Is There a War On Terror - Continued.
by Bobby Hanafin, The Mustang Major

This is a continuation of the feedback that I received from various members and activists in the anti-Iraq War movement regarding debate and division over diverting our troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.

As I reviewed the various responses that I receive, there tended to be a common thread that linked the root of debate and division over winding down one front (Iraq) in the War on Terror and building up on another (Afghanistan). That trend was reinforced by a recent RAND Corporation Study (to be posted later) that questions and challenges the very phrase WAR ON TERROR.

It is a voter's belief (or being sold on) the concept of a War On Terror that is central to the reasons why our government wants US to:

SUPPORT THE WAR ON TERROR

Picking up where Stan Goff left off (no pun intended) in his article, "On Commanding-In-Chief,"

"That's where Obama is headed right now; and for the record, that does not mean there is no difference between him and McCain, or that I am encouraging electoral abstinence. Those are red herrings. It means the war has in many respects escaped the calculable control of the American state no matter who the President is." Peace Activist Stan Goff

[Senator Barack] Obama did not inherit Bush's war, except in the details. He inherited a business class's war that was inevitable (though not in its present form).

The United States was going to reposition its international military after the Cold War in any case; the old disposition for "containing" the Soviet Union was obsolete after all. And given the most obvious of considerations, the place to seek permanent and fully operational military bases abroad was in Southwest Asia. That's where the hydrocarbons are; and when you have the hydrocarbons, you have the competition on a nose ring. Following through with this is Obama's job after the election. (We get to participate in the elections for which wealth-selected candidate will be the CEO; but we are not, alas, on the board of directors.)

Obama is a very smart guy - a genuine intellectual - who has jumped through a rare political window of opportunity, but there's a punji-pit on the other side.

Bush's approval numbers are abysmal in the face of a four-sided crisis: a bursting bubble of fictional value, skyrocketing fuel prices, an interminable unpopular war, and the collapse of ecosystems. Bush (a historically) gets all the blame. That's the window of opportunity.

Obama has also run a brilliant and even technically audacious campaign (his policy pronouncements are anything but audacious).

I suspect he is going to win, and win big.

In other circumstances, he might win to become a brilliant CEO for the business class, and even make enough of the rest of us comfortable enough to remain complacent. But he is inheriting problems that are already - as they have been for the Bush administration - supra-political, impermeable to intervention by the actually-existing political system in which we live. He is inheriting a complex and world-historic impasse for the world and the US state. And he will be the commander-in-chief for the United States Armed Forces.

He has already committed himself to the emergent consensus of that system. Southwest Asia [Afghanistan/Pakistan] will be secured for the US, by military force if necessary; or there will be a phase shift in American economics and politics that will sideline the entire system (and consensus).

There is not a shred of evidence (except in the public's ever-hopeful imagination) that he intends to be anything more or less than other commanders-in-chief. Like the others, he will bend the military to the emergencies of empire - that is, secure the continuity of the existing system.

Maybe McCain will win, and none of this will matter to Obama. It will go the same way for McCain and worse still if he elects to vicariously relive the pre-capture glory days by ordering bombing runs over Qom. He'd be the commander-in-chief. He can do that as commander-in-chief. And Congress will not stop him. Neither will us.

The "antiwar movement" has always been more an anti-Bush movement and an anti-defeat movement (nudged along by competing leftist cadres without their own popular bases); and it has shown no ability to employ anything except 60s-70s tactics and techniques, even though the ruling class has long ago adapted to them.

Neither Congress nor the people-at-large will stop McCain or Obama from war-mongering. That's one reason there has been so much emotional investment in Obama's change rhetoric. A general election (a new king) is the current limit of our cultural imagination and the limit of our collective political will. This in no way means the system will continue along. It simply means that these creatures of the system will not be the agents of its undoing.

The weeds have been in the wheat for quite some time now, but pulling the weeds will kill the wheat. The harvest has to come before we can winnow and start fresh.

Making McCain out a devil does not make Obama a rescuing angel. Obama’s mature, articulate confidence is certainly reassuring after eight years of a Yalie frat-rat smirking in the foreground of serial disasters; but there is such a thing as misplaced confidence, even feigned confidence.

Obama's foreign policy is likely to be warmed-over Brzezinski-ism; and it was Brzezinski who was the architect of the conditions that put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan in the first place. Brzezinski, paradoxically, is warning Obama of exactly what's been said here, citing the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. "We have to be careful." Brzezinski warns Obama, ".not to overestimate the appeal of the democratic Afghan elite, because we run the risk that our military presence will gradually turn the Afghan population entirely against us.

"I realize that in an electoral campaign you don't want to antagonize large groups which are highly motivated. This is a very dangerous period of time with very unpredictable consequences. You have three countries [Iran, Israel and the U.S.] doing a kind of death dance on the basis of confusion, division and fear.

"If we end up with war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, [and] Iran at the same time, can anyone see a more damaging prospect for America's world role than that? That's the fundamental foreign policy dilemma at the back of this election. A four-front war would get us involved for years . . . It would be the end of American predominance."

In fact, a two-front war is already contributing to the same thing.

What's a commander-in-chief to do?

Welcome to GWOT world. Want that catastrophe with one lump or two?

On Commanding-in-Chief by Stan Goff

Or, Welcome to Global War On Terror (GWOT) world.
http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/07/21/on-commanding-in-chief/

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VIEW IN LINE WITH STAN GOFF'S GWOT THE MYTH

I received this feedback from Brother Dave Collins, a regional leader of VVAW and member of VFP from Texas.

The "war on terrorism" or "Global war on terrorism” is the Big Lies of this era. As you point out, one can no more wage a war on the tactic of terrorism than on blitzkrieg. But those who coined the slogans and promoted them with a mountain of deceit know that as well and do not care one whit.

That the Big Lie now permeates all foreign and military policy discussion, from all sides of the political spectrum, is testimony to its effectiveness. It has become an accepted "truth and given" of US politics and as such sustains the imperialistic, neo-con wet dream beyond any single politician or junta. Unless and until the Big Lie is exposed, it will continue to dominate and drive the foreign policy of this country - drive it, and us, right into the ground.

Dave Collins
Hill Country contact - VVAW

Dave also noted concerns about, Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch, an article from Information Clearing House - Regarding Afghanistan.

"For those who believe the illegal invasion of Afghanistan was a justified military action to capture and bring to justice 9/11/01 perhaps I would offer this reminder. When the junta came to power in January, 2001 long standing negotiations with the Taliban for the surrender of bin Laden had reached a very mature state. The primary sticking point, one easily resolved were a nation really keen to bring the criminal to heel, was how the turn over would be accomplish. The junta discontinued the talks as an early foreign policy action.

Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch, By John Pilger

"John Pilger describes the denigration of the of civilian casualties in colonial wars, and the anointing of Barack Obama, as he tours the battlefields, sounding more and more like George W. Bush.

On 12 July, The Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the "high drama" and "meticulously practiced routine" of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, "Saving a life took precedence over [their] security". Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that "47 civilians, most of them women and children were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday". Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the [Western] public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no "enemy" nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people, his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband.

Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes, “Nothing ever happened, even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a "coalition" specialty. At least four of them have been obliterated at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007.

"The most frequently used bombs," the Air Force Times reports, "are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided..." Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America's and Britain's puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA's payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush's former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit enablers," journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a "good war", the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the blood fests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, and more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power, because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same willful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'... there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilized limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain..."

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum Majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article, nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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DIVERSE VIEWS

Lane Anderson wrote that at "an [local] Obama platform meeting...we eliminated "Win the war on terrorism/redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan" from the platform by consensus. The meeting was attended by a range of democrats and progressives. The only opposition was based on political realities in swing states....none spoke to the need to win a war on a tactic or put troops where jihadists can get to them. I hope the VVAW and VFP follow suit!

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A DIVERSE VIEW – SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST!

Brother Horace (I believe he also survives in California) says, "I think I know American racism, belligerence, global provincialism, greed and desire and ability to dominate the world fairly well. Iraq was a mistake from the day we walked in until the day we walk out (if we should do so within the next 20 years). We knew bin Laden and al Qaeda were based in Afghanistan and had the seal of approval of the Taliban to do so.

Bush, some political hard liners and ass kissing generals wanted to get Hussein and supposed he had WMDs and bad intentions toward folk outside Iraq.

When we invaded and didn't get hot with WMDs--or find any--we should have pulled everything out of there and gone to Afghanistan and left the Iraqis an 800 number to call to negotiate the damages. The only thing a dictator is "good" for is keeping his own people down to a dull roar. When they can't do that, they get overthrown from within or without.

The "surge" was about putting almost as many people in the field as it would take to do the job right. Generals who said it would take more troops than we were using were fired or shuffled off to oblivion. What should have been the primary target was turned into the back burner. Pakistan is politically unstable and its own radical Moslems are acting up. Afghanistan is full of opium poppies, poorly governed and corrupt. We can occupy but all that will get you is some surface un tension and a low grade, long lasting guerilla war - a war of troop assassination and sabotage

We don't have enough troops in either country. The ones we do have are racking up more combat time than people did in WWII. The last time we fought any one close to being in our weight class was the North Koreans / Chinese.

We could catch bin Laden tomorrow and it would be of little consequence? Why? He's put the idea out there and shown how global terrorism can be set in motion. We should have treated him and al Qaeda like the criminals they are. If we wanted to get military, it should have been Delta Force, Special Ops, SEALs, CIA all the way--after we had good, solid Intel and assets in place.

The draft: If this shit was really important, we would have risen draft age to 50 and every swinging...and hanging...that could pass a physical--including politicians at all levels--would be in it. Take the oldest first. No hardships. Senators and members of the House would serve in the same proportion as the general population. [Being 56, I say raise the draft age to 60, that's the average age of most pro-war zealots. Bobby Hanafin].

The cost: This overpriced mess is outrageously expensive. And, some one should go to jail for some serious time. There are a couple of articles about cost and the shortage of Majors [Field Grade Officers in the Army] in the body of this post. We're about out of money and people to field. As our economy softens and more banks and corporations fail, the public will start screaming. Just in time for the resource wars to really kick in--oil, food, and water. There will be so many varlets in so many places and the global flow of illegal immigrants will increase greatly.

As long as Canada is in the same war we are, it's not going to give U.S. AWOLS / draftees asylum.

--Horace Coleman

On a side note it is THE ECONOMIC COSTS of Iraq AND Afghanistan that will bring an end to any so-called War on Terror:

[Washington Post] Iraq war's total cost nearing Vietnam's price tag
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502863.html

Extract: The total cost of the Iraq war is approaching the Vietnam War's expense, a congressional report estimates, while spending for military operations after 9/11 has exceeded it. The new report by the Congressional Research Service estimates the U.S. has spent $648 billion on Iraq war operations, putting it in range with the $686 billion, in 2008 dollars, spent on the Vietnam War, the second most expensive war behind World War II. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. has doled out almost $860 billion for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world. All estimates, adjusted for inflation, are based on the costs of military operations and don't include expenses for veterans benefits, interest on war-related debts or assistance to war allies, according to the nonpartisan CRS.

[USA Today] Report: Iraq war cost approaches total bill for Vietnam
http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/07/report-iraq-war.html?csp=34

Spending on the Iraq war is approaching the total cost of combat in Vietnam, according to a new report written by the Congressional Research Service and distributed by the Secrecy News blog. When you convert the budgets to constant dollars, CRS says the Pentagon spent $686 billion in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. The military has spent $648 billion in Iraq since 2003, according to the report. (They caution readers that such comparisons are "problematic" given the "difficulties in comparing prices from one vastly different era to another.")

"Almost as soon as the next Administration takes office, the military services are expected to submit requests for additional funds - quite possibly $100 billion or more - to cover costs of overseas operations and of repairing and replacing worn equipment through the remainder of the fiscal year," the analysts tell Congress.

Vietnam consumed a much higher percentage of the nation's GDP, according to CRS.

The Army is facing a shortfall of thousands of Majors [Field Grade Officers]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502976.html

[Washington Post] EXTRACT: The Army is facing a shortfall of thousands of Majors -- critical mid-grade officers whose ranks are not expected to be replenished until at least 2013, according to Army data. The gap in Majors represents about half of the Army's overall shortage of more than 4,000 officers, according to Army personnel figures. Caused by the Army's ambitious growth plan through 2012, a historical downsizing in the 1990s, and exacerbated by the demanding pace of war-time operations, there are no easy solutions for filling the deficit, according to Army experts.

"We need more officers, and we are pulling every lever we can," said Col. Paul Aswell, chief of the Army's personnel division for officers. The Army's plan to grow permanently by 65,000 soldiers is increasing the demand for captains and Majors by 7,512 officers from January 2004 compared with September 2012. The Army is currently short about 15 percent of Majors, a percentage that is projected to rise to over 20 percent in 2012, according to Army data. The Army is also short about 10 percent of captains. While the Army projects that it will fill the captain shortage by 2011, it will continue to be short thousands of Majors each year for the foreseeable future, according to Aswell. "We do not anticipate having grown all the Majors until about 2013," he said.

Majors fill key positions on the staffs of Army battalions, which usually consist of about 800 soldiers. The shortage of Majors is forcing the Army to promote captains faster, x xx x (overall rate up) In the next two weeks, the results are expected from the first Army promotion board to reach into the ranks of captains and promote the most qualified candidates to Major two years earlier than the norm. Such two year "below the zone" promotions of captains to Major - the first since the Vietnam era - are designed as "an incentive for our highest performing officers to stay on active duty," Aswell said. Captains are also serving in jobs normally performed by Majors one rank above them. In other cases, Majors who have already been promoted to lieutenant colonel must stay in their jobs longer, Aswell said.

Some Majors predict that the gap could widen as the heavy pace of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan forces Majors to deploy frequently away from their families and curtails their job choices and opportunities for schooling, leading them to decide to retire at higher rates. The Army says its data does not currently show Majors leaving the force at accelerated rates, but a recent survey of more than 400 Army Majors at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, predicts that could change in coming years.

"There is a tipping point that we have started to reach," said Maj. George B. Brown III, who conducted the survey and has discussed the problem with Army officials. "There is a much larger percentage of officers who is planning to get out right at 20 years, and once they are gone, they are gone," said Brown, a master's degree student at the college.

-- Anecdotes from Majors interviewed - and details from the survey

"A lot of my retirement plans hinges on the deployment cycle and the war on terror as it exists today," said Maj. James Blanton, an infantry officer who returned in 2007 from a 15-month deployment to Iraq. "Now I am doing about one year over there and 18 months out," said Blanton. "If that continues on to 2012, we would be leaning to getting out," he said, adding that whether he is able to remain stationed at his long-time base at Fort Lewis, Washington, is also a factor he and his wife are weighing.