[Peace-discuss] Raise the price of US colonial war

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/24-6

...Right now, as the government of Pakistan is making accommodation with the 
Taliban while candidates in the next Afghanistan presidential election say they 
could do the same, Obama has chosen to embrace continuing war with them. [And 
our first job is to tell people why he's done that; it's not a whim.  --CGE]

As Harry Truman said, "the buck stops here" and it is now Obama's responsibility 
to explain to the 17,000 soldiers about to go to Afghanistan, those already 
there, their families, and the rest of the nation just what it is that they have 
been sent to kill and die for.

At the moment, any hope for a saner foreign policy comes not from the White 
House but from a newly reforming antiwar movement struggling to come to grips 
with that fact - an antiwar movement that needs to keep two things in mind. The 
first is that we shouldn't limit ourselves to peripheral issues like Obama's 
continuing the Bush Administration's policies on secrecy and the treatment of 
prisoners of war. All of this would fall away if the new administration would 
break with the fundamental proposition that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are 
justified.

The second caution is not to underestimate the difficulty of the task in front 
of it. Although many of his supporters chose to turn a blind ear to it, 
candidate Obama embraced the possibility of expanding the war into Pakistan 
[that puts it mildly: he promised to do so --CGE] and President Obama has been 
doing that. And the retention of Bush's Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, would 
have been a particularly perverse move for a truly antiwar candidate.

Unfortunately, when you govern a country that spends forty eight cents out of 
every dollar spent on the military worldwide, war can come to seem the norm. It 
will be up to us to convince Obama that making the Afghanistan War his own will 
only come at a political price higher than he is willing to pay.

[Tom Gallagher is an antiwar activist living in San Francisco.  He has in the 
past been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.  Reach him at 
TGTGTGTGTG at aol.com]