I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’ Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.
After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy. Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.
9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror. They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.
The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.
In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’ Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.
Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more. The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains. The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’
Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.
Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.
Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.
First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror. It’s impossible. It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents. Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.
Terrorists come in many flavors. Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists. No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear. This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!
I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.
This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists. Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there. Ergo – stalement.
How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again? It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground. And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global? There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.
Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy. And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog. Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds. Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.
Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs - and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.
