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'news' magazine covered for Dick Cheney on his meeting with Gary Condit on the very day--and during the very disappearance hours--of one of Condit's mistresses (Chandra Levy), but...
I think they ARE right that Afghanistan is "Obama's Vietnam." The trouble is, as several astute commenters in this thread point out, their timing. Their timing is ALL.
There is absolutely NOTHING to be gained from continuing to kill Afghanis. There is NO ONE in Afghanistan whose death would "keep us safe." The best thing from everyone's point of view, except the war profiteers, is to STOP killing Afghanis. No conquerer on earth, from Alexander the Great forward, has been able to subdue the tribes on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and nothing short of nuking the entire region will 'succeed.' Deja vus all over again. That was exactly the situation in Vietnam (--a people with a 5,000 year history of repelling invaders). The "quagmire" in Afghanistan is already far more advanced than the "quagmire" that LBJ 'inherited.' But I can't see that Obama's intentions are any different. He said during the campaign that he would move the Forever War from Iraq to Afghanistan. That is what he is doing. The main purpose of the war on Iraq was to hogtie the Iraqis to the oil contracts. Mission accomplished. But NOW what will our humongous war machine do to 'make a living' (out of death)?
Doubling US troops in Afghanistan is beyond stupid, from the point of view of the American people, the Afghani people, the world and all of history to this point. But people just don't get to be emperor...ahem, president of the United States unless they've pre-agreed to beyond stupid military policies. It's the whole game. We are a Beyond Stupid empire.
Those few who are profiting, however, are not stupid. Enter Newsweek and its 'sudden' realization that Afghanistan is like Vietnam, and tagging Obama with it. Hear the drumbeat of civil disorder? It's already starting. So, go ahead, get out in the street and protest "Obama's War," and escalate the protests when he and Congress cook up a "national service" program to feed cannon fodder to the Forever War, and get ready for big anti-war protests, grannies-in-wheelchairs protests, veterans' marches, food riots, agents provocateur, skinheads weighing in, the lot. Germany 1932. Economic meltdown. Fracturing of the center-left, and its inability to govern. Rule of law destroyed, in our case by 9/11 and the Patriot Act (and so much else). That's what the Dark Lords likely have planned. They are going to use Obama's agreement to do what they asked him to do, against him, in order to create the narrative for Diebolding him out of office in 2012, and Diebolding the uber-fascists back in.
Thus we will be denied even the "scraps from the table" that Obama is trying to get us now, and will become the full-blown "1984" nazi nightmare that Orwell envisioned.
That's the plan, I think. I don't know if it will work. We are a very different country than Germany. As W.B. Yeats said, history does not repeat itself--it's not that boring; it is instead a gyre, a spiral, with repeating themes, and we thus have repeated opportunities to learn certain lessons and to change the outcome.
Lesson no. 1: Newsweek WANTS this war. They are a war profiteering, lying, propagandistic, piece of shit of a magazine. Don't be fooled. Step back. See the Big Plan.
Lesson no. 2: The reason Obama had to make certain promises to the war profiteers is that they now have direct, 'TRADE SECRET' code control of the voting machines--with the code owned and controlled by far rightwing corporations. Obama is a good guy, in my opinion, truly elected (by a larger margin than we know), and doing the best that he can--he might even like to curtail the out-of-control 'military-industrial complex'--but he is operating under severe constrictions. The best thing we could do for ourselves, our country and Obama, is to rid our election system of 'TRADE SECRET' code and restore transparent vote counting, so that we can prevent him being Diebolded out of office, and, of course, start electing real representatives of the people to Congress.
Lesson no. 3: The bitter lesson of the awfulness of corporate 'news' monopolies is before us. Likely, we cannot do much about it, until we restore transparent vote counting, but we should do what we can. Ditto--our filthy campaign money system.
Lesson no. 4: The mistake of the Sixties generation--my generation--was in not fully comprehending WHY the Vietnam War occurred, and addressing the root of the problem: the 'military-industrial complex' with a secret government, working on its behalf, to manufacture wars*. The Bushites' novelty was to direct this war machine toward a corporate resource war. But there need be no purpose to it. It is truly a Forever War, that perpetuates itself, no matter what. There WILL be war, because the war profiteers MUST have it, to justify trillions of dollars in profiteering. They are like a great cancerous growth on the back of the public--sucking the life blood out of every dollar we earn. There is NO NEED for 90% of this cost. We can defend ourselves very well, from any major threat, with 10% of the current 'defense' budget, and a little diplomacy (--and as for "terrorism," good police work). Our military spending is NUTS. Insane. Unnecessary. But it is self-perpetuating, never reduced, always increased, and when no serious threat exists, one will be invented out of whole cloth, as with the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror." We need to stay focused on this root problem--as we restore our voting system to transparency, and work on other mechanisms of democracy, by which to retrieve our country from this 50+ year wrong direction--which originated with the failure of the US to demobilize after WW II.
Lesson no. 5: Peace will never be given to us freely by our war machine. We must look to the mechanisms of power that we have--or can regain--as a people, to force dismantling of the war machine, and to achieve peace.
The secret government that manufactured the Vietnam War assassinated JFK, RFK and MLK in order to prevent the peace movement from succeeding.* JFK had just turned toward the new goal of ENDING--entirely ENDING--the Cold War (disarmament, peace with Russia, end of proxy wars, sympathy with the social justice cause of revolutions like Cuba's), when he was killed in 1963, and RFK and MLK were fully developed along those lines, when both were assassinated five years later. TWO DAYS after JFK was killed, LBJ ripped up JFK's plan for withdrawing from Vietnam, and said, of the war profiteers, "Now they can have their war."*
We need to KNOW this history, to understand it and to bear it in mind, when deciding upon political action now--especially with regard to President Obama. While methods for removing peace-minded presidents may have changed, we need to understand that any president who seriously acts to achieve a general peace will be removed, one way or another. And no one who does not agree to the perpetuation of the war machine will get anywhere near the White House. To gain power, Obama had to agree to this. We have MUCH, MUCH work to do, on our political institutions and on grass roots organizing before we can change this. Years, decades of work (--like the South Americans have done--we can look to them for the model--the democratic, leftist revolution that is occurring there now did not happen overnight; it took about a decade). When your impulse is to go out into the street to protest "Obama's War," go instead to your local county registrar's office and demand transparent vote counting. You will be doing a lot more to end the war machine! Antiwar protest without the power of the vote is fairly useless, as we have seen, time and again. The practical aspects of power--such as the power of our vote--has to take priority, although a groundswell of public outrage at the Forever War will also be needed, to protect those leaders who DO represent us, and to shift the emphasis away from leaders to The People.
In the '60s, they simply killed our peace-minded leaders. That's one way of taking away your right to vote. They also traumatized a generation with 55,000+ soldier deaths and 2 million people slaughtered in Southeast Asia. Now they mostly Diebold good leaders--or keep them in line with the threat of Dieboldization (combined with corpo-media 'swift-boating'--such as this crap from Newsweek). Don't complain about the leadership you get, in these circumstances, if you don't try to change the circumstances. You also need to understand the subtleties of the power that the war profiteers have over our leaders. Obama is severely constrained by the power of the war profiteers to destroy his administration and throw him out of office. WE need to act to remove some of those constraints. No one else is going to do it.
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*(MUST reading: "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters," by James Douglass. Douglass lays out the case, in meticulous detail, for the CIA laying the trail from Oswald to Russia and Cuba, in order to trigger a US nuclear attack on both, which the MIC thought they could win. JFK considered nuking Russia to be insane. After the Cuban Missile Crisis--when he stared armageddon in the face, and saved us and the world from a nuclear war by the skin of our teeth--he opened backchannels to Krushchev and Castro, to END the Cold War. Kaput. Fini. No more nuclear weapons. No more arms race. That was his goal for his second term. This is also meticulously documented in Douglass' book. LBJ--whom Douglass does not believe was party to JFK's assassination--felt he needed to cover up the CIA's intention, in order to protect our secret government from public outrage, and also to prevent the public's incomplete understanding of the plot, which might lead to a demand for retaliation or some other forcing of LBJ's hand. LBJ also opposed a nuclear war, but fully supported the Cold war. Thus his comment, "Now they can have their war" (Vietnam).)
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