[Peace-discuss] Obama's war

[C. G. Estabrook]

This is OK on the domestic constituencies -- governmental & corporate -- for 
aggressive war by the US, and on how the US has substituted physical force for 
relative economic decline since over the past 50 years (for most of which time 
Pfaff's been in Paris, I think).  But it's wrong to suggest that it makes no 
difference where US presidents wage war.  (Clinton invaded Serbia, not Rwanda.)

It's simply false to say, "On Afghanistan, there seems to be no coherent reason 
or vision as to why we are there."  The "reason or vision" is obvious, it's been 
  the same for most of that 50 years, but the Obama administration (which knows 
it perfectly well) can't admit it, for fear of domestic (and foreign) 
opposition.  It needs the cover story of "stopping terrorism."  That's also the 
only legal basis it has for killing people in AfPak  -- the Congress' AUMF of 2001.

During World War II the US State Department described the Mideast is the “most 
strategically important area of the world,” and the area's vast energy resources 
– oil and natural gas – as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of 
the greatest material prizes in world history.” In the years since then, oil 
companies and their associates have reaped colossal profits; but, even more 
importantly to the US, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated 
hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to exploit – provides what 
Obama's foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called “critical leverage” 
over European and Asian rivals, what the State Department many years earlier had 
called “veto power” over them.

Pfaff's airy dismissal of Afghanistan's role in that policy is nonsense:

"Once, before all this started, [Afghanistan's] geographical location interested 
U.S. oil interests as providing a route for a pipeline to carry Central Asian 
oil to the sea. But today there are cheaper ways for moving oil than by a 
pipeline across a country at war."

But it's a "country at war" only because the US wants it to be. The war would 
end with US withdrawal, tho' the US puppet government probably wouldn't be the 
victor...

Afghanistan's "geographical location" continues to interest the US  -- enough to 
spend billions of dollars there.  Afghanistan is the keystone in the arch of US 
colonial control of the Mideast, from the Mediterranean to Pakistan, from the 
Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa (note the US killings in Somalia this week) -- 
what the US calls "The Area of Responsibility of Central Command" -- presided 
over by US proconsul (and presidential hopeful) Gen. David Petraeus.  (And see 
Pepe Escobar's articles on "Pipelinistan.")

Even sillier, Pfaff repeats the assertion that Obama is "caught" in a war he 
supported "to defend against Republican accusations of weakness." It's far more 
disrespectful to Obama than saying "You lie" to say that he would lie about his 
willingness to commit mass murder for a rhetorical advantage over the 
Republicans.  But in fact he wasn't lying.  He was down with the program that 
the US has followed in the Middle East for decades ("Minion of the Long War," 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook05012009.html>).

The US is concerned that the real opposition to US control of the region is 
coming/will come from Pakistan, a country with 2/3 the population of the US -- 
and a larger army.  The war in AfPak is primarily to keep the -Pak part in line. 
  (There are parallels with the wars in Vietnam and Korea, which the US wanted 
largely to keep dangerous neighbors -- N. Korea & N. Vietnam -- in check.)

Some US planners (Stephen Biddle, David Kilcullen) even admit that we're killing 
people in Afghanistan primarily to keep Pakistan from crabbing our 
generations-long act in the Middle East.  --CGE


Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> Interesting remarks by Wm. Pfaff, writer for the IHT (alias European 
> edition of the NYT)
> 
> 
> … I think the American government now has become institutionally a war 
> government, which finds its purpose in waging war against small and 
> troublesome countries and peoples, in the generalized pursuit of running 
> the world for the world’s own good. In this effort, one war is pretty 
> much like another, and every president, to be re-elected, needs one.…
> 
> 
> Full article at   
> 
>  http://original.antiwar.com/pfaff/2009/09/16/presidents-need-a-war-to-call-their-own-now-obama-has-his/