The pro-war Nation and Obama ’s Afghan esc alation

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

The pro-war Nation and Obama’s Afghan escalation
By David Walsh
4 December 2009

The Nation magazine, the American liberal-left publication, has
responded to President Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday night announcing
the dispatch of an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan with a
flurry of articles. The commentary is both an effort at damage control
and a new attempt to mislead the US population and keep it within the
bounds of the present political setup.

Obama’s speech represents a turning point for the American
intervention in the region and for the Obama administration itself.
The government elected on the slogan of “change,” with the assistance
of “left” forces such as the Nation, has now fully revealed its
warmongering character. The Afghan escalation will lead to massive
destruction and death, new atrocities, new war crimes—all in pursuit
of the US ruling elite’s economic and political interests.

The Nation strongly endorsed Obama in the summer and fall of 2008. In
July 2008, the magazine authored an open letter to the Democratic
presidential candidate (“Change We Can Believe In”), eventually signed
by a good many of America’s liberal luminaries (including Phil
Donahue, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jodie Evans of CodePink, Eric Foner, Eli
Pariser of MoveOn.org, Norman Solomon, Studs Terkel, Gore Vidal,
Howard Zinn and others). The letter declared:

“Your candidacy has inspired a wave of political enthusiasm like
nothing seen in this country for decades. In your speeches, you have
sketched out a vision of a better future—in which the United States
sheds its warlike stance around the globe and focuses on diplomacy
abroad and greater equality and freedom for its citizens at home—that
has thrilled voters across the political spectrum.”

Last October, on the eve of the election, an editorial in the Nation
asserted that “American democracy finds itself at another crossroads,
facing a new democratic vista. The choice between Barack Obama and
John McCain could hardly be clearer.”

Obama’s December 1 speech and the openly militaristic and aggressive
character of his policy, as well as its obvious continuity with Bush’s
policies, embarrass the Nation and place it in a discomfited political
position. It has been exposed as an enabler of imperialist war and
reaction.

In an even more troubling problem for the magazine’s editors, ten
months of an administration that has handed over billions to the banks
while doing nothing for the jobless, and will now proceed with a major
intensification of the neocolonial war in Central Asia, have produced
disillusionment and disappointment within wide layers of the
population. Inevitably, that mood will turn to open opposition.

It is above all the danger of a popular break with Obama and the
Democrats that propels the Nation’s editors and writers into print.

It would be wrong to characterize the Nation as antiwar in any serious
sense, or as an opponent of American imperialism. The magazine’s
leading articles on Tuesday’s speech, by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tom
Hayden, John Nichols, Robert Dreyfuss and Robert Scheer, make no
attempt to dissect Obama’s lies and contradictions. They include no
demand for an immediate withdrawal of American forces from the region.
There is no mention of colonialism or American geopolitical interests.
“Oil” and “energy” never appear among the more than 5,000 words in the
articles.

The Nation writers express virtually no concern for the decades of
suffering of the Afghan people as a result of US intervention. (Hayden
makes the only reference to the human devastation, the perfunctory
comment that “Civilian casualties are under-reported according to the
UN mission in Afghanistan.”) Kunduz, the scene of a recent massacre,
and Bagram, the US base where torture and murder have been carried
out, receive no mention. Remarkably, the only use of the word
“torture” in the various pieces (in Nichols’s article) is in the
context of Obama’s supposed inner anguish in attempting to placate
proponents and opponents of sending additional troops.

The Nation treats the Afghan intervention much as the rest of the
American mainstream media does, as either an appropriate or a
misguided effort to defend US interests or make Afghanistan and the
region “secure” and “stable.” It is a thoroughly establishment organ.

Nichols (in “Obama Has Spoken—Now, Let’s Have a Debate”) calls Obama’s
speech a “carefully-constructed and nuanced call…for the extension of
the US occupation of Afghanistan.” He expresses his respectful
disagreement with the decision to escalate and urges a debate in Congress.

In his comment (“Exit: 2011?”), Robert Dreyfuss, fresh from his
service on behalf of US destabilization efforts in Iran, writes:
“Having had lengthy discussions with many, perhaps most, of Obama’s
advisers on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past two years, it’s
clear to me that those advisers believe passionately that vital US
interests are at stake in that conflict.” He too, however, begs to differ.

This extraordinary confession of closeness to top officials in the
American state appears in an ostensibly “left-wing” publication.
Dreyfuss unequivocally vouches for Obama: “He, and his team, aren’t
supporters of global, military hegemony by the United States.”

Vanden Heuvel, the Nation’s editor and publisher, who could barely
control her rapture over Obama’s victory last November, terms the
Obama speech “a tragic moment—both for the nation and his presidency”
(but not, apparently, for the people of Central Asia, who will by far
suffer the most). By “tragic,” she means—although she does not care to
spell it out—that the escalation politically unmasks Obama.

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, in his open letter to Obama issued on
the eve of the West Point speech, speaks somewhat more candidly,
asserting that an escalation “will do the worst possible thing you
could do—destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in
you.”

In her Nation piece, vanden Heuvel writes of “a President we had high
expectations for,” who is “escalating a war that may well deplete this
country of the resources needed to rebuild its promise, while doing
little to nothing to make us or the region more secure or stable.” But
why did she and her editorial board have such “expectations,” why, in
short, did they understand and foresee nothing?

Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer, veterans of the 1960s protest movements,
play at more leftish stances. Hayden, a former Democratic state
legislator in California, dramatically declares (in “Obama Announces
Afghanistan Escalation”), “It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my
car,” before hastily reassuring his readers that he will support Obama
in the 2012 election!

Scheer (“Afghanistan: Here We Go Again”) provides a history of US
intervention in Afghanistan, including the role played by President
Jimmy Carter, the latter’s national security adviser and current
adviser to Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Richard Holbrooke, “now
Obama’s civilian point man on Afghanistan,” in fomenting and financing
Islamic fundamentalism.

However, Scheer, the former editor of Ramparts magazine, draws no
conclusions from the history, except to observe cynically, “So here we
go again, selling firewater to the natives and calling it salvation.”
What is the US doing in Afghanistan? He has no idea: “Thanks to the
political opportunism of the current Commander-in-Chief the
Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose.”

What do the Nation’s writers propose as a response to the Afghan
escalation?

Vanden Heuvel bemoans the continuing grip of the “National Security
State” and the lack of “countervailing voices or centers of power and
authority to challenge the liberal hawks and interventionists.” She
advocates, in all apparent seriousness, the establishment of a new
think tank on “national security issues,” as well as the building of
“a broad-based movement for change” of an unspecified character.

The favored solution of the various writers, in keeping with the
Nation’s central task of reinforcing or resurrecting illusions in the
Democratic Party, is the application of pressure on “progressive”
Democratic members of Congress, with the aim of slowing down or
blocking funding for the Afghanistan war.

Typically, Hayden places hope in “Representative Jim McGovern’s
resolution favoring an exit strategy [that] has 100 co-sponsors and
Rep. Barbara Lee’s tougher bill to prevent funding for escalation,”
which now has 23 sponsors.

He continues: “Key political questions in the immediate future are
whether Representative David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations
Committee, will oppose Afghanistan funding without a surtax [sic] is
only bluffing, and whether Senator Russ Feingold will step up with
legislation for a withdrawal timetable.”

Nichols too depends on the “substantial Democratic discomfort with
Obama’s plan to surge tens of thousands of additional troops” to
Afghanistan, also mentioning Reps. McGovern and Obey, Senator Feingold
and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders. Nichols goes farther, however,
holding out hope that far-right Republicans will bloc with the
“antiwar” Democrats. He cites approvingly the positions of North
Carolina Republican Walter Jones Jr., a self-described “Pat Buchanan
American.”

There is hardly a more fantastical, futile policy than reliance on the
Democrats (and Republicans) in Congress to end the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. As Obama’s decision to accelerate the latter conflict
demonstrates once again, the Democratic Party is an imperialist party,
devoted to the interests of the American corporate-financial oligarchy.

The Nation editorial board, composed of liberals, ex-leftists and
opportunists of various stripes, expresses the interests of a section
of the American upper-middle class. Their collective superficiality,
self-delusion and impressionism have a social basis. The Nation
writers speak for a highly privileged, complacent section of the
population, largely insulated from the consequences, military and
economic, of the Obama administration’s policies.

The American “left” to a prominent man or woman endorsed Obama in
2008, or greeted the victory of an African-American candidate with
enthusiasm as a “historic” moment. Individuals with the reputation for
opposition to the status quo, such as Moore, professors Zinn and Noam
Chomsky, Naomi Klein and many others, lined up behind the Democratic
candidate, misleading the American population.

Words and political endorsements have consequences. The Nation has
thousands of readers, the individuals just referred to have a large
audience. This “left” shares responsibility for Obama’s policies,
including the bloody results of his decision to send 30,000 more
troops to Afghanistan.

The escalation in Afghanistan vindicates the perspective of the World
Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party: uncompromising
opposition to the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. We
base ourselves on a class analysis of this administration and the
Democrats.

The old “antiwar” movement has collapsed, as serious protest against
the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia cuts across its support
for Obama. Resistance to Obama’s wars can be based only on socialist
opposition to imperialism as a global system and a turn to the working
class, the only social force that can do away with the source of
imperialist war and oppression.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/nati-d04.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********