WEAKNESS IN OUR LEADERS AND MILITARY OVER-REACH
I heard on the TV news today (April 30, 2012) that for the first time President Obama has attempted to rationalize, through his spokesperson, counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan, his frequent use of aerial drones in the war in Afghanistan as well as elsewhere in places that are not war zones. Perhaps this is a result of the ramp up of attacks by the Romney camp who claim that Mr. Obama is "spiking the football*" in regard to his so called military successes. But for whatever reason, they claim, Brennan and Obama are dead wrong. They both should revisit the idea of what is a morally justified war and proportional response.
(By the way, John Brennan is the US official who claimed that the US has a "clean record" on the use of unmanned drones and a "year-long string of perfect assassinations with zero collateral deaths." Even hardened professionals who heard that statement winced at it's impossibility. So we must take what this man states--who is a charter member of the anti-terrorist mini industry--with a large grain of sand.)
The use of drones in a war of defense against a legitimate foe who is actually capable and poised to launch attacks on our homeland is of course justified--as a form of self defense. That is not the case in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and Yemen..one of our latest undeclared "war" zones. In Afghanistan, the Taliban (frequent targets of drones) are a home grown, local force defending their native land and way of life from invasion by a foreign occupying force. I do not agree with their policies, politics or their treatment of their womenfolk, or their support of Bin Laden prior to the 9-11 attack, but I can not legitimately claim that they are today a "threat" to our homeland. They just want us out of there.
In regard to the few al Qaida remaining in Afghanistan, (which the US government publications estimate recently to be in the range of 100 or so individuals. The President himself stated that to date we have "neutralized 20 out of 30 of their top leadership.") the Obama Administration would like to have their cake and eat it too. They would have us believe that after all the hundreds of drone air strikes (now, under Obama about one every four days) that they have decimated al Qaida, and they would like to take credit for the elimination of the "terrorist threat". But they do not want to have this handy and useful "threat" disappear completely. So somehow, miraculously, according to them, there are still more al Qaida cropping up everywhere, more al Qaida "associated", al-Qaida "related" more al Qaida "franchise" groups and more "threats to our homeland". In regard to Yemen, one must completely disengage our senses from our intellect to believe that the impoverished, desertified, sand-blown, politically fractured, wasteland called Yemen could ever stitch together a legitimate threat against the USA. If you believe that, there is a bridge in Brooklyn....that I think you might be interested in purchasing. Thus the ghoulish counting of al Qaida "takedowns," "kills", "neutralisation" continues and reminds me of the old-style military "body count" game which was used by our military (for a while) so effectively in Vietnam War days. Now with modern unmanned drone attacks the "kills" are even more secretive and unverifiable, and thus so much more effective (temporarily) to maintain unwarranted support for questionable military action.
The war in Afghanistan, it is essentially over. And tonight, May 1, 2012 the President, speaking from Kabul stated just that. The Taliban have won. But the President has signed an agreement which would keep us there for more than another decade. His so called "strategy" is to beat the Taliban up a bit with drone attacks so that when their survivors reach the negotiating table, they would be more amenable to our demands for permanent Afghan bases, and lucrative
inside deals for our corporate elites to exploit Afghan natural resources after our main forces leave. Or perhaps, the reason is so that our troops and allies will not have to fight each other as they climb into the open doorway of a whirring helicopter hovering above the rooftop of the US embassy in Kabul when we depart as we did in Vietnam, or sneak off surreptitiously in the dark of night as we did in neighboring Iraq. Furthermore, President Obama has already established his politically-motivated 2014 departure date--now extended to 2024. But be forewarned all details of course are still on the table.
But we stay on and probably will continue to use drones to kill innocents for the next decade. No one, least of all a President of the USA in a tight reelection race would want to pull up stakes and leave a war zone....and let the Republicans blame him for "losing", even losing an already "lost war". No, that is political suicide. Thus, we remain at "war" in Afghanistan, and will remain apparently until 2024, as our troops urinate on dead Taliban, burn Quarans in open fires, go on enraged killing sprees like Sargent Robert Bales who gunned down sixteen innocent women and children as they cowered in their homes, and in turn, our boys (and girls) get shot at, wounded, and killed, as the increasingly bold Taliban fight on, even now after ten years of our efforts and billions of dollars expended, as they surge back into the streets of Kabul from which we extirpated them ten years ago.
But is such a war a justified war with proportional response and taken up in the defense of our homeland? Hardly. The Taliban are no threat to us or our interests. Can they attack our homeland? No. Do they want to? No. Is our response to the threat proportional. No. Or is this just a political "situation" which the President must pace out to extend a phony war to more effectively "end" it when domestic political condition permit him to finally wrap-up and leave at an opportune time? And now he states it will not end until 2024--if ever.
Thus the war in Afghanistan, and its metastasized sub-wars in other nations, is NOT justified. It wears on not for our nation's defense, but for Mr. Obama's political survival and for that reason does not approach the minimum standard for a just war. Thus for that same reason the use of Predator drones which kill more innocent bystanders than it does our 'political' enemies is not justified either.
Of course the killing of our own citizens abroad by Presidential fiat such as the cold-blooded assassination of Arizona-born-and-bred, Anwar al Awlaki who may have had alien and objectionable ideas and perhaps sympathies with the enemy---but as a US citizen, the Constitution should have protected him from summary execution, and a death at the hands of his own countrymen without judicial review or input. Assassination of a US citizen at the hands of President Obama is a threat to us all and makes Awlaki's culpability or possible innocence unknowable. The death of his sixteen-year-old-Denver, USA-born son, Abdulrahman al Awlaki, is another case all together. He was an innocent US civilian who was certainly too young to have had fully formulated political ideas that would have been a threat to us. He was killed after his father in a subsequent Obama-ordered drone strike. That act is certainly a verifiable "Murder 2" charge (recall the Trayvon Martin case of a youngster of similar age) in any international court. This will remain a black mark on this President's Nobel Peace Prize reputation (and rightly so) for the rest of his life.
In summary, President Obama is using drone attacks as a form of high-tech political assassination to decapitate political groups he and his advisors presently see as "their" enemy, not necessarily the enemy of our state. The use of drones so freely by Obama also provides a form of political insurance for the President against a charge of military weakness. Rash unnecessary use of this form of warfare permits him to claim that he is "strong on defense".
A measure of just how much the President's use of drone warfare is a form of simple political insurance (and with little military value) can be gauged by the difference in use of this form of killing by the two Presidents who used it. George Bush, a leader not likely to be charged with "military wimpishness" used drone attacks more judiciously, about one in every forty-three days on average. Obama on the other hand, in very similar geopolitical and domestic circumstances, has used them ten time more frequently or about one in every four days. That difference in use of the two men in similar military circumstances is a clear measure of just how useful the drone kills have been as a "domestic political tool" to control and deflect internal political attacks by Republicans and not an element necessarily used to satisfy a justifiable military objective.
Finally, there lies the question of the efficacy of this new, drone-war technology. The idea of their use is to kill and weaken the enemy, frighten them into submission and decapitate the leadership cadre by assassinations. To a large degree, over time, such policies only inflame and exacerbate the conditions and political situations they are employed to control. They incite the populace against the foreign invader/colonial power. Furthermore, the process eliminates leaders who have the experience and authority to lead the insurgency and these are the very persons needed to eventually negotiate with the colonial (or neo-colonial) power. Eliminating these leaders interrupts, abrogates or delays the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Israel's experience with targeted assassinations ended up eliminating the moderate Palestinian leadership in the insurgency with the very same strategy and unfortunate results which continue to haunt that troubled state to this day. Killing off the leadership also tends to speed up the radicalization of the insurrection.
Thus, I'm sorry Mr. Obama, there is no justification for your continued war in Afghanistan, and therefore none for the use of unmanned drones there and elsewhere. Your politically motivated and unfortunate recent decisions have made you as much a war criminal as Mr. George Bush.
MORE POLITICAL MUSINGS
As a nation, we seem to be stuck on the horns of a national election dilemma. After a questionable election, and a national tragedy, the nation went off half-cocked, led by a "cowboy" tough-guy president like George Bush, who misrepresented his way into two foreign wars which have become an international disaster, and helped to usher in the second Great Depression. Then we elected what we all seemed to see as a George Bush mirror image--an intellectual, a thoughtful, and cool, cautious black President. But once in office he morphed into a "black" Bush. The electorate soon learned that in this nation, in the 21 st Century the President's race was a weakness which had to be dealt with, and all of his intellect and ability could not overcome. Had Obama been a white Protestant no one could have slugged him with that particular cudgel. Perhaps he would have smacked Netanyahu in the nose, and said NO to the troop surge, pulled out of Afghanistan now, and fought for the single payer option, etc. etc. We learned that he could not make those tough decisions, but was forced to compromise and give in to a tough opponent. To insulate himself from attacks he had to compromise and over-react and over-reach and make sometimes even more foolhardy acts than "the White Bush." Many of his foreign policy actions were designed just so he could insulate himself from charges of "wimpishness". But the lack of respect this nation gave him and the intolerance which simmered just below the surface weakened this leader.
So from this perspective we've had a long stretch of bad leadership. Without going back before most readers memory, we can start with Clinton. We elected this self-centered, sex-obsessed, white, scoundrel, who presented himself as a progressive but who governed from the right of center. He signed far-right banking legislation which helped to ushered in the Geat Depression of 2007-2008. He sullied the reputation of the White House and the Oval Office with his Huck Finn behavior. His actions aroused the far right. His failure to leave office gracefully and hand over the reins to Al Gore a strong leader, when he was impeached led to a a confused election in which the Supreme Court intervened to usher in a conservative, dullard cowboy, who was led through his eight years by a Rasputin-like reactionary VP, who conspired to involve the nation in two disastrous wars that ended in economic upheaval. The nation reacted again to elect a black, centrist, of intellect and talent. We dumped him into the most challenging foreign policy, economic and political circumstances probably ever faced by any President. His race and over conciliatory temperament prevented him from effectively facing down the forces of the right which mercilessly pummeled him throughout his term. We have had a long series of bad and weak or ineffective leadership.
Is there something wrong here? Is this some kind of Groundhog Day process going on? Perhaps our political system has some inherent weakness that drives us like a pendulum from right to left but never out of the same blasted-out fox hole, whomever we elect.
Woe for us if we elect a woman next time. What will she have to do to establish her military bona-fides? Start WW III?
One must think, at this juncture, after seeing President Obama's inability to change the nation's course away from a format established by George Bush and watch as he falters and falls into the same behavior patterns as Bush---that perhaps we do NEED a man of business, a non-ideologue, a nuts and bolts man, like a Romney who perhaps CAN somehow change our course. But is a Romney capable of thinking of what is best for the nation? Can he make the necessary changes?Would he hang on to and tame the crazy, whip lashing helm of this nation's wild ship of state.
Or will a reelected Obama, reborn by winning a second term somehow develop a calcification in his supple back which will permit him to face up to the challenges of a divided confused and suffering nation. I always had great optimism for this man. Give a smart man a chance, let him stew a bit and learn, and since he can learn he can change and soon he will see the light of day and make the necessary changes. Can he do it?
There is a bad dream I have now and again. It is that we have had a "White Bush" and a "Black Bush", and there seems a good chance that we can expect from the next election...a "Mormon Bush"! I care not about the Mormon part...but it is the Bush part that scares me. Will there be another "Bush style Presidency" and will still be in Afghanistan in 2024?
Get the picture?
rjk
*Spiking the Football. A term derived from late 20th Century American football. In American football, when a player makes a run that results in the player carrying the ball over the goal line of the opposing team, the ecstatic and overly demonstrative (victory dance) player throws the ball with force down into the ground, so that it bounces up into the air in an act of defiance and threat to the opposing team. It is looked on as poor sportsmanship.
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