No, I would not count Obama out. So what drives his agenda? What are its origins?

The Three Most Prominent Catalysts

1. Equality of Result

What Barack Obama advocates is as old as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, the agenda of the classical dêmos and Roman turba.

It is why the French Revolution emphasized égalité and fraternité, while the Founding Fathers instead championed the freedom of the individual from the despotism of the state. In short, equality of result doctrine ignores the role of markets, of skills, of tragedy itself that renders some of us ill, others in perfect health, some born gifted, others less so, some evil by nature, others good, and instead promises that the state can even us all out through its power of material redistribution. Give us all the same amount of money and perks at the end of the day, and then utopia reigns under the benevolent watch of Ivy-League professors and organizers.

It is a given that what we make is not our own, but predicated on the liberality of society. Thus, for those who were too greedy, too conniving, or even too lucky, the state must step in to ensure that we end up the same.

In its most benign form, we know this as progressivism or communitarianism, a big government, high tax philosophy that co-exists within democracy. Its more pernicious strains are socialist, in which the state ensures, through bureaucratic fiat and a labyrinth of laws that curb free expression, that redistribution is institutionalized. And the virulent form (thankfully with the fall of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China not so global-threatening any more) is, of course, a murderous communism, in which any means necessary are justified to ensure the desired ends and the rule of anointed apparat. Remember, history’s greatest killers (Stalin and Mao) do it all “for the people.”

2. Multiculturalism

But there is another element to Barack Obama besides progressive statism. A number of contemporary –isms and –ologies (multiculturalism, moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, post-modernism) also help to explain Obamism, especially in cultural terms. Our universities subscribe to race/class/gender theory of exploitation, in which much of the unhappiness of today’s women, of today’s nonwhite, and of today’s poor originates with the privileges of the white Christian Western male that are predicated on oppression.

It works like this: The ghetto resident, the denizen of the barrio, the abandoned and divorced waitress with three young children, can all chart their poverty and unhappiness not to accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality or drug use, or simple tragedy, but rather exclusively to a system that is rigged to ensure oppression on the basis of race, class, and gender—often insidious and unfathomable except to the sensitive and gifted academic or community organizer.

So Obama combines the age-old belief that the state is there to level the playing field (rather than protect the rights of the individual and secure the safety of the people from foreign threats), with the postmodern notion that government must recompensate those by fiat on the basis of their race or class or gender. Remember all that, and everything from the Professor Gates incident, to the dutiful attendance at the foot of Rev. Wright to Van Jones become logical rather than aberrant. Michelle Obama could make $300,000 and she will always be more a victim than the Appalachian coal miner who earns $30,000, by virtue of her race and gender.

3. The Chicago Way

A third and final ingredient to Obamism is the Chicago way. Here we see an interesting updated version of the old big-city, Daley thuggery. Rahm Emanuel threatens recalcitrant congressmen with reminders of the long Obama memory. The Axelrod/Jarrett clique ensures that the government channels stimuli to blue-states, that key Congress people are bought off with tens of millions of government largess, that every campaign promise — from no lobbyists and airing on C-Span healthcare debates to posting impending legislation on the Internet for set durations and “reaching across the aisle” — is simply cynical fluff that no sane person would take seriously.

So?

In short, we have a traditional statist bent on redistribution (Obama’s words, not mine), updated with the postmodern belief that race/class/gender oppressions require government affirmative reactions (which also abroad explains why we reach out to enemies and shun allies), all energized by an ends justify the means Chicago bare-knuckles apparat.
And?
These true believers, then, don’t really care that the Blue Dogs (if such really exist) bite the dust in 2010, if Harry Reid goes up in smoke, or indeed, if Barack Obama is reelected. Instead, they will institutionalize an agenda that will affect America for generations, move it sharply to the left, and earn a spot in the academic pantheon of American heroes.

Asking why would Obama & Co. be so self-destructive to push through an array of proposals that have no more than 45% of the public’s support is like asking whether the English Prof who teaches incomprehensible Foucauldian theory worries whether he has only 2 students, or whether the well-off union boss is all that upset that membership has sunk to 30% of the workforce, or multimillion-dollar-earning, Sarah Palin-interviewing Katie Couric is worried about her sinking ratings, or whether the New York Times columnists are upset that their mother paper is broke with subscription and readership down, and laying off thousands of blue-collar employees.

Instead, for the true believer, it is all about the self, and the sense of the self — and damn all other considerations. (We saw that with Jimmy Carter as well; that he destroyed liberal Democrat politics for a generation meant nothing; that he won prizes and jet-setted the world for thirty years meant everything. For these people, it is always about them — all the time. Let us eat cake as they end up liberal icons for the duration).

What Are We Left With?

The most blatant cynicism in recent American political history — a man who ran as a bipartisan who is the most partisan we’ve seen, a healer whose even flippant comments are designed to offend, a statist who assumes that the sheared sheep cannot stampede somewhere else, a reformer who trusts his honey-laced rhetoric can disguise Daley style-corruption.

On that Happy Note

Everything, as my dear late mother lectured me, happens for a reason, or at least presents a sort of logic — irony, paradox, karma, and nemesis being the best ways of interpreting our unfathomable existences. It took messianic narcissistic Barack Obama to expose the full extent of the mess that a once noble tradition of 19th-century liberalism had devolved into. Only he could have rammed it down the throats of the American people, and when he is done, we will suffer, but also sicken of it for quite a while.

Ms. Sultan began her argument by quoting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who says that there is no "moderate or immoderate Islam. There is Islam; that is it." She contends that terms like "radical Islam" conceal the true nature of Islam itself—a political ideology. She adds that the aim of Islam is to subdue the entire world under Shari'a. To prove her position, she quoted from the Qur'an; she also argued that the true nature of Islam can be seen in the Sira, or biography, of Muhammad, which, she says, has come to define Islam itself. For instance, Ms. Sultan claims that Muhammad's actions—such as marrying a 9-year-old and taking many women as concubines —means that there can be no equality for women under Shari'a.

During the question and answer session, Mr. Pipes pointed out that those who argue that Islam itself is the problem leave the West with no solutions, adding that, to truly reform Islam, Western governments must begin to empower genuine moderates. Asked what policies she would adopt toward the Muslim world, Ms. Sultan asserted that Islam can be reformed, and recommended Western pressure on the Saudi king as the surest way.

Mr. Pipes and Ms. Sultan agreed on some specifics, for instance, that Western governments must not welcome non-violent Islamism and should monitor the hate being taught in Muslim schools in the West. Overall, however, Mr. Pipes, while not denying what Islam has been or is, insists that Islam, like other religions, can and will change, whereas Ms. Sultan was more pessimistic.

Throughout the Senate debate over health care, the centrists repeatedly forced the president's hand by insisting on changes to the legislation that made Obama's liberal base furious and which will constrain the impact of this legislation. Health care was the second major victory for centrists this year. They also were able to cut down the size of the economic stimulus bill back in February 2008.

Why is this small group of senators so influential and will this change? The first reason has to do with the nature of the Democratic Party. Democrats have never been as ideologically disciplined as the Republicans, and they have been less successful containing party differences.

Moreover, since 2006, Democratic leaders embraced a campaign strategy of attempting to expand their numbers by encroaching into conservative districts and states: The 50-state strategy.

In 2006 and 2008, the strategy paid off. The cost, however, has been that President Obama needs to maintain support among legislators who come from areas that don't lean Democratic -- or who don't share his policy views.

When some Democrats pushed to punish Lieberman -- who supported Arizona Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign -- by stripping him of his committee chairmanship, Obama refused and insisted on keeping him in the Democratic coalition.

The second factor behind the new kings of the hill has to do with the sharpening of the partisan divide on Capitol Hill. The impact of growing party polarization since the 1970s has meant that winning votes from the other party is extraordinarily difficult. Except for rare moments, neither party can count on winning significant blocks of votes from the other side of the aisle.

As a result, it is essential that the majority party remains relatively unified in order to pass legislation. Obama has learned this lesson well. With health care in the Senate, he even failed to win the vote of the moderate Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Because of such partisan intensity, the vote of just a few Democrats becomes that much more important. Nor can he afford to lose the vote of a defiant Independent, Lieberman, who still goes along with Democrats on many votes.

Finally, institutions matter. The U.S. now has a Senate that operates as a supermajority. The Senate now requires 60 votes on any piece of legislation given that senators are willing to use the filibuster on almost any bill. If the majority party needs 60 votes to pass a bill, and it can't win votes from the other side, a handful of moderates wield tremendous power.

[Excerpt - Continue reading on CNN.com]

Israel's response to that first strike was immediate and severe: it issued military orders categorising all forms of resistance as insurgency – including protests and political meetings, raising flags or other national symbols, publishing or distributing articles or pictures with political connotations, and even singing or listening to nationalist songs.

Moreover, it quickly deployed security forces to suppress opposition, launching a punitive campaign in Nablus, where the strike's leaders resided. As Major General Shlomo Gazit, the co-ordinator of activities in the occupied territories at the time, points out in his book The Carrot and the Stick, the message Israel wanted to convey was clear: any act of resistance would result in a disproportionate response, which would make the population suffer to such a degree that resistance would appear pointless.

After a few weeks of nightly curfews, cutting off telephone lines, detaining leaders, and increasing the level of harassment, Israel managed to break the strike.

While much water has passed under the bridge since that first attempt to resist using "civil disobedience" tactics, over the past five decades Palestinians have continuously deployed nonviolent forms of opposition to challenge the occupation. Israel, on the other hand, has, used violent measures to undermine all such efforts.

It is often forgotten that even the second intifada, which turned out to be extremely violent, began as a popular nonviolent uprising. Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar revealed several years later that the top Israeli security echelons had decided to "fan the flames" during the uprising's first weeks. He cites Amos Malka, the military general in charge of intelligence at the time, saying that during the second intifada's first month, when it was still mostly characterised by nonviolent popular protests, the military fired 1.3m bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. The idea was to intensify the levels of violence, thinking that this would lead to a swift and decisive military victory and the successful suppression of the rebellion. And indeed the uprising and its suppression turned out to be extremely violent.

(Excerpt - to continue reading, visit the Guardian website)

Excuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we’re all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day.  You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly.  Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War.  More than eight years later... well, you know the story. 

Worse yet, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates that a startling 58% of Americans, otherwise in a mighty gloomy mood, support the president’s latest “surge” in Afghanistan which will extend that war into the dismal future.  And worse than that, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, from the point of view of official Washington, next year won’t really count for much.  The crucial decisions on both wars will evidently leapfrog 2010.  So, on that score, we might as well just mark the year off on our calendars now. 

2010: pure loss.  But before I go into the details, let me try this another way.

In his 1937 short story with an unforgettable title -- “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” -- Delmore Schwartz’s unnamed narrator imagines himself “as if” in a “motion picture theatre.”  He’s watching a silent film -- already then a long-gone form -- “an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps.”  It’s not any movie, however, but one about his parents’ awkward, uncertain courtship, and there comes a moment when his character suddenly leaps up in the crowded theater of his dream life and shouts at the flickering images of his still undecided (future) parents:  “Don’t do it.  It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.  Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” 

For just an instant, that is, he’s willing to obliterate himself, his very being, in order to stop a nightmare he knows will otherwise occur. 

This unnerving fictional moment, which I want you to hold in abeyance for a while, came to my mind recently -- in the context of TomDispatch. 

Bombing Afghanistan Back to the Stone Age

Our endless wars are nightmares.  Few enough would disagree with that, even, I suspect, among the supportive 58% in that poll or the 54% who “approve of the president’s performance as commander-in-chief.”  If only we could wake up. 

I was reminded of our strange dream-state recently when I reread the article that sparked the creation of what became TomDispatch.  I first stumbled across it in the fall of 2001, after the Towers came down in my hometown, after that acrid smell of burning made its way to my neighborhood and into everything, after I traveled to “Ground Zero” (as it was already being called) to view those vast otherworldly shards of destruction via nearby side streets, after I spent weeks reading the ever narrower, ever more war-oriented news coverage in this country, and after I watched George W. Bush and Company mainlining fear directly into the American bloodstream, selling the eternal terror of terror and the president’s Global War on Terror that so conveniently went with it. 

It was obvious that war was on the way, and that the men (and woman) who were leading us into it had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans.  Somewhere in that period, probably in late October 2001, a friend sent me a piece by an Afghan-American living in California that spurred me to modest action. 

His name was Tamim Ansary and he posted it online on September 16^th, just five days after the attacks on New York and Washington, having listened to right-wing talk radio rev up to an instant fever pitch about “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age.”  His piece went viral and finally reached me -- I was hardly online in those days -- by email sometime in October after the Bush administration had begun the bombing campaign in Afghanistan that preceded its invasion-by-proxy of that country. 

Ansary wrote “as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden,” and yet his piece was a desperate warning against the American war to come.  He wrote with passion and conviction, with knowledge of Afghanistan and a kind of imagery that was otherwise not then part of our American world:   

“We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.”

It was the image of our bombs only “stirring the rubble” that stunned me.  I had been reading the papers for weeks and had seen nothing like it.  It seemed to catch the forgotten nightmare of the Afghan past as well as the nightmare to come at a moment when the only nightmare on the American mind was our own.  Our own chosen imagery was then playing out in repeated public rites in which we hailed ourselves as the planet’s greatest victims, survivors, and dominators, while leaving no roles for others in our about-to-be-global drama -- except, of course, for greatest Evildoer (which Osama bin Laden filled magnificently).  It wasn’t only our foreign policy that was switching onto the “unilateral” track, so was our imagery. 

Small wonder, then, that the strangeness of that single image moved me to gather the email addresses of a small group of friends and relatives, copy the piece into an email, add a note above it indicating that it was a must-read, and with that modest gesture, quite unbeknownst to me, launch TomDispatch.com. 

Ansary, an Afghan who had been living here for 35 years, wasn’t thinking only of Afghan lives and nightmares, however.  He had American lives and nightmares in mind as well.  He wrote about Americans dying, about the dangers of Pakistan, and especially about bin Laden’s dream -- to draw this country’s military into the backlands of Islam and start a war of civilizations -- while pleading against an invasion that, even on September 16^th, was unstoppable.  Of bin Laden, he wrote:

“It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.  Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?”

In the Biggest Dreams, the Largest Miscalculations

Well, yes, as it turned out, someone did have the “belly” for just that -- and far more.  One thing you can still say about the various characters who made up the Bush administration, including George’s one-percent-doctrine vice president, all those neocons ominously stashed away in the Pentagon, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who, within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, was already urging aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq):  they were thinking geo-strategically.  They had the globe, the whole damn thing, in their sights.  They were also desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do.  They believed that the mightiest, most advanced military force on the planet could shock-and-awe anyone into submission, and quite unilaterally at that. 

As still unrepentant Cold Warriors, even with the Soviet Union a decade gone, they were still eager to roll back Russia’s borders and influence, especially in oil-rich Central Asia, and so turn that rump empire into a second- or third-rate state of no future importance to the U.S.  They were eager to encircle Iran with bases and take down the mullahs. (As the infamous neocon quip of that moment went:  “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.  Real men want to go to Tehran.”)  With a president and vice president who were former energy company execs and a national security adviser for whom Chevron had named a double-hulled oil tanker, they tended to be riveted by energy flows and how to control them. 

They had their minds, that is, on a very big picture -- nothing less than the creation of a future Pax Americana abroad and Pax Republicana at home.  And they truly believed that Pax could be established at the tip of a cruise missile.  Having been shocked-and-awed themselves on 9/11, they were more than ready to return the favor, to use that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” as an excuse to do their damnedest, including, as they bragged at the time, targeting up to 60 countries, mostly in what they liked to call “the arc of instability” (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet) where terrorists were supposed to operate at will.  Nothing, that is, was too grandiose for them. 

They clearly saw the chance of a lifetime and grabbed it like the opportunists they were, and at first, it looked like they were right on the mark.  Two"victories" were the result, each accomplished in a matter of weeks within less than a year-and-a-half of each other.  The Taliban were gone in nanoseconds; bin Laden almost in their grasp and driven underground; Saddam Hussein swept into the dustbin of history.  It seemed -- to them above all -- like a miracle of modern military power.  Who could now withstand them?  The answer was obvious: no one. 

The rag-tag oppositional forces left in Afghanistan and Iraq were like so many flies to be swatted away.  So they sent their viceroys into Kabul and Baghdad to clean things up, which, especially in the case of Iraq, meant disbanding that country's military, privatizing its economy, and opening up the oil industry of one of the most energy-rich regions on the planet to the mighty transnational (and significantly American) oil giants.  In the meantime, the Pentagon would build massive military bases and prepare to garrison both countries till hell froze over.  The official documents they wrote for, and sometimes in the name of, the newly “liberated” Iraqis read like fever-dream versions of nineteenth century imperial fantasies. 

When reality up and bit them hard, they were already looking to the future.  They were going to crush Syria, drive Iran to its knees, make OPEC and the Saudis grovel (with the help of increased Iraqi oil output), bring China to heel, and, oh yes, get the terrorists, too. 

What a dream!  What a miscalculation!  What a nightmare for the rest of us!  Hundreds of thousands (or more) now dead, millions of refugees, ongoing war, a region -- those very oil heartlands -- destabilized, and of course the massive draining of American resources in two major wars (and various minor conflicts) on which almost a trillion dollars has already been spent and another trillion could easily go down the drain. 

And where are we eight years later?  The Chinese, the Russians, the Malaysians, and others have picked up those energy dreams and, in Iraq and elsewhere,translated them into success without spending a cent on war.  The Russians are back in Central Asia.  The Chinese are now sending Central Asian natural gas China-wards through a newly opened pipeline.  Meanwhile, the American oil giants have ended up with few of the spoils.  The American Army is a wreck and two minority insurgencies with but tens of thousands of relatively lightly armed guerrillas have made a mockery of that military’s supposed power to shock and awe anybody.  The latest laugh-fest being that insurgents have, according to the Wall Street Journal, hacked into the most advanced weaponry the Pentagon has, the video feeds from its latest drone aircraft, with a $26 piece of off-the-shelf Russian software.  In other words, while, at the cost of multimillions, Americans were capable of looking at battlefield scenes fit for destruction from distant Langley, Virginia, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, or various secret sites in the Greater Middle East, so were Iraqi, and possibly Afghan, guerrillas and terrorists on their laptops for nada. 

Eight years later, the Bush administration’s dreams of a Pax Americana and its domestic twin are in that dustbin of history along with Saddam Hussein.  And all the big ideas that went with our two disastrous wars seem to have been sluiced down the drain as well.  And yet, in both countries, the giant bases remainlike permanent scars on the land, as do the wars.  No dust heap of history for them.  Not yet, anyway.  Our wars are instead to proceed without rhyme or reason.  And among those deciding U.S. policy, military and civilian, none (I have no doubt) have placed a call to Tamim Ansary, wherever he may be.  It doesn’t pay to be right in our world. 

I don’t want to claim, of course, that no reasons are offered any more in explanation of our wars:  There’s Osama bin Laden, for starters, as President Obama reminded us recently.  No one in our world knows where he is, or even, at this point, if he is.  But if he still exists, he must be dancing a jig.  With possibly fewer than 100 operatives in Afghanistan and another few hundred in Pakistan (according to the best calculations of the Obama administration), he’s somehow managed to bog imperial America down in the tribal backlands of Central (and increasingly South) Asia. 

Beyond the damage inflicted on 9/11, he’s already helped drain the United States of nearly a trillion dollars in war costs and counting.  His"presence" seems to insure that, sometime in the near future, the Obama administration will further compound the folly of the last eight years by attempting to completely destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan with air attacks on its restive province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership is supposedly hiding.

If back in 2002 or 2003 you had presented such a scenario -- a few hundred terrorists tying us up in a trillion-dollar war -- you would have been laughed out of the country; yet it’s safe to say that what’s happening now represents, for bin Laden, triumph on a level that the attacks of 9/11, no matter how televisually spectacular, could never come close to.  And here’s the worst of it in this holiday season, peering into the murk of 2010, all I can see is signs of endless war.  As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fuggedaboutit.

2010: A Year of No Significance

Just to take our wars one at a time:

In Afghanistan, here’s what we know.  The president is surging at least 30,000 troops into that country, reportedly accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 private contractors, and an extra crew of civilian employees of the U.S. government as well.  What initially was announced as a six-month surge is now expected to last 11-12 months (if things “line up perfectly,” according to the general in charge).  That means the surge itself will probably still be underway next November.  Fittingly, then, the Obama administration has made it clear that it won’t even consider beginning what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called a “thorough review of how we're doing” in Afghanistan until December 2010, a process that, based on the last set of presidential deliberations, could last months.  Put another way, war in the present escalated form is simply what’s on the books for 2010.  Period.

Moreover, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry recently assured Afghans that July 2011, the date the president mentioned for beginning a withdrawal of American forces, is not “a deadline” of any sort.  According to Thomas Day of the McClatchy newspapers, he insisted, in fact, “that a strong American military presence will remain in Afghanistan long after July 2011.”

In Iraq, on the other hand, the war is officially ending.  In the last months of the Bush administration, the U.S. negotiated an agreement with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to withdraw all its “combat troops” by August 2010 and the rest of its troops by the end of 2011.  Ever since, on both counts, fudging has been the order of the day.  To begin with, all troops are, in a sense, “combat” troops, but it soon became clear that some of those now defined as such might be conveniently relabeled “advisors” or “trainers.”  This has left a good deal of flexibility as to just who has to be withdrawn by this coming August.  As for “all” the troops, although next to no media attention has been paid, the weaving and bobbing has begun there, too.  While visiting Iraq recently, Gates managed to sideline 2010 as a date of significance, while angling for an unending, if smaller scale, occupation of that country.  Under the headline, “Gates Expects New Sanctions on Iran,” for instance, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Timesreported this: 

“The defense secretary also spoke about America’s involvement in Iraq, saying that the administration expects that some United States forces might remain in an advisory capacity in Iraq after 2011, the deadline for all American troops to withdraw from the country.  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a “train, equip and advise” role beyond the end of 2011,’ Mr. Gates said.  He added, ‘I suspect as we get on through 2010 and begin approaching 2011, the Iraqis themselves will probably have an interest in this.’”

So scratch 2010 when it comes to Washington’s Iraq plans, and for 2012, start imagining thousands, or even tens of thousands of American “advisors” and “mentors” (not, heaven forbid, “combat troops”) on a few of those giant bases the Pentagon built.  Keep an eye, in particular, on massive Balad Air Base -- since the U.S. quite consciously never helped the Iraqi military build up a real air force of its own -- and the monster base complex, Camp Victory, on the edge of Baghdad.  Only if those are turned over to the Iraqis would an American “withdrawal” seem a plausible reality.  (Keep in mind as well that the Bush administration in its planning for the occupation of Iraq in 2003 always expected to withdraw all but perhaps 30,000 American troops who were to be garrisoned on out-of-the-way American-built bases for the long haul.)   

And when Gates says such things, it’s no small matter.  After all, what’s now being called “Obama’s war” might at least as reasonably be called “Gates’s war,” as might the war in Iraq that Obama is ostensibly ending.  In both countries, Washington’s basic policy was set in the last months of the Bush administration when Gates, then as now secretary of defense, was already ascendant.  The first 11,000 troops of “Obama’s” surge were, for instance, dispatched by the Bush administration, even if they only left for Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama presidency. 

Similarly, the new Pentagon budget -- a Gates-supervised document in its planning stages before Obama arrived -- is larger than the last Bush-era budget, and that’s without the supplemental bill for Afghan surge funding, now estimated at $30-$40 billion (and likely to rise), that will be submitted to Congress sometime next year.  The “new” military strategy for fighting our wars, counterinsurgency (or COIN), isn’t an Obama-era creation either.  It’s the baby of Bush’s favorite general and Iraq surge commander David Petraeus.  Advanced to the post of Centcom commander by Bush, he is now the key military figure who oversees both our wars in the Greater Middle East.  In other words, in war policy the continuity between the post-Cheney Bush era and the Obama one is striking, not to say overwhelming, and given the fact that Gates and Petraeus hold such crucial posts, that’s hardly surprising, just depressing as hell. 

These are men already preparing for “the next war” and, in that sense, Afghanistan is also our main laboratory for the weaponry and concepts that will animate our future conflicts.  Its skies and villages are the testing grounds for endless war, American-style. 

Full Drone Ahead

So here’s my fantasy this holiday season.  If I could return to the movie theater of those early post-9/11 days, I’d like to stand up in that well-packed place and shout:  “Don’t do it.  It’s not too late to change your minds.  Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, impoverishment, death, and a population whose character will be monstrous.” 

I’d like, that is, to obliterate TomDispatch -- for without the Afghan invasion and war, the one that, all these years later, only grows wider, my website would never have existed.  

And yet, here’s the saddest thing:  I know full well that its future is assured as long as I care to do it.  Our American way of life is a way of war.  War and more war.  2010, a snap.  2011, no problem.  2012, 2013, Ambassador Eikenberry guarantees it.  2018, 2025, 2047?  Don’t worry, we already have one nifty bomber (advanced battlefield surveillance system, dogfighting drone) on the drawing boards for you!

Even without the geopolitical thinkers of the Bush administration, even without the necessary set of rationales, war has a force of its own.  Especially in our country, it has its own powerful set of interests, its lobbies and enthusiasts, its powerful weapons makers, its law makers, planners, and dreamers.  It has its own head of steam.  After a while, it seems, it doesn’t need explanations to keep itself going.  It’s self-propelled.

None of what’s happening in the world of American war may make much sense any more, not even in terms Washington’s foreign policy power brokers understand, but no matter.  They -- and so all of us -- are already in the grip of a nightmare, and nothing, it seems, can wake us.  So, for the last days of this year, as for the days that preceded them, as for all the days of next year, it’s full drone ahead and damn the torpedoes.  That’s our American world, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.    

Perhaps, though, it’s worth keeping one modest thought in mind:

In nightmares, too, begin responsibilities.

Months of intense pressure (see "The Battle of Okinawa 2009") had brought the Hatoyama government close to capitulation. The bureaucrats in both the Defense and Foreign Ministries insisted that the national interest was at stake and required submission. Moreover, the Futenma Base was a quid pro quo for US plans to withdraw—at Japanese expense—an estimated 8,000 Marines and their families to Guam. US Ambassador Roos (known to be a close personal friend of President Obama) expostulated, red-faced (according to observers) to the Japanese Defense and Foreign Ministers on 4 December that trust between Obama and Hatoyama might be grievously damaged if agreement to construct the Henoko base was not reached before the end of 2009. In Okinawa the following day, Foreign Minister Okada could only beg his audiences of Democratic Party faithful to understand how important this issue was for the US, and therefore for the alliance and for Japan. All previous LDP-led governments had submitted just as Okinawa had been forced to submit to American bases for more than six decades, unbroken by the 1972 “reversion” to Japan. The pressure applied to Hatoyama far exceeded that directed to any previous government of Japan, and many assumed that in due course he, too, would submit. He chose otherwise.

The mid-December decision was due to three factors, one long-term, one short-term, and one personal: the first and overwhelming one is the triumph of the non-violent resistance movement of the people of Okinawa itself, sustained since 1996; the second is the outcome of the 30 August Lower House national elections, which swept the Hatoyama DPJ to power nationally and especially in Okinawa gave them and other opponents of base construction a massive endorsement; the third is the strength of resolve by Prime Minister Hatoyama. He insisted throughout the crisis that he would personally make the key decision, and in the end that is what he has done, at least for the time being.

The decision was not solely shaped by US considerations. Japanese domestic politics played a critical role. Had Hatoyama submitted, however, and ordered work to commence on filling in the seas off Oura bay for the construction of a base, he would have faced the likely collapse of his coalition government (since both minor parties had said they would withdraw), the absolute alienation of the Okinawan people from him and his party (and in a sense from the Japanese national project itself), and the need to resort to martial law measures to enforce works whose legitimacy was accepted by virtually nobody in Okinawa. Submission, in other words, might over time not only have undermined the DPJ but might even have more seriously damaged the US-Japan relationship than resistance.

When Foreign Minister Okada visited Okinawa on 5 December, he was shocked to find nobody at all who would support the base construction project. His pleas to understand the American insistence that it proceed and his calls to recognize the importance of the US-Japan “alliance,” simply roused his DPJ audiences to anger. The Okinawan prefectural assembly is more than 90 percent opposed. Even the “conservative” Okinawan Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) League has said that it will switch from support to opposition to the base project if a decision is held off beyond the end of this year (as has now happened). Conservative mayors, including the Mayor of Naha, are increasingly lining up in support of the platform of anti-base meetings, while Futenma Mayor Iha, as Tanaka Sakai shows in the following report, has led the way in unmasking the machinations of Tokyo and Washington on the future of the base. The August election of the Hatoyama government has given Okinawan people the sense that at last they have a government that might listen to them.

Options for an alternative “Futenma Replacement Facility” to Henoko have been canvassed in recent months and they will now be submitted to a ruling coalition commission for further investigation. They include Guam (discussed below), Kadena, the US Air Force base close to Futenma, the island of Umage, just 8 square kilometres in area and 12 kilometres west of Tanegashima in Kagoshima prefecture, the island of Io (once known as Iwojima) south of Tokyo, and various unused or much underused airports in mainland Japan itself, from Osaka’s Kansai International (offered for consideration by Osaka’s Governor) to the recently built “white elephant” Shizuoka or Ibaraki airports.

Okinawan sentiments are especially aroused today as the lies and deception they have been fed by LDP governments over the past half-century gradually come to light. The Okinawan “return” to Japan in 1972 is now known to have been a purchase, in which Japan paid huge sums to subsidize the US war effort in Vietnam, opening the path to a system of Japanese war subsidies paid to the Pentagon ever since in the guise of “omoiyari” (consideration or sympathy) payments. The Japanese government, contrary to its proud “three non-nuclear policies”, has long given covert permission to US vessels carrying nuclear weapons to pass through Japanese ports and signalled its readiness to allow them into Okinawa in advance of any renewed war in Korea. The details of the “secret nuclear agreements” are now being exposed by former Japanese government officials who were party to the arrangements. Most explosive is the fact that Okinawans continue to learn more details of the readiness of their government over decades to pay almost any price to keep the US forces in Okinawa while sparing mainland Japanese the inconvenience of having numerous GIs in residence. That sense of grievance cannot easily be assuaged.

One major new factor in the Okinawan equation is the revelation, flowing principally from the office of the Okinawan town mayor of Ginowan City (reluctant host to the Futenma Marine Air station), that the Henoko project itself rests on a massive deception. That revelation is the subject of the Tanaka Sakai text that follows.

The Marine Corps documents that Mayor Iha Yōichi analyses call into question the official Japanese government claim that the construction of a Futenma Replacement Facility at Henoko is necessary to accommodate the Marine helicopter force by showing that the 2006 Guam Integrated Military Development Plan is a design to accommodate those helicopter forces plus battle force, artillery and supply units. If the Futenma Marines are designated under Pentagon plans for relocation to Guam anyway, the Henoko project loses its strategic purpose. And the foundations for Japanese government payments to maintain US forces in Okinawa, still less to pay for their transfer to Guam, are baseless. Even before the Iha revelations, military critics in Japan questioned the rationale behind the Agreement on Reorganization of US Forces in Japan and the Guam Treaty, many viewing them as new forms of coercion and of the secret diplomacy that has long characterized US-Japan dealings on Okinawa. If the Marines are going to Guam anyway, under Pentagon plans, the real design of the Guam Treaty agreements can only be to siphon off further substantial Japanese subsidies to the Pentagon, to provide a foothold for the Marines in an Okinawan resort location, or, perhaps, a fine new facility eventually for Japan’s own Self Defense Forces.

The Government of Japan’s initial response has been to deny Mayor Iha’s claims and the national media has yet to pursue them seriously. They are, however, based on persuasive US documentation and on the evidence of Iha’s investigations in Guam. Certainly, they sharply contradict the official rationale for the Henoko base construction and the official understanding of the Guam transfer. Now that the relocation issue has been returned to the drawing board, the newly established coalition body to study and report on the relocation issue has on the table many interesting and potentially explosive questions to examine.

[Excerpt, continue reading at http://japanfocus.org/-Tanaka-Sakai/3274]

[Antony Adolf, author of Peace: A World History (Polity Press, Wiley Distributor) is publisher and host of One World, Many Peace: Current Events Creating the Future, Blog and Podcast.]

The first question is to what extent the missile deployments to Poland contravene Obama's celebrated decision to shut down President George W. Bush's European missile shield earlier this year. The decision to shelve the widely contentious program was welcomed by Russia's premier, the primary opponent to Bush's plan because of its stationing in former Soviet satellites. If saving Russia face is the goal, doing it at the expense of local hosts is too high a cost because of potential “blowback,” the official CIA term for missions that come back to haunt, like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The response of the intended host countries was mixed at best and grudging at worst: there's more than just a bit of money and might involved in hosting U.S. Military bases, setting aside for a moment the equally tremendous costs.

At the time of the announcement, I optimistically heralded Obama's bold move as ushering in a new period of global détente. There certainly could have been if he wasn't proving so keen on taking back door measures to achieve front line military objectives, as with Poland and the Czech republic. Toying with the type, quantity and locations of missile launchers so that they do not constitute a 'shield' is smokescreening of the first order and needs immediate unmasking as such. Whether Patriot missiles, SM-3, here or there: a weapon by any other name is still as deadly, and its supporting staff still as damaging, in this case a missile shield and the U.S. soldiers stationed to man and if need be launch them.

The second major question in regards to Polish military cooperation are the terms of the SOFA itself. Such agreements have generally been the bane of countries that host U.S. military operations because of their blatant and seemingly incontrovertible double standards for U.S. military personnel and locals, even when they come with considerably bounty. All but a few of the 800 or so U.S. Bases worldwide have SOFAs in place, usually considered a prerequisite for the military and its civilian contractor entourage to move in. The latter often have even less accountability than the former, and a large part are employees of Halliburton subsidiaries.

American bases in Okinawa, for example, are among the most longstanding and most visible stain along these lines, as rapes, destruction of private property and environmental and noise pollution (among other crimes) by U.S. personnel have gone unpunished because they are unpunishable according to the SOFA in place. These are, to be polite, blemishes upon the brave and diligent record of American soldiers abroad who work and play by the rules. Thousands of violations like these are reported at U.S. bases yearly, from drunken brawls to prisoner abuse and torture, the last of which Obama also pledged to end as one of his first Presidential acts. If the missiles are a first Presidential take-back, will torture under the SOFA be a second?

Arguably the most astutely critical scholar of SOFAs globally, Chalmers Johnson, may contend that because SOFAs and the bases or installations they cover are inextricably tied to each other as to stipulations of jurisdiction, both should rejected outright. I think that being able to intercept missiles launched by rogue states and terrorists (nuclear or otherwise) is a reasonable and pragmatic proposition, need not be linked to a shield-in-disguise, and can be operated by locals with sufficient training and cooperation. If the U.S. believes it can do something similar on the level of a country (namely, 'train' Iraqi and Afghan police forces and government officials), surely it can in a militarily-secured area of a few square miles.

A foreign U.S. Base operated entirely by locals would bypass the need for a traditional SOFA, preserve Obama's "good guy" image to Bush's "bad" domestically and internationally, and limit the downsides for Eastern Europeans while maximizing the upsides. For better or worse, the world does not yet have a global police system other than the either barbarously zealous or immorally reluctant U.S., depending on who is in charge. I have argued elsewhere that NATO should be put under a reformed U.N. command. But doing so is unlikely to transform SOFAs into comfortable couches armed forces and locals alike can sit on together until the raison d’être of military bases abroad are addressed to the point of disappearance.

In fact, you didn’t have to look far that week to see signs of trouble in the military.  It’s true that Major Nadil Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist who murdered 12 military personnel and one civilian, while wounding 29, at Fort Hood, Texas, had at least briefly faded from the news.  In Grant County, Oregon, however, a judge sentenced 27-year-old Jessie Bratcher, an Iraq veteran, to a state psychiatric hospital in a murder case in which he had shot an unarmed civilian during what was claimed to be a post-traumatic stress disorder-induced “war flashback.”

Meanwhile, in Boise, Idaho, George Nickel Jr., another Iraq War veteran, armed with a handgun and wearing “a tactical vest with as many as 90 rounds of ammunition,” and “accused of shooting into two locked apartments before getting into an armed confrontation with Boise police officers this summer,” pleaded guilty to “the unlawful discharge of a firearm into an occupied dwelling.” Nickel, whose year in Iraq was spent disarming IEDs, “suffered a broken leg and shrapnel in his face in a roadside bomb explosion that killed three Idaho soldiers.”  He is “diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.”  He faces up to 15 years in prison.  

Last week, across the continent, 20-year old Joshua Hunter, a military policeman accused of stabbing “his two Army buddies” to death in the apartment they shared near Fort Drum in New York state, was arraigned on second-degree murder charges.  All three men had served in Iraq.  Hunter’s last message at MySpace included this: "I will not be stopped until I get my revenge."  According to the Associated Press, Hunter's wife said “that her husband was outgoing before he went to war, but when he returned stateside, he was an emotional wreck. ‘He wasn't in any good mental shape at all… I tried to get him to go to therapy. They prescribed him medicine and stuff, but it just wasn't enough.’"

Unlike the week when Hasan struck at Ft. Hood and media attention was overwhelming, stories like these are small-scale and generally local in nature, yet they have now become a regular feature of the American landscape.  Most of us may only half-notice, and yet something is happening here, even if we don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones.  Certainly, William Astore, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular, has a strong sense of where it may lead.  Tom

“They’re Wasted”
The Price of Pushing Our Troops Too Far
By William Astore

When I was on active duty in the military, an Army friend used to remind me: “Any day you’re not being shot at is a good Army day.”  Today’s troops, especially if they’re “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t have enough good Army days.  Many of them are on their fourth or fifth deployments to a combat zone.  They’re stressed out and tired; they miss their spouses and families.  And often they’ve seen things they wish they’d never seen.

But you’d hardly have known this listening to the debate over President Obama’s decision to escalate yet again in Afghanistan.  Its tone was remarkably antiseptic.  I can’t help recalling old wargames I played as a kid in which deploying infantry brigades to faraway places was as simple as picking up a few cardboard counters, tossing the dice, and pinning my troops to a new spot on the map.  No gore splattered on my face when I rolled snake eyes after pushing my grunts too far into the Fulda Gap while playing MechWar ‘77.

As we roll the dice again in Central Asia, it’s clear that we’re pushing our Army and Marines too far.  Naturally, our troops, notably the brass, will deny this.  For them, it’s “Army Strong” or “Semper Fi”; only losers whine or bellyache.  Well, we Americans need to recognize the limits on our troops, even if they refuse to do so.

So let me be blunt: We’re wearing them out. 

Our “Wasted” Troops

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, our Army is hollowing out.  Such is the predictable result of eight years of ceaseless deployments in support of ill-advised wars.  Remarkably, the Army has, so far, managed to maintain its combat effectiveness, in part by its recourse to a “Stop Loss” policy -- essentially a backdoor draft (only recently curtailed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) that involuntarily extended the enlistments of 60,000 troops.  It has also relied heavily on the use and reuse of the Reserves and the National Guard.  Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania noted last month on Meet the Press that “our troops are tired and worn out. [With respect to the] Pennsylvania National Guard, most of our guardsmen have been to either Iraq [or] Afghanistan, over 85 percent, and many of them have gone three or four times and they’re wasted.”

Signs of severe strain, of being “wasted,” are often not visible to the American public.  Nevertheless, they are ominous and growing.  Suicides have hit record highs in the Army.  Cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression, having reached an alarming 300,000 in 2008, according to Invisible Wounds of War, a RAND study, continue to escalate, constituting a mental health crisis for the Army.  Traumatic brain injuries from IEDs and other explosive shocks in our war zones, difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat, may already exceed 300,000, another health crisis exacerbated by a lack of treatment available to veterans.  Divorce rates among active duty troops continue to climb.  An epidemic of domestic violence and crime has been linked to returning veterans and to the difficulty of readjusting to “normal” life after months, or years, in combat zones.  These are just five of the better documented signs of an Army that’s struggling to cope with wars of unprecedented length and still uncertain outcomes.

To maintain its force structure, given these kinds of symptomatic pressures, the Army has taken several questionable steps.  It has boosted the maximum age of enlistment from age 35 to age 42 at a time when its operational tempo is burning out far younger men and women.  It has authorized enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 for new soldiers, and reenlistment bonuses to select soldiers, also for up to $40,000.  As the Army attempts to entice enlistees with big-money bonuses and benefits, it’s also accepting more recruits who lack high school diplomas; the rate of new recruits with high school diplomas declined to 71% in 2008, a 25-year low.  Counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns -- the sort of wars promoted by Centcom commander General David Petraeus and Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal -- theoretically demand restraint, tact, and flexibility exercised at the squad level by so-called strategic corporals.  What’s the likelihood that enough of today’s recruits will develop the sophistication, the so-called “soft” yet decidedly hard-won “people skills” they need to succeed as strategic corporals?

Within the officer ranks, the Army has been boosting the success rate of those promoted to major (a point at which weaker officers are typically winnowed out) to better than 95%.  In the past, it hovered around 80%.  As Colonel Paul Aswell, chief of the Army’s Officer Personnel Policy Division notes, “Every [Army promotion] board is going to select every officer that they can to [the rank of] major for as far as I can see right now.” 

Because so many seasoned but stressed-out captains are choosing to leave the Army after their initial service commitment is up, the selection rate for major will likely remain above 90% for years to come.  “[W]e really don’t think that’s healthy,” concludes Aswell.  Plans to add 65,000 new recruits to the Army over the next few years only exacerbate the problem; an expanded Army necessitates even more field-grade billets.  Many of these new billets are likely to remain vacant, since it takes 10 years to develop the “Iron Majors,”who, along with mid-level NCOs, form the core of the Army.

Instead of a stable pyramid, then, think of an expanded yet still exhausted service taking on a more unstable, hourglass shape: heavy at the top with long-serving colonels and generals, heavy at the bottom with “green” privates and lieutenants, but corseted at its essential core due to shortages of experienced platoon sergeants and battle-hardened company and battalion commanders.

In the military, leaders are supposed to be promoted based on demonstrated potential to fulfill the expanded responsibilities inherent in a higher grade, but here the Army is trapped in a Catch-22 situation: It has to promote virtually every eligible captain to major (and quickly) precisely because so many captains are leaving the military.

Whether at the company or field-grade level, the simple fact is that the Army is bleeding experienced officers.  Ever larger numbers of promising lieutenant colonels, for instance, are now taking earlier-than-expected retirements, opening further “must-fill” rungs on the promotion ladder.  I know of two highly qualified Army lieutenant colonels who, as outstanding battalion commanders, could easily have reached colonel and might perhaps even have ended up with a general’s star.  Tired of repeat deployments, constant stress, and extraordinary burdens placed on their spouses and children, they chose instead to retire from active duty.

As we bleed experienced officers and promote marginally qualified ones almost automatically, it’s sobering to consider another modern drain on the military -- the vast pay disparities that exist between those serving in the All Volunteer Army and civilian contractors often operating beside them in the same combat zone.  Whereas an unmarried Army sergeant makes roughly $85 a day and a married captain roughly double that, a “protective security specialist” employed by Blackwater (now Xe) makes 14 times the pay of our sergeant.  Of course, no one joins the Army to get rich, but such dramatic inequities are hardly conducive either to high morale or to retaining experienced military specialists who know they can sell their skills at top value elsewhere.

Indeed, the Army (and so the American taxpayer) is being forced to compete with Xe, Triple Canopy, DynCorp International, and similar private security outfits for the services of experienced non-commissioned officers (NCOs).  Even a reenlistment bonus of $40,000 for a staff sergeant with interpreter/translator experience may be unpersuasive when such an NCO could double or triple his take-home pay -- and perhaps decrease his stress level as well -- by hiring on with a paramilitary contractor.

So what, you may ask?  Well, despite what Napoleon said, an Army doesn’t march on its stomach.  It marches because experienced NCOs boot it in the butt and get it moving in the right direction.  NCOs are the backbone of any effective army.  Lose too many and you’re done for.

“Decades More” of Dread and Death

It’s this under-compensated, over-stressed Army that we’re sending into Afghanistan to accomplish what could only be termed a herculean task.  It’s not only supposed to defeat the Taliban insurgency by force of arms -- something its troops are, at least, trained for -- but build a nation by negotiating a complex “human terrain.”  That’s Army jargon for the reality that roughly 80% of so-called nation-building operations basically add up to armed social work.  Simultaneously, our troops are being tasked with training an Afghan army that, despite years of effort, exists more on paper than in the field.

By all appearances, that Afghan army is hollow.  Making it solid and reliable in a few short years is truly a bridge too far for our trainers.

And if that’s an overly imposing task, no less imposing are the literal mountains of Afghanistan.  One can hardly overstate the mind-numbing fatigue suffered by troops fighting at high altitude.  Our soldiers typically carry nearly 100 pounds of equipment, including body armor, weaponry, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, extra batteries, night vision goggles, GPS receiver -- the list goes on.  Now, think of hauling yourself and 100 pounds of gear up goat paths at altitudes exceeding 10,000 feet.  Think about fighting a lightly-armed, lightly dressed, fleet-footed enemy with better knowledge of the harsh terrain, and with physiologies acclimated to the thinner, drier air.

I asked an Army battalion commander to put the plight of our troops and the challenge of COIN in terms the average American could understand.  His reply was sobering:

“Dread is the term most soldiers apply to their emotions in the six months leading to deployment.  Not dread of the enemy, but dread of the prison-like conditions of their service [overseas].  There are no leave breaks in Paris or at the canteen.  Even coming home for mid-tour leave is stressful as hell. 

“Then of course you add the mental grind of constant exposure to [the] lethal threat of roadside bombs and sniper fire and hotter engagements.  Or the converse that many times absolutely nothing happens for these soldiers other than traveling to, securing, and returning from endless marginally productive meetings with local leaders.  [Add to that] the separation from family, the enforced celibacy and enforced sobriety and uncorrectable disruption of social lives. 

“Imagine working without a break in your current job with no weekends… no social events, no wife, no bars, no permanent buildings, no funding.  That’s what the grind is… Putting up with those conditions and heading out the gate every day… and grinding away at those armed social-working tasks is the new criterion of valor.

“The cost of winning an insurgency is staying at it for years, decades.  In a fundamentally flawed operating environment like Afghanistan, we could be there at or above our current level of commitment for decades more.”

Decades more: So much for an 18-month timeline for our latest Afghan surge and withdrawal.

The Horrifying Legacies of War

By sending up to 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan, we’re further stressing a military that, if not entirely “wasted,” is nevertheless showing serious signs of strain.  This shouldn’t be surprising.  Our Army, after all, isn’t made up of rootless, robotic “universal soldiers,” but men and women who are deeply rooted within our communities.  Indeed, that very rootedness may help explain their remarkable staying power over the last eight years.  Sooner or later, however, such roots will be cut if we continue to send them on lost causes.

Consider our latest “surge”:  What will happen to our Army if its augmented presence only alienates Afghans further?  What if it ends up strengthening Taliban recruitment efforts and prolonging the war instead of shortening it?  What if our enemies simply choose to wait us out?  Are we truly prepared to stay for a decade, or even decades, more?

Prolonging a stalemated war will, in fact, only mean more hurt for both Afghans and Americans.  The hurt to Afghans will undoubtedly be worse, for their homes are the battlefield, but our own hurt shouldn’t be underestimated.  More broken bodies and shattered minds.  More echoes of the horrifying violence that accompanies war.

To paraphrase William Faulkner on history’s relationship to the past: Even when war is officially declared over, it’s not dead.  It’s not even past.  The horrors of war endure in the hearts and minds of the people who experience them, and they dwell, to some degree, in the collective consciousness of us all.

Are we willing, then, to sit and watch as our military strives to endure what may ultimately prove unendurable?  Do we really want to risk returning to the hollow army of the mid-1970s, reeling from defeat in Vietnam, that judged the American public numb to its service and sacrifices? 

What if, upon returning to the American “homeland,” whether in 2012 or 2052, an exhausted, embittered, and demoralized army again judges us and finds us even more wanting?  What if, as in the 1970s, some alienated soldiers come to see the public as treacherous backstabbers, with all the potential dangers that entails?

As we embrace policies and strategies that erode our army, we risk more than a weakened military; we risk breeding resentments and recriminations that could lead to a future domestic surge of militant nationalism of our very own, conceivably imperiling the foundations of our democracy.

And that’s a peril -- and a price -- too terrible to contemplate.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF).  He taught cadets at the Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and applauded thousands of troops as they crossed the stage to graduate from the Defense Language Institute.  A TomDispatch regular, he currently teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.  He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

The international community is increasingly aware that cooperative diplomacy is the most productive way to tackle the multiple, interconnected global challenges facing humanity, not least of which is the increasing proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Korea and Northeast Asia are instances where risks of nuclear proliferation and actual nuclear use arguably have increased in recent years. This negative trend is a product of continued US nuclear threat projection against the DPRK as part of a general program of coercive diplomacy in this region, North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, the breakdown in the Chinese-hosted Six Party Talks towards the end of the Bush Administration, regional concerns over China’s increasing military power, and concerns within some quarters in regional states (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) about whether US extended deterrence (“nuclear umbrella”) afforded under bilateral security treaties can be relied upon for protection.

The consequences of failing to address the proliferation threat posed by the North Korea developments, and related political and economic issues, are serious, not only for the Northeast Asian region but for the whole international community.

At worst, there is the possibility of nuclear attack¹, whether by intention, miscalculation, or merely accident, leading to the resumption of Korean War hostilities. On the Korean Peninsula itself, key population centres are well within short or medium range missiles. The whole of Japan is likely to come within North Korean missile range. Pyongyang has a population of over 2 million, Seoul (close to the North Korean border) 11 million, and Tokyo over 20 million. Even a limited nuclear exchange would result in a holocaust of unprecedented proportions.

But the catastrophe within the region would not be the only outcome. New research indicates that even a limited nuclear war in the region would rearrange our global climate far more quickly than global warming. Westberg draws attention to new studies modelling the effects of even a limited nuclear exchange involving approximately 100 Hiroshima-sized 15 kt bombs² (by comparison it should be noted that the United States currently deploys warheads in the range 100 to 477 kt, that is, individual warheads equivalent in yield to a range of 6 to 32 Hiroshimas).The studies indicate that the soot from the fires produced would lead to a decrease in global temperature by 1.25 degrees Celsius for a period of 6-8 years.³ In Westberg’s view:

That is not global winter, but the nuclear darkness will cause a deeper drop in temperature than at any time during the last 1000 years. The temperature over the continents would decrease substantially more than the global average. A decrease in rainfall over the continents would also follow…The period of nuclear darkness will cause much greater decrease in grain production than 5% and it will continue for many years...hundreds of millions of people will die from hunger…To make matters even worse, such amounts of smoke injected into the stratosphere would cause a huge reduction in the Earth’s protective ozone.⁴

These, of course, are not the only consequences. Reactors might also be targeted, causing further mayhem and downwind radiation effects, superimposed on a smoking, radiating ruin left by nuclear next-use. Millions of refugees would flee the affected regions.   The direct impacts, and the follow-on impacts on the global economy via ecological and food insecurity, could make the present global financial crisis pale by comparison.  How the great powers, especially the nuclear weapons states respond to such a crisis, and in particular, whether nuclear weapons are used in response to nuclear first-use, could make or break the global non proliferation and disarmament regimes.  There could be many unanticipated impacts on regional and global security relationships⁵, with subsequent nuclear breakout and geopolitical turbulence, including possible loss-of-control over fissile material or warheads in the chaos of nuclear war, and aftermath chain-reaction affects involving other potential proliferant states. The Korean nuclear proliferation issue is not just a regional threat but a global one that warrants priority consideration from the international community.

North Korea is currently believed to have sufficient plutonium stocks to produce up to 12 nuclear weapons.⁶ If and when it is successful in implementing a uranium enrichment program - having announced publicly that it is experimenting with enrichment technology on September 4, 2009⁷ in a communication with the UN Security Council - it would likely acquire the capacity to produce over 100 such weapons. Although some may dismiss Korean Peninsula proliferation risks on the assumption that the North Korean regime will implode as a result of its own economic problems, food problems, and treatment of its own populace, there is little to suggest that this is imminent. If this were to happen, there would be the risk of nuclear weapons falling into hands of non-state actors in the disorder and chaos that would ensue. Even without the outbreak of nuclear hostilities on the Korean Peninsula in either the near or longer term, North Korea has every financial incentive under current economic sanctions and the needs of its military command economy to export its nuclear and missile technologies to other states. Indeed, it has already been doing this for some time. The Proliferation Security Initiative may conceivably prove effective in intercepting ship-borne nuclear exports, but it is by no means clear how air-transported materials could similarly be intercepted.

Given the high stakes involved, North Korean proliferation, if unaddressed and unreversed, has the potential to destabilize the whole East Asian region and beyond. Even if a nuclear exchange does not occur in the short term, the acute sense of nuclear threat that has been experienced for over five decades by North Koreans as a result of US strategic deterrence is now likely to be keenly felt by fellow Koreans south of the 38th Parallel and Japanese across the waters of the Sea of Japan. China, too, must surely feel itself to be at risk from North Korean nuclear weapons, or from escalation that might ensue from next-use in the Korean Peninsula resulting not only in the environmental consequences noted above, but in regime collapse and massive refugee flows.  South Korea and Japan appear willing to rely on their respective bilateral security pacts with the United States to deter North Korean nuclear attack for the time being.  However, should South Korea and/or Japan acquire nuclear weapons, the outcome would be destabilizing, especially if this resulted from rupture of their alliance relationships with the United States.   Both have the technical capability to do so very rapidly. South Korea has previously engaged in nuclear weapons research but desisted after US pressure. Japan still proclaims its adherence to the three Non-Nuclear Principles although recent confirmation that the United States routinely transited nuclear weapons through Japan and retains the right of emergency reintroduction of nuclear weapons has tarnished Japan’s non-nuclear image.  Moreover, it has large stockpiles of plutonium that could rapidly be used to produce nuclear warheads. Such responses, already advocated by conservative and nationalist groups within South Korea and Japan, could trigger a regional nuclear arms race involving the Koreas, Japan, Taiwan, and China, with incalculable wider consequences for Southeast Asia, South Asia and the whole Pacific and beyond. These developments would spell the demise of the current global non-proliferation regime as underpinned by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Failure to reverse the DPRK’s nuclear breakout is also an important factor driving a general malaise in the exercise of American power which one of the authors has characterized elsewhere as “the end of American nuclear hegemony.”⁸

The advent of the Obama Administration in Washington, and the new Hatoyama Government in Japan, both with declaratory policies of pursuing progress towards nuclear disarmament and placing greater emphasis on diplomatic approaches to regional issues, might open a new window of opportunity for addressing Korean and Northeast Asian nuclear and security dilemmas, including consideration of new approaches to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and the wider Northeast region (Japan, the two Koreas, Taiwan and Mongolia).

In the above context, this paper examines the applicability of nuclear weapon free zones to the Korean Peninsula. Such zones represent a form of state-based cooperation that aims to denuclearize a geographic area.⁹

We note at the outset that the logic of a NWFZ requires major policy shifts by all the parties.  As one reviewer of this paper wrote:

The US needs to jettison extended deterrence and nuclear missions of the Pacific Command.  South Korea and Japan need to accept extended non-nuclear deterrence and reject the nuclear option.  North Korea needs to forego its only bargaining chip and minimum deterrent to US attack.  And China, depending on how much of it is included in the zone, will likewise need to make exceptional sacrifices.  Particularly important will be the domestic political obstacles to acceptance of a zone in place of weapons and nuclear protection—the bureaucratic, military service, and other institutional interests that are wedded to nukes.

Obviously, these are severe limiting conditions that unless overcome, would make it difficult to create a full-fledged NWFZ in Northeast Asia or even in the Korean Peninsula.  However, we argue below that a zone delimited to only the Peninsula can avoid many of these limitations, and over time, the other obstacles can be worn down and eventually overcome.