This is telling it like it is. I’ll get back to Ike’s quote in a moment, after raising the curtain and revisiting the scene.
More and more has been coming out to the public eye about the war in Afghanistan, to support the view that it is now high time for the American troops to leave that country.
We are stuck there. And that’s where Moscow loves to see us stuck, while it expands its own prerogatives westward in ex-Soviet space.
The latest tremor came in July from the disclosure of secret US military papers by the website WikiLeaks — a chronicle of more than five years of gruesome grind, compromising intelligence failures and more light on how NATO military effort has killed innocent civilians.
It shows a sobering metamorphosis of fantasized strategies into the abysmal reality of the triage of blown-off legs and truncated bodies. The salaciousness of this “good war” is overwhelming, despite the media focus on golfer Tiger Woods and the other guy (with a funny French name), a basketball hero who kept the country guessing the size of his upcoming contract and with which team in the National Basketball Association.
Still, there are many who reject anti-war arguments, with a seemingly persuasive retort: “It all started with 9/11” and, therefore, it requires pouring more money and more troops.
Perhaps the problem is that it really did not start with 9/11. The root of that conflict, as well as of several other debilitating confrontations between the U.S. and Third World countries (Vietnam and Iraq among them) goes back at least 50 years, with the presence of American military outside of the U.S. national borders, and military bases in more than 60 foreign countries. Some of these countries are governed by unpopular American-backed regimes.
In the last 50 years, American air strikes inflicted civilian casualties in the tens of thousands, in Vietnam and Laos, in Iraq (in the first Gulf War and its aftermath), and less (an improvement) in a string of Gulf region states.
From an American national security point of view, even if the U.S. had a plausible rationale to invade Afghanistan, having done so proved to be counterproductive. After nine years, the resulting economic, financial and political damage to the U.S. is enormous, and it will haunt the legacy of this generation.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda has metastasized into many countries, outside of Afghanistan.
A rational alternative could be to revisit the causes of such confrontations. In stark terms, it would mean not to follow the unsustainable ways of the former European colonial empires, and not to be obsessed with “projecting our power” in the Third World, while addressing legitimate defense and security concerns — as during the Cold War when facing the Soviet threat in Europe.
Not surprisingly, it is the U.S. Congress, with its vast constitutional prerogatives numbed by its inability to grasp the significance of the moment, that keeps the Afghan war consuming its human fodder.
Cowed by pro-war groups and defense industry contractors with their political campaign financing power, the mainstream media control and the terror rant from a wide gallery of right-wing talk shows, that august assembly is taking the path of the least resistance.
Only 102 House Democrats and no Republicans have voted most recently against the Afghan war funding authorization.
Remarkably, it was U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, himself a military man familiar with the culture of defense establishment, who saw a potential for damage from ingrained power centers, and warned the American people in his farewell address about the danger of excessive influence from the military-industrial complex. Not many Americans remember.
Ike’s farewell address can be found on Yahoo. Enter President Dwight Eisenhower, click search, then on the top of the list click on also try, and scroll down to “Military-Industrial Complex Speech.”
“The unwarranted influence” of the military, of which Eisenhower was keenly aware, is not hiding far today. The New York Times reported in a lead story on Aug. 12: “American military officials are building a case to minimize the planned withdrawal of some troops from Afghanistan starting next summer in an effort to counter growing pressure on President [Barack] Obama inside his own party to begin winding down the war quickly.”
“Building a case” for a foreign policy twist and “countering” an activity in the president’s own party? Or in any political party? This is not exactly in the Pentagon’s charter, much less in the military officials’ manuals, according to this country’s duly constituted governance system.
A president can be actually hampered by the pugilists in the conduct of foreign policy. Recall the antics of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
Eisenhower was able to end that seemingly endless war, inherited from the previous Administration. But Obama, clearly, is facing opposition to his plan to begin troop withdrawal — coming from military circles.
Not the least of reasons for pro-war sentiments is a pervasive culture of militarism , surfacing at random as if it were normal patriotism. Witness General David Petraeus tossing the coin before the start of the traditional Rose Bowl football game. And why having the military jets fly over? This would be a strange sight in Europe’s stadiums — where loyalties are expressed by football hooligans.
The latest video games with dead bodies seem to be a natural progression in sporty entertainment, inspired by imagination of combat prowess.
Ike himself was elected president mainly on the strength of his military hero fame, but he proved to be much more than that. Not bad for a graduate of the top military academy.
Luck had it that West Point was also the alma mater of General George C. Marshall, one of America’s greatest minds, so badly missing in today’s self-imposed conundrum of President George W. Bush’s vocabulary and barbeque leftovers.
Deterioration of the minds by packaged ignorance in the Bush era made finding a way out of Afghanistan more difficult than managing a way out of a paper bag, while Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh have become the Republican Party’s best bets in the next election.
One of the unintended consequences of the U.S.-Afghan conflict is the boon to Moscow’s influence in the ex-Soviet space. It automatically took a quantum leap when a bargain was made with Moscow by the Bush administration in its waning months (and officially announced on Jan. 20, 2009, but not by White House press secretary, to keep a low profile) for passage of U.S. military supplies to Afghanistan by land through Russia. That deal gave Moscow huge leverage over America’s position in Eastern Europe.
It seems that the Ukrainian diaspora has been leaning over backwards in trying not to notice Bush’s bargain with Russia, so as not to underline its own sheepishness of studiously ignoring the Afghan war as it affects all Americans, and as if it had no consequences for Ukraine.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
