May 10 2010

The Commanded in Chief

Have you wondered why the antiwar movement seems to be so co-opted since the 2008 election? Have you wondered why Obama seems unable to move forward with any substantive changes in US Foreign Policy, or make any headway in winding down the middle east wars?

Via Michael Moore:

Seymour Hersh on Obama Being “Dominated”
by the U.S. Military

Seymour Hersh spoke at the 6th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva on April 24, 2010

REPORTER: You didn’t include Obama in your list of liar presidents. I’m wondering if you would include him also?

HERSH: To use a basketball or a football analogy, American football, fourth quarter – he may have a game plan. At this point he’s in real trouble. Because the military are dominating him on the important issues of the world: Iraq, Iran, Afghan and Pakistan. And he’s following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a fare-thee-well. He talks differently. And he’s much brighter, he’s much more of the world. So one only hopes he has a game plan that will include doing something, but he’s in real trouble, in terms of – he’s in real trouble.

In Iraq I don’t have to tell anybody the prospects – in the American press they never mention Moqtada Sadr, but look out. He’s going to be the kingmaker of that country. He’s now studying in Iran. And he’s going to be the next ayatollah-to-be. I don’t know how he’ll work it out with Sistani. But he’s going to be the force, the Shia.

And so this is going to be very complicated for us because the two men we talk about, Allawi and Maliki, have about as much to do with the average Iraqi – they’re both ex-pats. Allawi, let’s see, he was certainly an American agent and a British agent, the MI-6, the CIA, the Jordanians ran him probably for Mossad. I’m not telling you anything that is not a fact. So who knows?

So Iraq is very problematical. There’s going to be much more violence. Whether it’s civil war or not it’s going to be much more violence.

He’s never going to win, whatever that means, in Afghanistan. The only solution in Afghanistan is a settlement with the Taliban. And the only person to settle with is Mullah Omar, and he’s become another Hitler to the American public. So how we’re going to do that and survive politically?

And the same in Pakistan. He’s got the wrong policy there. So it is – and again for Obama, Iran’s not resolved, in terms of, the Iranians have come out of this crisis stronger than ever. We don’t want to believe that.

Also see: Meet the Commanded-in-Chief, by Tom Engelhardt

Victory at Last!

Monty Python in Afghanistan

Let others deal with the details of President Obama’s Afghan speech, with the on-ramps and off-ramps, those 30,000 U.S. troops going in and just where they will be deployed, the benchmarks for what’s called “good governance” in Afghanistan, the corruption of the Karzai regime, the viability of counterinsurgency warfare, the reliability of NATO allies, and so on.  Let’s just skip to the most essential point which, in a nutshell, is this:  Victory at Last!

It’s been a long time coming, but finally American war commanders have effectively marshaled their forces, netcentrically outmaneuvering and outflanking the enemy.  They have shocked-and-awed their opponents, won the necessary hearts-and-minds, and so, for the first time in at least two decades, stand at the heights of success, triumphant at last.

And no, I’m not talking about post-surge Iraq and certainly not about devolving Afghanistan.  I’m talking about what’s happening in Washington.

A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority

You may not think so, but on Tuesday night [last December] from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered.  It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head.  Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief.

And give credit to the victors.  Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant.  Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot.  

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    • Edger on May 10, 2010 at 02:43
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    was coming from a universally respected well known veteran journalist, we might have better success getting some people to understand what’s happening?

    </snark>

  2. …and the economic wars being waged against the people of the planet are, if not the same, at least completely intertwined in purpose and planning.

    In their new book, “The Global Economic Crisis. The Great Depression of the XXI Century” Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall (Editors) present a seres of writers who explore this connection here

    PREFACE

    In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a “war without borders” led by the United States of America and its NATO allies. The conduct of the Pentagon’s “long war” is intimately related to the restructuring of the global economy.

    …snip…

    The global financial architecture sustains strategic and national security objectives. In turn, the U.S.-NATO military agenda serves to endorse a powerful business elite which relentlessly overshadows and undermines the functions of civilian government.

    …snip…

    War is inextricably linked to the impoverishment of people at home and around the world. Militarization and the economic crisis are intimately related. The provision of essential goods and services to meet basic human needs has been replaced by a profit-driven “killing machine” in support of America’s “Global War on Terror”. The poor are made to fight the poor. Yet war enriches the upper class, which controls industry, the military, oil and banking. In a war economy, death is good for business, poverty is good for society, and power is good for politics. Western nations, particularly the United States, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to murder innocent people in far-away impoverished nations, while the people at home suffer the disparities of poverty, class, gender and racial divides.

    I think Sy Hersh would agree with this.

  3. Daniel Ellsberg has made the same observation 6 months ago. There is a video of that somewhere out there from The Real News.

    I’ve often wondered how much of a say Obama had in the selection of Robert Gates to continue on at DOD.

  4. Obama is level four on the scale of 47 secret classification levels of the military industrial intelligence agency complex.

    • Edger on May 11, 2010 at 18:31
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    by David Swanson this morning…

    Isn’t it time to call what Congress will soon vote on by its right name: war escalation funding?

    Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan with 21,000 “combat” troops, 13,000 “support” troops, and at least 5,000 mercenaries, without any serious debate in Congress or the corporate media.  The President sent the first 17,000 troops prior to developing any plan for Afghanistan, leaving the impression that escalation was, somehow, an end in itself.  Certainly it didn’t accomplish anything else, a conclusion evident in downbeat reports on the Afghan war situation issued this month by both the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon.

    So it seemed like progress for our representative government when, last fall, the media began to engage in a debate over whether further escalation in Afghanistan made sense.  Granted, this was largely a public debate between the commander-in-chief and his generals (who should probably have been punished with removal from office for insubordinate behavior), but members of Congress at least popped up in cameo roles.

    In September, for instance, 57 members of Congress sent a letter to the president opposing an escalation of the war. In October, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced a bill to prohibit the funding of any further escalation.  In December, various groups of Congress members sent letters to the president and to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing an escalation and asking for a chance to vote on it.  Even as Congress voted overwhelmingly for a massive war and military budget in December, some representatives did speak out against further escalation and the funding needed for it.

    While all sides in this debate agreed that such escalation funding would need to be voted on sometime in the first half of 2010, everyone knew something else as well: that the President would go ahead and escalate in Afghanistan even without funding in place — the money all being borrowed anyway — and that, once many or all of the new troops were there, he would get less resistance from Congress which would be voting on something that had already happened.

    The corporate media went along with this bait-and-switch strategy, polling and reporting on the escalation debate in Washington until the president fell in line behind his generals (give or take 10,000 or so extra troops).  The coming vote was then relabeled as a simple matter of “war funding.”  This was convenient, since Americans are far more likely to oppose escalating already unpopular wars than just keeping them going — and would be likely to oppose such funding even more strongly if the financial tradeoffs involved were made clear.  However, a new poll shows a majority of Americans do not believe that this war is worth fighting at all.

    Nonetheless, as in a tale foretold, Congress is expected to vote later this month on $33 billion in further “war funding” to pay for sending 30,000 troops (plus “support” troops, etc.) to Afghanistan — most of whom are already there or soon will be.  In addition, an extra $2 billion is being requested for aid and “civilian” operations in Afghanistan (much of which may actually go to the Afghan military and police), $2.5 billion for the same in our almost forgotten war in Iraq, and another $2 billion for aid to (or is it a further military presence in?) Haiti.

    This upcoming vote, of course, provides the opportunity that our representatives were asking for half a year ago.  They can now vote the president’s escalation up or down in the only way that could possibly be enforced, by voting its funding up or down.  Blocking the funding in the House of Representatives would mean turning those troops around and bringing them back home — and unlike the procedure for passing a bill, there would be no need for any action by the Senate or the president.

    What Does $33 Billion Look Like?

    read it all here…

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