by Jim Knapton

Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt. Someone said recently that if it were in five-dollar bills placed end to end, they would almost reach the moon. That’s what the USA owes the world, from the newest born to the oldest still with us: $40,000 each! Yet we’re at war in Afghanistan wasting billions on what? Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda apparently. If we are the greatest military machine the world has ever known and they are a bunch of “desert derelicts” (quoting Mark Steyn’s delicate words in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), after a hundred months of conflict, why is President Obama “winding it down”? Isn’t it because we can’t afford it? In other words, thirty-six years since the end of the Vietnam War, haven’t we lost again?

I am sure President Obama doesn’t wish to see it that way. Motivated by pressure from the military-industrial complex, whose only interest is its own profit and expansion, “benign imperialism” – or what George W. Bush proclaimed as “ensuring democracy” – is the fool’s gold of our foreign policy. Worse still, it is the cornerstone of our self-made slide into an unimaginable economic black hole, brought on by our shameless waste of resources and feigned ignorance of our own internal corruption. Come to think of it, hasn’t weaponry become the only substantial export we have left?

Oy, the war makers are now pretending to be ending the war. But they are not doing so.

Credit: Truthout.org.

How long will we tolerate these deceptions? Our tax money is paying for the continued use of drones against the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is relatively crippled. We don’t need to continue fighting in Afghanistan.

Last night, President Obama announced a plan for Afghanistan that will leave nearly 70,000 troops on the ground at the end of his first term. That’s still almost double the number of troops President Bush had in Afghanistan.

Call the White House now at 1-202-456-1111 and tell them you’re disappointed in President Obama’s plan and want to see the war end sooner.

Then, write to me to tell me how your call went.

While the press is portraying this plan as a large withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fact is that the administration is still investing billions of dollars and risking thousands of lives for a failed strategy. And risking the lives of so many civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we still don’t know when those 70,000 soldiers will come home to their families, because under the guise of withdrawing troops, this latest plan keeps the longest war in American history going indefinitely.

That’s why the NSP (Network of Spiritual Progressives) is teaming with Peace Action West to urge that President Obama bring all the troops home by September 2012, not just a symbolic fraction of the troops who are there.

The Jewish tradition has much to say on the killing of our vicious and even murderous enemies.

When Pharaoh’s troops were drowning in the Red Sea as they sought to re-enslave or kill the Israelites, the angels began to sing praises (the Hallel prayers: Psalms 113-118). According to the Talmud, God chastened them: “My children (the Egyptians) are sinking in the sea, and you are singing praises?”

Yet God did not silence the Israelites, knowing that at that moment it would be hard for humans not to celebrate the death of an oppressor.

Nevertheless, the Jewish tradition then instituted two practices in accord with God’s response: first, that the Hallel prayers would be cut down to a partial saying of some of the psalms on the last six days of Passover; and second, that when we do the Seder on Passover and recite the plagues that were used against the Egyptians to get them to free the Jews, we put our finger in the cup of wine, symbolic of our joy, and dip out a drop of wine for each plague — this symbolizes that our cup of joy cannot be full if our own liberation requires the death of those who were part of the oppressor society.

It is the loss of this consciousness by almost every society on the planet that is a real source for concern and mourning. For far too many people, the war on terrorism seems to be an extension of the football games where we cheer on our team: “USA! USA! Hey, you are tough!”

Forget Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or Godiva chocolate, there’s no sinful pleasure like that delightful sense that “we” are so much “better” (more developed, more moral, more spiritually advanced) than “them.”

At least two recent items in the news gave me that seductive pleasure, big time.

First, there is the report that a new biography of Gandhi has been interpreted by some people as suggesting that the Mahatma had a homosexual relationship with a long-time German follower. Even though the author denied that he was claiming this, the Indian state of Maharashtra banned the book, and many have called on the Indian government to make the banning national.

Could anything be more ironic? Gandhi’s whole life was dedicated to the idea of truth. He used the word “satyagraha” — literally “truth force” — to define his non-violent approach to politics. He subtitled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. So to honor this man we ban a book because we don’t like what it says. We don’t seek to disprove it, we just try to wipe it out our minds.

The second example is much more serious, one to be greeted with horror rather than irony. In Afghanistan, enraged by the burning of a Qur’an by a Florida pastor, whipped up into a frenzy by local clerics, people went on a murderous rampage that left (at this count) around twenty dead.

On Sunday December 5th, Afghan children and a U.S. combat veteran shared their experiences of the war with each other and people across the world. Their stories were heart-breaking, their mutual calls for an end to the war powerful and clear, and their gift to anyone willing to truly listen and learn about the situation in Afghanistan is priceless. You can take part in the next two conversations on Sunday December 12th and 19th.

A New York Times map depicting Republican gains (indicated by striped areas) in the House of Representatives

1. Don’t let the media frame this as a defeat of progressives. Had Obama embraced and fought for a progressive agenda, even if he had passed none of it, he would have entered the 2010 elections as the champion of the huge idealism of the American people that was elicited in 2008 and which would have led the Democrats to an electoral sweep in 2010. Being seen as fighting for the needs of ordinary people — never letting anyone forget for a moment that he had inherited the mess that Republican and pro-corporate Democrats had created, positioning himself as the champion of those who resented the Wall Street and corporate interests — his popularity would have grown; he could have won a much bigger victory for the Democrats in 2010, and that would have allowed him to actually legislate the policies of a progressive vision.

Had Obama refused to give more money to the banks and Wall Street unless equal or greater amounts were allocated for a visionary New Deal-style program for jobs and a freeze on mortgage foreclosures; had the Democrats refused to fund the escalation of war in Afghanistan; had they advocated for “Medicare for Everyone” instead of passing a plan that forced 30 million people to buy health care, but puts no serious restraints on the costs that insurance companies or pharmaceutical can charge; had Obama fought courageously for a carbon tax and ended the bargain taxes for the wealthy; had the Democrats insisted on stopping the harassment of immigrants; had the Obama Administration called for a national effort to overturn Citizens United, such as the ESRA (the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution); had Obama set up public forums at which his supporters could give him public feedback and used the web creatively to allow his supporters to weigh in; and had Obama consistently spoken honestly to Americans about the constraints he was facing and who was putting pressure on him to do what… there would have been no electoral defeat.

It wasn’t the progressive agenda that got defeated, it was the corporate-military accommodation of the Democrats and Obama who couldn’t address popular outrage, not only at the economic problem, but at the way we had been manipulated in 2008; and the humiliation many felt at having allowed themselves to hope that someone in politics would fight for what they said they would fight for.

2. Challenge the elitism in the Left. Whenever you hear someone saying that it is the stupidity or reactionary nature of Americans that led to this defeat, remind them of why, absent any other voice that they would encounter expressing their outrage, it was rational for Americans to be attracted to the right-wing voices that were expressing that outrage (albeit with programs that will actually make things worse). When Americans thought they had a chance at progressive change, they voted for it in 2008 — so they are neither stupid nor reactionary.

Found after Twain's death, this story was written in oppodsition to the Philippine War of 1899-1902, and first published in 1923.

We are delighted to start presenting occasional one-off posts by guest authors with this fine essay by Cynthia Wachtell, author of War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914.

By Cynthia Wachtell

I sometimes wonder what Mark Twain would make of America’s many modern wars. This year marks the centenary of Twain’s death, which means he died before World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and our current contretemps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh what a century he missed!

Of course, Twain wrote the American classics Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but he also spilled a lot of ink about war. In early 1899, in the wake of the shocking battle at Omdurman, in which eleven thousand poorly armed Dervishes in the Sudan were completely annihilated by British forces equipped with new Maxim machine guns, Twain reacted with obvious alarm.

He darkly mused, “Suppose circumstances made it necessary for us to fight another Waterloo . . . I will guess that 400,000 men were on hand at Waterloo . . . In five hours they disabled 50,000 men. It took them that tedious, long time because the firearms delivered only two or three shots a minute. But we would do the work now as it was done at Omdurman, with shower guns, raining 600 balls a minute.”

Twain worried that combat was becoming ever more modernly deadly. He grimly observed, “Cain did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder.” Twain knew the future of war would bring new innovations, even if he could not exactly envision aerial warfare, atomic bombs, napalm, and guided missiles.

Three years ago, Sen. Barack Obama was sharp, forceful and eloquent in his questions to Gen. David Petraeus about the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a congressional hearing on Iraq, Obama did not mince words with the general:

This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options?

Sen. Barack Obama questions Gen. Petraeus during Iraq hearings, 2007. (Go to 3:00 of this 9:45 minute video for above quote.)

This same candidate Obama was also confidently talking about withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months during his 2007 interviews. He defended a pull-out to two New York Times reporters, saying it would not “backfire” and discourage the Iraqis to find a political solution involving all sides of the conflict, as the critics claimed.

By dismissing McChrystal, did President Obama reassert civilian authority over the military, pull his “national security” team together, and enhance the power of our democracy? So it would seem. But in fact, the dismissal provides a classic example of what Marxists used to call ideology: it represents reality in an inverted form. The truth is that the dismissal of McCrystal is another giant step in the defense establishment’s control over American policy. Let me explain.

The key thing is to understand the Rolling Stone story. The news accounts have provided a series of speculations concerning “how this could have happened” including the role of alcohol, hardworking military men unwinding after 18-hour days, or (my favorite) the Icelandic volcano that supposedly trapped McChrystal, his team and the reporter (Michael Hastings) in a Paris hotel for a week during which the General and his aides let their guard down.

In fact, nothing like that occurred. Duncan Boothby, McCrystal’s PR man who has since resigned, carefully arranged for the story. From the moment that Hastings arrived he was shocked at how open and candid McChrystal and his aides were about their vituperative opinions. According to Eric Bates, Rolling Stone‘s editor, every insult in the piece including the view that McChrystal found Obama distant, uninformed and intimidated, and the slams at Eikenberry, Biden and Holbrooke were repeatedly run by McChrystal for approval, which was forthcoming. Many other things that were said were off the record, and none of these were printed. In other words, this was no careless thoughtless loose talk. McChrystal and his aides deliberately planted this story, pretty much as it was written. The question is what were they thinking?

Camino de Paz Team

In May of 2010, a group of northern New Mexico middle school students helped to train the 2nd 45th Agricultural Development Team of the Oklahoma National Guard techniques of organic permaculture farming. The youngsters showed troops how to milk goats, clean eggs and care for bees in preparation for their deployment to Afghanistan in September, 2010. The three week training was coordinated by the Pojoaque, NM-based Permaculture Institute.

These children from my community are the only youngsters who have ever trained US troops.

What do Obama’s three greatest failures — health care, Afghanistan and the oil spill — all have in common? Each one was preceded by an elaborate attempt on Obama’s part to portray his decisions in non-partisan, quasi-scientific and technical terms. Each one was presented as seizing a middle-ground between unreasonable partisans on the two extremes. Of all of the masks worn by this carefully constructed persona, that of the man of reason is the most prominent. Let us look at how it works.

At least since the New Deal, progressives argued for health care as a universal right. They did not want to live in a world where their fellow citizens, or even their fellow human beings, died because they didn’t have access to doctors or medicine. Obama dropped this emphasis for one that foregrounded cost-cutting. According to him, evidence-based scientific research would be used to mandate medical decisions. The possibility that raising the level of the country’s health might cost money, not save money, was never directly considered.

Obama’s first expansion of the Afghan War occurred only a few weeks after taking office, but his second large-scale expansion was preceded by an elaborately choreographed set of seminars in which all the different options were supposedly considered. Those who still believe that this was anything more than a charade have to tell the rest of us what Obama learned from his seminars, i.e., in what way his post-seminar understanding of “the good war,” as he calls Afghanistan, differs.

As to the oil spill, Obama announced his support for offshore drilling on March 10, unfortunate timing for him as the BP spill occurred a few weeks later. In his announcement he said he would provide “order and certainty to offshore exploration and development … ensuring we are drilling in the right ways and the right places.” As to spills, he promised we would “employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration…. And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.”
Once again, we got the message: the non-Bush, the thoughtful ratiocinator.

Charles Blow in today’s New York Times has most of the story right. According to Blow, each day brings “more news of unconscionable conservative tilts in the electorate.” The string of bad news compounds “an already palpable sense of loss and longing on the left, an enveloping fear of the inevitable: rejection…. By most accounts, Nov. 2 is going to be a blue day in blue America. That is in part because of a sizable enthusiasm gap that favors Republicans.” Nevertheless, Blow concludes, “the right may win the day, but the left will win the age. That’s because the right is running an intellectually bereft campaign of desperation and disenchantment, amplified by a recession. Great Recessions don’t last. Great ideas do.”

Bravo to Charles Blow. Everything in his article is correct, including his explanation for the Republicans’ enthusiasm. What he fails to do, however, is explain the sense of “loss and longing on the left.” The explanation is simple. After living through twelve years of Reagan and his Vice President, the first President Bush, then eight more disappointments from Bill Clinton, then eight nightmare-like years under the second President Bush, liberals, progressives and, if you will, leftists, hoped that the country would give its core liberal and progressive tradition a chance. And it had every reason to believe that with Obama as the nominee, it would have that chance since Obama positioned himself to the left of Hillary Clinton, as the anti-war candidate, as the candidate who had the most liberal voting record in the Congress, and as the candidate who was looking not just for a changed policy but a changed mindset.

Once he got the nomination, however, and especially since he became President, almost everything Obama has done has been aimed at sending the message that the difference between left and right, progressive and conservative, even Democrat and Republican, is an outmoded “partisan” or even “ideological” stance, and that what we need are people who will “solve problems,” not people who will “strike poses.”

My fellow Americans, and men and women throughout the world:

Like all people of good will I condemn the actions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Killing innocent people to make a political point is repulsive to me, whether it is done by individuals or by governments, as I will explain. As President, I am also ordering a full-scale review to be sure that everything that can be done to prevent terrorism is being done. However, I have been rethinking this question and come before you to say that heightened security is not enough.

Tell Congress to vote NO.

Robert Greenwald, director of the powerful video Rethink Afghanistan, along with Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan, is gathering signatures for a petition against the escalation in Afghanistan to be delivered on the floor of the House by U.S. Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) tomorrow, Tuesday. The petition:

President Obama has decided to send more than 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100 billion/year. But America cannot afford a war that does not make us safer, and Congress has the power to stop the escalation. Vote NO on any spending bill that would send more troops to Afghanistan.

Congress has the power to stop the escalation by denying funding. Please add your name to the petition by the end of day on Monday December 14 by going to www.rethinkafghanistan.com.

Many of the world’s religious leaders in attendance at the Parliament of World Religions taking place in Melbourne, Australia, are in partial mourning for the dream of a new world that President Obama promised, and decisively torpedoed in his announcement of major escalation of military forces in Afghanistan. While the conference sessions have officially ignored current political developments, the hallways are filled with heated discussions of the widespread disillusionment with Obama.

For political activists, the issue of Afghan escalation is primarily framed in terms of Obama’s failure to learn the lessons of Vietnam: one cannot win a war against a population that has been fighting for many decades for its own independence. No matter what America’s stated war aims, the people of Afghanistan perceive the American military presence as generating far more violence and destruction than they faced before the U.S. got involved.

President Obama on Afghanistan

After sending folks out to do all the morning shows, the White House held a national teleconference to discuss the President’s announced plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I attended representing Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, an organization with whom I spent last evening listening to the President’s address. Today’s teleconference didn’t help to overcome the disappointment our group experienced last night, or our deep concerns for the upcoming increase in military forces in Afghanistan, but it did provide me with some hope that there’s more going on than just the “surge.”

I felt an enormous sense of sadness watching Obama last night. To begin with, there was the moral disintegration of the United States, the enormous weight of the military it carries: 3,650,000 active armed forces, plus 850,000 men and women on reserve. 1000 bases, spread everywhere throughout the world, many of them secret. Think of all the steel, the barbed wire, the tanks, the aircraft carriers, the mines, the crippled children. Think of the secret services, the drones, the chemical warfare, moles, assassins, double agents. Then there is the network of businesses, corporate allies, privatized services, bought congressmen, government agencies, dependent communities. The cemeteries, the wounded, those with brain injuries, spinal injuries, paraplegics, the mentally ill, the drug-addicted.

One also must remember the lies that have put this military in place: the lies of the German and Japanese Occupations, the lies of the cold war, the lies aimed at Arbenz and Mossadegh and Nasser and Castro, the Gulf of Tonkin lie, the Granada lie, the Panama lie, the 9/11 lie, the WMD lie, the other Iraq lie. And this does not even get us to the very big lies, the lie for example, that the world is a dangerous place, a lie that is only true when one considers how dangerous the US is, and how small and local and containable the strictly military problems of the globe would be, if only the United States breathed a little bit more softly down everyone’s backs.

When one considers the enormous guilt and worry that Obama must have it is impossible not to feel compassion for his situation. At the same time, it is also impossible not to despise the decision he came to. Just as with the economic crisis, in which he gave a completely free hand to the top banks, insurance companies and corporations — handing them the checkbook of the United States people and having them fill it out as they want — so in regard to Afghanistan he has submitted completely to the military recommendations, in both cases a few pr details notwithstanding.

More important, even, than the details of his decision is his reaffirmation of the myths — the myth of American goodness and innocence, the myth of the bad guys, the denial that only a few years ago we created them, and the myth which makes it impossible for Americans to see the negative results of their own actions, the inability to grasp that the US’s world is not Afghanistan’s world, or Pakistan’s world, or Russia’s world, or France’s world. Truly, this is a time to feel sad for our country, which has squandered so much of its great legacy and potential, including now its remarkable but unhappy President.

From www.enduswars.org

This message, left on our Tikkun home site here, deserves to be more widely read:

Dear Friends,

Our organization, End US Wars, is holding an Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally on December 12 at Lafayette Park at the White House, Washington DC, from 11am to 4pm.

Featured speakers include: Cynthia McKinney, Senator Mike Gravel, Chris Hedges, David Swanson, Kathy Kelly, Betty Hall, Granny D (message), Lynne Williams, Elaine Brower, Mathis Chiroux, Michael Knox, Ron Fisher and others. We are very excited about so many illustrious speakers, with more in the offing. Musical performers include Jordan Page.

We expect to do a lot of action in DC around the time of Obama’s announcement. We also are planning events the evening of December 11th–a Green Party event, authors book signings, and Greenwald’s new movie on Afghanistan.

1) The US Has a Mercenary Army.
Since the ancient world conscription has been a fundamental principle for all democratic and republican forms of government. The reason is obvious. When people are going to die for a cause, they should spread the risks evenly. In 1974 the United States abolished the draft, supposedly temporarily, for one reason. If there were a draft Americans would never tolerate the kind of adventure in which Obama is engaging. The people who support this war are relying on the poor, often racial minorities, to fight for them: people who have no opportunity for jobs and education other than what the military provides. Ask the supporters if they would support the war if they had to fight, or their children.

2) The Taliban Will Not Take Over.
Everyone knows by this point that there are more “safe havens” for terrorists in Hamburg, London or the Paris banlieues than in Afghanistan. Supporters of the war argue, rather, that the Taliban will return if America doesn’t expand the war, and that the Taliban will protect “Al Queda,” whatever that may actually be.

This argument rests on a little knowledge: the Taliban did run the country from 1994 to 2001. However, they are much too weak to take it back. The reason the Taliban gained power in 1994 was that Pakistan backed them as an anti-India ally, as did Saudi Arabia, because of their anti-Shia policies. Behind Pakistan and Saudi Arabia was the United States, which created the fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan in the first place as a way to hurt the Soviet Union. The Taliban will not return to power if Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US do not back them.

3) The Messenger Is Not Reliable
Obama supporters claim that during his campaign he promised to wage this war in Afghanistan. This is not true. Obama ran as the antiwar candidate, filling the vacuum left by Hillary Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her vote supporting the war in Iraq. He did often refer to Afghanistan but had he ever said he want to expand that war, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House today.

Only a few weeks after taking office, on March 27, 2009, Obama sent 34,000 new troops to Afghanistan (21,000 combat troops and 13,000), announcing “a comprehensive, new strategy,” the conclusion of “a careful policy review, led by Bruce [Reidel].” In May he fired General David McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, and appointed McChrystal. This was only the third time in American history that a General was fired out from under his own command during a war. McChrystal’s memo asking for another 40,000 troops appeared on September 20, 2009. Anyone who believes that McChrystal leaked that memo without clearing it with his boss doesn’t understand America. Since September, Obama has engaged in his usual shell game, meant to demonstrate his thoughtfulness, reflectivity, listening to all sides and all the rest of it. Please give me a break. He is every bit the liar that Bush was, appearances notwithstanding.

Bill Distler, a war vet on disability who organizes anti-war action in Washington State, and has written here before, tells me he has been working on this article for about six weeks but now’s the time to get it out into the conversation, before Obama tells us what he’s made up his mind to do.

General McChrystal has Plans for Afghanistan

by Bill Distler

Obama and McChrystal on Air Force One, 11/2/2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

The New York Times Magazine recently had a long article about General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The article examined the general’s counterinsurgency plan for “success”. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently claimed that General McChrystal is the world’s foremost counterterrorism expert because in Iraq he led a program “killing thousands of bad guys.” Mr. Krauthammer’s intended compliment turns out to be proof of General McChrystal’s unfitness to represent the United States.

A picture in the Times article showed the general with Ranger and Special Forces patches on his sleeve. He must be strong and brave, and that’s fine. But for our country, the more important questions are: is he compassionate and is he wise? Because strength and bravery without compassion and wisdom are worse than useless, they are destructive.