Critique of the President's decision and reaction at DU

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.

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all too often here and in the Fox Media....everyone wants to opine their shit without knowing what Obama has in front of him..

You Sir...is an exception...thank you

to congratulate you on a well written post.

Bravo!

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NOw, watchout for the debbie downers in 1, 2, 3, 4.....

One point of contention:

"Bush was not a mass murderer but a thief."

I think he is a mass murderer, by proxy. There are a lot of US and coalitions forces, as well as, dead Iraqis and Afghanis(if that's the correct term) because of Bush and Cheney and their illegal and immoral wars.

The statement is made to refute the Bush-Hitler analogies. One could also say that Hitler was a thief: he seized property without cause and expropriated items from death camp victims, including gold teeth. But that was incidental to murder. Bush murdered to be sure, but that was incidental to the theft of Iraq's oil. If Bush could have seized Iraq's oil on behalf of his corporate pals without killing any one (except Saddam, perhaps), he would have done so.

Bu$h was/is a lazy, incurious, unmotivated "C" student.

Obama was/is a smart, motivated, intelligent "A" student.

But it's like we've allowed the "C" student to determine the master-plan/big-picture stuff, and now expect the "A" student to make it successful. I don't see how it can work.

The lipstick-on-a-pig analogy comes to mind.

I don't agree that it is a bad decision, but rather an unfortunate only viable option in a sea of bad options. But I love that you have reasoned this through in such a thoughtful way.

A lot of it was nuanced and indirect - the deaths not being the primary intention, but a side effect, but he was still a mass murderer. Getting people killed through your avoidable and illegal and unethical actions is murder. If you want to call him a mass manslaughterer, then I suppose that might work.

above.

Cause I think it has to.

I most certainly do expect it, based on the fact that he hasn't given up any that Bush took!

Had Bush not handed him this no-win problem to solve, Obama would never allow himself to be in such a conundrum. You're right, Obama is nothing at all like Bush.

Bush fights by swinging first, then you see him wondering why he's holding his head sitting on his ass.

Obama analyzes the opponent, looks for an appropriate solution and applies it. The solution may not involve the use of a weapon.

Grudging support is what the President asked for and should get. One need not be optimistic to say this -- in fact, I don't see how one could be optimistic.

As for workability the reality is that most insurgencies are not successful. Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia were all confirmed 'lost causes' at some point, now Vietnam cannot reform its economy to join them fast enough.


The Taliban can 'win' by continuing to creat havoc for some time, but they are unlikely to reassert power over a large geographical mass, they are more fenced in by tribal loyalties than the Afghan government is.


All things are not failing in the Afghan government and the ANA by almost universal objective analysis is forming as a strong institution based on meritocracy.


One important thing that has been almost universally overlooked in the President's speech is that he is going to be bypassing the federal government in allocating funds directly to ministries and local bureacracies that are proven effective.


The one thing I did not hear was the development of an opium replacement program that would stop suppression (which does not work) and make the US government the main purchaser of opium and wean farmers away from opium by creating incentives to have them grow other crops.


War is not the policy. Sufficient military force is needed to give the real answer time to grow. Of course there are some spectacular failings, especially the Afghan police force. Failure is not an inevitable and suprisingly between 1920 and 1970 Afghanistan had a liberal and effective (in comparison to its neighbors) central government.

that was well worth reading. Great post, much wisdom.

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