OurFuture.org Blogs: Norman Solomon2

Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan

Norman Solomon2 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:36:11 -0700

The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now.

That’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

But “escalation” isn’t mere jargon. And it doesn’t just refer to what’s happening outside the United States.

“Escalation” is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad -- nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper -- nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “demonic suction tube,” complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he’s hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren’t already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual -- a repetition compulsion of the warfare state -- carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he’d decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a “Special National Security Estimate” -- a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that “in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: “There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan.”

Mullen’s comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come “piecemeal” -- “with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Abstract Quality Journalism for War

Norman Solomon2 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:53:46 -0700

The New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline “Names of the Dead.” Their names -- Peter K. Cross and Steven T. Drees -- were listed along with hometowns, ranks and ages. Cross was 20 years old. Drees was 19.

They were, the newspaper reported, the latest of 706 Americans “who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.” There wasn’t enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.

That’s the way routine death stories go. But of course no amount of newsprint or airtime can do more than scratch the human surface. Reporting on life is like that, and reporting on death is like that: even more so when the media lenses are ground with ideology, nationalism and economic convenience.

But real grief isn’t like that. It twists and burns and has only names and adjectives unworthy of itself. That doesn’t stop many journalists or politicians from claiming to describe what’s beyond description.

A week before Peter K. Cross and Steven T. Drees were buried in a three-square-inch box on page A9 of the national edition, the New York Times editorialized about the war that killed them and 704 other members of the American military. Years from now, media researchers and historians will view the date of that lead editorial, June 23, 2009, as a time when the American deaths in Afghanistan had not yet reached four digits and when the uncounted Afghan deaths were a lower uncounted number.

Beginning with its headline -- “Afghanistan’s Failing Forces” -- the editorial was replete with erudite lamentation (not to be confused with grief). The war has been managed so badly. Two authoritative sentences bookended the editorial: “The news from Afghanistan is grim.” And, “There is no more time to waste.”

The words in between were consistent with a grand tradition of press demands for more effective warfare. (“President Obama was right to send more American troops to fight. … The Taliban must be confronted head-on. … Building an effective Afghan Army is critical…”) Peering into their computer screens in Manhattan, the editorialists would have been more concise to simply write: “Let’s you and them fight.”

Some who went into battle have a very different perspective. “As an infantry rifleman in the Marines Corps, I saw so much of these wars through nightly patrols,” says Rick Reyes, a former Marine corporal who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. “We worked with translators whose sole interest in supplying us intelligence was to earn money and other forms of aid. We gathered information that often proved faulty. During a raid, we would ransack homes, breaking windows, doors, families, lives, chairs and tables, detaining and arresting anyone who seemed suspicious. In one case, we detained, beat, and nearly killed a man, only to realize he was merely trying to deliver milk to his children.”

Reyes speaks of a routine with “unconscionable acts of violence” and awful harm to civilians, whatever the differences in terrain: “These patrols were all the same, whether I was in the desolate desert terrain near Camp Rhino, the U.S.-led coalition's first strategic foothold in Afghanistan, or stationed outside Basra in Iraq.”

When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard from Rick Reyes on April 23, he did a lot to shatter illusions with six minutes of testimony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypwrq4mbiQw

But the conventional wisdom of press and state insists that the U.S. war effort must do more than go on -- it must escalate -- in the name of human decency. The political rhetoric in Washington is close to 100 percent humanitarian, while the new supplemental infusion of U.S. spending for Afghanistan is 90 percent military.

Inside a contrived news frame, destruction can nurture life. In media myth, we can be well-informed and ignorant of war’s realities. Along the way, the benefits of numbed quiescence and muffled dissent are vastly overrated.

Full-Spectrum Idiocy: GOP and Chavez on Iran

Norman Solomon2 — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:50:58 -0700

When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions -- but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.

Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the U.S. government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran’s democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.

But Bush played to the same kind of peanut gallery that is now applauding the likes of Sen. John McCain. The Bush White House denigrated the 2005 election just before the balloting began -- to the delight of the hardest-line Iranian fundamentalists. The ultra-righteous Bush rhetoric gave a significant boost to Ahmadinejad’s campaign.

Denunciations and threats from Washington are the last thing that Iran’s reform advocates want. And Iranians certainly don’t need encouragement from Uncle Sam to do what they can to bring about democratic change.

John McCain doesn’t get it. And neither does Hugo Chavez.

Of course, Chavez has practical reasons for his warmth toward Ahmadinejad. (Practitioners of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” usually do.) While sharing Washington as a common adversary, their oil-rich countries have the makings of a world-shaking energy bloc. And they’re on similar pages with well-founded antipathies toward institutions like the World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank.

But human rights -- whether food, shelter and healthcare or freedom of speech, press and elections -- should not be matters of winks and nods.

As voting began in Iran on June 12, Chavez praised Ahmadinejad as “a courageous fighter for the Islamic Revolution, the defense of the Third World, and in the struggle against imperialism.”

Nine days later, with a bloody crackdown on Iranian protesters gaining momentum, Chavez declared that “Ahmadinejad’s triumph was a triumph all the way.” The Venezuelan president condemned those “trying to stain Ahmadinejad’s triumph and through that weaken the government and the Islamic revolution.”

I’m among millions of progressive North Americans who admire much of what Chavez has been doing for economic equity and social justice in Venezuela. But that admiration is no reason to be quiet when Chavez makes common cause with repression in Iran.

Meanwhile, in the United States, we have nothing to be smug about. The day after President Obama toughened his criticisms of Iran’s rulers at his June 23 news conference, a venerable human-rights organization named the Quixote Center was noting that more than 1,200 people had sent letters and faxes asking the Obama administration “to denounce the violent repression of peaceful protests organized in response to the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement” -- a massacre of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon.

What happened during that massacre on June 5? “A hundred people were wounded by gunshot, and between 20 and 25 were killed,” the Center for International Policy reports.

“The Obama administration,” the Quixote Center noted, “remains silent on the massacre in Peru.”

But the fact of some hypocrisy from President Obama does not change the fact of some idiocy from President Chavez.

On Wednesday (June 24), the Associated Press reports, “Chavez reiterated his support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a close ally, and said he is ‘completely sure’ Ahmadinejad fairly won re-election on June 12.”

For good measure, Chavez ascribed the protests in Iran to Washington and its allies. “He said protests and violence that have rocked Iran since the contested vote appear part of a recurring strategy by U.S. and European intelligence agencies to destabilize enemy governments.” Chavez declared: “From my point of view, that’s what’s happening in Iran.”

It seems to be beyond the vision of both Hugo Chavez and John McCain to see that vast numbers of Iranian people, fed up with repression, are able to grasp the historical moment on their own while opposing the regime. The last thing they need or want is “help” from the U.S. government as they struggle for a democratic future.

Obama and Anti-War Democrats

Norman Solomon2 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:44:39 -0700

Days ago, a warning shot from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue landed with a thud on Capitol Hill, near some recent arrivals in the House. The political salvo was carefully aimed and expertly fired. But in the long run it could boomerang.

As a close vote neared on a supplemental funding bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no.” In effect, it was so important to President Obama to get the war funds that he was willing to paint a political target on the backs of some of the gutsiest new progressives in Congress.

But why would a president choose to single out fellow Democrats in their first congressional term? Because, according to conventional wisdom, they’re the most politically vulnerable and the easiest to intimidate.

Well, a number of House Democrats in their first full terms were not intimidated. Despite the presidential threat, they stuck to principle. Donna Edwards of Maryland voted no on the war funding when it really counted. So did Alan Grayson of Florida, Eric Massa of New York, Chellie Pingree of Maine, Jared Polis of Colorado and Jackie Speier of California.

Now what?

Well, for one thing, progressives across the country should plan on giving special support to Edwards, Grayson, Massa, Pingree, Polis and Speier in 2010. If we take the White House at its word, they may find themselves running for re-election while President Obama withholds his support -- in retaliation for their anti-war votes.

But it’s not enough to just play defense. We also need to be supporting -- or initiating -- grassroots campaigns to unseat pro-war members of Congress.

In the Los Angeles area, the military-crazed and ultra-corporate Congresswoman Jane Harman will face the progressive dynamo Marcy Winograd in the Democratic primary next year.

Harman’s vote for the latest war funding was predictable. But dozens of Democrats with longtime anti-war reputations also voted yes. Among the most notable examples are Oregon’s Peter DeFazio and Washington’s Jim McDermott, who apparently found their antiwar constituencies in Eugene and Seattle to be less persuasive than the White House chief of staff.

“White House aides worked the halls during the hours before the vote, and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called some lawmakers personally,” McClatchy news service reports. “DeFazio, who was undecided and wound up voting yes, said he talked to Emanuel by phone for about five minutes as Obama’s top aide explained the administration’s strategy in the war on terror.”

This is a crucial time for anti-war activists and other progressive advocates to get more serious about congressional politics. It’s not enough to lobby for or against specific bills -- and it’s not enough to just get involved at election time. Officeholders must learn that there will be campaign consequences.

When progressives challenge a Democratic incumbent in a primary race, some party loyalists claim that such an intra-party contest is too divisive. But desperately needed change won’t come to this country until a lot of progressive candidates replace mainline Democrats in office.

On behalf of his war agenda, the president has signaled that he’s willing to undermine the political futures of some anti-war Democrats in Congress. We should do all we can to support those Democrats -- and defeat pro-war incumbents on behalf of an anti-war agenda.

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Norman Solomon, the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” was an elected Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Words and War

Norman Solomon2 — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:29:28 -0700

It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.

Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can’t be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration’s current supplemental bill is military.

Often it seems that lofty words about war hopes are boilerplate efforts to make us feel better about an endless warfare state. Oratory and punditry laud the Pentagon’s fallen as noble victims of war, while enveloping its other victims in a haze of ambiguity or virtual nonexistence.

When last Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline “Iraq War Deaths,” the newspaper meant American deaths -- to Washington’s ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American.

Ask for whom the bell tolls. That’s the implicit message -- from top journalists and politicians alike.

A few weeks ago, some prominent U.S. news stories did emerge about Pentagon air strikes that killed perhaps a hundred Afghan civilians. But much of the emphasis was that such deaths could undermine the U.S. war effort. The most powerful media lenses do not correct the myopia when Uncle Sam’s vision is impaired by solipsism and narcissism.

Words focus our attention. The official words and the media words -- routinely, more or less the same words -- are ostensibly about war, but they convey little about actual war at the same time that they boost it. Words are one thing, and war is another.

Yet words have potential to impede the wheels of war machinery. “And henceforth,” Albert Camus wrote, “the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.”

A very different type of gamble is routinely underway at the centers of political power, where words are propaganda munitions. In Washington, the default preference is to gamble with the lives of other people, far away.

More than 40 years ago, Country Joe McDonald wrote a song (“An Untitled Protest”) about war fighters: who “pound their feet into the sand of shores they've never seen / Delegates from the western land to join the death machine.” Now, tens of thousands more of such delegates are on the way to Afghanistan.

In pseudo-savvy Washington, “appearance is reality.” Killing and maiming, fueled by appropriations and silence, are rendered as abstractions.

The deaths of people unaligned with the Pentagon are the most abstract of all. No wonder the Washington Post is still printing headlines like “Iraq War Deaths.” Why should Iraqis qualify for inclusion in Iraq war deaths?

There’s plenty more media invisibility and erasure ahead for Afghan people as the Pentagon ramps up its war effort in their country.

War thrives on abstractions that pass for reality.

There are facts about war in news media and in presidential speeches. For that matter, there are plenty of facts in the local phone book. How much do they tell you about the most important human realities?

Millions of words and factual data pour out of the Pentagon every day. Human truth is another matter.

My father, Morris Solomon, recently had his ninetieth birthday. He would be the first to tell you that his brain has lost a lot of capacity. He doesn’t recall nearly as many facts as he used to. But a couple of days ago, he told me: “I know what war is. It’s stupid. It’s ruining humanity.”

That’s not appearance. It’s reality.

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Norman Solomon’s books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film.

We Need a Green New Deal

Norman Solomon2 — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:19:08 -0700

In the Arctic, sea ice is melting. In the United States, houses are foreclosing.

And in Washington, the Senate is becoming a real-life Bermuda Triangle for progressive agendas.

Proposals for major limits on carbon emissions aren’t getting far in the Senate, where the corporate war on the environment has an abundance of powerful allies.

As for class war, it continues to rage from the top down. Last week, a dozen Democratic senators teamed up with Republicans to defeat a bill that would have allowed judges to reduce mortgages in bankruptcy courts.

President Obama supported that bill. But as the Associated Press reported, he was “facing stiff opposition from banks” and “did little to pressure lawmakers” on behalf of the measure. The Senate “defeated a plan to spare hundreds of thousands of homeowners from foreclosure through bankruptcy.”

Big-money vultures are circling the Capitol Dome to feast on the latest multibillion-dollar carrion, whether under the heading of “cap and trade” or “healthcare reform.” And many billions in profits can be found inside yet another supplemental bill to fund war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, a familiar pattern is unfolding for the most important piece of labor legislation in decades -- the Employee Free Choice Act -- which would go a long way toward protecting the rights of workers to form unions. Obama says he supports EFCA. But there are no signs that he’ll go all-out for its passage.

There are pluses and minuses on Capitol Hill these days. But on big-picture items, it’s clear that environmentalists and labor-rights activists are mostly up against the corporate wall -- and the wall is not yielding.

We need a Green New Deal.

It won’t happen without a lot more effective grassroots coalitions -- strong and sustained enough to change power relations for the long haul. But acculturation in the USA often encourages us to think along the lines of solo acts.

There’s the old American story about the solitary Dutch boy who discovers that a dike has sprung a leak. He inserts his finger, hangs in there heroically by himself and saves the town.

But in the real world, individual heroics are a fool’s gold when compared to the genuine value of building political movements. The immense obstacles to effective grassroots organizing can be overcome: not by lone rangers, but by persistent organizers and coalition-builders.

During the last six months, I’ve participated in a lengthy series of meetings with many other local activists. Across two counties in Northern California, we’re about to launch a long-term project called the Green New Deal for the North Bay (www.GreenNewDeal.info).

It’s just a start. But, as we begin a round of public forums throughout the region, we’re in the process of developing a grassroots agenda for far-reaching change that will address these two key questions:

“How can we create a sustainable green future that includes economic equity and social justice?”

“How can agendas for economic rights and environmental protection become more integrated and more successful?”

Seventy-five years after the start of the New Deal, and nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, the need for basic change on behalf of social justice and ecology is clear.

But ideas are the easy part. In an era of massive environmental damage and vast economic inequality, we’ve got to organize.

Why Are We Still at War?

Norman Solomon2 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:09:45 -0800

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.

Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”

But the “war on terrorism” rubric -- increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” -- kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize -- or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.

Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.

And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.

“This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced,” Norman Mailer wrote in his book “Why Are We at War?” six years ago. “It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void...”

Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: “This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. ... There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist.”

And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just has there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.

It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America -- but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.

For anyone who believes that the war in Afghanistan makes sense, I recommend the Jan. 30 discussion on “Bill Moyers Journal” with historian Marilyn Young and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey. A chilling antidote to illusions that fuel the war can be found in the transcript.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about “the war on terror.” Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed.

And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.

44 Years Later, LBJ’s Ghost Hovers Over the 44th President

Norman Solomon2 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:59:29 -0800

A few days after the inauguration, in a piece celebrating the arrival of the Obama administration, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that the new president has clearly signaled: “No more crazy wars.”

I wish.

Last week -- and 44 years ago -- there were many reasons to celebrate the inauguration of a president after the defeat of a right-wing Republican opponent. But in the midst of numerous delightful fragrances in the air, a bad political odor is apt to be almost ineffable.

Right now, on the subject of the Afghan war, what dominates the discourse in Washington is narrowness of political vision -- while news outlets are reporting that the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is expected to “as much as double this year to 60,000 troops.”

It’s heartbreaking now to read the admixture of profound humanity and nascent war madness in the inaugural address of Lyndon Johnson. “In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty,” he proclaimed. “In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended.” And that wasn’t just rhetoric. LBJ went on to launch Great Society programs with great effects and far greater promise.

But the same inaugural speech foreshadowed the massive slaughtering of people in Vietnam, and the undermining of the United States -- with what Martin Luther King Jr. two years later likened to “some demonic destructive suction tube” -- bringing home terrible depths of human pain and bitterness. “If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know,” Johnson said at his inauguration, “that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.”

Pundits and congressional leadership nodded sagely as the president cited the threat of communism and proceeded to boost U.S. troop levels in Vietnam. Similar nodding -- and nodding off -- is now underway as the president cites the threat of terrorism and prepares to boost U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan.

Down the line, some key words from Obama’s inaugural address -- telling dubious foreign leaders that “your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy” -- will need to face a reflection in the mirror.

Lyndon Johnson’s capacity to deliver on hopes for a Great Society shattered on the jagged steel of a war that, year after year, few pundits were willing to acknowledge was crazy. The war effort in Vietnam was the essence of supposed rationality.

Now, hopes for the Obama administration are vulnerable to destruction from an escalating war. “Afghanistan could quickly come to define the Obama presidency,” the New York Times reported on Sunday.

Many independent journalists and authors, such as Chris Hedges and Sonali Kolhatkar, have written from depths of knowledge about the derangement of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. That effort won’t bring “victory,” but it can multiply the suffering endlessly.

Several weeks ago, a Bob Herbert column made a practical moral argument: “Sending thousands of additional men and women (some to die, some to be horribly wounded) on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness.”

Days after the inauguration, the news has included a fresh spate of stories about Afghan civilians killed by U.S. missiles. Hamid Karzai, in effect the president of Kabul, declared that the Pentagon’s frequent killing of civilians in Afghanistan “is strengthening the terrorists.” And so it goes.

Escalation of a crazy war will make it crazier. Pretending otherwise will not make it any less insane -- or any less destructive.

And, as we heard in Obama’s inaugural address, “people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

The Return of Triangulation

Norman Solomon2 — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:08:03 -0800

The Return of Triangulation

By Norman Solomon

The mosaic of Barack Obama’s cabinet picks and top White House staff gives us an overview of what the new president sees as political symmetry for his administration. While it’s too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, it’s not too soon to understand that “triangulation” is back.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was adept at placing himself midway between the base of his own party and Republican leaders. As he triangulated from the Oval Office -- often polarizing with liberal Democrats on such issues as “free trade,” deregulation, “welfare reform” and military spending -- Clinton did well for himself. But not for his party.

During Clinton’s presidency, with his repeated accommodations to corporate agendas, a progressive base became frustrated and demobilized. Democrats lost majorities in the House and Senate after just two years and didn’t get them back. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, numerous left-leaning causes fell by the wayside -- victims of a Democratic president’s too-clever-by-half triangulation.

Now, looking at Obama’s choices for key posts, many progressive activists who went all-out for months to get him elected are disappointed. The foreign-policy team, dominated by strong backers of the Iraq invasion, hardly seems oriented toward implementing Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to “end the mindset that got us into war.” On the domestic side, big-business ties and Wall Street sensibilities are most of the baseline. Overall, it’s hard to argue that the glass is half full when so much is missing.

The progressives who remain eager to project their worldviews onto Obama are at high risk for hazy credulity. Such projection is a chronic hazard of Obamania. Biographer David Mendell aptly describes Obama as “an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.”

But in the long run, an unduly lofty pedestal sets the stage for a fall from grace. Illusions make disillusionment possible.

There’s little point in progressives’ faulting Obama because so much of their vital work remains undone at the grassroots. A longtime Chicago-based activist on the left, Carl Davidson, made the point well when he wrote after the November election that “one is not likely to win at the top what one has not consolidated and won at the base.”

By the same token, we should recognize that Obama’s campaign victories (beginning with the Iowa caucuses) were possible only because of the painstaking work by antiwar activists and other progressive advocates in prior years. To make further progress possible, in electoral arenas and in national policies, the country must be moved anew -- from the bottom up.

As his administration gets underway, disappointed progressives shouldn’t blame Barack Obama for their own projection or naivete. He is a highly pragmatic leader who seeks and occupies the center of political gravity. Those who don’t like where he’s standing will need to move the center in their direction.

Obama has often said that his presidential quest isn’t about him nearly as much as it is about us -- the people yearning for real change and willing to work for it. If there’s ever a time to take Obama up on his word, this is it.

Crucial issues must be reframed. The national healthcare reform debate, for instance, still lacks the clarity to distinguish between guaranteeing healthcare for all and mandating loophole-ridden insurance coverage for all. With the exception of Rep. John Conyers’ single-payer bill to provide “enhanced Medicare” for everyone in the United States, each major congressional proposal keeps the for-profit insurance industry at the core of the country’s medical-care system.

As for foreign policy, the paradigm of a “war on terror,” more than seven years on, remains nearly sacrosanct. Among its most stultifying effects is the widely held assumption that many more U.S. troops should go to Afghanistan. Rhetoric to the contrary, Obama’s policy focus appears to be fixated on finding a military solution for an Afghan conflict that cannot be resolved by military means. The escalation is set for a centrist disaster.

During his race for the White House, ironically, Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about “the fierce urgency of now.” But King uttered the phrase in the same speech (on April 4, 1967) that spoke of “a society gone mad on war,” condemned “my own government” as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and declared: “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now.”

Barack Obama never promised progressives a rose garden. His campaign inspired tens of millions of Americans, raised the level of public discourse and ousted the right wing from the White House. And he has pledged to encourage civic engagement and respectful debate. The rest is up to us.