Obama ’s Afghan escalation and the d ecay of democracy

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Obama’s Afghan escalation and the decay of democracy
16 December 2009

With President Barack Obama approaching his first anniversary in
office, his escalation of the Afghanistan war is writing a new chapter
in the history of Washington’s shredding of democratic forms of rule
in order to further militarist aggression abroad.

This has become increasingly clear since the announcement earlier this
month of the plan to send an additional 30,000 US soldiers and Marines
to Afghanistan. It was further spelled out in Obama’s Nobel Peace
Prize speech in Oslo, where he enunciated what has been widely
described as the “Obama doctrine.”

The Obama doctrine incorporates all of the essentials of the Bush
doctrine—preemptive war and the assertion of the right of the United
States, as the world’s “sole military superpower,” to launch military
aggression unilaterally as it sees fit. Obama’s contribution is to
argue openly for the junking of existing international rules of war
and the recognition of what was previously defined as aggressive war
as a legitimate instrument of foreign policy.

Key passages of this hypocritical address tacitly recognized that
imperialist war in general, and the US war in Afghanistan in
particular, remain deeply unpopular at home and abroad.

Obama acknowledged the existence of “deep ambivalence about military
action today, no matter the cause,” adding that this “is joined by a
reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.”
He lamented a “disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and
the ambivalence of the broader public.”

The US president dismissed popular antiwar sentiment in the US and
around the world as naive. “Peace requires responsibility,” said
Obama. “Peace requires sacrifice.” In short, peace requires war,
whether those forced to die and to pay for it like it or not.

This theme has been further amplified since the Nobel speech, both by
Obama and in the media.

In an interview broadcast Sunday on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,”
Obama was asked why, under conditions where “most Americans…don’t
believe this war is worth fighting,” he decided to escalate it anyway.

The president replied, “Because I think it’s the right thing to do.
And that’s my job... If I was worried about what polled well there are
a whole bunch of things we wouldn’t have done this year.”

Here Obama said more than he intended. This “bunch of things” includes
his administration’s allocation of trillions of dollars to prop up
Wall Street, while doing nothing to aid the millions who have lost
their jobs, their incomes and their homes.

The “60 Minutes” segment was eerily reminiscent of interviews given by
Vice President Dick Cheney in 2007 and 2008, as the Bush
administration was carrying out its own “surge” in Iraq in the face of
overwhelming opposition.

Appearing on Fox News in January 2007, Cheney dismissed the hostility
of the American public to the war. “I don’t think any president worth
his salt can afford to make decisions of this magnitude according to
the polls,” he said.

Asked on ABC News in May 2008 if he didn’t “care what the American
people think” about the war, Cheney replied, “No. I think you cannot
be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

In Obama’s case, the indifference to the public’s hostility to war is
all the more breathtaking since the Democratic president owes his 2008
election victory precisely to such sentiments.

The media, which universally hailed the Oslo address, has expanded on
the theme that the will of the people must not be allowed to interfere
with the waging of war. The New York Times published an editorial
Monday admitting that in Europe “ambivalence has long been replaced by
fierce demands for withdrawal” from Afghanistan. Indeed, polls in
France and Germany have shown two-thirds of the public supporting an
end to the US-NATO intervention.

In the face of such mass opposition, the Times counseled:
“Democratically elected leaders cannot ignore public skepticism, but
they should not surrender to it when they know better. Mrs. Merkel and
Mr. Sarkozy must educate their voters to the harsh reality that Europe
will also pay a high price if the Taliban and Al Qaeda get to retake
Afghanistan and further destabilize Pakistan.”

Presumably, Washington has set the standard on how best to “educate
the voters”: by frightening them with manufactured terrorist threats
and deceiving them with phony pretexts for war.

The real motives driving US militarism are to remain hidden from the
public. This was illustrated by Time magazine’s Joe Klein, a
journalistic conduit for the political and national security
establishment, in an article posted Sunday. Klein put forward the
thesis that the US military had to remain in Afghanistan to forestall
an Islamist-backed military coup in Pakistan and diminish the threat
of war between Pakistan and India.

“Some of the best arguments about why this war is necessary must go
unspoken by the president,” he wrote.

That is, there are the real reasons for the US war in Afghanistan and
the fraudulent ones palmed off on the American people.

The most fundamental of these “unspoken” motives is the drive by US
imperialism to assert its hegemony in a region containing some of the
world’s largest energy reserves together with the pipelines to siphon
them off to the West. It was this aim that led to US plans for war in
Afghanistan being hatched long before September 11, 2001.

Obama is continuing and escalating a dirty colonial war to suppress
popular resistance to foreign occupation and to secure the interests
of the corporate and financial oligarchy that rules the US.

Despite systematic disinformation from the government and the mass
media, millions of American working people have drawn their own
conclusions from more than eight years of war in Afghanistan and more
than six years in Iraq. The mass opposition to war, however, can find
no means of expression within the existing political establishment.
After going to the polls in both 2006 and 2008 to vote against war,
the American people are confronted with the continuation and
escalation of military aggression.

Neither the pursuit of imperialist wars in the face of public
opposition, nor the execution of economic policies that defend the
profits and wealth of the ruling elite at the expense of the rest of
the population, can be carried out by democratic means. Both
ultimately require methods of repression and intimidation. This is the
fundamental reason that the Obama administration has kept intact all
of the essential police state policies and institutions created under
George W. Bush.

The fight against war, like the defense of democratic rights, can be
waged successfully only through the independent mobilization of the
working class against capitalism, which is creating intolerable
conditions for billions of people around the world together with the
threat of ever bloodier conflagrations.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d16.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
**********