[Peace-discuss] Could a "Great Negotiation" End the War in Afghanistan?

[Morton K. Brussel]

David,

I think you are selling Englehardt short. The first paragraph you quote from his article indicates that indeed he knows, or guesses, why we were/are in Afghanistan (or Iraq, Pakistan, …). But what he is driving at—what he intends—is to try to force the Obama administration to truthfully answer that question, which if honestly answered would point to the stupidity, not to speak of the immorality, of the U.S. wars/occupations. Of course, you can guess that it wont be answered, but it may still be worth while to press the issue. 

There is one caveat here: Perhaps "we" like wars that damage the American economy, increase inequality, and continue to enrich the war profiteers, even strengthening our supposed enemies/competitors in the process. Is that being too cynical? Are Obama and his advisors that contemptuous of the American public, and that cynical in their motives? 

Mort

On Jul 12, 2010, at 10:33 PM, David Green wrote:

> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/12-2
>  
> Tom Englehardt, for example, doesn't seem to really know the answer to the question in his title:
> Why Are We in Afghanistan?
>  
> "Of course, the Bush administration might have offered other explanations for the ongoing Afghan War, including the need to garrison what it called "the arc of instability" stretching from North Africa to the Chinese border (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet), roll back Russia from its former Soviet "backyard" in Central Asia, and guarantee the flow of Caspian Sea oil westward.  More recently, with the revelation that a trillion or more dollars worth of natural resources lie under Afghan soil, securing that country's raw materials for western mining companies might have been added to that list.  The Obama administration, however, offers no such explanations and, being managerial rather than visionary in nature when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, might not even have them.
> 
>  
> In any case, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be telling a rather different story.  The singular thing the Iraq War seems to have done politicallyis promote Iranian influence in that country.  Economically, it's made Iraq a safer place for the state-owned or state-controlled oil companies of China, Russia, and a number of other non-western nations.  In Afghanistan, in terms of those future natural resources, we seem to be fighting to make that country safe forChinese investment (just as the recently heightened U.S. sanctions against Iran are helping make that country safe for Chinese energy dominance)."
> 
> 
> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
> To: naiman.uiuc at gmail.com
> Cc: Peace-discuss List <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
> Sent: Mon, July 12, 2010 9:00:12 PM
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Could a "Great Negotiation" End the War in Afghanistan?
> 
> It's certainly worthwhile to think about ways out of the US government's Long War in the Middle East, but there are a number of things wrong with this proposal. Here are some examples.
> 
>       [1] It ignores the reason for the Long War.  All recent US administrations have been determined to control the 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf - the Greater Middle East, as the Pentagon says - where the bulk of the worlds' hydrocarbons (oil & gas) are found.  Not because the US needs them domestically - in fact we import very little gas and oil from the Mideast - but because of the advantage that control over them gives the US in competition with its real economic rivals in Europe and Asia. SW Asia is far more important to the US economic elite than SE Asia (where we killed many more people) ever was: no US administration will leave willingly.
> 
>     [2] It ignores the fact that the US wants war, and the Afghans (and the other people of the region) don't.  War gives the US an excuse for having its military occupy the Greater Middle East in one form or the other (alliance, intimidation, subversion, military occupation).  The Afghans and others simply want the invaders to leave. Since its real reasons for domination are inadmissible, the US has to pretend it's "fighting terrorism," when all can see that US attacks simply produce more "terrorists" (i.e., armed resistance to American domination).
> 
> There's a further legal problem for Obama; the only Constitutional authority he has for making war in the Mideast - since there is no congressional declaration of war - is the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" passed by Congress a week after 9/11. It said, "...the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." So if he's going to kill people in the Mideast, Obama must contend that they are connected to the 9/11 attacks! Stopping terrorism in the Mideast is what stopping Communism was in Vietnam - not the reason for mass murder, but the excuse.
> 
>     [3] The account of the Cuban missile crisis - and the heroic efforts of John Kennedy to avoid war - is pure fantasy (and American propaganda). The call for attention to history is admirable - but the history has to be accurate.
> 
> The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was "the most dangerous moment in human history," as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana. The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster," recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective. He concluded that we should today speak of "apocalypse soon".
> 
> In 1962 the Kennedy administration brought the world very close to total destruction in order to establish the principle that we had a right to have missiles on the borders of the Soviet Union while they did not have the same right to have missiles on our border. One finds little mention of the criminal insanity of those willing to risk nuclear war to defend such a principle within mainstream American opinion.
> 
> In the 2002 conference it became clear that the world was saved from nuclear devastation by one Russian submarine captain, Vasily Arkhipov, who blocked an order to fire nuclear missiles when Russian submarines were attacked by US destroyers near Kennedy’s “quarantine” line.  Had Arkhipov agreed, the nuclear launch would have almost certainly set off an interchange that could have “destroyed the Northern hemisphere,” as Eisenhower had warned.
> 
> President Kennedy was willing (according to Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's brains trust, who wrote his books for him) to accept a probability of 1/3 to 1/2 of nuclear war, in order to establish that the United States alone has the right to maintain missiles on the borders of a potential enemy. The probabilities are meaningless with respect to the objective situation, but not with respect to the mentalities of those who use them as a guide to action. If anything can be more frightening than the behavior of the self-styled "pragmatic" and "tough-minded" policy makers of the Kennedy administration in this crisis, it is the attitude that remains, long after the crisis has cooled, that this was Kennedy's "finest hour," in which he demonstrated his skill at the game of "nuclear chicken" (as presidential historian Thomas Bailey wrote in 1965).
> 
> The roots of the missile crisis lay in US terrorist attacks against Cuba, which began shortly after Castro took power in 1959 and were sharply escalated by Kennedy, leading to a very plausible fear of invasion, as Robert McNamara has acknowledged.  Kennedy resumed the terrorist war immediately after the crisis was over; terrorist actions against Cuba, based in the US, peaked in the late 1970s.
> 
> In 1954, when Khrushchev became Soviet premier, he had offered Eisenhower a proposal to the effect that both sides should reduce military spending and cut back offensive military forces. The Eisenhower Administration disregarded it, but Khrushchev did it anyway, unilaterally and over the objections of the Russian generals. Later, he cut back Soviet offensive military forces quite sharply and asked the Kennedy Administration to do the same. Instead, the Kennedy administration escalated military spending. (Kennedy had quite consciously lied about a "missile gap" during the 1960 campaign.) Then came the Cuban missile crisis in which the Kennedy Administration did as much as it could to humiliate Khrushchev, and it worked: the Russian military in response threw Khrushchev out and went into a mad arms race that closely matched the US in military spending (on a much smaller economic base) - and ruined the economy. It's in the 1960's that the Soviet economy started to stagnate - e.g., health statistics started to decline. It was the Kennedy Administration that drove them into bankruptcy.
> 
> On August 23, 1962, President Kennedy issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, "a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention," involving "significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel "where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans"; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. A few weeks later came "the most dangerous moment in human history."
> 
> In the middle of the crisis, President Kennedy and his brother are on record as saying that one of the big problems Cuban missiles posed was, "They might deter an invasion of Venezuela, if we decide to invade." Terrorist operations continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis. They were formally canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement but went on nonetheless. On November 8, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility," killing 400 workers, according to the Cuban government. One historian of the events  writes that "the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba." After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for "destruction operations" by US proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships." A plot to kill Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination.
> 
> Kennedy may well be Obama's model for peace in Afghanistan, I'm sorry to say. Obama's policy seems almost as lunatic as Kennedy's. --CGE
> 
> 
> On 7/12/10 12:52 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:
> > A key obstacle to moving the debate on negotiations to end the war in
> > Afghanistan is that most Americans don't know much diplomatic history. This
> > ignorance makes us vulnerable to facile slogans: for the neocons, it's a
> > noun, a verb, and Neville Chamberlain. But Fredrik Stanton has published a
> > corrective: "Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World"
> > shows how U.S. leaders entered successful negotiations with realistic goals
> > for their adversaries. If President Obama engages Taliban leaders as
> > President Kennedy engaged Premier Khrushchev, we could end the war.
> > 
> > http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/could-a-great-negotiation_b_643147.html
> > 
> >  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/12/133610/993
> > 
> > http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/645
> > 
> > --
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