QUAGMIRE!: The Perils of Valedictocracy

“The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.”
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

Below I’ve included some recent news articles indicating why I think Obama’s ideas about change are an example of realpolitik sloganeering rather than moral or ideological considerations. If my skepticism of the new status quo comes as any surprise, recall my disagreement with our new president’s stance on same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and universal health care. My strong support of Obama during the election run had more to do with the necessity of unseating a criminal regime and the frightening possibility of a McCain succession, then the kind of unswerving support many of my liberal friends showered on him.

Just as I feared, rather than a closet radical patiently awaiting the chance to affect some real change, we’ve got (I’ll skip the highly charged racial epithet I’m sorely tempted to use here) a house, rather than field, colored person in the oval office. Here’s one of the kinder descriptions of what I’m talking about: “It [the house/field distinction] refers originally to slavery times, when black women used to be raped by the white slave owners to produce mixed children. They would usually grow up working in the plantation house and sometimes would receive a formal education, unlike the black slaves who worked outside in the fields. The mixed children would associate with whites and have privileges the slaves did not. Now the term refers in a derogatory manner to lighter-skinned people of color, who are sometimes perceived as acting superior to darker-skinned people, and who because of their color, are in association with whites in what is viewed as a fawning manner, and therefore enjoy greater success in life.” (Taken from Urban Dictionary.com)

The epigraph in Lewis Lapham’s Notebook Essay, “Achievetrons,” in the Harpers Magazine March, 2009 issue is this: “Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a government which they hold to be right, rather than in comfort under one which they hold to be wrong” (C.V. Wedgewood). Lapham’s point is that, like Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Kennedy before him, Obama has cast his lot with the same Ivy League wunderkinds who led us into the Vietnam War (Kennedy); inaugurated the ascendancy of privatization, trickle-down theory, and unregulated-laissez-faire economics (Reagan); instituted a neo-con political philosophy based on eliminating the system of checks and balances between the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government, stripped citizens of their civil liberties, sought to do away with habeas corpus, and legalized torture (G.W. Bush); advocated abstention from signing a global land mine ban, and approved the destruction of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum by a Cruise missile air strike that ultimately caused the deaths of tens of thousands of African (Clinton). These “achievetrons,” a term Lapham takes from David Brooks, the cohort of rich plutocrats that have historically benefited from the long running canard that America is not a socially stratified society, are not likely to implement the redistribution of wealth Obama has promised. And why should they, given that this would run counter to the “discomfort” they themselves would surely experience should any such painful redistribution actually be undertaken.

Besides being co-opted by the wealth, privilege, and power that inevitably intoxicates even the most incorruptible, I fear Obama’s biggest mistake will follow Kennedy’s: his commitment to escalating an un-winnable and morally and economically, unsustainable war in Afghanistan, no doubt stems from following the self-same advice of a cadre of elites whose delusory and romantic notions about the nature of war and its outcomes got us into the tragedy of Vietnam.

Associated Press Writers Nedra Pickler And Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press Writers Fri Feb 20, 7:48 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights. In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys. "The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected better." The military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy combatants." The Bush administration said in a response to the petition last year that the enemy combatant status of the Bagram detainees is reviewed every six months, taking into consideration classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation. After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself. "They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.

By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: February 20, 2009

WASHINGTON — With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

ReutersMembers of Pakistani tribes offered funeral prayers on Feb. 15 for victims of an American missile attack in the North Waziristan region, near the Afghan border.
The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft. Under President Bush, the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops. The strikes are another sign that President Obama is continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the UKGuardian:

Another myth is that the west "walked away" after the Russians left. If only it had. Instead Washington and Pakistan broke the Geneva agreement by maintaining arms supplies to the mujahideen. They encouraged them to reject Najibullah's repeated efforts at national reconciliation. The mujahideen wanted all-out victory, which they eventually got, only to squander it in an orgy of artillery shelling that left Kabul in ruins and produced the anger that paved the way for the Taliban. If western governments are now paying a high price in Afghanistan, they have brought the disaster on themselves.
The Taliban will not drive Nato out militarily. The notion that Afghans always defeat foreigners is wrong. The real lesson of the Soviet war is that in Afghanistan political and cultural disunity can slide into massive and prolonged violence. Foreigners intervene at their peril.
Nato is in a cleft stick and the idea that, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is the "right war" is a self-deluding trap. A military "surge", the favoured Obama policy, may produce short-term local advances but no sustainable improvement, and as yesterday's Guardian reported, it will cost the US and Britain enormous sums. Pouring in aid will take too long to win hearts and minds, and if normal practice is followed, the money will mainly go to foreign consultants and corrupt officials. Talking to the Taliban makes sense under Najibullah-style national reconciliation. But the Taliban themselves are disunited, with a host of local leaders and generational divisions between "new" and "old" Taliban. Worse still, since the war spilt into Pakistan's frontier regions, there are now Pakistani Taliban.
What of the better option, a phased Nato withdrawal? It will not produce benefits as clear or immediate as the US pull-out from Iraq. Most Iraqis never wanted the US in the first place. They know the destruction the invasion brought, have stepped back from sectarian war, and now have a government which has pressed Washington to set a timetable to leave. In Afghanistan the risks of a collapse of central rule and a long civil war are far greater.

j.steele@guardian.co.uk