Robert Parry: Obama Pleases the Neocons

[seafan]

We've seen this horror movie before.


Robert Parry writes:


December 3, 2009

President Barack Obama’s escalation of the Afghan War has upset many rank-and-file Democrats who had hoped for a more peaceful strategy, but Obama’s order to dispatch 30,000 more U.S. troops is being welcomed by neoconservatives, a group that has long favored U.S. military interventions in Muslim lands.

After Obama’s West Point speech on Tuesday, the neocons gloated over their success in turning the Obama administration’s deliberations on Afghanistan toward an Iraq-like “surge” and away from negotiations aimed at winding down the eight-year-old war.

The Washington Post’s editorial pages, which have become the flagship for neocon opinion, sounded almost giddy.

On Thursday, the lead editorial cheered Obama for falling in line behind the hawkish recommendations of Gen. Stanley McChrystal; mocked Vice President Joe Biden for claiming he had reined in McChrystal’s ambitious schemes; and praised the President for accelerating McChrystal’s timetable for deployment.

“This will make the escalation a true ‘surge’ and raise its chances for success,” the Post editors declared.

On the adjoining op-ed page, leading neocon Robert Kagan dismissed anyone who opposed this military escalation as an effete defeatist.

“People talk about American decline, but these days it is not in the basic measurements of national power that American decline is to be found; it is in the willingness of the intellectual and foreign policy establishments to accept both decline and defeat,” wrote Kagan, who curiously is attached to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

On Wednesday, the Post gave space to another prominent neocon, William Kristol, to sniff at the sop that Obama had extended to the Left, his promise to begin withdrawal of U.S. forces by July 2011. Kristol noted “thankfully” that Obama’s target date represented only a “pseudo-deadline” that could be readily pushed aside.

Kristol also expressed pleasure that Obama had bowed to pressure from the Pentagon and from neoconservative opinion leaders to expand the Afghan War and to accept George W. Bush’s mantle as “war president.” Kristol wrote:

“By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since taking office; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007.

“He also will have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power.”

.....

Yet, looking back at the failures of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, two troubling characteristics about the neocons stand out – a lack of empathy for people not like them (i.e. the Iraqis, Afghanis, etc.) and a stunning lack of realism.

Like classic armchair warriors, they act as if their theoretical constructs don’t have to be measured against empirical evidence, nor tempered by practicality, nor moderated by concerns about the loss of human life.

This also was a characteristic of the neocons who first emerged as important players during the Reagan administration’s brush-fire wars in Central America. In those conflicts, tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and others perished at the hands of U.S.-backed military forces.

Some of those same neocons, like Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan, reemerged two decades later to guide or advise Bush’s Middle East policies.

The neocon detachment from reality continues to pervade their wishful thinking about a successful counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the nation they persuaded Bush to put on the back burner so they could advance their grandiose vision of Middle East victories.

.....

To the neocons, all that is important is the American ability to project military power around the world – and especially in the Middle East. The reality of the disappearing U.S. industrial base and America’s decaying infrastructure do not fit into the soaring rhetoric about U.S. global power.

Yet, wielding the “successful surge” myth as a club, the neocons shaped the Washington debate about the Afghan escalation and now believe they have managed to influence another President to do as they wished, even while operating from more distant positions, like the Washington Post’s editorial pages, TV talk shows and think tanks.

With their ideological certitude and intellectual firepower, the neocons seem to believe they can will the results in the field much the way they dominate dinner-party conversations in Washington, with tough-talk, bluster and a readiness to question the patriotism and courage of anyone who doesn’t agree.

However, the real world isn’t defined by clever arguments over a chilled Chardonnay. It is a hard place where soldiers and civilians bleed and die – and where imperial overreach can corrode the foundations of a Republic.

It also is one of the bitter ironies that the same geopolitical thinkers who persuaded Bush to prematurely turn his attention away from Afghanistan – and thus enable Osama bin Laden to escape and al-Qaeda and the Taliban to rebuild – now are celebrating their victory in getting Obama to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to that same country.

"No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now." ---Richard Perle, to investigative journalist John Pilger

Perle Washes His Hands Of Iraq: I Was Not An ‘Architect Of That War,’ Neocons Had No Influence , January 8, 2009






Mr. President, there is still time to reverse this ill-fated course.





(Robert Parry allows unlimited use of his articles at consortiumnews.)