The market for war

This was supposed to be the good war, the one most connected to the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers 11 years ago. It was a war with support from both sides of the aisle, one built on an allegedly legitimate rationale. But no war is a good war. That is the lie that has allowed us to engage in an 11-year farce of deadly proportions.

Roger Cohen, who supported the war in its infancy, tries to explain the failure today

The untruths have been almost too numerous to chronicle, beginning with the great untruth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq (where more than 4,480 U.S. service members died); and sliding into the smaller, no less lethal untruths about how Pakistan was an ally in the Afghan struggle, and global terrorism beatable on the battle field, and nation-building feasible in Afghanistan, and sacrifice in the cause reasonable when half of the United States was off at the mall shopping, and victory always — always — within reach

Afghanistan is a country where President Obama appointed an able envoy, the late Richard Holbrooke, only to emasculate him; where the president, Hamid Karzai, has long manipulated Western succor to his private ends; and where the greatest emergent threat comes from Afghans in the uniforms of the security forces America and its allies are training to take over from them in 2014. The country is a bottomless pit of hypocrisies.

Cohen reminds us that the numbers — 2,000 Americans dead in this war — seem small by historical proportions, but that is only because “We have sanitized war.”

It is kept at a distance, hardly more real than a video game. The shopping continues (although less of late). When a milestone is reached — 2,000 dead — attention flickers up

But otherwise the war seems far away unless you are from a military family. Pilotless drones do ever more of the killing. The thing about robotic warfare is you can watch Afghans get vaporized on a screen near Las Vegas and then drive home for dinner with the kids.

The new mode of war has allowed us to go about our days without giving thought to what has been happening on the other side of the world. News of the war has fallen from the lead pages of the nation’s increasingly unread newspapers. It has little place in our televised news coverage or even on news Web sites.

And it has been nothing more than an asterisk in the 2012 presidential race, a time when we should be debating the major issues of importance to the nation. In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama cited his support for the Afghan war to prove he was not soft on terror, even as he reiterated his original opposition to the war in Iraq. His criticism of Iraq separated him from his chief Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and from the Republicans, and encouraged the liberal wing of his party. And he has followed through in Iraq, essentially ending that debacle.

But in Afghanistan, he has held firm. His plan for disengagement there is a farce that foresees significant American involvement well into the 2020s, and he has aggressively pushed to expand the so-called Af-Pak theater with drone strikes. He sent planes into Libya without Congressional approval and it remains unclear how he will respond as Syria unravels or whether he will keep “all options,” including military intervention, on the table regarding Iran.

Mitt Romney is worse, but it is only a matter of degree when it comes to foreign policy. The dirty little secret is that there is no debate when it comes to foreign policy and Washington and its corporate sponsors prefer it that way. The men and women who fight have become literal pawns to be sacrificed on the alters of natural resources and markets; democracy has become a buzzword without meaning, whether we are talking about the United States or elsewhere.

The situation in Europe, seemingly unrelated, is a case in point. The central bankers refuse to budge in their imposition of austerity reforms, regardless of what the people in Greece, Italy, Spain and elsewhere want, regardless of what austerity might do to the average working person.

In the meantime, the Afghan war grinds on, we continue our courtship of those authoritarian regimes that embrace markets or buy into our anti-terror meme (see Ethiopa), and the public keeps its head planted firmly in the sand.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet