[Peace-discuss] Obama's High Noon

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Hudibrastic Huber may be on to something here.  I hope so.  Perhaps the 
first movie I ever saw was Gary Cooper's "High Noon" (1952), and I was much 
impressed years later when I read in college an analysis of it as an allegory of 
American political fears in the 1950s (sort of "Go West, Mad Men!").

I see two problems with Huber's account.  First, he sees the AfPak phase of the 
war as a contest between a Petraeus-dominated Pentagon and a beset 
administration, but he ignores the extent to which that administration is down 
with the long-term US program for the Middle East, viz., we must dominate it for 
geopolitical reasons.

Second, he's too confident that "Defeating insurgencies is never possible." 
That's not quite the lesson of the last 60 years.  It's rather that "Defeating 
insurgencies is never possible, unless you're willing to all but destroy the 
society."  It was a bit of aesthetic insight (the poets usually get there first) 
to seize on the remark of a US officer in Vietnam, that "we had to destroy the 
village in order to save it," as the motto of the US assault on SE Asia.

Remember that the US did defeat an insurgency in South Vietnam, in the sense 
that we destroyed the possibility that the country would be a model of 
independent social and economic development, outside of US control -- which is 
what the Vietnamese war of national liberation was about.  Vietnam today begs 
for tennis-shoe factories.  But we had to kill four million Asians and produce 
an environmental catastrophe in order to get that result.

And who's to say that, driven by policy, we're not willing to do that and more 
in the Mideast?  SE Asia was important to the US only as a demonstration (pour 
encourager les autres*) to other developing states; SW Asia is vital to US 
control of the resources that give us the upper hand over Europe and a now 
independent Asia.  If we killed four million for the former, how many will we 
kill for the latter?  --CGE

________
*Voltaire's novel Candide, referring to an actual incident in England in 1757, 
includes the remark "dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un 
amiral pour encourager les autres" ("in this country, it is wise to kill an 
admiral from time to time to give courage to the others").


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

	Obama’s High Noon
	by Jeff Huber
	September 22, 2009

Recent events indicate that President Barack Obama is considering cutting the 
Pentagon’s "long war" short.

First came his decision to drop the Bush administration policy of demanding that 
Iran cede its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes as a precondition to 
diplomatic talks. Then he canceled Bush’s pledge to deploy a missile-defense 
system that doesn’t work in the Czech Republic and Poland and promised to 
replace it with a missile-defense system that does work. Pro-war legislators 
John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, John Boehner, and others howled like 
a coven of wicked witches. (What a world! What a world!)

Now it looks like Obama may be seeing the forest among the trees with regard to 
his Afghanistan policy. As Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com noted on Sept. 20, Obama is 
looking at Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional troops in 
Afghanistan with skepticism. The Afghanistan question looks to be shaping up as 
the big showdown between Obama and the long-war cabal headed by Gen. David 
Petraeus and his lieutenants: Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, Defense 
Secretary Robert Gates, Iraq commander Gen. Ray Odierno, and McChrystal.

The long warriors were openly skeptical of candidate Obama’s promise to end the 
U.S. presence in Iraq. When their allies in Congress and the right-wing media 
slammed Obama for having voted against the Iraq surge as a senator, Obama 
replied that the Iraq surge had drawn attention and resources from Afghanistan. 
Ever since, the warlords have used their echo chamber to stuff Obama’s words 
back in his face.

Afghanistan is President Obama’s war, they tell us. He’s the one who sent us 
there; he’s the one who gave us the strategy. He’s the one, the implication 
goes, who is making us quit in Iraq, so he better let us stay the course in 
Afghanistan. Republican senator from Kentucky Mitch McConnell said that Petraeus 
"did a great job with the surge in Iraq. I think he knows what he’s doing. Gen. 
McChrystal is a part of that. We have a lot of confidence in those two generals. 
I think the president does as well.”

Piffle. Petraeus knows what he’s doing all right; he’s setting himself up to be 
the GOP’s great white hope come 2012 or 2016. By any real measure, the Iraq 
surge has been a spectacular failure. Iraq’s government and security forces are 
corrupt and incompetent, Sunni reconciliation is still a pipe dream, and no 
progress has been made on the Kurdish issue. If McChrystal is a part of that, 
all the more reason to distrust him as much as we should distrust Petraeus (or 
Mullen or Gates or Odierno, who referred to the surge’s strategic malfunctions 
as mere "tactical issues." That’s a perfect illustration of why I call Odierno 
the "Desert Ox." Odierno, by the way, is the point man on pressuring Obama into 
keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the December 2011 deadline dictated by the 
status of forces agreement. Thanks to Petraeus hagiographer Tom Ricks, Odie is 
on record as wanting to see 30,000 to 35,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2015).

McChrystal has become the point man in the Pentagon mob’s unrestricted 
information-warfare campaign against its commander in chief. According to a 
Sept. 21 Washington Post article by Bob Woodward, McChrystal’s 66-page 
assessment of the Afghanistan situation "bluntly states" that "without more 
forces, the eight-year conflict ‘will likely result in failure.’"

McChrystal assessment states that “failure to gain the initiative and reverse 
insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) – while Afghan security 
capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer 
possible.”

Defeating insurgencies is never possible. The only folks who ever win an 
insurgency war own a majority share in the local gene pool. For us to "succeed" 
in Afghanistan would require at least 10 percent of us to move there permanently 
– something that might just happen, come to think of it, if Obama continues to 
accede to the Pentagon’s demand for escalations.

And there’s plenty of pressure for him to do so. Petraeus says, “I don’t think 
anyone can guarantee that it will work out even if we apply a lot more 
resources. But it won’t work out if we don’t.” That’s a lovely piece of 
obscuration; we should apply more resources, but don’t blame me when it doesn’t 
work out.

A Sept. 18 McClatchy piece says that the military is "growing impatient with 
Obama on Afghanistan" and complaining that "the Obama administration is sending 
mixed signals about its objectives there and how many troops are needed to 
achieve them." This information comes from unnamed "officials" and "senior 
officers" in Kabul and Washington, who hint that McChrystal might resign if he 
doesn’t get his way on additional troops.

The McClatchy article reports that "some [unnamed] members of McChrystal’s 
staff" said they "don’t understand why Obama called Afghanistan a ‘war of 
necessity’ but still hasn’t given them the resources they need to turn things 
around quickly." I bet you a shiny new Illinois quarter that these members of 
McChrystal’s staff included his personal public affairs officer, Rear Adm. 
Gregory J. Smith, who is one of the Pentagon’s leading propaganda operatives.

McChrystal reports that the Afghan government is riddled with corruption, the 
same situation that we have in Iraq and the same situation we had in Vietnam. 
“The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread 
corruption, and abuse of power by various officials … have given Afghans little 
reason to support their government,” McChrystal says. Those aren’t the kinds of 
things we can fix.

During his talk show telethon last Sunday, Obama said, "I’m not interested in 
just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or 
… sending a message that America is here for the duration.”

That’s a direct answering shot to the Pentagon’s chief propaganda point: that in 
order to succeed in Afghanistan, we must promise the Afghan people to stay there 
forever and then do it. That doesn’t do the Afghan people a whole lot of good – 
they got along just fine before we showed up – but it gives the Pentagon a 
never-ending excuse to exist.

It might just be that Obama can reverse the insane tide of self-destructive 
militarism that Dwight David Eisenhower warned us about during his 1961 farewell 
speech. "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether 
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," Ike said. "The 
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Maybe, just maybe, Obama has the political skill and will to put our malignant 
obsession with war into remission. I sure hope so.

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

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/09/21/obamas-high-noon/