printDuring the Bush and Fox News reign of war, I welcomed the anti-war monologues delivered by the verbose Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown. When last has this Obama lackey said something about the lives the new war president has squandered? I don’t need a repeat of Olbermann’s Bush-era, interminable, self-aggrandizing soliloquies, but a word about Obama’s failure to bring the troops home would not go unnoticed. Moreover, how ridiculous is Olbermann’s signature sigh-off—“so and so days since the declaration of mission accomplished in Iraq”—given the failure of his man Obama to change the status quo.
The administration has stated that Fox New is the organ of the Republican Party. This is true about many of the networks operatives. But what then is MSNBC, and especially Rachel Maddow and Olbermann? The two are uncritical slaves to the ship of state just as long as the pirates at the helm are Democrats.
A contrast to those two clowns is Andrew J. Bacevich, a military man as well as a man of the mind whose lovely son was killed in Iraq. Bacevich has provided consistent, principled commentary throughout. This via Daily Kos (I’m afraid):
Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.
Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around. Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in early 2007 when President Bush launched his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy.
Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.
More than six years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago, General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for another five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.
Update (Oct. 22): COULTER ON KEITH, “The Grating Communicator”:
“I don’t blame Keith personally for this blatant distortion: He gets all his research material from Markos Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers, so he can’t be held responsible for the content of his show. Keith’s principle contribution to the program is his nightly display of self-congratulation and pompous douche-baggery.
“Remember, Keith, like his MSNBC colleague Contessa Brewer, majored in “communications” in college, not a research-related field, such as political science. In his coursework, he learned such skills as: Dramatically Turning to Camera, Hysterical Self-Righteousness, Pausing Portentously and Gravely Demanding Apologies/Resignations From Various Public Figures.
Given this background, it’s understandable that Keith will make errors. As viewers witnessed recently, he can’t even pronounce the name of prominent American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell. (Although he did spend three weeks at a Berlitz course in Arabic honing his pronunciation of ‘Abu Ghraib’ to razor-sharp prissiness.)
The bloggers and Keith bring different skill sets to the game. They provide the tendentious half-truths, phony opinion polls and spurious social science, while Keith provides his booming baritone, gigantic ‘Guys and Dolls’ suits and gift for ridiculous, fustian grandiloquence. Keith is far better equipped than, say, the pint-sized, girly-voiced, Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas to deliver the party line.
Again, in fairness to Keith, he’s never been a ‘content guy.’ He was a communications major. (The agriculture school Keith attended offered a degree in this field.) He lifts the material for his show from liberal blogs, overwrites it, and throws in his trademark smirking and snorts. But that’s all he does because, again, he was a communications major.”
In physics, one learns about matter and anti-matter – just as an electron orbits a proton in the hydrogen atom, a positron will orbit an anti-proton in the anti-hydrogen atom but both atoms have the same behaviors. The LEFTist Welfare-Warfare state where Olbermann orbits Obama is the mirror image of the RIGHTist Warfare-Welfare state where Limbaugh orbits Bush.
A fascinating read is the series by David Rhode of the New York Times who spent seven months as a “guest” of the Taliban which was operating in the open in Pakistan with the acquiescence of the Pakistani military:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/world/asia/20hostage.html
Wars are NOT FOOTBALL GAMES to be “won”. They should ONLY be undertaken for national survival. Unlike Kristol and the neocon chicken hawks, Bacevich served and lost a son. He’s a Vietnam vet who understands the nature of war.
A colleague of mine was murdered by the “friendly” Iraqis when he tried to expose their corruption:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/…/0506.roston.html
and a Marine tragically took his own and his brother’s life – from PTSD:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/…/080929fa_fact_finnegan
and they don’t even COUNT among the 4000+ dead.
The barbarian Islamic world will NOT BECOME CIVILIZED by endless search and destroy patrols, foreign aid, or Reaper drones! Leave Iraq!
The Revolution Was contains a paragraph:
“So, what the New Deal really intended to do, … , was to reorganize and control the ‘whole economic and therefore the whole social structure of the country.’ And therein lay the meaning — the only consistent meaning — of a series of acts touching money, banking and credit which, debated as monetary policy, made no sense whatever.”
Nothing that the government has done in its prosecution of the “War on Terror” makes any sense debated as military policy or civil defense policy. For example, it made no sense to invade either Iraq or Afghanistan, to declare that Saudi Arabia is our ally, or to continue admitting ever increasing numbers of Middle Eastern Muslims to this country. It’s easy to dismiss the architects of the “War on Terror” as fools, but they might be more clever than anyone suspects. Their motives are beyond my comprehension.
Keith Olbermann is the Unitarians’ most famous contribution to the show business since P. T. Barnum (200 years ago next year). Wasn’t it PTB who said “There’s a sucker born every minute”?
For whatever its worth – coming from me – Andrew Bacevich is right.
If the U.S. stays in Iraq and Afghanistan for a considerable length of time, I believe it will be instructive to hear the political reasons why we must stay involved there. It will be a good opportunity for us to hear how the State explains itself. Given Obama’s campaign rhetoric, I can’t imagine what he can say about maintaining our military presence in these two countries that will not be an appalling self-contradiction. But then how does bombing Kosovo mesh with the proclaimed values of “progressive liberalism”? I’m sure explanations for maintaining our presence in these regions will have something to do with -“Well Bush got us there.” True, but a non sequitur for staying there. And it will have something to do with our vital interests and our own good. And it may even be a way that Obama can prove he’s a “tough guy” and serious about combating terrorism. But it makes sense when one understands Statism to some degree. The “War on Terror”, the “War on Drugs”, and the “War on Poverty” all maintain the State’s existence. And all these “wars” are nothing more than aggression on other people’s liberty.
MP makes an important point
” Wars are NOT FOOTBALL GAMES to be “won”. They should ONLY be undertaken for national survival.”
We should only engage a act of War to support and defend the United States and it’s Constitution ,against all enemies foreign and domestic and use whatever it necessary to defend the US and when the threat is no longer there we rescind the act of War and come home.
To do anything else is not only unconstitutional, it is uncivilized.
Unfortunately, we Americans have little grasp of history, and that includes the history of the British Empire in locations such as Mesopotamia and Afghanistan. Do folks realize that the first “plebiscite” in Iraq was promoted after WWI to bring Faisal (an ally of T. E. Lawrence) to power there, with no regard whatsoever for the fact that the tribal peoples had no experience at all with “democracy” as western people understand it, and was also merely a charade to convince the French in Syria and the English public back home that individuals in the region really did desire that this king be crowned? (He was soon overthrown.)
It might be wise to reconsider whether “elections” in far-off countries with no history of “democracy” are just put up for “good results” attributed to those who have military power (that’s us!) with a desire to convince gullible citizens back home that things are “working to plan.”
As barbaric as the Pashtun are, they aren’t stupid. They have the power of patience on their side. They have internet connections, they know whats going on in the United States. They don’t want modernity or westernization, they want to be isolated, poor, and free. They know all they have to do is wait until our economy collapses from the cost of war, and if it takes more than one generation, so be it. Isn’t that how they succeeded against the Soviets? Our “allies” in the north of the country are the Tajik and Uzbek drug lords, the same ones the Soviets backed. But of course, any comparison between the US and the Soviet Union is just unthinkable!
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the ‘War on terror’ represented the ideal enemy with which to justify a vast military-industrial establishment. One can only go so far inflating the threat from powerhouses like North Korea. Also, you can’t have an ennemy whom you trade with, or depend on for vital resources. So here is a foe that doesn’t really exist, so he can never really harm you (unlike the Soviet Union), and is always there handy since he can never really be defeated. Problem is, even bogus ennemies costs a lot to fight, way too much for what the US can now afford. Soon it will be time to declare victory and bring back to boys.
War is one of the Liberals stock in trade. If it’s the other team’s war, you have something to use against the other guy, if your side has the war, now you can promote ‘nation building’ Win-win.