Critique of the President's decision and reaction at DU [View All]

Marshall McLuhan said we go into the future looking through a rear view mirror. We go into the unknown making references to what is known that don't quite fit the new situation. Thus, for many of us, Bush, the presidential usurper with authoritarian tendencies, was equal to Hitler, a real totalitarian monster. That doesn't really work. Bush was not a mass murderer but a thief. He came to power by one and possibly two stolen presidential elections and then lied to the entire world in order to commit American resources to an unprovoked invasion and an imperialist occupation of Iraq. The idea was simply to put Iraq's natural resources, mainly its oil, in the hands of western corporations, not to murder every Iraqi on whom he could lay his hands. Hitler, for his part, did not usurp power. He was named Chancellor by German President von Hindenburg in the normal constitutional process for the Wiemar Republic. I also liked to point out, in a dig not only to Bush's rise to power but all facets of his entire life, that Hitler, unlike Bush, was a self-made man.

Now that President Obama has made the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, we see comparisons on DU to the Bush and Cheney regime, who saw no problem to which they did not think the solution was to drop bombs, launch missiles and send in the Marines. Such a comparison is, to use a technical term, a load of crap.

First of all, no one should expect President Obama to start asserting power he doesn't have, as Bush and Cheney did. Bush and Cheney interpreted the Commander-in-chief clause of the Constitution as giving the President carte blanche to commit the United States to war as he sees fit, unbridled by either congressional action, or, in the case of the usurping Bush-Cheney regime, facts or common sense. Also, President Obama is going to keep Congress informed, unlike Bush and Cheney, who treated the legislative branch in general and its opposition members in particular as most of us would treat an inflamed appendix. President Obama knows he'll have to withdraw from Afghanistan if Congress votes to cut funding for the effort. In the case of Bush and Cheney, Speaker Pelosi would have had to put impeachment back on the table first.

OK, I'm disappointed at the President's decision. I hope I'm wrong, but I think Afghanistan is already a lost cause and was long before January when President Obama was inaugurated. There is no way Karzai can keep his government weak enough to protect his brother's drug cartel and at the same time be strong enough to fight the Taliban. Karzai may be an American tool, but he's still a tool that doesn't work for the purpose intended.

Still, I do not believe that the President is using the war on terror to promote ulterior motives. For Bush and Cheney, that's all it was, which is why his statements about the importance of catching Osama varied with the phases of the moon. Osama and his lieutenants can be captured and it's hard to see why the President would need 35,000 more troops and three years to accomplish that. Even the incompetents Bush and Cheney nearly accomplished that in a matter of weeks.

There is the matter of Pakistan and nuclear proliferation. That was another matter that didn't seem to concern the Frat Boy or the Big Dick very much, but should have concerned them and thankfully does concern President Obama. The idea of a right wing Islamist regime in control of Pakistan supplying right wing Islamist terrorists with the ability to make a small scale nuclear device for the purpose of carrying out hits on soft targets wherever they choose is not a future to which we should acquiesce so easily. That may be worth committing blood and treasure to prevent, but if that's the idea then Obama is not sending the troops on a clear mission by sending them to Afghanistan to keep the Pakistani government propped up in order to withstand threats from right wing Islamists seeking to take control of the government and that government's nuclear arsenal by force. Nor do I see a possibility of the Pakistani government gaining any popular support by sending an SOS to Washington requesting that US troops in Afghanistan be redeployed to Pakistan to fight these right wing rebels.

Perhaps I don't understand is that if we created the Taliban by sending them weapons to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan why we can't defeat them by arming their enemies now. That comes back to Karzai being the wrong tool. Some time in the next three years I see a coup d'etat in Afghanistan, just as there was one in South Vietnam in 1963 to replace the crooked and tyrannical Ngo brothers just months prior to the major escalation of the war by the United States.

The US had relative success in South Korea at the cost of supporting authoritarian leaders, the best of which, Park Chung Hee, was not the kind of man any American who doesn't call himself a tea bagger would want as president. Otherwise, the Ngo were followed in South Vietnam by a series of embarrassingly clownish and short-lived military governments mostly led by General Nguyen Khan, then a fairly stable but unpopular regime led by Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky and finally a president who won a rigged election, Nguyen Van Thieu. That was a disaster. In Iraq, Bush and Cheney made no pretense that the invasion was any thing other than colonial piracy by appointing an American, Paul Bremer, as "administrator" of Iraq. Apart from the fact that Bremer's presence showed that Bush and Cheney were spreading democracy to Iraq like the British spread it India, Bremer made the very kind of stupid moves, such as dismantling the Iraqi army, for which Bush and Cheney were famous by going into Iraq in the first place, blowing the cover of a key CIA operative in a political vendetta against her husband, the firing of US Attorneys for refusing to bring trumped up charges against Democratic voters and office holders and generally being asleep at the wheel during disasters whether it was natural like Hurricane Katrina or man-made like the Wall Street meltdown.

War has not worked well as a policy tool for my country. Count me opposed to the President's Afghan policy and disappointed that he has gone this route. But please, please, please, don't compare him to Bush. It may be a bad decision, but it's it was still arrived at by better means and for better reasons than Bush or Cheney could imagine. President Obama is not Bush and Cheney. To say he is try to go into the future while looking though the rear-view mirror.

EDITED for typing.