- What would be the best way to pull America -- and the
world -- out of the dizzying spiral of the "War on Terror,"
which has spread death, destruction and extremism across the globe?
-
- Why, invading Pakistan, of course! Yes, sending American
tanks, troops and warplanes into the only Islamic nation with a nuclear
arsenal -- and a large, angry, powerful and growing fundamentalist movement
to boot -- would obviously be an act of wise and prudent statecraft. It
is, after all, the very strategy now being advocated by such brilliant
counselors as William Kristol and his doughty comrades in the ever-expanding
"Long War" against evilism.
-
- That's why we were truly heartened to see Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama boldly step across the partisan
-
- divide and embrace the policies of the Full Spectrum
Dominators in his "major foreign policy speech" on Wednesday.
Obama declared that if the Pakistani government did not start a wholesale
slaughter of its own people in the tribal lands on the Afghan border,
where no government writ has ever run, then when he is president he will
send in American troops to do the job.
-
- Of course, the Bush Administration is already carrying
out military operations in the border region, with drone attacks, air
strikes, and the presence of clandestine units in the area. And, through
various friendly "independent" analysts and government dogsbodies,
the Bushists have recently begun dropping heavy hints about increasing
its "footprint" in Pakistan. But thus far, the White House has
refrained from promising a direct military intervention on the territory
of its ostensible ally -- and act which would almost certainly bring down
the already-crumbling dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf and plunge
the nation, and its nuclear arsenal, into violent sectarian chaos.
-
- But bold Obama is not afraid to go where Bushists fear
to tread. In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
-- a venue named after the patron saint of "humanitarian intervention"
-- the young senator struck back at critics of his foreign policy inexperience
by throwing gobs of red meat to the permanent war crowd. Taking pains
to "reassure Americans that his long-stated opposition to the war
in Iraq would not make him hesitant to vigorously pursue extremists who
threaten the United States," as the Washington Post put it, Obama
said he would "end" the war in Iraq, and some thousands of U.S.
troops from there to "the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan."
-
- Of course, Obama's bold plan to "end" the war,
as outlined on his website, involves leaving a large contingent of US
troops in Iraq to "engage in counter-terrorism" -- which is
what the entire 160,000-strong occupation force is ostensibly doing, and
failing at, right now -- and to "continue the training of Iraqi security
forces," i.e., keep arming and paying sectarian militias to kill
each other and loot the government. This is the kind of "anti-war"
stance that only a militarist could love. Indeed, as we said here the
other day:
-
- Any "withdrawal" plan that includes a "residual
force" in Iraq is simply a perpetuation of the current war crime
by other means...and constitutes "mission accomplished" for
one of Bush's primary aims in this war of aggression: a permanent military
presence in Iraq. Client regime; oil law; permanent bases: these are the
Holy Trinity of Bush's ungodly enterprise...and most of the Democrats
in Congress share those goals, since every one of their oh-so-bold "antiwar"
measures would give Bush what he ultimately wants: a client regime hustling
to meet "benchmarks" set by Washington including an oil
law opening up the conquered nation's patrimony to Western interests
all safeguarded by a continuing American military presence.
-
- Barack salted the red meat of Wednesday's speech with
some pleasing noises about prohibiting torture and closing what the Washington
Post is pleased to call the "military prison" at Guantanamo
Bay, where hundreds of non-combatants have been held, some of them for
years. That would be nice for him to do, of course, but he seems strangely
content to let these abuses continue unabated until he takes office in
2009. He is a United States senator, after all; nothing prevents him from
introducing measures in Congress to start rolling back the authoritarian
usurpations of the Bush Regime right now. He wouldn't even sign on as
co-sponsor of the now-stalled "Restoring the Constitution Act,"
which would repeal some of the monstrosities in last year's habeas corpus-killing
"Military Commissions Act."
-
- But the bulk of the speech was given over to establishing
Obama's Terror War bona fides. Repeatedly evoking 9/11, he declared that
"when I am president, we will wage a war that has to be won...The
terrorists are at war with us...the threat is real." So there will
be more war in an Obama administration, just in case you weren't sure
about that, with Barack being so anti-war and all. But as another young
politician from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, once said
- (in a 1838 speech often noted by Gore Vidal):
-
- It is to deny what the history of the world tells us
is true to suppose that men of ambitions and talents will not continue
to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek
the gratification of their ruling passions as others have done before
them. The question, then, is can that gratification be found in supporting
and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly
it cannot.
-
- Obama, like almost all the other candidates, wants to
continue the Terror War -- and the vast global military empire that it
feeds. But he wants his own Terror War , not Bush's. Iraq is Bush's thing;
the fact that it has been a disaster makes it easier to put it on the
back burner, but even if it had been a "success," a new president
would still seek new fields of glory for reaping. Pakistan is apparently
Obama's choice (although he is clearly not averse to an attack on Iran,
either). In fact, Obama said in his speech that the greatest threat to
America's security today lies "in the tribal regions of northwest
Pakistan." The greatest threat, in this war that must be waged and
must be won, is in Pakistan. The very lives of the American people depend
on subjugating these "recalcitrant tribes," as Winston Churchill
once called the Muslims he advocated bombing and gassing.
-
- So it looks as though the parents, children and spouses
of American soldiers will have to start learning yet another set of strange
foreign names -- cities, towns, hamlets, mountains, rivers, wastelands
-- where their loved ones will be dying, and killing, for the gratification
of the ruling passions of our ambitious leaders.
-
- UPDATE: The Guardian's Declan Walsh has more on the meltdown
in Pakistan in this report from Islmabad: Disaster looms in land built
for peace and harmony. It's worth reading for the full background, but
below are some excerpts directly touching on the themes of this post:
-
- Gen Musharraf is also under fierce pressure from the
White House, where some officials seem to think they invaded the wrong
country after 9/11. The US has given Gen Musharraf's government $10bn
(£4.9bn) in aid. But now, frustrated with Pakistan's slippery approach,
policymakers feel they have been short-changed. Last week the US Congress
passed a law aggressively linking aid to progress in the "war on
terror".
-
- Hawkish officials suggested that unilateral strikes on
al-Qaida bases in Waziristan might be the only way to prevent a fresh
attack on the US. "We must be clear with Gen Musharraf that if Pakistan
won't take out al-Qaida, the United States will," Lee Hamilton, a
member of President George Bush's homeland security advisory council,
wrote on Monday.
-
- Ah yes, good old Lee Hamilton. From Iran-Contra to the
9/11 Commission to the Iraq Study Group, when whitewash is needed to
cover government butts or "bipartisan resolve" is required to
bolster some new imperial outrage, this "moderate Democrat"
is always there, a safe pair of hands for toting Establishment water.
Back to the Guardian:
-
- The Pakistani government is angered and alarmed [by the
American moves]. "Irresponsible ... counterproductive," thundered
the foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, last week. "This may be election
season in the United States but it should not be at our expense,"
he said.
-
- Analysts say strikes are unlikely in the short term.
But what is certain is that anti-American hostility is becoming deeper
and more bitter. "Red Mosque, Waziristan - this is all being manipulated
by America," said accountancy student Mazhar Qayyum in Islamabad.
"They've just been playing us since 9/11 - paying dollars and turning
the Pakistani army into killers of Muslims."
-
- Yes, that's just what we want to do: radicalize secular
students in the secular capital. The growing bipartisan consensus for
an attack on Pakistan -- led by the "anti-war liberal" Obama
and the "moderate centrist" Hamilton -- is just one more example
of the Terror War's extremely curious propensity for making the Islamic
extremists' dreams come true. At every stage of the Terror War, Bush
and his willing executioners in the Democratic Party have confirmed the
most provocative and radical charges of extremist leaders like bin Laden.
They have waged war -- directly and by proxy -- on a succession of Islamic
nations, and wrought a vast hell of ruin and death in the Muslim heartland
of Iraq. Bush and his Democrats have elevated a gaggle of criminal extremists,
Muslim apostates and third-rate birdbrains into perceived standard-bearers
for resistance to a war on Islam, and given them the global stature --
and worldwide war -- they have long craved but never could have achieved
on their own. Bush and his Democrats have instigated and countenanced
horrible atrocities which have destroyed the credibility of "Western
civilization," and tainted anyone who seeks to make the best of a
bad job by working with the Western attackers in hopes of building a better
future when (and if) they leave. Bush and his Democrats have ensured that
we will have at least a generation -- and probably more -- of sectarian-based
war and chaos, and the highly profitable "counterterrorism"
and "counter- insurgency" efforts that go with it.
-
- Why, you'd almost think they are trying to foment endless
war and fear and carnage. Or else that they're too stupid to pull their
own heads out of a beehive. (Or both; for obviously you'd have to be
the latter to push a strategy like the former.)
-
- At any rate, here we are again: a bipartisan coalescence
behind a bellicose policy guaranteed to exacerbate the very problem it
purports to address. We've said it before and we'll keep on saying it:
in addition to all the greed, vanity, ambition and bloodlust animating
the Terror War, there is genuine madness at work here. And it keeps on
getting worse, with no cure in sight.
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