Opportunity for peace movement in Afghanistan debate

While the U.S. war in Iraq has been widely opposed since well before it was launched, its intervention in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 was opposed only by the left and peace movement. But now, for the first time since then, space is opening up for a broad debate on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The trigger, ironically, is the pledge of a so-called "peace candidate" to further escalate that war.

In his debate with John McCain about Iraq policy over the last two weeks, Barack Obama has reaffirmed his promises to withdraw U.S. combat brigades, except for a residual force, from Iraq by 2010. While the residual force, and failure to mention Blackwater's mercenary armies, gives enough wiggle room for him to betray his promise after taking office, his criticism of a "misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq" indicates that a struggle to reduce U.S. expenditures and reclaim the ability to redeploy U.S. interventionist armies elsewhere is really underway.

Obama makes clear that one main reason he favors force reductions in Iraq is to be able to expand U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, calling for "more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance". He also repeated his reckless call last week for intervention in Pakistan to attack Al Qaeda targets. Obama's escalation plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan continue the Democratic tradition of trying to out-hawk the Republicans, instead of tapping the deep well of popular revulsion to war to support a non-militaristic foreign policy. In no other way than this do the Democrats exhibit so clearly their allegiance to U.S. empire rather than to the will, and the interests, of the American people.

Liberal bloggers Dan Kovalik and Robert Scheer criticized this stance in the Huffington Post today. In an "Open Letter to Barack Obama", Kovalik pointed out that Obama's call for "changing the mindset which leads us to war" is inconsistent with his call for escalation in Afghanistan (as well as with his pledge to increase the size of the armed forces and expand the "drug war" in Latin America).

Yesterday, centrist foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski, purported architect of U.S. support for the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980's, also came out against Obama's call to expand the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan . "We run the risk that our military presence ... will gradually turn the Afghan population entirely against us", he told the Financial Times. Brzezinski cautioned Obama to avoid a four-front "war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran at the same time." The realist Brzezinski's decision to criticize Obama from the left illustrates how limited is Obama's break with establishment foreign policy doctrines.

With Obama calling for escalation and Brzezinski suggesting caution, there is now an opportunity for the peace movement to get a hearing if it calls for withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan in opposition to the Obama escalation plan. However, the peace movement is currently focused on heading off a Bush administration strike on Iran. While the danger of such a strike has recently receded somewhat, it does remain a possible last-ditch move by neocon hardliners. But it would be shortsighted for us to oppose only the administration's Iran saber-rattling and ignore the hawkish plans of the Democratic frontrunner.

Nuclear Supremacy as Morality Tale

The United States, which developed the atomic bomb, is the only nation that has used it in war. During the cold war, the U.S. initiated each round of escalation in its nuclear competition with the Soviet Union, and several times brought the world to the brink of Armageddon.

In House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, James Carroll traces the development of U.S. military strategy in the nuclear age. The emphasis is on the presidents, secretaries of defense, and other key leaders who built the U.S. into the world’s undisputed superpower, but many of whom who also had second thoughts about what they were doing. Its drama is the internal struggle within these leaders between nuclear weapons as instruments of strategy but also as morally unacceptable destroyers of civilian life.

Carroll is the son of an Air Force general and founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who broke with his father over the Vietnam war, became a Catholic priest, and then left the priesthood to write. As a child of the 1950s nuclear terror, his method is to use his personal roots in a Catholic, Air Force family to humanize and shed light on his historical analysis.

Curtis LeMay is the villain of the story because he has no doubts. After launching the incendiary bombing of German and Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, in the last years of World War II even before the invention of the nuclear bomb, he repeatedly returns in later decades to threaten nuclear war in the Berlin crisis, Korea, and Vietnam.

Henry Stimson, secretary of war from 1940-1945, proposes after the war to turn nuclear weapons over to an international body. James Forrestal defeats the proposal, replaces him as the first secretary of defense, and leads preparations for war with the Soviets during the early years of the cold war, only to crack under the pressure and commit suicide.

John F. Kennedy, the tragic hero, is Carroll’s emotional reference point. After blundering in the Bay of Pigs and nearly exploding the planet in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy articulates the danger and calls for an end to the arms race in his speech at American University in June, 1963, considered by Carroll to be the turning point of the cold war. The speech leads to ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, but progress ends after Kennedy’s assassination in November.

Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, changes the Air Force’s strategy from massive retaliation to flexible retaliation, but then approves a new generation of missiles. After guiding the Vietnam war for several years, he testifies to Congress in 1967 that the bombing of North Vietnam is futile. Two months later he is out of office.

Richard Nixon, days from removal in the Watergate scandal, threatens to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike while in an alcoholic haze.

Jimmy Carter proposes to the Joint Chiefs that the U.S. reduce the number of nuclear weapons to a few hundred, but his plan is stopped by the “generals’ revolt” and by Paul Nitze, “Cassandra of the nuclear age”, who exaggerates the Soviet threat. Carter, the would-be disarmer, ends his term by approving the MX missile and the Carter Doctrine, in which the U.S. asserts that it will defend access to Persian Gulf oil “by any means necessary, including military force”. Carroll draws the lesson that “good intentions are not enough. Ideals are not enough…. Those of us who bathe in the soothing water of virtuous intentions, eschewing the gritty challenges of political struggle and bureaucratic infighting, imagining that the call to peace is enough to bring it, must acknowledge Carter as our character ideal. His [lack of] achievements stand as our rebuke.”

Clinton is equally ineffective at bringing the generals to heel. Losing credibility with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” fiasco, he cannot control the Pentagon.

To explain the force behind the U.S. military buildup, Carroll speaks of a “Niagara current” pushing the U.S. towards war. But what is the source of this current? The quest for military contracts, rivalry between the U.S. armed services for preeminence, and virulent anti-Communism, are mentioned as reasons, but Carroll offers no study of these factors or how they may be turned around -- and of course, he misses the biggest factor underlying the U.S. military establishment.

Compared to Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb, another peace activist's history of U.S. nuclear might, Carroll’s political analysis is almost nonexistent. He does not mention empire, does not explain that the Pentagon serves the U.S. drive to global domination, does not see that it serves the interests of a ruling class against those of the great majority.

In fact, Carroll does not agree that there is an “us” and a “them”. When the 1967 March on the Pentagon chants “Out, demons! Out!”, Carroll replies, “whatever the men in the Pentagon were to me by then, they were not demons.” Instead of following the vision of Catholic liberation theology which seeks to mobilize the victims to change unjust institutions, Carroll’s focus is on individual choices and morality, on acceptable use of force in national policy. “Every notion of a ‘just war’ presumed ‘proportionality’, the idea of consonance between ends and means… But nuclear weapons would never be ‘proportional’, which is, at bottom, why the American embrace of them was wrong…. “ “New choices can rechannel the current in another direction.”

Nuclear weapons are immoral; James Carroll's is a powerful moral voice against them, and he appears to be developing a critique of U.S. domination. While his account of the roots of nuclear policy and of the way to end the nuclear arms race is vague and untargeted, Carroll is an eloquent critic of the insanity of global domination through nuclear weapons.

Their foreign policy debate ... and ours

Joseph S. Nye, prominent foreign policy academic and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, writes in the Harvard Magazine that the United States should "become a smart power once again by investing in global public goods-- providing services and policies that people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of leadership by the largest county. That means support for international institutions, aligning our country with international development, promoting public health, ... maintaining an open international economy, and dealing seriously with climate change." Nye calls this agenda a "liberal realist foreign policy".

Except for the "open economy" part (for open, read free-trade capitalist), this sounds not so bad. But is such a policy on the foreseeable agenda?

For the past decade, the conventional wisdom has portrayed a struggle between two wings of the U.S. ruling circles -- a neoconservative wing and a realist wing. The neoconservatives want to exploit U.S. hegemony while it has it to expand our dominant influence, while the realists caution that overreaching will alienate potential supporters and leave the U.S. isolated.

Yesterday, the Boston Globe published a comparison illustrating that the McCain and Obama policies on Iraq and Afghanistan correspond to this lineup. According to the article, the two candidates differ on where to fight Al Qaeda. Obama wants to withdraw troops from Iraq partly in order to send them into Afghanistan, while McCain wants to stay the course in Iraq to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq. So what's the big difference?

The neocon/Bush/McCain strategy sees U.S. domination of the Middle East as critical. Having taken a stand by occupying a major Arab and oil-producing country, the U.S. must hold its position. The McCain remark about staying 100 years is not an inaccurate summary of this group's goal. Its aim is still to build a centralized Iraqi state (except for Kurdistan) -- one balanced between Sunni and Shi'a and therefore controllable by the U.S. In this view, the U.S. must also confront and contain Iran and hold the line in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as prepare to fight in other areas.

The realist agenda evidently embraced by Obama sees the Mideast as only one front of the struggle to sustain U.S. hegemony. In this view, the game is lost in Iraq, and the U.S. must draw down its forces, allowing the country to split up along sectarian lines. The Shi'a, who control the oil, are allied with Iran, so many realists favor reaching an accommodation with Tehran, acknowledging its increased influence.

The "heart" of the realist position then hopes to follow along the lines of the Nye proposal, in which America would use its strength more wisely and widely, combatting world problems, earning it goodwill, client states and markets. Many parts of the world are in motion, and U.S. world domination could qualitatively slip away if it does not engage the restive forces on multiple continents.

But the realists' "head" knows that the conflict in the Middle East is not over. No U.S. hegemonist policy could accept a nuclear-armed Iran, which would give it qualitative parity with nuclear-armed Israel, or the loss of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus the realists are thrown back from their lofty, "liberal" aims to what appears to be merely a tactical refinement of the Iraq 100-year-war plan: fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan instead of in Iraq.

Does the difference matter to the world's people? It matters in two ways. If the U.S. is forced to retreat from Iraq, it matters (much as McCain says it does) because it means the U.S. has had to back down, because it would give aid and comfort to those everywhere who want to resist U.S. domination of their own countries. This is true even if the war rages next in Afghanistan.

The other reason it matters is that the "international development ... public health ... climate change" agenda, while it will never be adequately realized by realists (be they liberal or otherwise), provides an opening to debate a genuinely democratic foreign policy agenda. As long as these objectives are acknowledged as legitimate, it breaks up the super-patriotic consensus that has a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy debate. It creates space for popular forces to enter the foreign policy discussion in a way they have not generally been able to do, to link up with forces in other countries, and to demonstrate the inability of the realist agenda to truly tackle the problems of the world's people. Popular forces must take care to preserve independence from the liberal realists so that they continue to advocate their program when the liberal agenda is jettisoned, as it unavoidably will.

For Obama to articulate a liberal realist agenda would be a step forward relative to the history of the Democratic Party. The more detailed the program, the better. Although as president, the imperatives of capitalism would make it impossible for a President Obama to carry most of it out, the political space it would open up would be significant.