[Peace-discuss] The Long War cabal

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In the Kennedy years, the US military used to say of Vietnam, "It's a dirty 
little war, but it's the only war we've got."  In spite of the wince-making 
prose, the following analysis seems about right on the current version of that 
attitude.  --CGE]

	Wednesday, June 17, 2009
	The Bully Pulpiteers

Contrary to what the most recent U.S. president named George told you, the 
oceans are “still there” and they still protect America. There is no evildoing 
navy or air force that can haul enough wild-eyed Islamofabulists here to conquer 
and occupy us. Another 9/11 will always be a slim possibility, no matter what we 
do, but fighting goofy wars overseas for gossamer reasons won’t prevent it. That 
9/11 ever happened at all was proof positive of the institutional Onanism that 
infested the CIA and the FBI and the FAA and the NSA and JFCOM and rest of the 
alphabet soup that was supposed to keep it from happening.

June 30, the day all of our troops are supposed to be out of Iraq cities, is 
right around one of those corners Dick Cheney used to say we’d just turned. I 
can’t wait to hear the excuse the Obama administration springs on us about why 
we still have soldiers in places they swore they’d get them out of. We’re also 
about to shove another 21,000 G.I.s into Afghanistan, a maneuver that the Army 
appears to have been planning on since before the 2008 election, and there’s 
still danger that the American warmongery will elbow our president and 
legislature into displaying fool traits vis-à-vis Iran.

Philip Geraldi put up a stunning article at Antiwar.com on Tuesday about the 
decades of abject failure our clandestine operations have produced. “Covert 
action,” he adroitly notes, “rarely turns out to be positive in the long term 
because the covert action in itself inhibits healthy political tendencies in the 
targeted country.” Covert actions, he adds, “support elites and the military” 
and in result “they are essentially anti-democratic and regressive in nature.” 
He also aptly observes that no country we have our finger stuck in today is 
“more stable or better governed because of the American intervention in its 
affairs.”

One can reasonably argue—as Theodore Roosevelt did—that America has a 
responsibility to be the major player in world affairs. I have no argument with 
that argument, but I wholly disagree with the warmongery’s argument that staying 
engaged with the rest of the world means we have to keep blowing the bejesus out 
of it a scrap at a time. What makes us so happy about beating everyone else up 
these days? When I was a kid, everybody viewed bullies as overgrown jerks. We 
became a colossus with our 20th century wars. I still assert that if we’d stayed 
out of the First World War, there might not have been a second one, or a cold 
one either. We can’t row upstream and relocate those boulders, but we can glance 
over our shoulders as we look upstream and think about what kind of world we 
want to be part of creating.

Russia and China won’t ever be military competitors, and we’ll never have 
another Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan to fight. Iran couldn’t bench press our 
jock strap. By some credible estimates, more than half of our Federal budget 
goes into funding defense related items, yet you seldom hear anybody with a 
mainstream pulpit blame the present state of our economy on our 
over-adventuresome military policies. You’ll hear instead about how the economy 
was going along swimmingly until all those blacks and Hispanics defaulted on 
$700 billion worth of mortgage loans the banks had to give them because of some 
law the liberals passed during the Carter years.

George Washington cautioned us to avoid entangling alliances. Dwight Eisenhower 
warned us to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether 
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” George W. Bush said, 
"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, 
again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the 
very best."

How is that we continue to heed the words of the third conservative in that 
lineup and ignore the first two?

As recently as May, the Obama administration was considering reaching out to 
coax “moderate” elements of the Taliban into laying down their arms. The Afghan 
government at the time was negotiating with the Taliban, whose initial demands 
included a total withdrawal of U.S. troops. In early June, Gen. Stanley 
McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee he wasn’t interested in 
talking to the Taliban. McChrystal’s new command is still on track to grow by 
21,000 troops. Funny how that worked out, eh?

McChrystal now says he intends to shift the Afghanistan strategy away from 
remote regions of the country to concentrate on protecting population centers. 
Funny how we tried that before and it didn’t work out, so now we’re doing it 
again. UPI calls McChrystal “a Special Forces expert schooled in the 
counterinsurgency doctrines employed in Iraq.” That’s the kind of remark UPI 
probably derived from the press kit McChrystal’s public affairs people handed out.

The Pentagon has successfully pushed the media into parroting the “successful” 
Iraq strategy of Gen. David Petraeus line, which even Petraeus acolyte Tom Ricks 
admits “succeeded” because Petraeus gave everybody guns and bribed them not to 
shoot at anybody. Ricks also confesses that, “U.S. soldiers will probably be 
engaged in combat there [Iraq] until at least 2015.” Ricks says that conclusion 
reflects “The quiet consensus” of many soldiers who have served in Iraq. But 
it’s actually the “consensus” of Iraq commander Gen. Ray Odierno and the rest of 
the long war cabal, who have used Ricks and the rest of the media as a 
stenography pad to shill their agenda for eternal low level conflict.

And it appears that they now own the pulpit lock stock and bullhorn.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword and 
Antiwar.com. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on 
America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/