Revisitation
Obama claims that he is going to fight terrorism by attacking Afghans instead of Iraqis, as well as maintain an “overwatch” presence of tens of thousands of troops in Iraq. Where will the troops come from?
Well, he has stated that he wants to expand the ground forces by 93,000 (both Army and Marines).
Lyndon Johnson started out like this, nickel-diming, and eventually found himself with 500,000 American troops occupying Vietnam. Several years later, the last US troops were literally driven out of Vietnam at gunpoint. Johnson didn’t run that war; the war ran him.
That’s where Obama is headed right now; and for the record, that does not mean there is no difference between him and McCain, or that I am encouraging electoral abstinence. Those are red herrings.
It means the war has in many respects escaped the calculable control of the American state no matter who the President is.
Obama will be the next chief executive of the American state – a state by, for, and of the business class. That’s the job description. That business class depends on the larger economy which is materially dependent on massive and unceasing throughputs of fossil hydrocarbons. That same economy has been overrun by rentier capitalists who have driven the global economy over a cliff.
Competitors are on the horizon, China, Russia, India, Brazil… but mostly Western Europe. The war is one central drama in a multiply-determined crisis that also includes immanent food shortages, water famines, radical climate shifts, and the general decay of inter-class stability.
Obama did not inherit Bush’s war, except in the details. He inherited a business class’s war that was inevitable (though not in its present form).
The United States was going to reposition its international military after the Cold War in any case; the old disposition for “containing” the Soviet Union was obsolete after all. And given the most obvious of considerations, the place to seek permanent and fully operational military bases abroad was in Southwest Asia. That’s where the hydrocarbons are; and when you have the hydrocarbons, you have the competition on a nose ring.
Following through with this is Obama’s job after…
I dredge this up because Afghanistan is in the news. At Asia Times today (a pub that is actually interested in the region enough to publish detailed articles about it), the top four pieces are related to the Af-Pak War: (1), (2), (3), and (4); and the fifth article is about Iraq.
It’s always risky — if you mind being shown to have been wrong — to pull up old prognostications, because reality has already started to fray them. But I’m cool with that. It’s how we learn, I think. The main prognostication that seems to be actualizing with alarming force, however, is the Af-Pak War, which the CIA has massively escalated with its secret attacks in Pakistan, a now more destabilized nuclear state. The match has already been introduced to the tinderbox.
The high-side — feeble as it is — is that public opinion is turning against both fronts in this war for strategic redisposition. News personalities are equivocally editorializing on the desirability of abandoning the region militarily. In reaction, there is a push by the war-supporters to dick-up the rhetoric, that is, challenge the masculinity of the leadership for not being rash enough.
Gender remains a powerful political force. If Obama withdraws, he will be feminized by the opposition as the one who wasn’t tough enough to win the war.
Michael Anderson:
…Race is a powerful force, too. If Obama withdraws, he’ll be the n-word with no cojones, too, further disenfranchising black males (the threat—as Michael Moore put it, the “perp” who looks the same in all the mugshots), and, excuse me; people of color in general; in favor of white males.
This post is a good capper (or re-capper) on top of the post below on the R-Train ruminations and perception amagement.
29 October 2009, 11:01 amStan:
Hot off the press, Obama is conducting a province by province review of Afghan leadership. Anyone in his position(s) with a lick of sense certainly would.
And of course there is the latest CIA-drug dust-up (a recurring theme in American history), this time with his paladins in Pakistan and Bro Karzai.
29 October 2009, 1:27 pmKim Sky:
Call Obama what you might, feminine (help! a deep cultural tragedy) or worse … he’s a figure head, a diplomat, a cog in the wheel, as all presidents, the difference between Obama and Bush — Bush was a figurehead of wretched-speak. The machine is what remains in tact. As you point out the CIA-drug thing, wow, underground, undercover, what a machine!
not on the radar screen — the arms race in Latin America
A Summer Fling in South America: US Bases and a Weapons Race?(PDF) ~ISN
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?lng=en&id=108672
the general idea proposed by the wsws — that the current worldwide situation is one marching toward W-W-WAR, that this is not foreseen, is perhaps a grand error on our part?
Wsws: ” … if we recall that World War I and II arose out of the destabilization of the old imperialist order dominated by Britain and France as a result of the emergence of new competitors, it is not unlikely that the present international order—in which the dominant power, the United States, is already riven with internal crisis and hard-pressed to maintain global dominance—will break down beneath the pressure exerted by emerging powers (such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, the EU) which are dissatisfied with existing arrangements.
“The world is, in other words, a powder keg. It is not necessarily the case that the ruling classes want war. But they are not necessarily able to stop it. As Trotsky wrote on the eve of World War II, the capitalist regimes toboggan to disaster with their eyes closed. The insane logic of imperialism and the capitalist nation-state system, of the drive to secure access to markets, raw materials and cheap labor, of the relentless pursuit of profit and personal riches, leads inexorably in the direction of war.”
Wsws – http://wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/wwii-o29.shtml
30 October 2009, 3:44 pmKim Sky:
ANOTHER BIT ABOUT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION FROM GLEN GREENWALD WITH AMY GOODMAN, REGARDING A RECENT NY TIMES EDITORIAL.
“I guess they’ve reached a tipping point or a breaking point, because earlier in the week they published a very scathing editorial, finally, that recognized what has been transparently clear for quite some time, which is that it’s not really that the Obama administration is failing to fulfill its promises to undo these abuses, it’s that they have become principal advocates of them and are actually taking extraordinary steps to entrench them further in a way that even Bush and Cheney didn’t manage to accomplish. And as a result, the New York Times editorial page accused the Obama administration, to which they had been extremely friendly for the first nine months, of complicity in the cover-up of the war crimes of the Bush administration, which is an extraordinarily serious charge to make. In fact, it’s one of the most serious charges you can make about a president. The word “cover-up” has lots of rhetorical significance and packs a big punch. And when you combine that with “war crimes,” even in our political discourse, that’s a serious accusation. And to see the New York Times making it so unapologetically and forcefully, I thought, given their pro-Obama sympathies, was something really worth highlighting.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/30/glenn
30 October 2009, 8:12 pmCurt Kastens:
So the US needs 100,000 new soldiers. Where will they come from? Let me see America has 300 million people.
9 November 2009, 5:08 pmThat is my guess would be 75 million people between the ages of 18 and 42. minus the 3 million already in the service and that leaves 72 million to fill 100,000 slots. Now of those 72 million what percent are so economically desperate or indoctrinated by the system that they would be willing to join the service?
Todd Millions:
Stan-last week on cbc (national),Eric Margolis commented on signs of us ‘surge’ forces doing prep work in Kandihar to set up a large permanent base.The usual blow out a crater with bulldozers and use the outer ring as a civilain hostage free fire zone one assumes.They have also sent the canadians too the outer perimeter too protect the centre they have secured and cleared for them.I expect this is due to them being much more effective and cheaper in this work than blackwater.The only cost is obama having too put up with Harper or Igautoffs reptilian tongue(s) licking his asss- occasionaly.So a permanent fire base with air hub-before the chinese say no.
19 December 2009, 4:45 pm