The early returns have an eerie familiarity. U.S. troops pushing a major offensive into “enemy” strongholds in the countryside, Pentagon flacks with charts and pointers, the mass media uncritically trumpeting “success”, the President promising that nobody’s gonna push us around.
This time it’s Pakistan and Afghanistan. Forty-some years ago, it was Viet Nam. Each time, a Democratic President with a working majority, popular support, and an ambitious domestic program. Same bleeding war.
A few days ago, the government of Pakistan reported that more than 700 innocents have been killed since the first of the year, most by remote-controlled missiles, drones. At this time there are already about half a million refugees streaming north, ahead of the American war. In Pakistan, as in Cambodia in the late ‘sixties, it cannot possibly end well.
We are waging a war in Pakistan for the same reason Lyndon Johnson began a secret war into Laos and Cambodia: the main event had begun spilling across borders. The Vietnamese insurgents were able to duck across the lines, move supplies, find sanctuaries. So, too, the Afghan rebels. Wars of imperial purpose can never be confined to targets; they spread. As in Viet Nam, so it is in Afghanistan.
Lyndon Johnson assured the American people that he wanted peace. In the meantime, he wanted conquest. The U.S., often through a Texas company named Brown & Root –– the precursor to Halliburton –– built enormous permanent bases in the occupied land. In a sense, the politics of the matter was secondary. The point was control over economies and resources.
Barack Obama was carried to unlikely victory on a great wave of anti-war sentiment. He promised to end the war in Iraq and bring American troops home. LBJ won by a landslide against Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee whose bellicosity worried the electorate. When Johnson took the oath of office in January, 1965, the U.S. had fewer than 16,000 military personnel in Viet Nam, none of them combat troops.
Robert McNamara died recently. Known principally as a major architect of Johnson’s war against Viet Nam, he had come to recognize both the horror and the futility of the enterprise, but not before more than fifty thousand Americans –– and a million or more Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians –– had been killed.
Just as was the case with Viet Nam, at the beginning, Obama’s widening of the theater is popular with the general public and taken by the media as a sign of toughness and resolve. Everyone talks about supporting the troops, as they are fed into a hopeless conflict and maimed in growing number. As always, a corrupt and generally ignorant Congress appropriates the money and is afraid to criticize lest its members be seen as unpatriotic.
In one sense, Obama’s war is closer to the one waged by Richard Nixon. Johnson’s assault on Viet Nam had become a liability, in the same way that Bush’s invasion of Iraq had backfired. Nixon pledged to end the war; instead, he invaded Laos and Cambodia. Obama’s war is already spreading across the subcontinent and, like the ones pursued by Johnson, Nixon, and Bush, it is creating new enemies every minute. We have bombed wedding parties, local gatherings, schools, and hospitals. As in Southeast Asia, the ‘enemy’ is ubiquitous and defined by body counts and not any recognizable ideology, culture or behavior. If you are hit by missiles, you deserve it.
In press accounts, so pathetically biased, ignorant, and xenophobic, the term being used now is “militant.” We are killing “militants.”
I’ve seen all of this shit before. In the ‘sixties, the Pentagon released figures on “enemy casualties” that later turned out to have been inflated by a factor of 10, and to have included water buffalo. Also, it included children. America tried everything: carpet bombing, ‘strategic hamlets’, special forces murders, napalm, deals with drug warlords. In the end, we had so lost all sense of moral compass that Nixon and Henry Kissinger unleashed the infamous “Christmas bombings” –– in the North two months AFTER a deal had been struck to end the war. Why? Because Kissinger argued that we needed it to convince our “allies” in the South of our continuing ‘resolve’. It was mass murder as public relations stunt.
Today, the lies are more sophisticated, they’ve had to be, but there is little difference in the death and misery. Most Americans accept as an article of faith that our militaristic adventurism is ‘necessary’ for reasons of national defense, a ludicrous proposition on its face. And while the U.S. builds enormous, permanent military facilities inside other nations, its government pretends that its presence is temporary.
Geopolitics is about money and the control over global resources. It is America’s conceit that our foreign policy is grounded in fairness and in assisting other nations. That has never been true. It has also never been less true than it is now.
As President Obama journeys to Russia and elsewhere in search of arms reduction agreements, America’s military-intelligence operations are ongoing in hundreds of places around the world. The U.S. has had special ops forces in Iran for quite a while, just as it did in Iraq and Pakistan before the recent unpleasantness. By now, you could probably recite the names as well as I of the countries whose democratic and/or popular governments have been overthrown by America’s CIA in concert with local thugs. Millions of people have been murdered by the fascist governments we have installed in Iran, Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Salvador, Greece, well, as I said...
Millions of human beings. Human beings who loved and were loved, who had families, friends, joys, and the array of life’s events to which they brought meaning, care, and passion.
It was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, responding to a reporter’s question about civilian deaths in Kosovo, who remarked, “We think it was worth it.”
The fact is, as Scott Fitzgerald said about the very wealthy, the political elite are “not like you and me,” and they are aware of it. It is the basis for policies which can entertain terms such as ‘kill ratio’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘extraordinary rendition.’ The people being kidnapped, tortured, and killed are not named Allbright, Clinton, Bush, Rumsfeld, Kissinger. To the latter, war’s victims are mere figures in calculation, part of the profit-and-loss statement.
Obama still talks about closing Guantanamo, but worse conditions, worse tortures, are inflicted on thousands now being held without charge in worse prisons in Afghanistan. He does not speak of these. Nor does he speak of closing the School of the Americas, now under a new name, which trains South American death squads.
The Bush policies on kidnapping remain in force; so do those pertaining to domestic wiretapping, and breaking-and-entering without a warrant.
Having read Obama’s first book, I remain convinced that he is a rare President, someone who, like President Kennedy, might actually hear the weeping of the world. If so, he is also aware of the realities of power. He is constrained. He knows what happened in Dallas in 1963.
Jack Kennedy, in the words of his lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, “was moving too fast.” He tried to bring the country’s secret police and the CIA under control. He wanted to end the arms race. Historical ‘revisionists’ have buried it, but that’s who he was.
At a back-channel meeting during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Robert Kennedy told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, his brother was “under tremendous pressure to use force against Cuba. If the situation continues much longer, the President is afraid that the generals may seize power...”
Meanwhile, America’s wars are part of an enormous military-intelligence deployment whose actual budget remains secret, even from the President.
This is the situation in which Obama finds himself. And Afghanistan is his war. Whatever his actual calculations, whatever the pressures, he obviously feels that it is necessary to expand it and to fight it. But Obama’s war cannot be won. It is Viet Nam all over again, and it will bleed us as it ruins that nation, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, murdering children, bringing home veterans whose rates of depression, domestic violence, and suicide exceed those of Viet Nam.
“We think it was worth it,” Allbright said. Obviously, someone thinks so now.
