Afghanistan

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On Obama’s Afghanistan Speech

by Elias Isquith on May 2, 2012

I thought the President’s speech last night was interesting, especially for an address just shy of 11 minutes long. The basics: Obama declared victory in Afghanistan (basis: wanting) and promised to soon take the United States’ ball and go home. (Of course, when you wage covert war, home is where the drone strike target is.) And he did so on the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, validating those who believed that one of the primary reasons the President so emphasized capturing or killing al Qaeda’s figurehead was for its propaganda value in disengaging from Afghanistan. Obama finished the speech by framing the impending withdrawal from the failed state as the closing of a dark chapter in America’s history, one that began a little more than 10 years ago.

The not especially subtle implication? A second Obama inaugural won’t just represent a victory for the 44th President; it’ll be morning in America.

All of this is well and good and not especially surprising. Past when he was snookered by General McChrystal and his partisans (as well as Obama’s own political cowardice) into sending more troops to Afghanistan than he seemingly intended, I’ve never truly believed that the President wanted much to do with maintaining a significant occupying force in the country. Being the consummate politician he is, he let the generals have their last chance before pulling the plug, but, as much as the United States ever disengages militarily from the undeveloped world (i.e., not much), I think Obama sincerely wants out of Afghanistan.

Of course, a lot of people have died in the time between his decision to send more troops and his speech yesterday — and more will die between now and 2014. Having to accept — or rationalize my way to accepting — compromises and moral sacrifices like these is but one of the many reasons I would not want to be President.

But the section of the speech that really caught my attention was intended for a domestic audience, specifically those in the crowd who haven’t yet decided whether they’ll vote to give the President four more years. It’s a more explicit attempt to tap into the zeitgeist than I’m used to seeing from a President. My emphasis:

My fellow Americans, we have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon. The Iraq War is over. The number of our troops in harm’s way has been cut in half, and more will be coming home soon. We have a clear path to fulfill our mission in Afghanistan, while delivering justice to al Qaeda.

This future is only within reach because of our men and women in uniform. Time and again, they have answered the call to serve in distant and dangerous places. In an age when so many institutions have come up short, these Americans stood tall. They met their responsibilities to one another, and the flag they serve under. I just met with some of them, and told them that as Commander-in-Chief, I could not be prouder. In their faces, we see what is best in ourselves and our country.

The man certainly knows his audience:

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And so we see another important pillar of Obama’s reelection strategy, manifested most explicitly in the Democrats’ trumpeting of the bin Laden mission, but present here, too: Tie yourself to America’s most beloved institution while running against its most loathed. For good and ill, he’s clearly taken the advice of many and decided to give ‘em Hell.

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Why Are Americans So Blasé About Bombing Iran?

by Elias Isquith on February 6, 2012

Responding to a new poll that shows a clear plurality of Americans are hunky dory with the idea of bombing Iran, Doug Mataconis writes:

[N]otwithstanding the American public’s rather obvious war wariness, making the public case for military action against Iran wouldn’t be all that difficult given the three decades of antipathy between the United States and the Islamic Republic that started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis….

[T]he idea of military action against Iran is already so engrained in the American psyche that it’s unlikely that any future President would have to worry about the legacy of the unpopular wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in making their case to the American public for action in Iran.

I’m sure Mataconis is right that the public support is partially because the state of relations between the US and Iran have as of late been, well, not awesome.

But the other reasons I’d imagine are that people have a false idea that bombing a country isn’t the same as going to war and that it can be done without the negative repercussions associated with warfare (and especially boots-on-the-ground invasion). Also, there’s really been no one in the political mainstream in America who has been arguing against bombing Iran. On the one hand we have the Right which has been singing the above tune for years now. But on the other hand it’s not as if the Democrats are strenuously delineating why bombing Iran would be a bad idea. On the contrary, they’re ostensibly fine with the idea, it’s just that many (not most) of them aren’t in quite as much of a rush to do it as are their Republican counterparts.

The only figure of any prominence, really, who has been making the opposite case is (sigh) Ron Paul. In the aggregate, I think his is the kind of support that hurts just as much as it helps with Mr. John Q.

 

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The national anthem

by Elias Isquith on September 29, 2011

The Reactionary Mind Robin Corey 97801997937472

I don’t know my Gramsci especially well, but I know what might be called the simplistic, short-hand version of his theory of cultural hegemony. I understand the theory to be basically as follows: when the conventional wisdom of a society becomes so ingrained that people stop being cognizant of the fact that what they believe is not, in fact, objective truth but rather contestable ideology. Overwhelmingly, of course, it is the powerful within a society who support and enforce this conventional wisdom which, not coincidentally, leads to rather beneficial results for them and theirs. In general, when a political movement has gotten to the point where its assumptions and beliefs about the world are embraced unconsciously by everyone else, that’s when it’s really won.

By this standard, the famed military-industrial complex’s real victory is not found in its army of lobbyists or its stranglehold on DC policy. Instead, it’s found in two simple words: national security.

That’s a way to describe Corey Robin’s argument in an essay originally published in the London Review of Books and now featured in his latest book, The Reactionary Mind. Here’s the thread that ties—rather tightly—one of America’s greatest crimes of the modern era to this seemingly anodyne phrase:

There are fewer than six degrees of separation between the idea of national security and the lurid crimes of Abu Ghraib. First, each of the reasons the Bush administration gave for going to war against Iraq – the threat of WMD, Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaida, even the promotion of democracy in the Middle East – referred in some way to protecting America. Second, everyone agrees that getting good intelligence from Iraqi informers is a critical element in defeating the insurgency. Third, US military intelligence believes that sexual humiliation is an especially forceful instrument for extracting information from recalcitrant Muslim prisoners.

The same dynamic possibly explains former Vice President Cheney’s relative lack of censure of any kind for ordering, and to this day defending, the use of torture. It’s certainly a key element of the excuses offered by the Obama Administration as to why it chose not to prosecute anyone for that crime—all involved were not only following orders, we’re told, but following orders given by men who felt the nation to be imperiled. Those were chaotic, scary days; who could have known another attack wasn’t imminent?

As should be clear to any American who has followed politics over the past 10 years, an open society that accepts the tenets of the national security ideology is unlikely to remain open for long. In general, the paranoid, anxious style of such a political culture is not conducive towards unfettered discourse and tolerance—if your life and the life of everyone you care for is potentially hanging by a thread, what patience can you really muster for democratic niceties? But the cult of national security isn’t simply corrosive towards civil society. It’s incompatible with the democratic form of government, whatever its iteration.

And that’s because, as Robin points out, the national security is such a vague concept—as all such euphemisms tend to be—that it’s almost impossible for anyone to say with any certainty what, exactly, it is. What’s more, the emphasis on the nation’s security immediately takes us into that historically dangerous realm of reducing millions of individuals into a single mass with a unifying principle. The principle can differ—sometimes it’s liberty, fraternity and equality; sometimes the dictatorship of the proletariat; sometimes lebensraum. More often than not, however, the principle is inextricably bound-up with survival itself and, crucially, can only be deigned by a tiny coterie, capable of floating above the masses and interpreting their will:

Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defence should determine its relations with other nations are unable to explain the failure to achieve domestic consensus on international objectives.’ And this makes a good deal of sense: if an individual finds it difficult to determine her own interest, why should we expect a mass of individuals to do any better? But if a people cannot decide on its collective interest, how can it know when that interest is threatened? Faced with such confusion, leaders often fall back on what seems the most obvious definition of a threat: imminent, violent assault from an enemy, promising to end the independent life of the nation.

In America today, the concept of national security is so wholly accepted, so fundamentally unchallenged, that it’s increasingly being woven into the government’s institutional structure. How else to explain the amazing degree of consistency on this issue between the policies of Bush and Obama? It’s been widely recognized that President Obama’s greatest divergence from candidate Obama is on the issue of civil rights. Many have recognized how, on issues ranging from indefinite detention to the prosecution of torture, Obama is arguably just as bad as his predecessor. What’s gone slightly less noticed, though, is the degree to which the entire ideological framework through which Obama inevitably reaches these policy conclusions is basically the same as Bush’s.

During Bush and still today under Obama, terrorism remains an omnipresent and existential threat, one that requires the United States to act preemptively and without regard to national borders or international law. Once, Bush was our clear-eyed leader. Once, he was the one who could see—like so many throughout the rest of the world never could—how the seemingly broken and doomed Iraqi regime posed a long-term threat to our national security. The disaster that followed his decision to invade Iraq has led to the creation of a mistaken narrative in which Obama, in no small part due to his opposing the Iraq war, was elected President as a repudiation of the Bush worldview.

But rather than a reject the ideology, Obama simply questioned its practitioner. Bush wasn’t wrong; he was just doing it wrong. There was still a long-term threat to our national security; we still needed to break the pervious era’s chains of law and order to preserve our very survival. But it was the threat emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan that necessitated such radical actions, not Iraq. We still needed masses of troops alongside drone strikes. It was merely the balance between the two that was off.And we still needed to hold people without charges for as long as we liked—just somewhere less noticeable than Guantanamo, like Colorado. The list goes on.

And as long as we continue to unthinkingly accept that there is such a thing as national security, that it requires extraordinary action and that it’s best determined by our political leaders—elected and otherwise—it’ll no doubt go on longer still. Bush, Obama, Romney; it hardly makes a difference.

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The Washington Post’s shameless editorial on the anniversary of September 11

by Elias Isquith on September 10, 2011

Screen Shot 2011 09 10 at 4 49 27 PMEveryone is engaging in acts of reflection and remembrance this weekend to mark the 10 years since September, 11. For some, that has inspired a lot of handwringing, a recognition that the past decade has not been a good one for the United States, neither economically nor spiritually. Others have pointed out how the past ten years have in large part been an elaborate and almost grotesque exercise in denial and distraction—we obsessed over a small band of stateless, reactionary, ideological extremists while a greater threat loomed ever closer. Many have lamented how in significant ways, 9/11 never really ended at all.

The Washington Post‘s editorial board, on the other hand, has taken the opportunity to engage in a rather poorly-veiled and very weakly-argued defense of most of our government’s most controversial actions in response to the tragedy, all of which the Post itself heartily endorsed. In case you had any doubts, the piece makes it very clear that, at the very least, these men and women learned nothing:

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold. Yes, the nation made big mistakes over the past decade. When has America ever geared up without excess and error? But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had previously noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride.

The overreaction argument holds that al-Qaeda goaded the nation to curtail civil liberties and construct a monstrous homeland security apparatus while bungling into adventures abroad that birthed new enemies, sapped the American economy and distracted the nation from bigger problems. There is some truth to each element of the critique. The nation stained itself with its treatment of foreign detainees and particularly its use of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that had long been recognized as torture. By refusing to raise taxes to face the new reality, it endangered its fiscal health. The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence and was arrogantly ill-prepared for the responsibilities of occupation once Saddam Hussein fell. After initial successes in Afghanistan, it paid insufficient attention as the Taliban attempted a comeback. There’s a danger now that the nation will, once again, withdraw too soon from the challenges.

But al-Qaeda was a well-organized, capable organization intent on causing America mortal harm. It embodied an ideology that repelled most Muslims but was nonetheless attractive enough to permit continuous recruitment. And it was operating in an era when new technologies — nuclear, biological, chemical and cyber — allow small numbers of people to envision doing enormous harm to advanced and open democracies.

Well, I’ll tell you, it took nearly 10 years, but now I find such hysterical, disproportionate, and thickheaded descriptions of the latest Great Enemy, al Qaeda, to be quite persuasive indeed. After all, it was an ideology that, in a world with billions of Muslims, was potent enough to “attract enough to permit continuous recruitment.” Bear in mind that, in Afghanistan, where we are fighting a war against this titanic evil that The Washington Post fervently urges us never to end, the government itself estimates there to be well below 50 al Qaeda members. Yes, these dozens of fanatics are a testament to how grave and epoch-defining is the threat of al Qaeda.

And in response to charges that the United States has, in its shirking of habeas corpus, international treaties and norms (which it once championed) against torture, laws against surveillance, and countless other measures that limit what government may be able to do to us in the name of our own security, the Post reminds us that, well, y’know, it could’ve been worse:

There was in fact no large-scale assault on personal freedoms — no equivalent to the Supreme Court-sanctioned roundup of Japanese Americans, no repeat of the Red Scare infringements on freedom of speech and association. The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance. When there were excesses in the earliest, most panicked years, there was self-correction, with pushes from within the system (the Justice Department inspector general, for example), from members of Congress of both parties and from unfettered media and public interest groups. There have been hateful acts against Muslim Americans, but overall Americans accepted President Bush’s early insistence that the U.S. war was not against Islam. And though it took too long, Congress and a new administration eventually made clear that torture is not acceptable.

There was never any doubt, however, whether or not torture was “acceptable”; I’d remind the Post that the sickening, lie-ridden, and bad faith discussion we had in the past decade was over whether or not waterboarding was itself torture to begin with. For the time being, we have a President who says it is. But on this issue, as is the case with so many others, he does not stan in agreement with the vast majority of his partners on the other side of the aisle. Just ask Marc Thiessen, currently an op-ed contributor to The Washington Post.

It goes on, of course. You’re welcome to click over and read the whole thing—the artless conflation of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with the Arab Spring is a particularly inspired bit of sophistry—but I promise you it’s nothing you haven’t confronted innumerable times before. Tomorrow will be 9/11/2011 for most of us, but for The Washington Post, it’s always 9/12/2001 and there always remains much more fighting left to be done.

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