[Peace-discuss] George Will: Time to Leave...

[C. G. Estabrook]

Will's position is more anti-war than, say, Feingold's "flexible timetable." 
Maybe the Democrats and Republicans are becoming once again the War Party and 
the Antiwar Party respectively.

There's certainly precedent.  World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the 
Vietnam War all begun by Democratic administrations, and three of the four were 
ended by Republican administrations.  That was part of the source of the 20th 
century bromide, "With the Democrats we get war, with the Republicans depression."


Robert Naiman wrote:
> Rest assured that I am not about to nominate George Will for the Nobel
> Peace Prize.
> 
> However, if it leads to Republican defections on the war, it will be a
> significant development.
> 
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:06 PM, C. G. Estabrook<galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
>>   George Will, "Time to Leave Iraq," 3 Sep 09
>> http://townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2009/09/03/time_to_leave_iraq
>>
>>   George Will, "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan," 1 Sep 09
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083102912.html
>>
>>
>> It's certainly worth noting that a well-known conservative pundit is
>> attacking the Obama administration's war policy -- attacking it more clearly
>> in fact than some self-styled anti-war organizations (primarily but not
>> exclusively the Democratic party front groups -- MoveOn, VoteVets, etc.).
>>  And it's also significant that he apparently sees Iraq and Afghanistan as
>> theaters of one war -- Obama's war, as Johnson's war became Nixon's war --
>> not two.
>>
>> But for all that his proposals may prove an embarrassment to the
>> administration -- because they represent the majority sentiment of Americans
>> -- it nevertheless seems clear that Will upholds rather than rejects the
>> long term policy of the US in the Middle East -- military control of energy
>> resources for geopolitical advantage.
>>
>> The questions he addresses in these articles are tactical, not strategic --
>> notably, what configuration of military force best serves the goal of US
>> domination of the 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf.  That is what
>> the Pentagon calls the Long War, and Will is debating the tactics within it.
>>
>> His proposal bears comparison to another another plan to end a long war,
>> that put forward by Richard Nixon in regard to Vietnam 40 years ago.  (Will
>> in fact explicitly compares the government that the US installed in Kabul
>> with the government that the US installed in Saigon.)
>>
>> Those old enough to remember (see yesterday's Doonesbury) will recall that
>> Nixon ran for president in 1968 as an opponent of the Democrats' war in
>> Vietnam.  In the campaign he indicated that he had a plan to end the war,
>> and many voted for him for that reason.  Of course the plan was a campaign
>> gimmick -- but, unlike the one used by Kennedy in 1960 (the "missile gap')
>> or Johnson in 1964 (the Daisy commercial), it was not an outright lie; it
>> was more honest than Obama's equivocal antiwar stance in 2008.
>>
>> In office, it became clear that the plan consisted of drawing down the
>> number of US combat troops by forcing South Vietnamese to do the bulk of the
>> fighting ("Vietnamization") and greatly increasing the air war over both
>> North and South Vietnam -- and eventually Laos and Cambodia.  Millions of
>> people were murdered and a country was devastated, so that  others would
>> learn not to flout American wishes. The revolt of the American army on the
>> ground and the massive protest at home -- by 1969 about 70% of the US
>>  public had come to regard the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not
>> "a mistake," largely as a result of the impact of student protest -- led to
>> the withdrawal of US troops (and the end of the draft) in 1973, but by then
>> Vietnam was too devastated to stand as a model of alternative development:
>> the primary (and successful) US war aim was to prevent that. (The war was
>> primarily against South Vietnam, on which the US dropped more bombs that
>> were used in all of WWII, because the Vietnamese wouldn't accept the
>> government the US had picked out for them.)
>>
>> In this light, Will's "comprehensively revised policy"  looks as familiar as
>> a faded family photograph: Will asserts "America should do only what can be
>> done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes
>> and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous
>> 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters."
>>
>> And why does Pakistan "actually matter"?  Because it's from populous
>> Pakistan --  with an army larger than that of the US -- that the real
>> resistance to US domination of the whole Middle East threatens to arise. The
>> point is obscure only to Americans (and the administration is working hard
>> to keep it so): in an August poll in Pakistan, only one person in ten
>> thought that the greatest threat to Pakistan came from terrorists or
>> militants, and less than two in ten thought it came from India  -- while
>> almost 60% saw the US as the greatest threat to Pakistan.  It's hard to deny
>> that the poll respondents know what they're talking about -- and George Will
>> in a sense agrees with them.  --CGE
>>
>>
>> Robert Naiman wrote:
>>> our new best friend :)
>>
>>
> 
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