War on terror – Page 2

Say it ain’t so O

Any notion that President Barack Obama will be scaling back our military involvement in Afghanistan has now come to a crashing halt.

Obama, according to The New York Times, said today “it is his intention to “finish the job” that began with the overthrow of the Taliban government in the fall of 2001.”

Mr. Obama, offering a tantalizing preview of what looms as one of the momentous decisions of his presidency, said he would tell the American people about “a comprehensive strategy” embracing civilian and diplomatic efforts as well as the continuing military campaign.

While he avoided any hints of the new troop levels he foresees in Afghanistan, the president signaled that he will not be talking about a short-term commitment but rather an effort muscular enough to “dismantle and degrade” the enemy and ensure that “Al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot operate” in the region.

A round of White House meetings on Afghanistan, which concluded on Monday night, included discussions about sending about 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, administration officials said. There are about 68,000 United States troops there now.

And now there will be more — and, despite the apparent inclusion of an “exit strategy,” they are going to be there for a long, long time.

The decision to double down on Afghanistan comes at a moment when the war has lost support among the American people and it is becoming clearer by the day that continued fighting will do little more than further inflame the situation.

A piece in the Sunday Times’ Week In Review by Robert Wright, author of an important
overview of religious history called The Evolution of God (I am reading it now and find it fascinating), offers a glimpse into the potential side-effects of this unnecessary remedy to our security ills.

These could include the creation of homegrown terrorists. Wright, focusing on the horrible case of “Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre,” says — quoting the argument of dovish liberals — attempting to end terrorism by killing terrorists is counterproductive. It actually does more to spread terrorism than to stop it.

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.

This calls into question our nearly obsessive focus on Al Qaeda — the deployment of whole armies to uproot the organization and to finally harpoon America’s white whale, Osama bin Laden. If you’re a Muslim teetering toward radicalism and you have a modem, it doesn’t take Mr. bin Laden to push you over the edge. All it takes is selected battlefield footage and a little ad hoc encouragement: a jihadist chat group here, a radical imam there — whether in your local mosque or on a Web site in your local computer.

If this is the case — and I believe it is — then the Afghanistan war and our incursions into Pakistan and potentially other hot spots becomes a game of “Wack-a-Mole.” Each time a mole pops up from its hole and we smash it, another mole pops up from another hole.

Bulking up our mission in Afghanistan, therefore, will do little to alter this and could do much to exacerbate it.

As Wright points out,

Central to the debate over Afghanistan is the question of whether terrorists need a “safe haven” from which to threaten America. If so, it is said, then we must work to keep every acre of Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc.) out of the hands of groups like the Taliban. If not — if terrorists can orchestrate a 9/11 about as easily from apartments in Germany as from camps in Afghanistan — then maybe never-ending war isn’t essential.

However you come out on that argument, the case of Nidal Hasan shows one thing for sure: Homegrown American terrorists don’t need a safe haven. All they need is a place to buy a gun.

I’m not arguing that we should ignore terrorism. On the contrary, we should address it using a law-enforcement model, which would require a greater reliance on intelligence gathering and investigation, while also focusing on international economic development and aid.

There is another drawback to Obama’s apparent “surge”: It will derail his domestic agenda, sucking dollars from the treasury while weakening support for the president at home. LBJ is the model for this, of course, as Bill Moyers reminded us last week, when he made the connection between Vietnam and Afghanistan and LBJ and Obama:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

I hope Obama is not following the path blazed by LBJ. That would be a tragedy for all of us.

The logic of dictators

Follow the reasoning on this one:

Pakistan grabs a then-18-year-old during a sweep in 2002, less than a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The teen, as a judge eventually finds, was arrested and held without cause at our Guantanamo Bay prison facility. The judge — five months ago — orders the man, now 26, released.

The Obama administration balks. Even if the Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed,

was not dangerous in 2002, they said, Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States. If he returned to his troubled homeland of Yemen, the officials feared, he might fall in with the growing contingent of Al Qaeda there, one more Guantánamo survivor to star in their propaganda videotapes.

So American officials first sought to route him to a rehabilitation program for militants in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis would take him only if he wanted to go — and he did not.

To sum things up: He’s arrested and held without cause for eight years, which turns him into a potential terrorist, which creates the cause to hold him. When did we become the Latin America of Pinochet and Peron?
So it wanted to keep him in custody, which the judge overruled.

The

What was that he said about change?

This is getting old. At every turn, it seems, the Obama administration has chosen to keep in place some noxious policy from his predecessor. The latest — following his decision earlier this week not to release photos of detainee abuse — is his decision to keep in place a version of President Bush’s military commissions.

Administration officials said they were making changes in the system to grant detainees expanded legal rights, but critics said the move was a sharp departure from the direction President Obama had suggested during the campaign, when he characterized the commissions as an unnecessary compromise of American values.

In a statement, Mr. Obama noted that the country had a long tradition of using military commissions, and said the changes would make the tribunals, to be used along with federal courts, a fairer avenue for prosecution. “This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply held values,” Mr. Obama said.

The commissions are run by the Pentagon under a 2006 law passed specifically for terrorism suspects, in part to make it easier to win convictions than in federal courts. The Obama administration suspended the military commission system in its first week in office.

The commissions, however, do not uphold our values so much as create a system that allows us to pretend we remain committed to a system of justice that puts the burden on the prosecution to prove its case while, all the while, ignoring that basic tenet.

Obama should have realized that he was driving down the wrong street on this one when he was praised by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky,

who has issued daily criticisms of the president’s plan to close Guantánamo, called the move to revive the tribunals “an encouraging development.”

Then there is this even more troubling reaction from David B. Rivkin Jr., a former Reagan official, who

said the decision suggested that the Obama administration was coming to accept the Bush administration’s thesis that terror suspects should be viewed as enemy fighters, not as criminal defendants with all the rights accorded by American courts.

“I give them great credit for coming to their senses after looking at the dossiers” of the detainees, Mr. Rivkin said.

Accepting the Bush thesis? Is this the change for which Americans voted?

Tribute? Maybe. Campaign ad? Without a doubt

The Republicans have just shown a short video about 9/11 that links those terror attacks with earlier, unrelated attacks to create an ideology — defined as Islamism — against which we are supposed to battle. The idea was to recreate the communist menace, to use the images of horror and tragedy that we all remember to scare voters into backing John McCain. They want this to be about security and the only way they can make this about physical safety is to scare us.

Keith Olberman, who I lately have found to be too partisan, calls the GOP out, saying that TV news channels would have rightly been castigated for showing so many graphic scenes from 9/11 and that the video shown by the Republicans was inappropriate. He’s right.

Realism and the irrationality of conventional wisdom

I was critical a week or so ago of Chris Hedges’ call for the antiwar left to consider third-party candidates who are unequivocal on the war, given that a John McCain presidency would likely result if there was a mass revolt.

But then I read stories like this — via Chris Floyd’s Empire Burlesque — and I think that maybe Hedges is right. Here are two quotations from the AP story that raise the hair on the back of my neck and make me wonder if he is pandering or lost on this:

“The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that’s been naive and it’s people like John McCain and, unfortunately, some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world,” he said.

Foreign policy realism is code for “I’d use force, but I’d be less likely to be a cowboy.” It doesn’t mean he’d be less likely to flex his muscles than McCain or Bush, only that he’d be more careful about creating a coalition — a la, the first President Bush and the 1991 Gulf War, which Obama said relied on a large coalition and had carefully defined objectives.

He then tried to tie current Bush administration policies to Hillary Clinton.

“I do think that Sen. Clinton would understand that George Bush’s policies have failed, but in many ways she has been captive to the same politics that led her to vote for authorizing the war in Iraq,” he said. “Since 9/11 the conventional wisdom has been that you’ve got to look tough on foreign policy by voting and acting like the Republicans, and I disagree with that.”

Instead, he appears to endorse a different kind of conventional wisdom, one still tied to the notion of American exceptionalism and leadership, that still relies on the idea that we have a right and responsibility to reshape the world to our needs — so long as we can cobble together a decent-sized international coalition.

Floyd deconstructs the comments this way:

Obama is also signaling to the real masters of the United States, the military-corporate complex, that he is a “safe pair of hands” — a competent technocrat who won’t upset the imperial applecart but will faithfully follow the 60-year post-war paradigm of leaving “all options on the table” and doing “whatever it takes” to keep the great game of geopolitical dominance going strong.

What other conclusion can you draw from Obama’s reference to these avatars, and his very pointed identification with them? He is saying, quite clearly, that he will practice foreign policy just as they did. And what they do? Committed, instigated, abetted and countenanced a relentless flood of crimes, murders, atrocities, deceptions, corruptions, mass destruction and state terrorism.

This is a difficult pill to swallow, if you’re in anyway looking for a candidate to redirect the United States away from its long-standing imperial ambitions.

This brings me to a piece that ran last week in The Guardian (U.K.) — Tuesday on Alternet — by a couple of journalists from The Nation. In it, Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill say antiwar voters who uncritically back a Democrat are making a “serious strategic mistake.”

There is no question that the Bush administration has proven impervious to public pressure. That’s why it’s time for the anti-war movement to change tactics. We should direct our energy where it can still have an impact: the leading Democratic contenders.

Many argue otherwise. They say that if we want to end the war, we should simply pick a candidate who is not John McCain and help them win: We’ll sort out the details after the Republicans are evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Some of the most prominent anti-war voices–from MoveOn.org to the magazine we write for, The Nation–have gone this route, throwing their weight behind the Obama campaign.

This is a serious strategic mistake. It is during a hotly contested campaign that anti-war forces have the power to actually sway U. S. policy. As soon as we pick sides, we relegate ourselves to mere cheerleaders.

And when it comes to Iraq, there is little to cheer. Look past the rhetoric and it becomes clear that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has a real plan to end the occupation. They could, however, be forced to change their positions–thanks to the unique dynamics of the prolonged primary battle.

Despite the calls for Clinton to withdraw in the name of “unity,” it is the very fact that Clinton and Obama are still fighting it out, fiercely vying for votes, that presents the anti-war movement with its best pressure point. And our pressure is badly needed.

Klein and Scahill point out that the Democrats have been receiving significant cash from the military-industrial complex with a bottom-line tied to the prolonging the war.

In sharp contrast to this downsized occupation is the unequivocal message coming from hundreds of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq Veterans Against the War, who held the historic “Winter Soldier” hearings in Silver Spring, Md. earlier this month, are not supporting any candidate or party. Instead they are calling for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. soldiers and contractors. Coming from peace activists, the “out now” position has been dismissed as naive. It is distinctly harder to ignore coming from hundreds who have served–and continue to serve–on the frontlines.

The candidates know that much of the passion fueling their campaigns flows from the desire among so many rank-and-file Democrats to end this disastrous war. It is this desire for change that has filled stadiums and campaign coffers.

Crucially, the candidates have already shown that they are vulnerable to pressure from the peace camp: When The Nation revealed that neither candidate was supporting legislation that would ban the use of Blackwater and other private security companies in Iraq, Clinton abruptly changed course. She became the most important U. S. political leader to endorse the ban, scoring a point on Obama, who opposed the invasion from the start.

This is exactly where we want the candidates: outdoing each other to prove how serious they are about ending the war. That kind of issue-based battle has the power to energize voters and break the cynicism that is threatening both campaigns.

Obama’s comments last week, however, along with Clinton’s “pragmatic” vote on the war in 2002, offer me little hope.

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