Sunday, July 4, 2010

Is the US Moving Away from the Graveyard of Empires?

Hello, I'm re-posting this earlier piece (Title slightly tweaked) because:

1) Due to "winds" counter to war/occupations/oil greed, etc. in US growing stronger, the title may be more appropriate than the usual constant litany of hopeless-sounding articles many of us have been posting for all too long. See BEHIND the "tentative" and sometime spineless voting in the house recently. You may want to take a quick survey of the lead-up and of both Peace Action's and
David Swanson's comments below. Also I highly recommend the blog-site: Common Dreams dot org for some of these various and sundry "winds".

2) I have been enjoying an interesting dialogue with an unusually astute and well-informed commenter to which I'd like to bring more visibility here at the top of this blog.

3) I'm finally seeking to consciously encourage more inter-action with this site.

(If I'm unable to bring the older comments up to the top, look just below this post.)


The New York Times and Reader-Supported News

Op-Ed Columnist
The 36 Hours That Shook Washington

By Frank Rich
Published: June 25, 2010

THE moment he pulled the trigger, there was near-universal agreement that President Obama had done the inevitable thing, the right thing and, best of all, the bold thing. But before we get carried away with relief and elation, let’s not forget what we saw in the tense 36 hours that fell between late Monday night, when word spread of Rolling Stone’s blockbuster article, and high noon Wednesday, when Obama MacArthured his general. That frenzied interlude revealed much about the state of Washington, the Afghanistan war and the Obama presidency — little of it cheering and none of it resolved by the ingenious replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus, the only militarily and politically bullet-proof alternative.

What we saw was this: 1) Much of the Beltway establishment was blindsided by Michael Hastings’s scoop, an impressive feat of journalism by a Washington outsider who seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than most insiders did; 2) Obama’s failure to fire McChrystal months ago for both his arrogance and incompetence was a grievous mistake that illuminates a wider management shortfall at the White House; 3) The present strategy has produced no progress in this nearly nine-year-old war, even as the monthly coalition body count has just reached a new high.

If we and the president don’t absorb these revelations and learn from them, the salutary effects of the drama’s denouement, however triumphant for Obama in the short run, will be for naught.

There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock that an interloper from a rock ’n’ roll magazine could gain access to the war command and induce it to speak with self-immolating candor. Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”

That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right. It’s the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with high-level access. Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters, nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, not journalistic stars courted by Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the “slam-dunk” W.M.D. intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.

Symbolically enough, Hastings was reporting his McChrystal story abroad just as Beltway media heavies and their most bold-faced subjects were dressing up for the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. Rolling Stone has never bought a table or thrown an afterparty for that bacchanal, and it has not even had a Washington bureau since the mid-1970s. Yet the magazine has not only chronicled the McChrystal implosion — and relentlessly tracked the administration’s connections to the “vampire squid” of Goldman Sachs — but has also exposed the shoddy management of the Obama Interior Department. As it happens, the issue of Rolling Stone with the Hastings story also contains a second installment of Tim Dickinson’s devastating dissection of the Ken Salazar cohort, this time detailing how its lax regulation could soon lead to an even uglier repeat of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco when BP and Shell commence offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

The Interior Department follies will end promptly only if Obama has learned the lessons of the attenuated McChrystal debacle. Lesson No. 1 should be to revisit some of his initial hiring decisions. The general’s significant role in the Pentagon’s politically motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start. The official investigation into that scandal — finding that McChrystal peddled “inaccurate and misleading assertions” — was unambiguous and damning.

Once made the top commander in Afghanistan, the general was kept on long past his expiration date. He should have been cashiered after he took his first public shot at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last October. That’s when McChrystal said he would not support the vice president’s more limited war strategy, should the president choose it over his own. According to Jonathan Alter in his book “The Promise,” McChrystal’s London remarks also disclosed information from a C.I.A. report that the general “had no authority to declassify.” These weren’t his only offenses. McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity tour that culminated with “60 Minutes” — even as his own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation somehow leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama’s war deliberations. The president was livid, Alter writes, but McChrystal was spared because of a White House consensus that he was naïve, not “out of control.”

We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was out of control and the White House was naïve. The price has been huge. The McChrystal cadre’s utter distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death sentence for the general’s signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can’t engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow said last week of McChrystal, “the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn’t believe in it.”

This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war’s failures under McChrystal’s aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency fashion by rolling out a civilian “government in a box” after troops cleared it of the Taliban. Such is the general’s contempt for leadership outside his orbit that it extends even to our allies. The Hastings article opens with McChrystal mocking the French at a time when every ally’s every troop is a precious, dwindling commodity in Afghanistan.

In the 36 hours between the Rolling Stone bombshell and McChrystal’s firing, some perennial war cheerleaders in the Beltway establishment, including the editorial page of The Washington Post and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, did rally to the general’s defense and implored Obama to keep him in place. George Stephanopoulos, reflecting a certain strain of received Beltway wisdom, warned on ABC that the president risked looking “thin-skinned and petulant” if he fired McChrystal.

But none of the general’s defenders had an argument for him or the war beyond staying the course, poor as the results have been. What McChrystal’s supporters most seemed to admire was his uniquely strong relationship with Hamid Karzai, our Afghanistan puppet. As if to prove the point, Karzai was the most visible lobbyist for McChrystal’s survival last week. He was matched by his corrupt half-brother, the reported opium kingpin Ahmed Wali Karzai, who chimed in to publicly declare McChrystal “honest.” Was Rod Blagojevich unavailable as a character witness?

You have to wonder whether McChrystal’s defenders in Washington even read Hastings’s article past its inflammatory opening anecdotes. If so, they would have discovered that the day before the Marja offensive, the general’s good pal Hamid Karzai kept him waiting for hours so he could finish a nap before signing off on the biggest military operation of the year. Poor McChrystal was reduced to begging another official to wake the sleeping president so he could get on with the show.

The war, supported by a steadily declining minority of Americans, has no chance of regaining public favor unless President Obama can explain why American blood and treasure should be at the mercy of this napping Afghan president. Karzai stole an election, can’t provide a government in or out of a box, and has in recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on his national peace conference. Until last week, Obama’s only real ally in making his case was public apathy. Next to unemployment and the oil spill, Karzai and Afghanistan were but ticks on our body politic, even as the casualty toll passed 1,000. As a senior McChrystal adviser presciently told Hastings, “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”

To appreciate how shielded Americans have been from Afghanistan, revisit Rahm Emanuel’s appearance last Sunday morning on “This Week,” just before the McChrystal firestorm erupted. Trying to put a positive spin on the war, the president’s chief of staff said that the Afghans were at long last meeting their army and police quotas. Technically that’s true; the numbers are up. But in that same day’s Washington Post, a correspondent in Kandahar reported that the Afghan forces there are poorly equipped, corrupt, directionless and infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers and spies. Kandahar (pop. 1 million) is supposed to be the site of the next major American offensive.

The gaping discrepancy between Emanuel’s upbeat assessment and the reality on the ground went unremarked because absolutely no one was paying attention. Everyone is now. That, at least, gives us reason to hope that the president’s first bold move to extricate America from the graveyard of empires won’t be his last.

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

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 27, 2010, on page WK10 of the New York edition of The New York Times.

Be sure to see the Comments below...

7 comments:

  1. Please go to the next post to see the Inter-Cultural Dialogue from an earlier version of this article.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm re-posting the LAST few of the 20 Comments shown in post just below to help this Inter-cultural Dialogue get re-started here:

    Syeda Zehra said...

    Ahem...
    I was thinking the other day about the title of your blog..
    And I think it isn't appropriate.
    As the EX-US president called this war against terrorism as a 'crusade" back in 2001.
    So it's already another yet crusade going On..!

    ReplyDelete
  3. July 3, 2010 4:51 AM
    Connie L. Nash said...

    Yes, and I'm so glad you brought this up!

    There are several angles by which this title doesn't work and your perspective here is definitely one of the major concerns.

    Another is that many who don't "get" the need over the years to end US violence say the "Peacemakers" who point out growing parallels to much older Crusades are "Crusading"! In fact a dear aunt of mine whom I hadn't seen in years asked me upon our reunion: Connie, are you still Crusading?

    Also, I admit that in my passion for peace sometimes I do end up sounding like that kind of crusader perhaps my aunt is talking about and 'campaigns' themselves can sometimes be thought to be 'crusades'.

    I am currently seeking to 'deepen my work' - to Be the Change I want to see in the world, to tell more stories, to find more creative ways to Be Peace and attract peace rather than to lament, rail and to seek to force compliance in any way...

    Still whether or not the US has tried to begin another huge and hellish Crusade (some do understandably believe they have) we can still say NO! (All of us world-wide!) NO -- NO more! Let's unite to STOP IT! There's no more place in history for any more Crusades to become any more full-blown and to continue and to end up causing any more clashing of cultures and religions and GREED FOR OIL, water and land for "look-out posts" for the same. Nor to be a bully over Nuclear "equipment" with other nations when the US is the least trustworthy "safe-keeper" nation to handle the same for years to come.

    ReplyDelete
  4. How might we do this?

    Well, we citizens of the US must do all we can to stop more funding for our US wars & occupations by VOTE (see the reports of recent voting in House in recent posts here).

    (Second) We can stop being the largest exporter of arms in the world! Exporting arms which end up in the hands of all manner of terrorists beyond the few we keep naming as our "enemies" just doesn't make sense. By this standpoint aren't we perhaps the most hypocritical nation in the world as well whenever we say we are for human rights and a Beacon of Peace on the globe?

    (Third) We must stop our use of torture and assassinations and outsourcing of the same.

    (Fourth) And we are currently pressured by the world to end our support of Israel for ditto reason. And the guilty UN which ushered such a poorly-conceived plan as the Israel state should be behind us all the way.

    (And of course, there are many many other ways:
    Our greed for oil & other resources MUST end. We must Be the Change in terms of treatment of the poor, ongoing racism and the use of contractors, the young poor and people of color to fight our wars. We must put our funding into healthcare, education, jobs and so much more. We must find and make accessible to all alternative sources of energy. We must RETURN to the Constitution of the USA and to our absolute International Agreements (such as the Geneva Accords and others) -- our absolute YES to human rights in and out of war.

    How might we do this worldwide? Well, we do need more non-violent actions and events. Problem here is that sometimes these end up somewhat violent. Some groups unfortunately encourage rioting - random destruction. Sometimes within an entirely peaceful group there have been known to be "plants" whether among US contractors who don't want wars to end because that is how they make their living (like morticians who don't want dying to end? excuse the rough metaphor)...or some other group.

    We do need more trans continental discussions and sites. We do benefit from brave journalists and all manner of writers and historians world-wide.

    And I particularly love inter-faith discussion because I don't see how we're going to break the "stale-mate" of our positions without Spirit helping and because by ourselves united without Spirit we are just not nearly as strong as we may think we are.

    Due to a peacemaker's own logic and/or due the misuse and abuse of religion for way to long and so many wars in the name of God -- some who want peace may not recognize any sort of possibility for God or Allah. Yet even for these there may be a growing appreciation for the spiritual. Many may appreciate Spirit and various ways to put the same...perhaps we might recognize The Collective Humanity among us all at our best, the Collective Soul, the Collective Ego and even Love as that which binds us together: The One Heart of us all (you may want to see that other site I started sometime:

    http://www.oneheartforpeace.blogspot.com

    SO, now we need to look into the most creative, life-sustaining ways. I have a few ideas...yet first, I'd love to hear your own.

    Thanx so much for coming by and leaving your well-considered and quite appropriate comments!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Syeda Zehra said...

    Hmm.....It's ok..we can have a discussion over here...
    July 5, 2010 5:19 AM

    ReplyDelete
  6. Syeda said:

    I also love to have a discussion on this topic..
    And I guess you did repost this one but the comments didn't remain intact..:)

    Posted by Syeda Zehra to No More Crusades at July 5, 2010 5:06 AM

    Syeda, keep watching and posting here...I may even make up a simpler, shorter post soon to encourage more discussion after we go a bit further here...Thanx again. And since I can't find what I'm missing, plz repeat your missing phrases.

    ReplyDelete
  7. From Alan Grayson Representative in Florida, USA ... Plz support him

    We're making progress toward peace.

    Late last week, Congressional leaders refused to offer the House an up-or-down vote on $33 billion more for war. Why? Because they knew that they wouldn't get it.

    So instead, they engaged in arcane procedural maneuvering, resorting to a "self-executing rule" festooned with impenetrable amendments. When they have to go that low, you know something weird is happening.

    Or something beautiful. And something beautiful is happening - despite the procedural legerdemain, 168 members of Congress voted in favor of an amendment to require "a plan by April 4, 2011 on the safe orderly and expeditious redeployment of U.s. troops from Afghanistan, including a timeframe for the completion of the redeployment."

    In other words, there are now 168 votes for peace. More than ever before.

    50 more votes, and we're done.

    So keep watching your inbox, and answer the call. You might have to send an e-mail, sign a petition, or make a telephone call. Whatever it might be, make your voice heard, and this war will end.

    We can do it.

    Courage,

    Alan Grayson

    P.S. Here is a Roll Call of Honor, the ten Members of Congress who voted against the "self-executing rule," and in favor of all three amendments to end the war:

    Duncan
    Filner
    Grijalva
    Kucinich
    Michaud
    Napolitano
    Paul
    Pingree

    And me.

    ReplyDelete