Because You Never Asked

 

(12/09)

     Barack Obama has been president for about a year now. Nothing could be worse than the 8 years of cataclysm that preceded his administration, an 8 year period that led us into the military quicksand we continue to sink into; an 8 year period culminating in a global financial disaster that still affects every aspect of our lives and public policy. But Barack Obama was not elected to be not worse than that, nor was he elected to be just a little better. He was elected to clean this puke up. He was elected to shake things up. “Change we could believe in”. For the first time in more than a generation, we were actually voting for someone rather than against someone. He was not just the lesser of 2 evils, he was our man. “Be our president, lead us, save us from this provincial anti-intellect the world’s most powerful nation is in danger of falling into”.

     Barack, we hardly know you.

     A year is not that long a time. Perhaps it is unfair to start losing faith this early. Maybe he has a plan. Maybe his patience and seeming timidity is a calculated strategy that will reap its benefits later on. Maybe he is taking a cue from an earlier version of himself by playing “rope-a-dope” with an ignorant foe who will eventually punch itself out in its own stupidity.

     Maybe he knows what he is doing.

     But in at least one aspect of his presidency, the verdict seems to be in, and it is a bitch slap for everyone who so passionately voted for him. One of the reasons we did so was to put an end to these debilitating military adventures that are sucking the life blood out of the nation’s ability to solve its problems. He was very coy about this during the campaign, and, as an electoral strategy, we accepted it. But he knew where we stood on this issue and he used his negative vote on the Iraqi war to charm us. Millions of us preferred him to Hillary for just this reason --- and he knew it. It is difficult to not see what he is about to do in Afghanistan as a crass betrayal. He told us he loved us --- and he’s walking away with the other girl.

     The bulk of this essay will focus on Obama’s decision to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan , but I’ll start off with some mention of the Iraqi idiocy because the 2 wars, in the big picture, cannot be considered unrelated. Undoubtedly, the mythical “success” of the so called troop surge in Iraq played a role in the president’s decision to send more soldiers to Afghanistan .

     But have we really had any success in Iraq ? Have we won anything?

     American sources of information would have us believe so. Sure, the increased military presence has more pacified the country, but it is little more than a military occupation looked upon with hostility by the civilian population. Sure, it has mounted this vaudevillian democracy that has replaced a Sunni government with a Shiite one. Could this government survive without an American military presence? It’s doubtful, but it might with the help of --- Iran !

     That’s a good one, and the joke’s on Uncle Sam.

     Perhaps the most striking aspect of the war in Afghanistan is the reason we are fighting it, meaning the lack thereof. This war has a personality that could almost be described as a mild form of autism, something that almost seems normal but is not quite right. After those clumsy initial attempts to capture the perpetrators of 9/11, it has become a war searching for a reason. We can’t even come up with a strategy for it because we are not quite sure what we are trying to do. On the contrary, although they lied to us about Iraq every step of the way, for those Americans with 2/3 of a brain (this narrows the field considerably), the abundant supply of a certain natural resource there begins to pierce one’s consciousness. American foreign policy has been held hostage by petroleum for more than a half century and the war in Iraq is the ransom being paid in order to have it. It is stupid, counter productive, out moded, financially debilitating, and just plain morally wrong, but there is a logic to it that can be dug up from under the surface. What is the logic in Afghanistan ?

     Do you remember when Osama Bin was a hot box office attraction and the nightly news filled our screens with his image on a routine basis, lovingly caressing machine guns in his remote mountain retreats in Afghanistan or Pakistan or some Stan somewhere? There was daily footage of swarthy assassins hand walking across monkey bars or crawling under barbed wire, fanatically training for the havoc they would rain down upon the infidels from Disneyland. It was boot camp with hummus and the Koran, and half of Islam was supposedly flocking to them.

     This seems to be the reason Barack Obama has chosen for his escalation in Afghanistan . He sees what is happening in this backwater refuge of pre-diluvium culture; in this maze of impenetrable mountain passes and isolated valleys at the flat edge of the world, as a serious security threat to the United States . For those of us who voted for him, there is an absurd quality to all this that could almost be seen as surreal. Pinch me! Maybe I’ll wake up.

     In refuting what seems to be motivated by the president’s imagination, spurred on by the delusional mindset of America’s professional warrior class, led by those dudes who show up at congressional hearings with endless rows of color coded bars and self congratulatory trinkets and bric-a-brac festooning their well starched uniforms, let’s begin with a broad brush look at history.

     As mentioned before in this ongoing mass of dubious philosophical patter (see essay “Imperial Rationalizations”), the frontiers defining the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world have been sculpted on the globe for about a millennium. There was brief Christian possession of the Holy Land, ended in 1099 by Islam’s greatest hero, Saladin. There was some skirmishing on the Iberian peninsular and in southeast Europe, where the Moors and Ottomans were, respectively, eventually rebuffed. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, western imperialism (that’s the Christians, in case you’re confused), in its unquenchable thirst for energy, militarily imposed its administrative control in the Middle East, but made no dent in the cultural-religious fabric of the region. Contrary to the narrative currently put forth by occidental sources of misinformation, it is this colonial incursion and its lingering effects, not some cultural-religious conflict, which is fueling (no pun) the friction between these 2 great segments of humanity.

     In other words --- there are no great armies of Mohammed mustering in preparation to take back or extend its dominions in the west, or anywhere else really. Islam has extended itself noticeably in the 20^th century, but not through military action. Now, maybe those stiletto-faced desperados we see hand walking across the monkey bars are the beginnings of a great conquering Islamic army. I’ll let the readers come to their own conclusions.

     But terrorism is a different animal and anyone with a memory knows it is a real threat. Obama is basing his Afghan escalation on something related to this threat. But the question is: how do we fight this threat?

     The spectacular box office appeal of the events on 9/11 was the excuse needed by a simple minded group of imperial lunatics to make war in the Middle East, and for many reasons beyond terrorism. The photogenic fall of the Twin Towers was a game breaker. It was exploited to change our national mindset, to provide an imperial attitude way beyond fighting terrorism. This was a big mistake.

     When a good prize fighter gets rocked with a solid punch, he doesn’t lose his head and start flailing away recklessly. If he does, he’ll soon find himself in the dressing room and won’t know how he got there. The accomplished fighter will clutch and grab, try to hold on and weather the storm, until his head clears and he can get back to boxing as he knows how.

     America got hit with a good shot on 9/11. It sent us reeling. Unfortunately, the amateurs running the country began flailing away wildly, like a 15 year old in his first Golden Gloves tournament. As a result, we keep getting hit --- our face is puffy, there’s a lump over the eye, the nose and mouth are seeping blood --- and Obama has decided to keep flailing away.

     Pinch me!

     The perpetrators of what turned out to be a visual event unprecedented in the annals of the motion picture (see essay “Terrorism, II”), had a military arsenal who’s most significant weapon was a razor blade. Their most principle training regimen consisted of leaning how to fly an airplane, something they did primarily in Florida and Minnesota, if my memory serves me. As far as I know, neither place is considered a “safe haven” for Al Qaeda. The relevance of this operation to those ominous dudes hand walking across the monkey bars in a place as far from Kansas as Judy Garland has ever been, is difficult to reconcile. The same can be said for the London attacks, the Madrid attacks, the first assault on the Twin Towers, the Mumbai-Bombay incursion, the ramming of the USS Cole --- get the picture? These types of operations are not that dependent on safe havens anywhere.

     In a country like the United States , the poster boy for unhindered capitalism and the profit motive as a way of life, the conversation must always find its way back to cost effectiveness, both in lives and money. At this juncture in the whole fandango, I’m fed up with talking about the loss of life, because it has become obvious to me over the last 8 years that your average American doesn’t give a butt fuck for the loss of life, be it American or anyone else. If they did care, they’d not demand the end of this by tomorrow, or next week, but right now! If there was a conscripted army, they’d care plenty, but the “volunteer army” has given them all a “safe haven” right on the 50 yard line of the comfort of home.

     With regard to financial cost effectiveness, this whole Iraqi-Afghan gambit has already irreversibly become a huge loser that has hemorrhaged money beyond all initial speculation. If these wars were being fought by the private sector and they had to provide their own capital for the manpower and equipment to do so, and during the planning stage, after the number crunching and market analyses, the chief economist  walked into the board room and said, “well, here it is, these are the projected expenditures and these are the projected earnings”, they’d have all laughed, gone to lunch, and moved on to something different in the afternoon. But the private sector does not fight the wars, they only profit from them. As a result, even if we could bring this to some kind of successful conclusion (whatever that is), we’ve already lost big. We’ve invested a million dollars in a race car that can only win $100,000 in prize money. If you think we haven’t lost already, just ask our Chinese creditors or see what you get for a dollar at the Eiffel Tower.

     The only rational strategy left is to cut our losses and move on to a better idea.