By all accounts, this guy is a fanatic whose career has been distinguished along the way by efforts to cover-up the Tillman fiasco, over-the-top leadership of the special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who relentlessly hunted down insurgent leaders, employing, to say the least, dubious means in the process, and, according to Seymour Hersh, heading up Dick Cheney’s international assassination squad.
Quite a resume, as they say. But, you have to ask yourself, what the hell is Obama doing promoting this guy? Of course, you have to ask yourself also why the hell he retained Gates and his underlings to manage the Defense Department, and why whenever his administration is confronted with some new or belated revelation of illegal or immoral or monstrous behavior from his predecessor’s regime, we are told that, geez, these guys were bad, you know, but we need to put it all in the past and move on?
There is a school of thought that holds that Obama is playing some multi-dimensional chess game here, that he is many moves ahead of his critics and enemies, etc., etc., etc. This viewpoint is absolute nonsense and wishful thinking. In the long run, all the psychoanalysis of the President’s motives and ambitions is ultimately meaningless. It just obscures reality. Barack Obama is a politician. He is relatively well-meaning and he is certainly intelligent. But, in the end, and lacking a mass movement to the contrary, or, in the case of war, an absolute disaster on the ground, he is going to respond to the strongest institutional pressures.
Unfortunately for the current administration, that pressure comes from the most violent, bloated, corrupt, and incompetent organization in the entire world, the United States military. I can already see my readers raise their hands in horror at this blasphemous remark. But lets look at the history of the world since World War II. I have always thought that a good case could be made for viewing the events of the past sixty years as a study in the degeneration of the American military. We have gone from being the nearest thing to a people’s army, an institution whose members were welcomed everywhere as liberators and which presided over the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, to the present state of almost institutionalized barbarity.
But to return to the main point here, the appointment of McChrystal, and why it is such a bad idea. McChrystal is the virtual poster boy of the new army, the unconventional warrior par excellence. What most people do not want to recognize is that the core principles behind the unconventional warfare doctrines go back to an analysis of the Wehrmacht and SS tactics in the occupied countries during World War II. The whole point of the exercise is the subversion of civil society.
(Here are links to some excellent background pieces on the subject).
It is a constant source of wonderment to the media and apparently to our political leaders, as well as others who apply themselves to not thinking for a living, that it has taken us more than seven years to stabilize and/or rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, and that by all current projections it is likely to take seventy more. But, honestly, that is the whole point of our interventions. They are designed to create failed states. They are premised upon the assumption that the societies subjected to their tactics and policies are inhabited by sub-humans.
There has always been only one plausible justification for intervention in Afghanistan, namely the pursuit of Osama bin-Laden, and even that was doomed from the start. Now we have an opportunity to reassess that commitment. Instead we seem to be lurching toward an even more disastrous course that involves doubling-down on failure by involving Pakistan. Further, we seem determined to put the worst possible man in charge, General McChrystal. For the left, or what is left of it, this might be a good place to draw the line.
Just for additional reading, there was a good piece in Huffington Post by an establishment figure, Graham E. Fuller, who used to be CIA station chief in Kabul. His main premise is that continued military presence by the United States and NATO is destabilizing Pakistan and that we ought simply to withdraw.
Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.
If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.
Words worth pondering. Obama has for some reason always had a peculiar attachment to the defense of the Afghan intervention, perhaps to prove that his opposition to the Iraq War did not indicate a reluctance to use force. Of course, the reluctance to use force, especially our particular brand of force, ought, in a sensible state, to be regarded as wisdom, but it is a further indication of the militarization of America that this chestnut seems no longer true.
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