Victory At Last!
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 by RLRFrom Tom Dispatch
By Tom Engelhardt
Let others deal with the details of President Obama’s Afghan speech, with the on-ramps and off-ramps, those 30,000 U.S. troops going in and just where they will be deployed, the benchmarks for what’s called “good governance” in Afghanistan, the corruption of the Karzai regime, the viability of counterinsurgency warfare, the reliability of NATO allies, and so on. Let’s just skip to the most essential point which, in a nutshell, is this: Victory at Last!
It’s been a long time coming, but finally American war commanders have effectively marshaled their forces, netcentrically outmaneuvering and outflanking the enemy. They have shocked-and-awed their opponents, won the necessary hearts-and-minds, and so, for the first time in at least two decades, stand at the heights of success, triumphant at last.
And no, I’m not talking about post-surge Iraq and certainly not about devolving Afghanistan. I’m talking about what’s happening in Washington.
A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority
You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered. It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief.
And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began in late September with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s grim review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war. It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president didn’t deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former neocon or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the U.S. military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into a conflict he had termed both “the right war” and a “necessary” one. After more than two months of painfully over-reported deliberations, President Obama has now ended up essentially where General McChrystal began.
Read more Victory!
Before declaring that McChrystal’s strategy will proceed untouched, let’s consider the alleged report to Obama that the WashPost was kind enough to provide us. In it vague hot-button pressing words are strung in sentences built around them– NO strategy is apparent, just a lot of tactics that might work here or there not but there or here. Obama was out-checkered by our assassin-in-chief SPECIALOPS, what we now call our sharpshooter assassins. It is hard to guess which of his peanut gallery of civilian “military experts” who never heard a gun go off was the wordsmith of which of the sections, but one sees no cogent strategy, only the familiar words of certain plump chickenhawk who insists that we must get used to accepting a lot more casualties on our way to “victory”; a term that is never defined in such a way that you might triangulate and see whether today or tomorrow we are closer or further from it. Our “privatized” Pentagon pays hard dollars for
experts to de-concretize English so that no general is ever held accountable. Instead we are told– ever since the Bush retort to the Iraq Study Group’s conclusions– that YES WE ARE LOSING ***BUT*** WE CAN ***STILL*** WIN, only if we accept the NEW way, surging into it with more mom and dad soldiers… of course, ever ready to accept making for even more widows and orphans on the homefront.
I am an old man who when I came here as a young man had the same sense of hopelessness about America, then a nation of people drugging themselves with TV ad illusions that all is well, and if not, all will soon be well through spending more. By the way, that has been the mantra I heard repeated ever since Eisenhower warned us on his way out to be weary of the military-industrial complex. But I must say that at UC Berkley in 1960s I developed a unique sense OF HOPE THAT AMERICA IS BACK ON ITS WAY UP when a Communist cabal form NYC led by Betina Aptheker won the FSM student revolution. I am an anti-Communist refugee from the Red Bloc and so it wasn’t that they were Communists what raised my hopes but rather that these Communists DIDN’T call for Red Revolution but for MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE and responsible debate instead. Today, I see academia surrendering to the Liliputhean intellect of think-tank Wash DC “expertise”– the “this is it” people who expound
but never feel the need to argue their case. Why should they? GONE are the days of the TEACH-INS, when we anti-Communists were always given an equal opportunity to face the New Left in debate at teach-ins, imposing on them the MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE that Betina and her Reds acquired for us. Instead, we have old ex-Trotskyites training a second generation of NEOCONS by the old Leninist concept acquired from their old master: POLARIZE TO MOBILIZE. The Pentagon copied these think-tank-ers, creating seemingly academic institutions, chairs and institutes to feign academic standards. But in fact, it all is only– AS I EXPERIENCED IN THE OLD RED WORLD– merely “THIS IS IT” nonsense MONOLOGUE like McChrystal’s report to Obama. Americans suffer from the “ain’t my kid going to war” disconnect syndrome so why should the Establishment make its case in anything but empty rhetoric? Afterall, MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE demands that we accept even less illusory certainty and
might have to take more Viagra to feel like men in our old age or more Ambien to sleep dead-silent at night. McChrystal is the first to know that a Congress that can be bought by banks, health insurers and weapons manufacturers surely can be bought off by hot-button jingoism: WE ARE LOSING ***BUT*** WE CAN ***STILL*** WIN. Americans like fourth quarter comebacks and the mythmaker of the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman deception to cover-up friendly fire snafus can always come up wit this formula in colorful PowerPoints to impress the sleepy Congressmen with no skin in the game.
It is more than a year late, but still time to recognize that we have elected the first black Republican president.
Mr. Obama ran as a Democrat, but has consistently governed like a Republican.