gateways, I could only say that having some small access to the msm air waves to ardently question, refute and demand real reporting and truth, will only then as a first step will maybe some of those dunderheads of the dumbstream wake up and start to realize that the continuous razzle dazzle of never ending celebrity news, empty spectator sports shows is not really helping them to keep track with what is being done in their name.
I also think that it is most likely a fool's hope to think anything of the sort will happen because the damage has been done and the people are quite contentedly dumb and that the horribly awful control of the current conservatively owned, operated and controlled MSM will continue as is.
Sioux Rose
SAMO: Excellent post. The power of media in its capacity to manufacture consent should never be down-played, and I feel that some who enter this forum, always taking aim at the American public for its "approval" of these dismal foreign calamities fails to really take in what it means when a population has become this hypnotized. The best visual depiction and explanation is seen on You Tube as: Century of the Self. I also think Zeitgest is of major significance. All that we come to understand collectively moves through the air waves (or published page); and the level of pollution there rivals that of our nation's waterways. On one article on CD today (related to the profits made by drug companies who'd rather take the fines then take dangerous products off the market) it became clear that people are in a LOT of pain, both mental and physical. If anguish could be measured on The Richter Scale, we'd be viewing seismic activity. When any entity, from individual to nation, goes against the basic universal laws, a price is paid. That our 4th estate has invested itself in the profits of blood senselessly shed, when not directed at the ruination of vast lands and natural resources (ecocide on a massive scale) means the rebound of these choices (what many term the LAW of karma) is inevitable. Security (homeland or personal) is not being served; and the public, hypnotized by grand deceivers, will be clueless when the boomerang (for these acts) comes home.
I can understand why Orwell would roll over in his grave!
It does take a curiosity and an effort to seek the truth.
Try reading into how diet has been and is being manipulated by big food businesses, read Gary Taubes 'Good Calories and Bad Calories'.
What the 'best and brightest' won't do for a buck.
100% agree. If the media was fixed, then many of the current problems would fix themselves.
Where I live in Australia, I can choose only from 2 "quality" newspapers both owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is hopeless, and people's acceptance of those viewpoints even after no WMD was found, etc, is also hopeless.
Btw, I know CD and ICH. Please direct me to TD and TO.
TD is TruthDig
TO is TruthOut
Perpetual war for perpetual profit.
Green tries to justify u.s. involvement in wars by using WW II, in which he falsely states that if the u.s. didn't enter into the fray, then the nazis would have reigned for 100 years. Maybe, Green should tell that to the Russians, the people that defeated the German army.
The u.s. has never defended its soil in any of its countless military excursions to date, with the lone exception being the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Green: Your characterization of our war against Hitler as necessary to "...prevent a thousand year Reich descending over the planet..." is hyperbole and misleading. It feeds into American arrogance exemplified by the book, The Greatest Generation. Germany would have been defeated by the Soviet Union without our participation. Stalin may have needed some material help but we didn't need to go to war for that. We helped Britain for a long time without going to war. Stalin had the manpower and was willing to sacrifice it to win.
"But strategy, of course, is not its own end. Strategy is used to achieve certain objectives which form the very purpose for fighting a war."
********************
The wars are for economic stimulus and the acceleration of the transfer of wealth to the corporate class. They have been and continue to be a smashing success because we are raising a generation that cannot imagine life without war going on in the background like some interior design logo distinctively identifying "our way of life" and remember:
"Our way of life is non-negotiable." Bush/Cheney, Kerry/Edwards, McCain/Palin, Obama/Biden.
These are the answers to all of DMG's questions.
"Like everything in America, both the Afghan war and US foreign policy in general have been relentlessly politicized in the last decades, ever since doing so was discovered as a survival technique for the otherwise completely bankrupt politics of the right."
***************
So at long last we see that DMG's purpose is as a polemicist for the Democratic Party. There is no right, there is no left, there is only the corporation party which, like the lunatic taking over the assylum, is now running things in the US today.
Poet
Agreed #1 to #8. Furthermore, I will add that the best intentioned politician / top level leader / top level executive will eventually come to decide policy issues under the heavy influence of #1 to #8, in what comes to seem like a natural and reasonable transition in perspective. So the description of our plight is complete.
Now, what is the prudent response for those organized around the value of "increasing the common good" at home for in the USA and abroad for our friends?
Seems to me the commentary, in this regard, has a lot rhetorical flavor, but little in proposals for organized and timely action -- since discussions of slavery at the time of the founding. I take this fact to mean that #1 to #8 continue to be effective.
Sioux Rose
VISITING PROF: In my view, your best post ever! You cover it all! I am a bit tired having returned from an arduous journey (at 1:30 AM last night), so I didn't have the mental energy to even begin to lay out a case that took all relevant factors into account. I am gratified that you did so, and added a few to the list that I might have neglected. It's remarkable how juvenile Mr. Green's analysis truly is. He reminds me of a sportscaster that views the entire event in terms of teams, apparent strategies for winning, and then compares the STATED views driving the action/policies. That's like a detective analyzing clues a murderer left behind on purpose to throw off the actual trail! I see this same species of interpretation in the articles of quite a few mainstream writers. I am unsure if they don't see the big picture themselves; or if instead they feel they must water down their thesis, keep it focused on 2 or 3 soundbites so that they "don't lose their audience."
In every writing class or seminar I've ever attended, the "word" is we must not write to an audience over an 8th grade reading level! I kid you not!
The only thing I would add to your post would be a dissection of exactly what subtle and covert mechanisms operate to bring a society to the point where war is rendered as banal as the TV weather report. Religious rhetoric in FAVOR of war, as if aggression actually reflected the Deity's will, is a very powerful atavistic tool of such programming. Huge sporting events, especially football (which in my view qualifies as a form of worship in the USA) play a major part, as do Hollywood films with such "bicepted" views of good and evil. Ubiquitous images of the always-on-the-side-of angels American uniformed men, and their usually bearded darker skinned evil opponents practically beg the reflex to rid the world of such beings.
You laid out a very fine analysis. This post is "a keeper." Gracias!
The great majority of the American people have lost all interest in the two ongoing and violent occupations.
Make of that what you will.
in a way - "have lost interest" is very true in the sense that the american people were even interested in TRUTH, rather than just being interested so long as they can perceive that it is "winnable".
NOTE that as the reports - no matter how the media and pentagon try to hide truth - leak , one way or another, or a palpable sense that something is very wrong "over there" and "with the war".....in short: as the war is showing more and more signs of "failure" or cost (as americans can surely "sense" in the economy) -- so goes the "loss of interest".
I have always maintained that americans (and perhaps any people or nation) -
are "interested" in something such as WAR --- NOT SO MUCH whether it is ultimately an ethical or moral thing - but whether it is "winnable" or "do-able" as a matter of "american way".
but the moment they sense that something is "not going very well"
or "costs more than it's worth"
THEN they begin to "lose interest" -- BY ONLY THEN focusing on the CONSEQUENCES Domestically (the economy, the wallet, the house, the job, "my son in iraq or afghanistan", Oil prices, etc...)
they "lose interest" in the manner that a "contestant" in a game loses interest because he or she senses that he/she is LOSING...and SO the game is no longer "so interesting" -- it's not "about winning" anymore.
IMO -- maybe a cynical one :
If americans were allowed the REAL complete story of its wars - such as presently --
and given 1) that america is TRULY "winning" - they would MAINTAIN and INCREASE interest....because that is the "american way...WINNING" and its effects at home , whatever the changes , are PROOF that "our way is good and successful" and will in fact SUPPORT it EVEN as the country , by "winning" becomes something of a military dictatorship.
2) that america is in fact LOSING...they would AVERT their eyes because such a "project" of power shows the FAILURE of america...
in BOTH -- success or failure in these projects -- americans might be facing much the SAME tactics, strategies and behavior of American Empire (torture, spying, secret detentions, invasions, bombings, setting up governments to its liking. etc) --
BUT would be INTERESTED and even SUPPORTIVE of EXACTLY those strategies or tactics and methods - SO LONG as "we are succesful and winning"..and , as has already been shown by the sheeplike willingness of americans to tolerate or be quiet or silent, in general , about torture, or collateral damage to other nations , even actually openly find ways to JUSTIFY them...SO LONG as "we are winning"....
YET if shown honestly that it is a FAILURE, or that in some visceral sense - that its consequences , even to americans at home are FAILURES - would simply "cocoon" themselves from recognizing it because much teh SAME things tyhat might be involved in a "SUCCESS" (torture, etc.)
are NOW involved as FAILURE.
if the 'wars' in fact "created jobs" - made america even richer, actually removed debt , deficits, actually magically made homes "more affordable" , made more americans realize "the american dream"...etc.....
imo -- not only would american be "interested" that it would be, without prodding , become a COMMON topic at the Waterhole - as to how efficacious it is. .but actuallY EMBRACED.
the fact that even on a visceral level, americans of all stripes SENSE that something IS wrong - that is connected in SOME way to wars - imo. THAT is the reason that americans "AVOID" it .
it's not something they can "CHEER" about as a "winner". as i said -- this is probably NOT unique to americans, except that -- america IS unique in the breadth and scope and continuity of its War Making..
a line by an author in an article some weeks ago keeps getting at me :
that with americans - whether about vietnam or 9/11 -- and its aftermath -- it is NOT that americans were "misled"
but that americans "WANTED to be misled". ..and george bush and company READ them very well -- and it is FROM this that these criminals gained their real boldness -- to GIVE americans what they REALLY wanted:
the LIES, the war, the sense of "winning", the revenge....with unbridled allowance for CHANGING rationales...STILL tolerated....
because they were WANTED by americans -- to give themselves a sense of "having won".
it is - therefore - like wanting to WIN so BADLY -- even if it means to LIE to YOURSELF.
Really interesting take, teddy. Americans tune out the war when they sense it's going badly because really facing the facts would upset their world-view so much, their preconceived notions of what America is and stands for. It would be unbearable to admit that their nation could be on the wrong side of righteousness, so they lie to themselves. And the media and the politicians, for the most part, help them in this-- so if one chooses to insulate oneself from ugly realities, one can easily do so.
hi , hamster, in Fairness to americans, I mentioned towards the end that I believe that it is more likley than not that most or all peoples might behave this way too.
however - we ARE talking about the USA as the one country that outstrips all others in the breadth , scope and continuity and habituality of its war-making - DEEPLY entrenched in a culture self-defined by "success and WINNING" .
consider:
world war TWO was "won" by the USA -- but HARDLY alone - and with even greater sacrifices for other nations (both the Axis powers and the allieds) - and yet its aftermath produced the "formal" entrance of the USA as the NEW world empire after britain's already gradual decline that the war simply made "official" (including its eventual Pound Sterling's giving way to the US Dollar Hegemony, which is the REAL seat of america's unearned and unjustified Empire at the expense of OTHER currencies).
and TODAY - with all of the Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc...wars - all of them failures - what is it that americans of EVERY generation since world war TWO STILL uphold as the "greatest" of america's foreign wars?
it is World War TWO - because IT was the one where the USA - abetted by the ensuing ascendance of WESTERN points of view - and through their media propaganda (including those spread by Time Magazine , etc.) - could CLAIM unbridled "success" as "THE" winner.....
NOT the soviets OVER hitler's greatest army in the East...NOT the french and norwegian and belgian and english fighters against fascism....NOT the sacrifices of the tens of millions of russians , slavs, greeks, italians, french, northern africans...etc...NOT the asians that fought and had insurrections against japan...
NO - it is LEARNED by americans as "THE GREATEST WAR --- WON BY the USA"..almost to the exclusion of the human price in all sides to finally end it.
WINNING. in other words.
NEXT to that - americans - even as the USA CONTINUES its war culture year after year after year -- hardly WONDER about these "other wars" ....
WHY?
because in reality - they SENSE that they ARE failures - if nothing more than what they SENSE ARE consequences of its imperial wars....
conclusion?
They are IGNORED or "forgotten" or "not noticed" or "discussed" as FOREIGN POLICY because they are NOT as glowing as the "winning" of second world war "by america that LIBERATED europe and the world" .
and YET - by that monstrous war -= and the "winning" by america in world war 2 - americans of every generation have TOLERATED ALL OTHER WARS - at least in their INCEPTION until the blowback comes (such as in the humiliating defeat in vietnam, or 9/11, or iraq) --
THINKING that "WORLD WAR TWO's VICTORY" gave america the RIGHT to go to war of ITS choosing everywhere , at any time, for any reason.........
BUT -- so long as americans can EXPECT or conceive that it is a "VICTORY".
and if it's NOT -- ooooooooooooooooooo --- the COMPLAINTS start to come.......!
one is tempted to remind them:
"YOU BOUGHT IT - generation after generation...a WAR CULTURE thinking that BY being such -- you are a WINNER...but you never remembered a very simple reminder you ought to have known: BUYER , BEWARE!"
mr. green asks- this is his first question- "Are we using tactics in Afghanistan that are as humane as possible?"
well actually, no mr green we most certainly are not.we are dropping bombs, often from unmanned drones, have dropped huge bombs, we have fired missiles at "suspects" and hit villages and mud huts and wedding parties. if you did not know any of this you really have no idea what you are talking about.
What the ruling class and its National Security State wanted before 9-11:
1. How to justify keeping a $700,000,000,000/yr franchise when there was no enemy with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and people were talking about a peace dividend.
2. How to get the public to endorse the neocons' plan for global military dominance, especially in the Caspian region that hold the future oil and gas reserves.
They realized that getting the Americans to back military global dominance and forgo peace dividend will be difficult unless there was another Pearl Harbor.
1. In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "Grand Chess Board" wrote "it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat". He also said that key strategic plan for the US was to secure the Caspian gas and oil fields.
2. In 2000, The Project for a New American Century(PNAC), which had Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Scooter Libby as members, calling for transforming the military for global dominance said: "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor".
The 9-11 attack of 2001, was the 'catastrophic and catalyzing event' that created 'the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat'.
A 300 billion dollar war for a country with a population of about 28 million. Of course if directly used to benefit Afghanistan people, thats 10,000 dollars for every man, women and child. Actually family and community compensation for deaths, for those that receive it, is much less per dead body.
But the rest of the money goes to the soldiers, the mercenaries, the makers of weapons and drone planes, and is used to blow up, poison and generally piss off the men, women and children of Afghanistan. There are far fewer US recievers of war money than the 28 million, since jobs still pay more in the US. Those that get the most money will favour the war. They ensure the US government keeps the wars going.
The natives to be blown up are simply just are in the way of the plans of mining corporations and military strategists.
Thats the way the US and Israel always likes to make friends and influence people in the real world. See what you like and blow up who ever is standing on it.
Since most the worlds remaining wealth and economy, as far as minerals and energy goes, now lies in Asia and China, the US wants some of it for itself, having gone through most of its own natural fortunes and resources over the last 50 years. There is a fair bit of wealth in Afghanistan ripe for profiteering once the rubbble and dead bodies are cleared away, and the Uranium dust settles.
The actual bounded national US economy is in compariosn worth less than zero regarding its prospects for the future.
The US government continues to spend more of its remaining Chinese credit card up to the eventual earth is the limit in these ongoing wars. The money is running out. So is the earth. The debt is not going to work for anybodies future prosperity. The interest bill itself is unpayable, forget the principal. The earth is not replaceable.
Killing an awful lot of people, fanancial fraud and internal collapse. Is that all what is left of what the USA is good at? Some pentagon scam artists are still making money out if all, but in all probability they no doubt bask in luxury, do not get taxed, nor do they tend to hold their blood fortunes in US dollars for very long.
We are still a few decades away from world wide ecological collapse.