The Nation’s Tom Hayden falsifies Obama’s Afghanistan plan
by David Walsh, wsws.org
June 27th 2011
On the Nation web site June 23, Tom Hayden, veteran of the 1960s protest
movements and longtime Democratic Party operative, posted a dishonest and
contemptible article about President Barack Obama’s speech the night before on
the war in Afghanistan.
Hayden makes entirely unwarranted claims about the so-called withdrawal plan
and then attributes the “de-escalation” to pressure from a “peace movement”
that is largely the product of his imagination.
Obama made his deceitful speech last Wednesday in the hope of assuaging and
diverting growing opposition to the war, at least through the November 2012
elections, with his claims that the “tide of war is receding” and “the light of
a secure peace can be seen in the distance.”
In reality, by the end of 2012, assuming Obama makes good on his promises,
there will be twice the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan as there were
when Obama took office. His administration has escalated the war, sharply
increasing the levels of violence and misery as well as the bitter Afghan
resistance.
No one should be fooled for an instant. The US military plans to drown the
Afghan insurgency against the neocolonial occupation in rivers of blood.
Tom Hayden has a political history that now spans half a century. Born in
Detroit in 1939 and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Hayden, while not
precisely one of those individuals who is “famous for being famous,” acquired a
reputation decades ago for radicalism that is undeserved and which has hung
about him far too long. In reality, if one examines Hayden’s opinions and
actions, he clearly belongs to the moderate flank of the Democratic Party.
He was a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a
principal author of the “Port Huron Statement” in June 1962, the organization’s
initiating manifesto. No doubt the document reflected the increasing
restiveness of students after the pervasive conformism and official
anticommunism of the 1950s. However, its political impact was limited at the
time; the statement’s significance emerged more in historical retrospect, in
the light of the student radicalization later in the decade.
A mix of influences can be found in the manifesto, which placed considerable
emphasis on personal alienation and dissatisfaction, including existentialism
and the left sociology of the C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) variety.
Hayden also articulated concerns similar to those outlined in Herbert Marcuse’s
One-Dimensional Man (1964) about the impossibility of resistance in America,
claiming that “the dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds
of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or
entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human
expectancies.”
The 1962 statement might be considered one of the founding documents of
identity politics. Inevitably linked to that was its insistence on the need to
orient toward the Democratic Party. It called on “publicly disinherited
groups”—which the document enumerated as “Negroes, peace protesters, labor
unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals”—“to demand a Democratic
Party responsible to their interests.”
The anticommunist Walter Reuther leadership of the United Auto Workers
collaborated closely with Hayden and the other SDS founders, funding a range of
activities, including the 1962 conference, held at the UAW summer camp in Port
Huron, Michigan.
“SDS leaders, in return, did their best to shape a program that they believed
would please the UAW. SDS’s 1962 ‘Port Huron Statement,’ for example, clearly
reflected the UAW’s influence.” (The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism,
1945-1968, Kevin Boyle)
The subsequent leftward turn of SDS (with the rise to prominence of Maoist and
anarchist elements), as mass antiwar protests erupted in the late 1960s, went
very much against Hayden’s wishes. He was reluctantly drawn into the protest
movement, eventually becoming one of the Chicago Seven, famously charged with
conspiracy related to violence outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention.
Hayden returned to his natural home, Democratic Party electoral politics, in
the mid-1970s, as the wave of radicalization subsided. After unsuccessfully
contesting the 1976 Democratic primary in California against the sitting US
senator, John Tunney, Hayden ran for and won a seat as a Democrat in the
California State Assembly (1982-92) and later the state Senate (1992-2000). He
has also been a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles and governor of California.
The Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which he helped found in 1977 with
his then-wife Jane Fonda, formed a close alliance with California’s once and
future governor, Jerry Brown.
Hayden, in short, personifies a certain strand of American middle-class left
politics, by this time a fundamentally conservative and establishment strand.
In relation to Obama’s Afghanistan policy, Hayden enters stage “left” to
reinforce the illusions sown by the president and shore up support for the
administration. His piece is aimed at smothering the outrage felt by those who
believed candidate Obama’s promises in 2008. Hayden’s method of choice is to
congratulate antiwar voters and activists on having supposedly forced the
current administration’s hand in “quickening” the Afghan withdrawal.
Thus, Hayden asserts that Obama “is responding to massive public pressure for
rapid troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.” He declares, “We have crossed the
line into de-escalation.”
The Nation journalist goes on to claim that the scheduled withdrawals by the
end of 2012 (which, of course, can be vetoed or altered by the military) should
make opponents of the war “feel a sense of gratification…about contributing to
the vast upswelling of public opinion against Iraq and now Afghanistan… There
is a magic about public opinion, which still matters despite the shadows of
authoritarianism all around.”
Hayden’s cynical article is a succession of attempts to wear down popular
skepticism and anger about Obama’s Afghanistan policy.
He juggles with the numbers. A withdrawal of 33,000 troops is not so bad, he
argues, although “Fifty thousand troops out by 2012 would have de-escalated the
American occupation by half, would have gone beyond ending the present surge
and would have broken the back of those who believe in the endless war.” Whose
surge? He neglects to mention that the current administration is responsible
for the huge intensification of the conflict in the first place.
Nor does he note the basic duplicity of Obama’s speech. When he announced the
“surge,” Obama implied that he was sending the additional troops in order to
hasten the withdrawal, beginning in July 2011, of the 60,000 troops already in
Afghanistan. Now he announces the withdrawal of just the additional 33,000
troops—by the end of 2012—and boasts that he is keeping his word!
Hayden lists his criteria for the success of social movements, which include
“(1) gaining mastery of ideas, approaches, strategies and tactics; (2) having a
tangible impact on the powers-that-be and public opinion; (3) making measurable
gains towards their goals, based on a growing organizational capacity; (4)
making everyday life better or more bearable; and (5) developing a sustaining
movement culture and heritage.”
By those standards, the “peace movement” in America is a dismal failure.
Indeed, it can hardly be said to even exist.
>From a long-term perspective, the antiwar movement never recovered from the
>betrayals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Communist Party and the
>Socialist Workers Party, with the assistance of the likes of Hayden,
>subordinated anti-Vietnam War sentiment to the Democratic Party and steered it
>away from opposition to capitalism.
These “left” elements or their political descendants underwent a protracted
decay, and by the 1980s and 1990s were entirely integrated into the Democratic
Party, dressing up that imperialist party as a “people’s party.” Following 9/11
and the eruption of militarism under George W. Bush, the official antiwar
alliance of liberals, Stalinists, pacifists, Greens and others in United for
Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and the ANSWER Coalition went into action. They acted
with one purpose in mind, to ensure that opposition never went beyond the
control of one wing or another of the Democratic Party.
The widespread opposition to the Iraq war was deprived of any perspective and
once again channeled back into support for a Democrat in the White House, with
the inevitable, disastrous results.
In the 2004, 2006 and 2008 election campaigns, organizations such as MoveOn.org
and others helped paralyze public opinion, claiming that each successive
Democratic presidential candidate or congressional slate would end the war and
hold the Bush-Cheney crowd of war criminals accountable.
Hayden, the Nation editorial board and others celebrated the election of Obama,
a right-wing figure of dubious political provenance, asserting that a new day
had dawned in America. In this manner, they helped the US ruling elite carry
out certain changes in foreign policy and prepare future bloodbaths.
While there is widespread antiwar sentiment in the US, there is no official
antiwar movement. The protest movement against the Iraq war was short-lived. It
finally collapsed after the election of Obama in 2008, but it had begun to fall
apart in the wake of the Democrats’ success in the mid-term elections in 2006.
The last major mobilization against the Iraq war occurred in Washington in
January 2007, although tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, and occupying
troops, have died since that time.
The anti-Iraq War movement was wound up by the Democrats and their hangers-on
once that party returned to power in Washington, because (a) the tactical shift
in American foreign policy these elements desired [including the Afghanistan
escalation] had been effected and (b) they had no interest in encouraging
popular hostility to wars now being conducted by the Obama administration.
An interesting study carried out by two academics, Michael T. Heaney of the
University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University, into the
“demobilization of the antiwar movement” discusses the various mechanisms
through which “the relationship between the Democratic Party and the antiwar
movement was essential in accounting for the demobilization of the antiwar
movement between 2007 and 2009.”
Heaney and Rojas point to the “abandonment” of the antiwar movement by
Democratic Party activists in 2009, which “led to the collapse of UFPJ, the
movement’s largest and broadest coalition.” They explain: “The election of
Barack Obama and the subsequent plunge in activist involvement was devastating
to the financial base of the antiwar movement.” By the beginning of 2010, UFPJ,
which had once maintained a budget of some $500,000 a year, “was struggling to
pay debts and maintain its website for $6,000 per year.”
Hayden chooses to ignore the death of the “peace movement” (the official
history of the UFPJ posted on its own web site ends in March 2008!) and goes on
to congratulate various “peace activists” and “peace networks,” who have, in
fact, worked assiduously to suppress resistance to the Obama administration,
the Afghan war and imperialism.
A statement on the rump UFPJ web site posted prior to Obama’s June 22 speech
argues, “There is common agreement from the likes of General Petraeus to
Senator John Kerry that a political solution, not the military, is the answer
to stability in Afghanistan.”
In his Nation piece, Hayden ends by thanking a long list of generally
pro-establishment, Democratic Party-oriented outfits, including the Institute
for Policy Studies, the Afghanistan Study Group, the New America Foundation,
which “have battled inside the Beltway,” as well as the right-wing Center for
American Progress and a succession of Democratic Party hacks and demagogues
whose aid at critical moments has been indispensable in keeping the barbaric
violence in Afghanistan going: John Kerry, Barbara Lee, Jim McGovern, Dennis
Kucinich and Russ Feingold.
If this wretched crowd were actually responsible for ending the war in
Afghanistan, or anywhere else, that old trick of turning water into wine would
lose its glow.
Hayden is at his most pernicious when he labels rejection of Obama’s latest
ploy on Afghanistan “negativity and alienation,” which is “infecting the
discourse with unwarranted cynicism and undermining any sense of achievement.”
This is meant to discredit a socialist exposure of Obama’s speech. Hayden plays
once again to his audience of “peace activists,” urging his “[f]riends and, may
I say, comrades” not to “disparage what your efforts have achieved… Instead,
dwell on this simple fact: we the people pushed them back.”
What a colossal fraud! The layer that Hayden speaks for, the Nation crowd and
the whole upper-middle class liberal and even “far” left, bought in to the
legitimacy of the “war on terror” a decade ago. They may have distant memories
of political activism in the 1960s and 1970s, but this is by now a thoroughly
domesticated and tame political herd, distant from and hostile to “the people.”
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are products of the historic crisis of
American capitalism. The US ruling elite is attempting to overcome its decline
through global conquest and relentless attacks on the working population at
home. Opposition to imperialist war under the present conditions will emerge
only as a working class movement, consciously linked to the fight against the
ongoing social devastation in the US.
Original Page: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jun2011/hayd-j27.shtml
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