RIP reality: Obama State of the Union preview says wars in Iraq & Afghanistan are over

[bigtree]

Spencer Ackerman ?@attackerman
RIP reality RT @OKnox: White House State of the Union preview says wars in Iraq & Afghanistan are over. Sigh. http://go.wh.gov/x6dFKu


Orwellian to the extreme.

George Orwell wrote in his book, '1984' that 'war is merely an imposture.'

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This -- although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

As I wrote recently:

The Taliban is an imposture in our government's terror war. Our own invading and occupying military forces are the most aggravating element in the perpetual violence in Afghanistan and the region. Deliberately so. The resistant unrest in Afghanistan hasn't abated; it's actually intensified, even as our forces are angling to leave; even the military commanders have recently predicted that violence and deaths will likely continue in the future.

Our nation's possessive militarism in Afghanistan and elsewhere has divided our nation from within, and, from without, against our restive allies. The escalated occupation has ignored whatever Afghans might regard as freedom in our insistence that their country be used as a barrier against the terror forces we've aggravated and enhanced in Pakistan. Yet, the soldiers the President insisted on continuing to commit to his retreat to Kabul are mostly fighting and dying because they're not wanted there by the majority of the Afghan people. Our soldiers have been fighting to control the Afghans, and they've been busy fighting to get the U.S. to release that control.

Ready or not, its becoming increasingly clear that President Obama can't leave Afghanistan fast enough to outrun the mission's devastating failure...but, we're not really leaving, are we? Almost 11,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for the first few months of 2015 and then drawdown to about 5,500 troops by the end of next year; 'training' Afghan military forces and conducting 'counterterrorism operations against the remnants of al Qaeda.'

"Our personnel will continue to face risks," President Obama admitted in his statement. Understated, I think, given that he's re-escalated his terror war in Iraq and expanded U.S. attacks to Syria in a military offensive which the administration and military has justified and defined as an extension of their 13 year terror war by stressing dubious and tangential ties between their new nemesis and enemy and al-Qaeda. Notwithstanding approval by the new republican Congress of President Obama's pursuit of a new authorization to use military force, they're still relying on the original 9-11 AUMF to recommit our forces to their perpetual war. Only in the most evasive and contradictory terms can Pres. Obama claim that the "longest war in American history" is coming to an end.

I don't believe there was ever anything to 'win' in Afghanistan (as the president suggested; as the president will undoubtedly stretch in his SOTU to conjure an image of some sort of 'victory' out of his sordid escalation of Bush's occupation). There has been, however, much to lose in this repeated flailing of our military forces against the Afghan people; against the remnants and ghosts of al-Qaeda. We have already been shown, repeatedly, that our government-building efforts behind the force of our military in the Middle East has produced more individuals inclined or resigned to violent expressions of resistance than it's succeeded in establishing any of the 'democracy' or 'stability' promised.

There's absolutely no hint of lessons learned from the President's tragic escalation of Bush's Afghanistan deployment in which he sacrificed over 1000 more troops' lives in his ''surge' than Bush lost avenging 9-11. Over 2200 U.S. troops have been sacrificed in Afghanistan - 630 of those deaths occurring in 8 years under George W. Bush. Illustratively, the top three deadliest years of the war -- 2010 (497 deaths), 2011 (362), 2009 (303) -- occurred under President Obama’s tenure. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. fatalities in the war in Afghanistan have occurred during the Obama administration, in a quarter of the war's duration.

The only lesson that our military invasions have imposed on the region is the one which the authors of the deployments purport to oppose; that of the efficacy of military force and violence as an ultimate avenue to power and authority. In Iraq and Afghanistan, those who support the U.S. military-enabled regimes and seek protection behind our dominating forces are considered 'democratic' and legitimate -- while those who choose to be or find themselves outside of that imposed influence are to be opposed as 'insurgent' or 'radical' in their opposition and defense of their chosen territory against NATO's selfish advance.

Bush wrote the script for the U.S. in the region; cast the antagonists in his kabuki play - erected Potemkins of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend in contrived protection schemes where we create the 'enemies' we then claim to protect and defend against.

In President Obama's recent representations of a future threat to the U.S. from this new enemy in Iraq, we see echoes of Bush's 'preemptive doctrine' which many believed this new president's election was repudiating. The results, worldwide, of contemporary U.S. interventionism, speak for themselves. The Obama administration, almost blithely, is hoping their own military steadfastness in Afghanistan - and their new offensive stand in Iraq says something uniquely democratic and inspiring to the world. I'm afraid that all anyone outside of this country will hear is 'empire...'

Terrorists

Back and forth, the ascended,
Leaders hurl their followers,
Into the bloody abyss upended,
None of them can be bothered,

Apart from the ones who do the dying,
There's nothing left for the tyrants,
But to gather up more kindling,
To appease the smoldering silence,

Mourning melts grief into anger,
Brooding saviors rise to avenge,
Oblivious, now of the danger,
Their prideful posture does pretend,

Power maims to gain the ground,
Casts bold shadows across fear-ed's face,
Yet, reaps the bare Earth where death stands,
Disturbs dust which was laid to waste,

Shrouds the martyr's bloody veil,
Soils the tyrant's immaculate cloak,
Yet, Mesopotamia will prevail,
To spite the war its descendants spoke.

-- Ron Fullwood (6-10-2006)



ron fullwood@ronfullwood

[jwirr]

1. Well they are. Now we are at war in much of the ME - not to mention wherever some ISIS

supporter kills someone for the cause. I am not going to add a sarcasm sign because I am not totally sarcastic here.

[nichomachus]

2. State of the Union? Are they still going through that charade?

Just write it down -- send it to Congress. Save the political theater for something else. There's no requirement in the Constitution that says it has to be a pageant.

[bigtree]

3. »

[Bandit]

4. When a nation is at war many soldiers die.

How many US soldiers have been killed in either Afghanistan or Iraq in the last year? We may be an occupying force but WAR...Hardly..

[bigtree]

5. it's whatever you believe it is

War

War is an organized and often prolonged conflict that is carried out by states or non-state actors. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, social disruption and an attempt at economic destruction.

The 'war' in Afghanistan that is defined by the current president (echoing the previous one) as a battle against 'al-Qaeda,' is leveraged off of the original 9-11 AUMF. It's no coincidence that the present military escalation and attacks in Iraq and Syria are also leveraged off of the 2001 AUMF, directly conflating ISIS with al-Qaeda -despite the tangential and long-ago severed ties between the ISIS leadership and the 9-11 originated terror group.

That 'war' continues. That war is deliberately perpetual; self-perpetuating by our very military presence and activity in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.

But, like I said, it's whatever you believe it is - but whatever you call it, it hasn't 'ended.'

[neverforget]

13. 55 Americans died in Afghanistan in 2014

http://icasualties.org/oef/

Year US UK Other Total
2001 12 0 0 12
2002 49 3 18 70
2003 48 0 10 58
2004 52 1 7 60
2005 99 1 31 131
2006 98 39 54 191
2007 117 42 73 232
2008 155 51 89 295
2009 317 108 96 521
2010 499 103 109 711
2011 418 46 102 566
2012 310 44 48 402
2013 127 9 25 161
2014 55 6 14 75
Total 2356 453 676 3485

[Bandit]

15. More died in the USA

We are an occupying force in both Afghanistan and Iraq but we certainly are not at WAR.

[bigtree]

17. contributing to war; fomenting war, accomplices to war;

... refusing to define the U.S. as 'at war' only gives U.S. political mercenaries (in these countries and in our government and military) the illusion of clean hands, but we are the merchants of those misdeeds. Who are we arming? Who are these soldiers we're 'training' to fight? Who will they be killing? Where does the violence end?

It may well not be the unbridled military imperialism of the Bush-era, but still fraught with pernicious measures designed to frighten our adversaries away from their own military conquests; yet, their sectarian violence is often fueled and inflamed by the seemingly deliberate vacuum created out of our own disruptive, self-serving military meddling. The Afghan national army and police suffered record losses last year, with more than 4,600 killed.

The president has, in the past, acknowledged the civil, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts around the world, which he observed are on the rise, without mention of our own nation's part in fueling, funding, and deliberately or clumsily exacerbating many of those into perpetuity. In Iraq, the war President Obama had insisted at the beginning of his first term was 'winding down', our nation's invasion and overthrow of the sovereign government was the catalyst to the chaos and civil and sectarian unrest and violence; the breeder of our present violent nemesis.

in his Nobel Peace Prize address:

"A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts, the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies and failed states have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed and children scarred.

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.

The emerging practice from politicians in Washington is to construct mechanisms of preemptive aggression in the vain hope of keeping war at bay. The insulation of American life and limb just makes warring more palatable to Americans and, thus, more likely. Is there anything more delusional; more of a self-serving contradiction than fomenting war to prevent war?

[neverforget]

18. Do only Americans count when it comes to war dead

not those we kill? What about the civilians killed by both sides? Do they count?

You can have an occupation and a war at the same time. It's called an insurgency or low intensity war.

[CJCRANE]

6. IMO someone deliberately screwed up Obama's foreign policy.

Well, not just someone, a group of people in different countries.

The seeds were sown during his first term, which sprouted into ISIS in his second term. Now, unlike in mythology, armed warriors from all over the world do not just pop out of the ground, so this was probably planned before he was even elected and the planners just went ahead with it instead of following the new policy. And right now we're seeing some of the blowback (perhaps unintended) from these plans coming to fruition.

[bemildred]

7. Vietnam.

We were promised after Vietnam that the lessons would be learned. But the people in DC are incapable of learning, since they never make mistakes.

[bigtree]

8. we never learn, do we, bemildred?

...that is, as if our leaders, our government was actually motivated to change their behavior or policies.

Their incentive doesn't come from the will of the people or out of some logical and moral principle; they're motivated by their moneyed benefactors- ie. the military industries in their states and their other corporate influences which benefit from perpetual war.

[Art_from_Ark]

12. The lessons were learned for a few years after Vietnam

But then the Iranian hostage crisis made the US appear "weak" in the eyes of many of its citizens, and they desparately wanted to kick some foreign butt, so they bought the tough-talking snake-oil pitch of Ronald Reagan.

[bemildred]

14. Right, we have infantile political arguments too, I know.

But that is more of an excuse in my view, we are infantile, the Congress is infantile, because it pays well, and that's all they care about. A bunch of little enterpreneurs.

[bigtree]

9. »

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. Right. The GIs in Iraq and Afhganistan are there on vacation and improving their tans.

And, the guns they carry are just fashion accessories.

[AtomicKitten]

11. bless his heart

[Scuba]

16. "Our own invading and occupying military forces are the most aggravating element ..."

Our own invading and occupying military forces are the most aggravating element in the perpetual violence in Afghanistan and the region. Deliberately so.

Agree 100%.

But these wars aren't "senseless." They make perfect sense if you own a piece of the MIC.