Liberals Get a War President of Their Very Own
http://www.hnn.us/articles/122635.html
By Murray Polner
2-08-10
Murray Polner is the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the
Vietnam Veteran and is co-editor, with Thomas E. Woods Jr., of We Who
Dared Say No to War. This piece originally appeared in the American
Conservative.
--
Suddenly and surprisingly, we have a Bush-like Obama Doctrine. To the
applause of liberal hawks and formerly critical neocons, the
president declared in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that the U.S. will
continue to wage warthough naturally, only "just" waranywhere and
against anyone it chooses in a never-ending struggle against the
forces of evil. His antiwar supporters can take seats on the
sidelines. It's all reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and the prescient
George Ball, and afterward Ball and Lyndon Johnson. In the early
'60s, JFKreluctantly, we are told by his admirersdecided to send
16,000 "trainers" to Vietnam to teach the South Vietnamese how to
play soldier and to stop the Communists from sweeping over Southeast
Asia. Vast quantities of money and assorted advisers were shipped
without accountability to the corrupt gang of thugs running and
ruining that country.
Ball, the one dissenter in Kennedy's entourage, pleaded with JFK to
recall France's devastating defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and
throughout Indochina. "Within five years we'll have 300,000 men in
the paddies and jungles and never find them again," he warned the
liberal icon in the White House. But JFK thought he knew better,
caustically answering, "George, you're crazier than hell. That just
isn't going to happen." Ball would also press Lyndon Johnson to stand
down in Vietnam before he destroyed his presidency, domestic agenda,
and more importantly the lives of tens of thousands of American
soldiers and their families, not to mention a few million Southeast
Asians. But LBJ wasn't going to be the first president to lose a war
and be blasted by pugnacious home-front warriors. Failing to stop the
North Vietnamese would sooner or later have us fighting them on
Waikiki Beach, or so the Cold War line went. Ever since then, we have
continued to hear about regional menaces that supposedly, if left
unchecked, will threaten vital U.S. interests or even Americans at
home. Ronald Reagan employed that rationale in defending the proxy
war in Central America waged by U.S.-backed Contras. George H.W. Bush
and Bill Clinton extended the tradition of intervention, sending
troops to theaters of combat as far-flung as Panama, Kuwait, and the
Balkans, while the second Bush launched invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan. They have all been war presidents.
But Barack Obama was going to be different, or so my fellow antiwar
liberals and a few antiwar conservatives hoped. He was to herald
the end of that uncompromising and unilateral era of preventive war.
The hundreds of thousands who joyously greeted the president- elect
in Grant Park or the 1.5 million at his inauguration were ecstatic
with anticipation. Left-wing pundits wrote excitedly about FDR's One
Hundred Days and projected great plans onto the new Man From
Illinois. In countless articles, Republicans were declared brain
dead, and the Bush- Cheney policies that got us into Iraq,
Afghanistan, and the torture business were buried.
One year after those celebrations, it's the neocons cheering, seeing
in Obama's policies a vindication of the late administration. Who
would have dreamed that following Obama's West Point speech
announcing 30,000 more troops destined for Afghanistan, William
Kristol would laud Obama in the pages of the Washington Post,
writing, "the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush's," and
praise the Democratic president for having "embraced the use of
military force as a key instrument of national power"? War makes
strange bedfellows. Michèle Flournoy, Obama's under secretary of
defense for policy, has been invited to speak about the president's
hopes for a new Afghanistan on a panel led by Frederick W. Kagan at
the American Enterprise Institute, the heart of neoconservatism.
Why did Obama buy what the hawks sold him? What if he had leveled
with the nation and acknowledged that, however obnoxious and cruel
the Taliban may be, they pose no danger to the United States? What if
he had vowed that we would not dispatch tens of thousands of
additional troops to a civil war in an agrarian, impoverished,
largely illiterate country divided by tribal loyalties?
It was not to be. Instead, as New York Times columnist David Brooks
stated approvingly, "With his two surges, Obama will more than double
the number of American troops in Afghanistan." Charles Krauthammer
was direct and sharp: "most supporters of the Afghanistan war were
satisfied. They got the policy; the liberals got the speech"and no
say in the construction of that policy.
After West Point and Oslo, neocons saw Obama as a more coherent Bush,
an electrifying orator who had dazzled antiwar Democrats and
independents and then promptly dumped them. When the New York Times
printed a photo of the men and women who helped Obama reach his
decision to escalate, not one dove was present.
Were there no alternatives? In this huge country, could he not find a
handful of realists, whether Left or Right, to supply some workable
ideas for eliminating third and fourth tours for our overextended
troops and the resulting suicides, amputations, epidemics of
post-traumatic stress disorder, and legions of weeping relatives at gravesides?
Hold on, Obama's loyal liberal defenders counter, shuddering at the
memory of Bush. Why blame him for the miserable decisions he has to
make based on impossible situations he did not create? They would
prefer not to explain why they and their allies in the think tanks
and Congress have so little influence.
Granted, some of Obama's base reacted negatively. In December, MoveOn
.org sent its millions of members a scorching email denouncing
Obama's troop escalation for "deepen[ing] our involvement in a
quagmire." Anti-Vietnam War rebel Tom Hayden removed the Obama
sticker from his car. United for Peace and Justice, the main
organizer of mass peace rallies around the country, announced, "It's
Obama's War, and We Will Stop it." The widely read liberal
TomDispatch.com dubbed its former champion the "Commanded-in- Chief"
for giving way to the hardball pressures exerted by the generals.
Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive, founded by the fabled
anti-militarist Robert M. LaFollette Sr. in 1909, compared Bush and
Obama's rhetoric and wrote an article called "Obama Steals Bush's
Speechwriters."
But these protests notwithstanding, we remainand will throughout
Obama's presidencyan empire of military colonization, the goal for
decades of neoconservatives and assorted liberal hawks. In
anthropologist Hugh Gusterson's wonderfully evocative words, "The
U.S. is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup." American forces
are stationed at approximately 1,000 military bases in 120 countries
at a cost topping $100 billion annually. Diego Garcia, a remote
island in the Indian Ocean midway between Africa and Indonesia, is
apparently so essential a base that 5,000 locals were thrown out of
their homes so the U.S. could have yet another top-secret facility
from which to conduct its perpetual wars.
Far from being a consensus-seeking peacenik, Obama would not even
sign the Landmine Ban Treaty, which Bush also refused to endorse,
thus leaving the U.S. the only NATO nation unwilling to participate.
Said Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch's Arms Division, "they have
simply decided to allow the Pentagon to dictate terms." A shocked
Bill Moyers pointed out that 5,000 people died from mine explosions
in 2008, noting the disconnect between Obama's refusal to enlist the
support of the government he leads and the Oslo speech in which he
maintained, "I am convinced that adhering to standards, international
standards, strengthens those who do and isolates and weakens those who don't."
In another instance of history repeating, the first Obama defense
budget has been virtually the same as Bush's military appropriations.
Obama has reduced spending on Cold War weapons such as the F-22
fighter, but he reportedly plans to ask Congress for an extra $33
billion for the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. To
his credit, the president is trying to negotiate a new nuclear-arms
reduction pact with Russia and close a few of the CIA's clandestine
prisons. But in many other vital areas of defense and national
security, like warrantless wiretaps and renewal of much of the
Patriot Act, he persists in activities that violate fundamental
freedoms. He has also refused to hold anyone from the Bush-Cheney era
accountable.
There's more: his administration has just signed an accord with
Colombia granting the U.S. a ten-year right to use seven of its
bases, including the centerpiece of the agreement, Palanquero AFB.
Take heed, any leftist South American government that dares defy
Uncle Sam. At the same time, Obama blinked at the coup d'état in
Honduras. "They really thought he was different," said Julia Sweig of
the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Latin America's
opinion of Obama. "But those hopes were dashed over the course of the summer."
So what happened?
Barack Obama happened. More eloquence than substance happened. More
time-honored political caution than audacity or hope. Liberal and
conservative Cold Warriors as key advisers. A reluctance to cross
wartime profiteers. A recognition by his poll-counters that, with
future elections in mind, it was best to govern from some ill-defined
center, acting tough abroad to keep the neocons off his back while
throwing an occasional bone to his left.
That strategy may buy him a second term as fruitless as his firstor
it could render him indistinguishable from his deservedly maligned
predecessor and cost him re-election in 2012. The Left howls now, but
from the very start, Obama signaled his lack of interest in
McGovernite ideas of change in foreign policy. There was a time when
he talked about pressing Israel to dismantle its settlements. But
thus far he has been cowed by Netanyahu and his American backers,
betraying any hope for a genuinely independent Palestinian state.
There was that stirring speech in Cairo and then silence. There was
talk about closing Guantanamo but no mention of the much larger
Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
The sad truth is everything we are seeing we have already seen.
Despite presidents who come and go, permanent war is a hallowed
American institution. Start if you will with the War of 1812, the
invasion of Mexico, and the carnage of a Civil War. Move to the mass
murder of Native Americans and theft of their property, the killing,
torture, and prison camps in the Philippines, then the blood-drenched
20th century. The 21st likewise dawns red. It never changes. Doves
protest, hawks rule, ordinary people pay the penalty. All wars are "just."
As surely as the bloodletting persists, so does the opposition. The
old chestnut that liberals have always stood for peace and
conservatives for war is historically false. In fact, our past is
rich with anti-militarist heroes of surprisingly varied political
colors. Daniel Webster opposed the War Hawks and the draft they
proposed in 1812. Abolitionist Theodore Parker denounced the Mexican
War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 "to protest against
this most infamous war." Henry Van Dyke, a Presbyterian minister and
ardent foe of the annexation of the Philippines, told his
congregation in 1898, "If we enter the course of foreign conquest,
the day is not far distant when we must spend in annual preparation
for wars more than the $180,000,000 that we now spend every year in
the education of our children for peace." Socialist and labor leader
Eugene Debs received a ten-year prison sentence for daring to tell
potential draftees in 1918 that it was "the working class who fight
all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices,
the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the
corpses." Against U.S. entry into World War I, Republican Sen. George
Norris of Nebraska asked, "To whom does this war bring prosperity?
Not to the soldier … not to the brokenhearted widow … not to the
mother who weeps at the death of her baby boy … . War brings no
prosperity to the great mass of common and patriotic citizens … .War
brings prosperity to the stock gambler on Wall Street." Rep. Barbara
Lee (D-Calif.), the only member of Congress in 2001 who voted against
George W. Bush's decision to invade Afghanistan, warned her
colleagues to be "careful not to embark on an open-ended war with
neither an exit strategy nor a focused target." Conservative Russell
Kirk laid out a post-World War II program for conservatives by
reminding them, "A handful of individuals, some of them quite unused
to moral responsibilities on such a scale, made it their business to
extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; we must make it
our business to curtail the possibility of such snap decisions."
Anti-militarism is very much an American tradition, but it has never
been a majority position. Who now reads Finley Peter Dunne, the
Chicago newspaperman who invented the brogish bartender Mr. Dooley
speaking to his customer, Mr. Hennessey, while deriding American
excesses and the national passion for imperial expansion? He wondered
why many leaders and everyday Americans passively embraced, without
much knowledge, our devotion to world hegemonyspecifically in his
time, the decision to invade and occupy the Philippines. "'Tis not
more than two months," he told his pro-annexation readers, "ye larned
whether they were islands or canned goods."
Yet just as certain as opposition to foreign adventuring arises,
again it goes unheeded. As we begin President Obama's second year in
office, of this we can be certain: in global affairs, but for a few
crumbs here and there, antiwar views will rarely be welcomed by this
White House. And when these marginalized voters complain, all the
president's men will remind them that they were told Afghanistan was
a "necessary war" and "national security" is everything. I can
imagine Obama's advisers confidently telling him that however many
troops he ships to these and future wars, however much money he
spends on military hardware, his anguished allies have no place else
to go. Plus ça change.
.
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