[Peace-discuss] IL pol plans murder (not Blago)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	The New York Times
	December 12, 2008

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates [NB: OBAMA'S DefSec] 
said here on Thursday that the Pentagon, which plans to send 20,000 additional 
troops to Afghanistan, was trying to get thousands of them into the country as 
soon as next spring...

The soldiers were requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in 
Afghanistan. The first of them, about 3,500 to 4,000 troops from the Third 
Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., are scheduled to 
arrive in Afghanistan next month.

Mr. Gates said he hoped to deploy an additional two combat brigades by the 
spring as part of an effort to counter growing violence and chaos in the 
country. Pentagon officials have said it would take 12 to 18 months to get all 
20,000 troops to Afghanistan. The United States currently has some 34,000 troops 
in the country.

Both Mr. Gates and General McKiernan said Thursday that there would be a 
“sustained commitment” of American troops in Afghanistan for the next three or 
four years, although they declined to provide a number.

Later, Mr. Gates was critical of NATO for allowing the United States to bear a 
disproportionate burden in Afghanistan. About 30,000 foreign troops operate here 
under a NATO command.

Mr. Gates arrived here Thursday on an unannounced trip to a rapidly growing 
regional base for international forces in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, 
where the Taliban are strong.

The rationale for the trip, originally conceived as a chance for Mr. Gates to 
say goodbye to American troops, shifted after President-elect Barack Obama asked 
him to remain as defense secretary...

Mr. Obama vowed during the presidential campaign to add thousands of more troops 
in Afghanistan, and he appears to be of the same mind-set of the men who will 
advise him on force levels...

“Let’s put it in historical perspective — this country has been at war for the 
last 30 years ... That’s not going to stop overnight. So if your question is, 
might it get worse before it gets better, the answer is yes, it might.”

When Mr. Gates was asked here if the conflict would last 10 or 15 years, he made 
a comparison to the cold war. “I think that we are in many respects in an 
ideological conflict with violent extremists,” he said. “The last ideological 
conflict we were in lasted about 45 years.”

...Mr. Gates also said there had been “some occasional awkwardness” as he made 
the transition to working with a new commander in chief, including having to 
choose between attending a meeting of “principals” at the White House — a 
session of cabinet members, without the president — or a session with Mr. 
Obama’s transition team.

“I haven’t missed any meetings with the president, let me put it that way,” he 
said. “But let’s just say that if I’m faced with a choice between attending a 
principals’ meeting on an issue that I think is not particularly hot and a 
meeting with the transition folks, I’ll opt for the latter.”

=============

...TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, 
sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew 
the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his 
brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes.  Every exciting detail was 
vouyeristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits -- many, if not 
most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic 
facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals.  TV 
"journalists" who have never even heard of the Taguba report -- the incredible 
indictment issued by a former U.S. General, who subsequently observed:  "there 
is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed 
war crimes.  The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who 
ordered the use of torture will be held to account" -- spent the weekend opining 
on the intricacies of Blogojevich's hair and terribly upsetting propensity to 
use curse words.

The auction conducted by Blagojevich was just a slightly more flamboyant, vulgar 
and reckless expression of how our national political class conducts itself 
generally (are there really any fundamental differences between Blagojevich's 
conduct and Chuck Schumer's systematic, transparent influence-peddling and 
vote-selling to Wall Street donors, as documented by this excellent and highly 
incriminating New York Times piece from Sunday -- "A Champion of Wall St. Reaps 
the Benefits")?  But Blagojevich is an impotent figure, stripped of all power, a 
national joke.  And attacking and condemning him is thus cheap and easy.  It 
threatens nobody in power.  To the contrary, his downfall is deceptively and 
usefully held up as an extreme aberration -- proof that government officials are 
held accountable when they break the law.

The media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed 
with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. 
war crimes, is perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks. 
Blagojevich's laughable scheme is transformed into a national fixation and made 
into the target of collective hate sessions, while the systematic, ongoing sale 
of the legislative process to corporations and their lobbyists are overlooked as 
the normal course of business.  Lynndie England is uniformly scorned and 
imprisoned while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are headed off to 
lives of luxury, great wealth, respect, and immunity from the consequences for 
their far more serious crimes...

--Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/15/rumsfeld/

[And we observe a respectful silence while a more attractive politician plans 
openly to continue the crimes of his predecessors -- if in a more elegant 
fashion. --CGE]