Robert Scheer: Obama's Meaningless War

Obama's Meaningless War
By Robert Scheer

September 2, 2009

True, he doesn't seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he's headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, beginning with his war on poverty, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.

Meaningless is the right term for the Afghanistan war, too, because our bloody attempt to conquer this foreign land has nothing to do with its stated purpose of enhancing our national security. Just as the government of Vietnam was never a puppet of Communist China or the Soviet Union, the Taliban is not a surrogate for Al Qaeda. Involved in both instances was an American intrusion into a civil war whose passions and parameters we never fully grasped and could not control militarily.

The Vietnamese Communists were not an extension of an inevitably hostile, unified international communist enemy, as evidenced by the fact that Communist Vietnam and Communist China are both our close trading partners today. Nor should the Taliban be considered simply an extension of a Mideast-based Al Qaeda movement, whose operatives the US recruited in the first place to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

Those recruits included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, and financier Osama bin Laden, who met in Afghanistan as part of a force that Ronald Reagan glorified as "freedom fighters." As blowback from that bizarre, mismanaged CIA intervention, the Taliban came to power and formed a temporary alliance with the better-financed foreign Arab fighters still on the scene.

There is no serious evidence that the Taliban instigated the 9/11 attacks or even knew about them in advance. Taliban members were not agents of Al Qaeda; on the contrary, the only three governments that financed and diplomatically recognized the Taliban--Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan--all were targets of bin Laden's group.

To insist that the Taliban be vanquished militarily as a prerequisite for thwarting Al Qaeda is a denial of the international fluidity of that terrorist movement. Al Qaeda, according to US intelligence sources, has operated effectively in countries as disparate as Somalia, Indonesia, England and Pakistan, to name just a few. What is required to stymie such a movement is effective police and intelligence work, as opposed to deploying vast conventional military forces in the hope of finding, or creating, a conventional war to win. This last wan hope is what the effort in Afghanistan--in the last two months at its most costly point in terms of American deaths--is all about: marshaling massive firepower to fight shadows.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/scheer

Obama could have cut his and the nation's losses, and brought all the troops home, instead he chose to escalate the war in Afghanistan, just like LBJ chose to escalate the war in Vietnam.

Like Eisenhower warned, they're taking over....

No Military Objective + No Exit Strategy = Quagmire

K&R back up to +5

We don't want to upset the self-deluded, do we?

Identity politics makes fucking idiots of people.

how far down the slippery slope do we as a nation have to go..and the cost is paid by our kids in uniform.....and their families.

These politicians are all crooks..and murderers!..for the MIC..

Wasn't Obama the big anti war guy? oh yeah..i seem to remember that..but i don't want to say it too loudly because i will be called a racist!

nations and if Pres. Obama can't (or won't?) recognize this, he'll only hasten the republic/empire's collapse. The amount spent on force projection is simply unsustainable and an immense waste. All empires fail.

There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders - Ralph Bunche, I believe.

Top Historian Warns Obama: Avoid Lyndon Johnson Trap On Afghanistan

For a time I’d been wondering if there was a fair historical comparison to be drawn between Lyndon Johnson’s domestic predicament with regard to Vietnam and President Obama’s on Afghanistan and to a lesser degree Iraq.

Both inherited their predecessor’s wars at a time of pressing domestic crises. So does Obama risk the fate that befell Johnson at home: Getting mired in an international war that could weaken his ability to deal with domestic challenges that are more enormous than those Johnson faced? Now presidential historian Robert Dalleck has weighed in with a warning to Obama about the Johnson trap:

With the country’s economy in such poor shape and his eagerness to enact bold health insurance, education and environmental reforms, he will need to recall that wars are the enemy of far reaching change. World War I stopped Progressivism; in the 1940’s “Dr. Win the War replaced Dr. New Deal,” as Franklin D. Roosevelt said; the Korean War sidetracked Harry Truman’s Fair Deal; and Vietnam frustrated Johnson’s hopes of additional Great Society measures…

If the country begins to see mounting costs in lives and money from the administration’s war policies, it risks distractions from the more urgent designs the president described in his campaign and recent messages to the Congress and the country.

History is never a precise guide for current political actions. But the consistent negative impact of earlier foreign conflicts on grand projects at home is a cautionary tale that should command President Obama’s close attention. Guns and butter rarely mix.

This possibility hasn’t really been on people’s radar, I’d argue, because the debate over whether to leave Iraq has sucked up all the oxygen and turned the Afghan conflict into a kind of forgotten war. But now Obama is escalating there, and tens of thousands of troops are temporarily staying in Iraq, at a time when he’s spending political capital on hugely ambitious domestic initiatives. Worth keeping in mind.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/afghanistan/top-historian-warns-obama-avoid-lyndon-johnson-trap-on-afghanistan/