[Peace-discuss] The war will go on

[C. G. Estabrook]

In the late summer of 2008, as the American political parties convene to produce 
a new president, it seems clear that Americans will continue to kill and die -- 
and suffer and inflict terrible injuries -- in the U.S. war in the Middle East, 
regardless of who is elected president, well into the next administration and 
beyond.

The war is not limited to Iraq.  The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, in 
March of 2003, was preceded by their invasion of Afghanistan, in October of 
2001.  In the spring and summer of 2008, more Americans have been killed each 
month in Afghanistan than in the on-going war in Iraq.

Furthermore, there are undoubtedly members of the current administration -- 
centered in the office of the vice president -- who wish to attack Iran, and the 
military and the CIA are already conducting "special operations" there.  But the 
foreign policy establishment in Washington -- which cuts across party lines -- 
believes, in the words of Democratic party deep thinker Richard Holbrooke, that 
"AfPak" [Afghanistan and Pakistan] is "even more important to our national 
security than Iraq."

As a result, the Pentagon will send 12,000 to 15,000 additional troops to 
Afghanistan, as soon as the end of this year, with planning underway for a 
further force buildup in 2009.  Meanwhile, as Tariq Ali points out, "Pentagon 
hawks ... have, for the last year, been pressuring Bush and Rice to unleash 
special operations units inside Pakistan," as well.

Both potential presidents approve.  McCain and Obama try to outdo one another on 
how war-like they will be in AfPak: after Obama said he would send two more 
brigades to Afghanistan, McCain said he would send three; in his major speech in 
Berlin, Obama's only specific exhortation to the Germans was, "The Afghan people 
need our troops and your troops ... We have too much at stake to turn back now."

What in fact do we have at stake? Recently an Afghan government newspaper loosed 
the proverbial cat when it asserted that the U.S. wants to keep Afghanistan 
unstable in order to justify the presence of the American military, given 
Afghanistan's geographical location bordering Iran and central Asia's rich oil- 
and gas-producing nations.

That's not far wrong.  It has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy since 
the Second World War that the U.S. must control the energy resources of the 
Middle East.  Not because we need them here at home -- the U.S. obtains the bulk 
of the oil used domestically from the Western hemisphere -- but because control 
of energy gives the U.S. a strangle-hold on our corporations' major economic 
competitors, the European Union and northeast Asia (Japan, China and South Korea).

Whether we call them al-Qaida, Taliban, insurgents, terrorists or militants, the 
people whom we're trying to kill in the Middle East are those who want us out of 
their countries and off of their resources.  In order to convince Americans to 
kill and die and suffer in this cause, the Bush administration has vastly 
misrepresented the situation, from trumpeting the non-existent "weapons of mass 
destruction" to, apparently, forging incriminating letters.

But even though a majority of Americans are now against the war in Iraq, many 
still think that the Bush administration was justified in invading Afghanistan, 
because it "harbored" Osama bin Laden.  They forget that the government of 
Afghanistan tried to discuss the surrender of Osama bin Laden for trial, but the 
U.S. government refused to negotiate.  It preferred a war that supported general 
U.S. policy in the region.

On the basis of the principles on which the U.S. and its allied governments 
hanged German leaders after the Second World War, the Bush administration has 
committed what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime 
[i.e., worse than terrorism] differing only from other war crimes in that it 
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" -- and they've done it 
twice, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

More than a generation ago, the U.S. war against South Vietnam came to an end -- 
after horrible suffering and millions dead -- because of the conjunction of 
three factors: (1) the resistance of the Vietnamese people against foreign 
occupation; (2) the effective revolt of the American military in Vietnam, 
largely a conscript army; and (3) the opposition of the American people, seventy 
per cent of whom came to believe by the late 1960s that the U.S. war was 
"fundamentally wrong and immoral," not a mistake.

	...what's past is prologue, what to come
	In yours and my discharge.

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