Mr. Obama: Tear Down This War!
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/CrisisPapers/245
May 11th 2010
by Bernard Weiner
Many of us progressives now in our 60s and 70s spent years of our
young lives in "The Sixties" trying to stop the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Many in this cohort were beaten, jailed, lost jobs, suffered
discrimination. We were, after all, considered "unpatriotic" and
"traitors" by government leaders and their rightwing supporters.
We didn't end the war on our own, of course, much as we would have
liked to believe that. Mainly, it was the Vietnamese themselves who
were responsible for that outcome as they battled U.S. forces to a
quagmire standoff and then took over the country when the massively
unpopular South Vietnamese government collapsed.
But our anti-war activism was at least partially responsible for
altering the-government-knows-better-than-you-do attitude of our
parents' generation. Our "Movement" also helped educate the new
generation as to the truth of what was happening in Southeast Asia
and in the rest of the world as U.S. forces, representing the
corporatism at the heart of Western society, supplanted the old
European colonialists in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Whenever I speak about those anti-Vietnam War days -- as I began to
do again after the illegal, immoral war was launched against Iraq in
2003 -- I surprise myself by how emotional I still am about the
tumultuous "Sixties." ( www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/past-prese...
) Its impact is strong. The past truly is never past, and isn't even
the past. In talking about the war and the mass-movement opposition
to it in "The Sixties" (in my reckoning, from the civil rights era of
the late-'50s/'60s roughly to the mid-'70s), long-buried feelings leap out.
>THE CIVIL WAR IN THE SIXTIES
I revisited my old anti-war haunts in the Pacific Northwest some
years ago and found my body trembling as those old sense-memories
washed over me. Another time, after seeing the movie "Born on the
Fourth of July," I was trying to explain to my teenage son about why
so many of us had been so engaged trying to get the war stopped --
and I was barely able to talk coherently, I was sobbing so much.
That was such a painful period in my life (also a gloriously
liberating time as well, of course) and in the lives of so many
others in this country. Not to mention how the war affected the
Vietnamese, who may have lost close to two million loved ones in that
conflict. (The irony: Today, we have good trade relations with
communist Vietnam.)
The U.S. was nearly torn in two by the Vietnam War and the opposition
to it. It was a kind of cultural/political civil war, aided to a
large degree by the presence of the military draft. That civil war
was ugly and painful, affecting nearly everyone in the country. It's
difficult to describe, for those who weren't there, the chaotic and
often bloody nature of the politics of that day.
HAVE TO FIGHT THE SAME FIGHT AGAIN?
And here we are again, with two more wars inherited from the
CheneyBush Administration but willingly adopted by the new
administration. In Iraq, Obama promises to withdraw U.S. combat
forces by next year, but, significantly, hedges with if "the
situation on the ground" permits. In Afghanistan, the U.S. has
doubled-down on a war that cannot be won (it's estimated there are
200,000 U.S. troops there now).
It seems that the only thing American governments learn from history
is that they don't learn from history.
In Iraq, Obama has begun re-positioning U.S. forces away from the
urban battlegrounds in preparation for the promised pre-2012-election
troop withdrawals. The U.S. situation in Afghanistan more and more
resembles the history of America in Vietnam four decades before.
THE PARALLELS THEN & NOW
The parallels between Afghanistan and 'Nam are not exact, of course,
but the main points are remarkably similar:
* In Vietnam, the U.S. was fighting a native insurgency that it
barely understood. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is fighting a native
insurgency -- laced with arcane political, clan and familial
complexities -- that it barely understands. (Need it be stated? The
U.S. has precious few who speak the local languages; indeed, because
they are gay, it fired a whole passel of intelligence agent in
Iraq/Afghanistan/D.C. who did speak the languages.)
* In Vietnam, the U.S. had taken over from the colonial French, who
were being defeated by the native insurgency led by Ho Chi Minh. In
Afghanistan, the native insurgency had battled earlier British
colonial control and later the Soviets. Both were forced to depart
their stalemated wars, unable to afford the political and financial costs.
* In South Vietnam, the local government propped up by the Americans
was venal, corrupt, brutal, well-versed in the arts of torture. A
succession of military regimes came and went, and none of them earned
the respect or support of the civilian population. In Afghanistan, we
are propping up a venal, corrupt government that barely controls its
capital, with many of the provincial governments run by drug lords
(one of them the brother of the president) and warlords; this time,
it's the U.S. that is often the torturer.
* In Vietnam, the U.S. administrations' experts warned all the
presidents over the years ( www.crisispapers.org/essays/ellsberg.htm
) that it could not win that war. Despite overwhelming firepower and
technological supremacy, the best that could be hoped for in this
type of guerrilla conflict, these experts noted, was endless
stalemate: a prohibitively costly quagmire. The various Presidents
"stayed the course" anyway, and paid the price: The U.S. had to
retreat from Vietnam in disarray, and is similarly likely to have to
leave Afghanistan with nothing that can be called a "victory." Even
President Obama has publicly acknowledged the likely military
stalemate in that nation, a country that in no way can be considered
a vital national interest to the United States.
(Remember Bush's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, saying U.S.
forces couldn't find anything in Afghanistan worth bombing?)
STICKING WITH CORRUPT LEADERS
U.S. policy in Afghanistan rests upon the continued strong presence
of President Hamid Karzai. True, his most recent election was a
corrupt electoral farce, but he's Our (Made) Man in Kabul and Obama
will stick with him -- until the U.S. realizes it must cut him loose
and push him under the bus. Much as the U.S. did to President Diem
and subsequent Vietnamese rulers during that war.
One is left wondering why the new U.S. president didn't announce a
staged withdrawal from Afghanistan after hearing from all his
experts. Obama doesn't believe the neo-conservative B.S. that victory
is possible in this war, so why keep sending in more and more troops
to fight it? Is he trying to strengthen his "national-security" creds
by going all macho, thus giving the rightwing little opening to
attack him as a weak-kneed commander-in-chief? Is he saving the
withdrawal speech until after the 2012 election? Is he a true
believer in, and supporter of, the military-industrial complex that
pulls the strings in Washington -- the same movers and shakers who
might financially support his re-election campaign? Is he trying to
wipe out the Taliban before the U.S. pulls out?
Certainly, not much good news is coming out of Afghanistan. Taliban
leaders are killed, and the Taliban grows more leaders, gains new
recruits. A recent poll of Pashtun areas revealed that 80% of these
men are angry, a doubling of this response from one year ago, and
only 9% are angry at the Taliban. Guess where their anger is
directed: yep, the U.S./NATO occupiers. (By the way, you probably
haven't read about this in the mainstream press, but there are
reports that the Times Square bomber says his anger about Predator
drone attacks in his native Pakistan, killing so many innocent
civilians, is what led him to make his car-bomb. In other words: U.S.
policy, not "hating our freedoms.")
Everyone, seemingly including President Obama, knows how this
Afghanistan misadventure will turn out. Either the U.S. will leave
voluntarily soon, on its own staged-withdrawal schedule, or America
will be forced to retreat from Afghanistan later, like the Brits and
Soviets did (and as the U.S. did from 'Nam), as yet another major
world power forced to admit it could not tame the poor, downtrodden
fighters in this destitute South Asian country .
CUT LOSSES, GET OUT A.S.A.P.
Let's do the tallying: This is an unwinnable war. There is no vital
U.S. national interest there. America continues to alienate Muslims
all over the world by our occupation of, and brutal behavior in, yet
another Islamic country. The U.S. is proving to be a top recruiter
for the Taliban and Al Qaida by our policy. The U.S. is propping up
provincial regimes in Afghanistan that are dependent on
drug-trafficking. America time and time again winds up slaughtering
innocent men and women and children in Afghanistan -- how many
slaughtered wedding parties does the U.S. need to have on its resume?
-- thus losing the battle for "hearts and minds" on the ground. We
need the billions this war is costing us at home.
And, perhaps most important domestically, the U.S. is losing its
sense of itself as a moral country. Much as we would like to believe
so, we are not seen as, and we are not in fact, the good guys here.
It's well past time for President Obama to realize that he made a bad
mistake, and exit as quickly as practicable.
Would the U.S. look bad? Yeah, for a few minutes. Unless the policy
changes, imagine what America will look like years from now after
many thousands more U.S. troops and Afghan civilians are killed and
maimed before our country comes to its senses and gets the hell out of there.
Just get out. Now.
.
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