John Kerry Said What? Welcome to Year 10 of the Long War

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising via TomHayden.com

Dec. 9, 2014 - Secretary of State John Kerry seems to be engaging in some double speak this week. (Photo: AP, December 2014)Secretary of State John Kerry today called for a congressional authorization of the New War before he didn't.

Instead Kerry proposed the appearance of an authorization before stripping the idea of real public and congressional accountability. Members of Congress should look carefully at this insult to their constitutional role.

First, Kerry said it was "crystal clear" that the President wants no US troops in combat operations on the ground, but that Congress should not, "preemptively bind the hands of the commander-in-chief to react to changing circumstances."

Second, Kerry said he doesn't want an open-ended timeline for war but that the authorization should run for three years or longer, safely after the 2016 elections.

Third, Kerry promised no wider war beyond Iraq and Syria, but doesn't want any constraint on US going after ISIS militarily in other nations.

HOW THIS HAPPENED

This is nothing but an attempt to avoid an embarrassing battlefield defeat during the next two years before handing over the mission of derailing ISIS to the next president. At the same time, it will limit the ability of Congress to question the policy once they have signed on. This is how escalation works.

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New Western Crusade in Middle East Has No Better Prospects Than Last

Photo: Iraq Kurds Protesting ISIS

Global Times –China - September 17, 2014

Washington's foreign policy has an increasingly Alice in Wonderland character. But President Barack Obama's policy toward the Islamic State (IS) does not surprise.

To consider the new US crusade, it is helpful to get first the context and narrative into perspective.

The present mess in the Middle East was caused by the George W. Bush administration's deeply flawed Middle East policy featuring an unnecessary war for "regime change" in Iraq. The US lied to the world about the Iraq threat and then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Back in 2002, despite warnings from many experts including academics, US military officers, diplomats and intelligence professionals, the US launched what president Bush himself called a "crusade" against Baghdad.

Back then, as today, what experts have to say apparently makes no difference. What does make a difference is what is politically correct inside the beltway surrounding Washington.

Policy is driven by a foreign policy elite linked to a variety of think tanks that receive money from foreign governments and corporations as well as receive generous funding from interested individuals, organizations and lobbies.

Many politicians ardently espouse the foreign policy line of the day, so as to themselves receive campaign funding and good press. This is particularly true with respect to the Middle East, as the pro-Israel lobby in the US is well organized and generous to friends in high places.

When it comes to Middle East policy, the US news media is of no help, as the pro-Israel lobby exercises decisive influence and in many cases ownership patterns are Israel-friendly.

Obama's policy has been a continuation of the regime change crusade launched by George W. Bush. Contrary to campaign promises, there has been no real "change" in US foreign policy.

The Obama administration joined the UK and France to launch regime change wars against Libya and Syria. Thus it is the West which created the present situation in the Middle East.

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FROM VIETNAM TO IRAQ, LESSONS NEVER LEARNED

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

[Ann Arbor, Sept 16, 2014 - Tom Hayden is speaking Wednesday night at Angell Hall, the site of the first Vietnam teach-in in 1965, on the lessons of Vietnam for Iraq. Excerpts of the speech are here, the full text is at the Democracy Journal online.]

I am joining many peace groups around American in expressing opposition to the escalation of the Iraq War into a quagmire that is likely to be costly in lives, tax dollars, and our tarnished reputation.

Ann Arbor is the place, along with Berkeley, where the young American peace movement demanded a teach-in, an end to campus business as usual, an end to intellectual conformity, as we confronted the growing horror of the Vietnam War.

There are many parallels between the wars of our youth and the latest one unfolding. Once again, we need to suspend the business-as-usual of our everyday lives and ask the questions that need to be asked. We cannot trust "the best and brightest" to have the answers any more than students trusted their pedigreed elders fifty years.

We need Congressional hearings, full debate and a vote on authorization of this unilateral war. In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" was contrived and exploited to stampede our country into a hasty and irresponsible authorization. Only two members of Congress had thegood sense then to vote "no" on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which permitted an open-ended bloodletting for more than a decade before the Congress finally helped put an end to it.

I would hope that the present Congress learns from the past to check and balance the war "fever" gripping Washington as described this week by the New York Times. I would hope that the Obama administration re-reads history and thinks again before excluding the Congress and the American public from a war by executive fiat. Only a Congressional debate with give legitimacy to the very real questions, and consideration of alternatives, to the questions many Americans are asking about this crisis.Whatever the outcome of a Congressional vote, the dissent deserves to be aired, the hawks must be held accountable, and the questioning must begin. No threat justifies the exclusion of Congress from its constitutional role, nor the American people from a voice in a decision that will take American lives and resources.

The Obama administration needs to take its case to the United Nations as well, since war is being planned against Syria, a sovereign state, and because diplomacy, beginning now, will be the only way this conflict will end.

During Vietnam, we were told that the "faceless Vietcong enemy" was disemboweling innocent villages, slaughtering Catholics, kidnapping children and imposing a dictatorship through aggression against South Vietnam. What we were not told was that our government was intervening in a civil war that had been set in motion by the French colonialists who we replaced in trying to "save" South Vietnam. We were fighting against a communist-led army, yes, but one who represented national independence to most of the Vietnamese people.

We were told it would be an affordable war, that our great country could pay for both "guns and butter", that it would be short in duration too. It bankrupted the US Treasury and lasted at least fifteen years.

We were told, and still are told, that counterinsurgency would be the answer, that rounding up the villagers in "strategic hamlets" to isolate the guerrillas, then a targeted killing campaign against those guerrillas, would bring stability to South Vietnam at last. The infamous "tiger cages" and Can Son island were the precursors of Abu Graeb and the dungeons in Iraq where eventually ISIS was born. Our own generals like David Petraeus wrongly interpreted the lessons of Vietnam to propose a renewal of Vietnam's failed CIA "Phoenix Program" and tried in vain to apply to Iraq in 2007.

We were told we were fighting for democracy, but in fact thousands of Americans were drafted against their will, families on all sides were deceived by one administration after another, secret bombings were carried out against Cambodia and Laos, secret CIA counterterrorism operations targeted alleged terrorists, and the repression came home in countless FBI campaigns to spy on, inform on, harrass, indict and demonize the anti-war opposition, from Dr. Spock to Dan Ellsberg, from the Catholic resistance led by the Berrigans to the Chicago 8 defendants. The Watergate conspiracy was properly described as a cancer on our democratic system, and two presidents were driven from office as a result of that war. Democracy was saved by the anti-war movement, including many soldiers in our armed forces, and by political leaders who found the courage to stand up.

Because our leaders didn't listen, or listened too late, the end came in Vietnam as a total catastrophe, the implosion of the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, and the literal expulsion of American diplomats from the rooftop of our embassy.

It may seem implausible, but who is to say these events won't repeat in some ways again?

Our government even now is spending millions on a multi-year memorial campaign to teach "the lessons" of Vietnam in our schools, while excluding the voices of the Vietnam generation dissenters who were right, and while failing in its ability to accept that Vietnam war a mistake. Some of us are meeting now to demand a say in how the Vietnam era is taught - just as we must demand a say in how to understand and approach Iraq. If a mistake is repeated over and over, the result will be the same. We must demand of our Sec. of State John Kerry, a Vietnam war hero who through some of his ribbons away and became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that he reflect on the very question he asked the Senate forty long years ago: who will be the last to die for a mistake?

It is a question as real today as before. Tonight we must begin again, announcing a demand for debate, diplomacy and democracy.

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Clinton vs. Obama, Iraq and ‘The Long War’ Theory

This photo is believed to be the ISIS forces moving into the Anbar province of Iraq in January 2014. (Photo: Associated Press, 2014)This article was republished by The Nation on August 13, 2014.

Tom Hayden on the Alternatives in Iraq

By Tom Hayden

Beaver County Peace Links via The Nation

Aug 12, 2014 - Hillary Clinton's flapping of her hawkish wings only intensifies the pressure on President Barack Obama to escalate US military involvement in the sectarian wars of Iraq and Syria. Domestic political considerations already are a major factor in forcing Obama to "do something" to save the Yazidis, avert "another Benghazi," and double down in the undeclared Long War against Islamic fundamentalism.

Clinton certainly was correct in arguing that Obama's statement "don't do stupid stuff" is not an organizing principle of US foreign policy. Instead of offering a new foreign policy, based for example on democracy, economic development and renewable energy however, Clinton lapsed into the very Cold War thinking she once questioned in the Sixties.

America's long war on jihadi terrorism should be modeled on the earlier Cold War against communism, Clinton said. We made "mistakes", supported many "nasty guys", did "some things we're not proud of", but the Cold War ended in American triumph with, "The defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism."

Ignoring the new Cold Wars with Russia and China, Clinton's nostalgic vision is sure to be widely accepted among Americans, including many Democrats. She ignores, or may not even be familiar with, the actual Long War doctrine quietly promulgated during the past eight years by national security gurus like David Kilcullen, the top counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq.

Put simply, the Long War theorists have projected an eighty-year military conflict with militant Islam over an "arc of crisis" spanning multiple Muslim countries. Starting with 9/11, the Long War would continue through twenty presidential terms. In Kilcullen's thesis, Iraq is only a "small war" within a larger one. Since a war of such duration could never be declared officially, the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force [AUMF] stands as its feeble underlying justification.

Obama has made cautious attempts to separate himself from the Long War doctrine and even seeks to narrow or revisit the AUMF. But Obama has never named and or criticized the doctrine, presumably for fear of being accused of going soft in the War on Terrorism. Obama's true foreign policy leaning is revealed in his repeated desire to "do some nation building here at home", which many hawks view as a retreat from America's imperial role. They prefer, in Clinton's words, the posture of "aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward," rather than being, "down on yourself."

While expanding US drone attacks, intervening in Libya and Yemen, and now escalating again in Iraq, Obama has emphasized another foreign policy direction that is disturbing to hawks. Obama repeatedly argues, “There is no military solution…" to the very wars he has engaged in, or tried to disengage from. That rational observation apparently is too "radical" for a government with the largest military in the world.

Clinton thinks the better approach is a little more muscular intervention - arming the Syrian rebels, for example, combined with some "soft power" on the ground.

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Don’t Go Back to Iraq! Five Steps the U.S. Can Take in Iraq Without Going Back to War

There is no military solution in Iraq—so end the threats of U.S. airstrikes, bring home the Special Forces, and turn the aircraft carrier around. (Photo: Jayel Aheram / Flickr)

By Phyllis Bennis

Beaver County Peace Links via Common Dreams

This is how wars begin.

Barack Obama says we’re not going back to Iraq. “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq,” he said on June 19^th, “but we will help Iraqis as they take the fight to terrorists who threaten the Iraqi people, the region, and American interests as well.”

The White House says it’s “only” sending 275 soldiers to protect the embassy, it’s only sending 300 Special Forces, they’re only “advisers.” There’s only one aircraft carrier in the region, they say, and a few other warships. They’re considering missile strikes but they’re not going to send ground troops.

Iraq isn’t a start-up war for the United States—we’ve been there before. And these actions increase the danger we could be heading there again. We thought we had a president who learned the lesson, at least about Iraq—he even repeats it every chance he gets: “There is no military solution.”

This is a very dangerous move. President Obama’s words are right: there is no military solution.But his actions are wrong. When there is no military solution, airstrikes, Special Forces, arms deals, and aircraft carriers will only make it worse.

We need to stop it now. Before the first Special Forces guy gets captured and suddenly there are boots on the ground to find him. Before the first surveillance plane gets shot down and suddenly there are helicopter crews and more boots on the ground to rescue the pilot. Before the first missile hits a wedding party that some faulty intel guy thought looked like a truckload of terrorists—we seem to be good at that. And before we’re fully back at war.

Iraq is on the verge of full-scale civil war along the fault lines set in place when U.S. troops invaded and occupied the country more than a decade ago. We need to demand that our government do five things right away:

First, do no harm. There is no military solution in Iraq—so end the threats of airstrikes, bring home the evac troops and Special Forces, and turn the aircraft carrier around.

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Behind the Madness in Iraq

 

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via HuffPost

June 13, 2014 - The U.S. had no business invading Iraq. We toppled a dictatorship on a false 9/11 rationale, which plunged Iraq into a sectarian civil war inside a war with the United States. We left behind a vengeance-driven Shiite regime aligned with Iran. Now the sectarian war in Syria is enlarging into a regional one. The primary blame for this disaster is on the Bush administration, but also on all those who succumbed to a Superpower Syndrome, which said we could redesign the Middle East. There is no reason whatsoever to justify further loss of American lives or tax dollars on a conflict that we do not understand and that started before the United States was born.

Anti-war networks already are sending online messages to Congress opposing any U.S. military re-intervention in Iraq. Representative Nancy Pelosi already is there. Those voices need to be amplified to help President Barack Obama stave off the most irrational forces during this crisis.

Then we need to construct a narrative that blocks the hawks from blaming Obama for "losing" Iraq, and turns the focus on the neo-conservatives, Republicans, and Democratic hawks who took this country into a sea of blood. Most of them remain in power, unscathed and immune, even occupying high positions in this administration. What they fear most is not an Iraqi insurgency, but the risen families of the dead and wounded, on all sides, that increasingly ask who led them into an unwinnable, unaffordable war. The duty-driven bravery of their lost sons and daughters stands in direct contrast to shameless privilege of those who sent them into harm's way.

As this immediate crisis unfolds, we must act to strip away certain delusions. The least of these, though still irritating, is the view of many visible anti-war "radicals" that says the United States never really withdrew from Iraq, but instead secretly left behind tens of thousands of Special Forces in disguise. This silly notion was meant to refute the belief that Obama had "ended" the war.

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Bin Laden and the Folly of Being Driven by a ‘Search for Monsters’

Bin Laden Is Dead, But Will

the 'Long War' on Terror Live On?

By Tom Hayden
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

May 2, 2011 - The killing of Osama bin Laden is a triumphant moment for President Obama and the CIA, allowing a symbolic claim to victory in the War on Terror, bringing an understandable feeling of closure for the victims of 9/11, and will almost certainly assure the president’s re-election in 2012.

But as I wrote in The Nation in October 2009, however, the death of bin Laden is not likely to end the Long War on Terror, now spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and a dozen other theaters of counterterrorism.

If bin Laden is gone, and his network heavily damaged, what is left of the terrorist threat to our national security that justifies so many trillions of dollars and costs in thousands of lives? Because of a fabricated fear of bin Laden, we invaded Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was to deny sanctuaries to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In response, Al Qaeda moved into Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed tonight. So why are the Taliban in Afghanistan a threat to the security of the United States with bin Laden gone? Surely there are terrorist cells with lethal capacity scattered around the world, surely there might be revenge attacks, but there is hardly a centralized conspiratorial threat that justifies the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops.

Now we shall learn whether there is another agenda that keeps 150,000 American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Wrong Turn: Obama's Diplomacy With Guns and Boots on the Ground

Let's Fact Check the AP's

Fact Checking on Obama's Speech

By David Swanson

Beaver County Peace Links via WarIsNotaCrime.org

FACT CHECK: Is Iraq combat really over for US?

By CALVIN WOODWARD and ROBERT BURNS (AP)

WASHINGTON — Despite President Barack Obama's declaration Tuesday of an end to the combat mission in Iraq, combat almost certainly lies ahead. And in asserting the U.S. has met its responsibilities in Iraq, the president opened the door wide to a debate about the meaning of success in the muddle that most — but not all — American troops are leaving behind. A look at some of the statements Obama made in his Oval Office speech and how they compare with the facts:

___

OBAMA: "Tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended."

THE FACTS: Peril remains for the tens of thousands of U.S. troops still in Iraq, who are likely if not certain to engage violent foes. Counterterrorism is chief among their continuing missions, pitting them against a lethal enemy. Several thousand special operations forces, including Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, will continue to hunt and attempt to kill al-Qaida and other terrorist fighters — working closely with Iraqi forces. Obama said, "Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission," while stopping short of a full accounting of the hazards ahead for U.S. troops.

Excellent point, but let's not leave out the thousands of mercenaries and tens of thousands of contractors.

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Iraq War Ending? The Real Story Is Being Hidden

US Combat Ends in Iraq,

But Will Iraq 'Invite' US to Stay?

 

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

While the Obama administration struggles to keep its pledge to end the Iraq war, a behind-the-scenes plan is developing in which the Baghdad regime “invites” the American military to stay.

Managing the withdrawal of combat troops was a significant achievement for Obama. But while media attention focused this week on the last American combat brigade rolling out of Iraq, US diplomat Ryan Crocker was predicting that if the Iraqis “come to us later on this year requesting that we jointly relook at the post-2011 period, it is going to be in our strategic interest to be responsive.” [NYT, Aug. 19]

That means troops and bases, keeping a US strategic outpost in the Middle East. Otherwise, according to some Pentagon sources, the Iraq war will have been in vain.

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Obama Pressed by US 'Long Warriors'

 

Threat to Iraq

Withdrawal Plan

 

By Tom Hayden

Peace & Justice Resource Center

Was it too good to be true? In February at Camp Lejeune, our new President Barack Obama surprised all observers by pledging to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by 2012, in accord with a pact secretly negotiated at the end of the Bush era. Previously, Obama was promising to withdraw all combat troops, leaving a "residual force" dominating Iraq for years.

Obama has restated his commitment to the full withdrawal on several occasions. But heavy pressure is building to make the president drop his commitment.

The most ominous sign of the gathering campaign to make Obama cave in came in an Feb. 24 op-ed piece in the New York Times by Thomas Ricks, the pre-eminent mainstream historian of the war. Given the political gridlock and growing turbulence in Iraq, Ricks says that breaking his campaign promise is the "best course" for Obama to pursue.

Ricks says "it would be best to let [read: pressure] Iraqi leaders to make the first public move to re-open the status of forces agreement" under which US combat troops will soon be departing.

"As a longtime critic of the American invasion of Iraq, I am not happy about advocating a continued military presence there", Ricks writes. Perhaps he is forgetting his 2009 book celebrating Gen. David Petraeus, The Gamble, in which Ricks predicted that Obama would have to break his vow to remove all combat troops to avoid "abandoning Iraq." Or his prediction in the same book that the US is only "halfway through" the Iraq War.

Ricks' epilogue was titled "The Long War", making him one of the earliest warrror-journalists to embrace the notion of a 50-80 year war projected by top counterinsurgency advisers to Petraeus and the Pentagon.

Everyone including Ricks agrees that the American public is completely soured on the Iraq War. Just this week a federal agency noted that the $53 billion spent on Iraq reconstruction, the largest aid effort since the Marshall Plan, has been squandered. [NYT, Feb. 22, 2010]

That doesn't phase our ideological fanatics who believe in permanent war until all their ideological fanatics are dead.

No matter that both Iraq and Afghanistan are trillion-dollar wars and, according the latest federal budget analysis, there is "virtually no room for domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors." The neo-conservative stealth strategy of destroying government programs by "strangling the baby in the bathtub" [the phrase of Grover Norquist] is working. 

The reason US military combat may continue in Iraq is that the Pentagon has not won the war. On the one hand, the US has installed a brutal authoritarian Shiite-dominated coalition in power in Baghdad, one closely aligned with the Pentagon's strategic enemies in Iran. That's not a victory. That same Shiite coalition has used its power to purge the minority Sunni candidates from running in the elections scheduled for next month. Gen. Ray Odierno recently stated the obvious, that the key Iraqi politicians purging the Sunni candidates "clearly are influenced by Iran." [NYT, Feb. 17, 2010]

Not surprisingly, the top Iraqi blocking Sunni participation, according to Gen. Odiorno, is the same Ahmed Chalabi who conspired with the neo-cons to pass along false information leading to the 2003 invasion.

These events may drive the Sunni community to revive its insurgency, which was contained by US funding of the "Awakening" movement and promises of protection. The return of insurgency would mean civil war. The alternative may be more likely, a demand from the Sunnis that their former enemies, the Americans, stay in Iraq to protect them from the Shiites. This scenario would be in accord with the doctrine advocated by Petraeus advisor Stephen Biddle [see Foreign Affairs, Mar.-April 2006]. Divide and conquer may succeed.

What are the chances Obama will keep to his commitment? At this point, the most likely withdrawal we can expect from the President is not from Iraq but from his previous commitment. How can he politically succeed in withdrawing against warnings from all sides that chaos and bloodshed will be the result? The Long War advocates have him where they want him.

The peace movement may protest, and public opinion may be unenthusiastic, but cannot be counted on to stop this Long War plan for Iraq if Obama caves. Last month there were only five American deaths in Iraq; for 2009, the count was 149 [compared to 822 in 2006].

If renewed American intervention cannot be stopped, neither can a reckoning down the road, however. The cost of occupation is more than a fiscal one. A permanent American occupation of Iraq will be like a giant breeder reactor generating deadly and unpredictable opposition from Iraqi nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism for years to come.

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No Collaboration with Torture, War Escalation

MoveOn: Break
the Silence on
Torture and War

By Tom Hayden
The Nation

June 10, 2009 - Progressives who have been silent on the escalating wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan have a new opportunity to change their stance now that the nearly $100 billion Congressional war supplemental (HR 2346) authorizes suppression of hundreds of torture photographs held by the Pentagon.

The amendment, by Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, is designed to bar the release of photos revealing torture at military prisons during the Bush administration, by exempting them from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.

Democrats are in disarray over the issue. According to Congressional reports, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at first approved the Lieberman-Graham amendment, then backtracked after hearing complaints from Representatives Barney Frank, Louise Slaughter and others from the Democrats' liberal wing. In the meantime, Hillary Clinton was dutifully making phone calls to pick off votes from the fifty-one Democrats' who opposed the House version in May.

Groups like MoveOn.org, with millions of members and campaign dollars, become crucial during close Congressional votes, either by their presence or by their absence.

When I recently posted an article questioning MoveOn's silence towards the escalating wars, the response of MoveOn's leadership was to question its accuracy and demand corrections from anyone publishing the piece.

I never meant to suggest that MoveOn's executive director explicitly or verbally promised President Obama at a White House meeting that MoveOn would keep silent about the war escalations. What I did write is that MoveOn told Obama they were supporting his domestic agenda, which, in Beltway culture, was a clear message that this former antiwar group would not be opposing the president's military escalation, nor his Predator strikes, nor the civilian casualties, not even his backtracking on torture promises. At that point, MoveOn had not even polled its membership on Afghanistan, Pakistan or torture.

Move.On's continuing silence only speaks for itself. While their internal discussion of Afghanistan and Pakistan unfolds, they at least could express strong opposition to the administration's non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, as well as support for Rep. Jim McGovern's amendment calling for an exit strategy by December.

But now with the amendment pending to suppress the torture photos, the moral pressure to break the silence is increasing. The administration added to its policies of secrecy yesterday by urging a federal court to suppress documents detailing the CIA's videotaped interrogations at secret prisons.

The Obama argument for suppressing the torture photos is specious. The administration claims that their release will inflame greater insurgent hatred against American troops. But the Abu Ghraib torture photos already have served that inflammatory purpose and the current cover-up will undermine confidence that America's secret policies are changing.

This is an administration that once pledged no more supplementals--the spending bills that avoid the scrutiny of hearings. Having reneged on that procedural promise, they now are loading the war appropriation measure with the FOIA exemption amendment, not to mention funds for swine flu and the International Monetary Fund. These administration approaches undermine the deliberative process and weaken the role of the legislative branch.

The real effect of Obama's censorship decision is to dampen any resurgence of antiwar sentiment and public support for an investigation of past crimes. Silence in the face of censorship means collaborating in the cover-up of torture. The political effect is to leave antiwar Democrats under greater pressure to yield than to stand their ground.

Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).

Author's Website: http://www.tomhayden.com

Author's Bio: After forty years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden still is a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation. Currently he is writing and advocating for US Congressional hearings on exiting Iraq. A more comprehensive bio, going back to the sixties, when he co-founded SDS and protested in the deep south

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Why Bush & Cheney Needed Torture

Bush's Torture
Used to Try to
Link Saddam to 9/11

By Marjorie Cohn

Portside.org

April 24, 2009

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn't believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded
183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury's 2005 memos asserted that "enhanced techniques" on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush's illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

President Obama released the four memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. They describe unimaginably brutal techniques and provide "legal" justification for clearly illegal acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the face of monumental pressure from the CIA to keep them secret, Obama demonstrated great courage in deciding to make the grotesque memos public. At the same time, however, in an attempt to pacify the intelligence establishment, Obama said, "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

In startlingly clinical and dispassionate terms, the authors of the newly-released torture memos describe and then rationalize why the devastating techniques the CIA sought to employ on human beings do not violate the Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. sec. 2340).

The memos justify 10 techniques, including banging heads into walls 30 times in a row, prolonged nudity, repeated slapping, dietary manipulation, and dousing with cold water as low as 41 degrees. They allow shackling in a standing position for 180 hours, sleep deprivation for 11 days, confinement of people in small dark boxes with insects for hours, and waterboarding to create the perception they are drowning. Moreover, the memos permit many of these techniques to be used in combination for a 30-day period. They find that none of these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Waterboarding, admittedly the most serious of the methods, is designed, according to Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of "suffocation and incipient panic, i.e. the perception of drowning." But although Bybee finds that "the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death," he accepts the CIA's claim that it does "not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard." One of Bradbury's memos requires that a physician be on duty during waterboarding to perform a tracheotomy in case the victim doesn't recover after being returned to an upright position.

As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye points out, the CIA and the Justice Department "ignored a wealth of other published information" that indicates dissociative symptoms, changes greater than those in patients undergoing heart surgery, and drops in testosterone to castration levels after acute stress associated with techniques that the memos sanction.

The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. "Severe mental pain or suffering" means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

Bybee asserts that "if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent." He makes the novel claim that the presence of personnel with medical training who can stop the interrogation if medically necessary "indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain."

Now a federal judge with lifetime appointment, Bybee concludes that waterboarding does not constitute torture under the Torture Statute. However, he writes, "we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion."

Bybee's memo explains why the 10 techniques could be used on Abu Zubaydah, who was considered to be a top Al Qaeda operative. "Zubaydah does not have any pre- existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from [the CIA's] proposed interrogation methods," the CIA told Bybee. But Zubaydah was a low-ranking Al Qaeda operative, according to leading FBI counter-terrorism expert Dan Coleman, who advised a top FBI official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
This was reported by Ron Suskind in his book, The One Percent Doctrine.

The CIA's request to confine Zubaydah in a cramped box with an insect was granted by Bybee, who told the CIA it could place a harmless insect in the box and tell Zubaydah that it will sting him but it won't kill him.
Even though the CIA knew that Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects, Bybee found there would be no threat of severe physical pain or suffering if it followed this procedure.

Obama's intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the President's constitutional duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

U.S. law prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and requires that those who subject people to such treatment be prosecuted. The Convention against Torture compels us to refer all torture cases for prosecution or extradite the suspect to a country that will undertake a criminal investigation.

Obama has made a political calculation to seek amnesty for the CIA torturers. However, good faith reliance on superior orders was rejected as a defense at Nuremberg and in Lt. Calley's Vietnam-era trial for the My Lai Massacre. The Torture Convention provides unequivocally, "An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification for torture."

There is evidence that the CIA was using the illegal techniques as early as April 2002, three to four months before the August memo was written. That would eliminate "good faith" reliance on Justice Department advice as a "defense" to prosecution.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17,
2002 "subject to a determination of legality by the OLC." She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Obama told AP's Jennifer Loven in the Oval Office:
"With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that." If Holder continues to carry out Obama's political agenda by resisting investigations and prosecution, Congress can, and should, authorize the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to do what the law requires.

The President must fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed. Obama said that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." He is wrong.
There is more to gain from upholding the rule of law.
It will make future leaders think twice before they authorize the cruel, illegal treatment of other human beings.

[Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of the new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com ]

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Afghan-Pak Conflict Rising as Main Problem

Photo: Obama at Camp LeJeune

Partial Peace, Looming War

By Tom Hayden
The Nation

March 1, 2009 - President Obama has surprised the national security establishment, and not a few in the peace movement, with his Friday commitment to pull all American troops out of Iraq by 2011.

The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks predicted in his recent authoritative history, The Gamble, that Obama would keep 25,000 to 50,000 troops in Iraq as a "residual" force indefinitely. Ricks reports that generals like David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno were expecting at least that many troops, and predicts that the fighting will continue for decades.

Obama's announced new policy must shock Ricks and the military leaders he extensively interviewed. Obama's official stance comes after many months of appearing to support the notion of residual forces, which many in the peace movement correctly believed could lead to low-visibility counterinsurgency and a permanent military occupation. Obama said nothing to dissuade the critics until Friday's speech at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

In debates within the Obama camp, only John Podesta, transition adviser and head of the Center for American Progress (CAP) was publicly advocating that all troops, including trainers and advisers, be withdrawn within one year.

Ricks' book is wrong on another related matter, the role of the antiwar movement in this process. Ricks celebrates Petraeus for having pacified Iraq in the face of considerable Democratic doubt, and for winning the political war at home in 2007-2008. Petraeus's stated goal was to speed up the Iraqi clock (the surge) while slowing down the American one (the electoral calendar). Ricks says he pulled it off. After Petraeus's appearance before Congress in September 2007, Rick says, domestic criticism faded away. News coverage of Iraq sharply declined, as networks began to withdraw from Iraq. The March 2008 antiwar demonstrations were "tiny," he writes, with fewer than 1,000 in Washington and 500 in San Francisco.

Ricks is partly right. Democratic party leaders and big donors pulled back from the issue of Iraq after Petraeus's testimony, and after a MoveOn advertisement accusing the general of betrayal. The resulting crisis in the DC hub of antiwar advocates was never resolved, but the grassroots peace bloc in the Democratic primaries mushroomed anyway, giving Obama a needed edge in Iowa and a string of wins against Hillary Clinton.

When there was a choice between supporting Barack Obama and attending rallies organized by various Maoists, Trotskyists and neo-anarchists opposed to Obama and electoral politics, the grassroots peace movement headed for the precincts by the thousands. What appeared to Ricks to be a failed antiwar rally in Washington was only evidence that the movement was moving on, becoming a voting force in and around the Obama campaign.

That turned out to be the right strategy for the peace movement when John McCain was defeated in November, but many continued to wonder--with good reason--whether Obama was promising nothing more than partial peace under a new form of military occupation. Now it is clear that somewhere along the way Obama became persuaded that it made little sense to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq when the Pentagon couldn't win with 150,000, the American economy was collapsing and his hands were full in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In Iraq the situation remains unpredictable. A brutal nationalist and authoritarian state, with sectarian police and thousands of detainees, looms as the result of a seven-year war. Under Odierno's command, according to Ricks, tens of thousands of military-aged Sunni males (called MAMs) were held in preventive detention. Bob Woodward's recent book goes further, crediting a top-secret US program of extrajudicial killings for imposing a peace of the dead in Baghdad. The Sunni insurgency decided in 2007 that an alliance with the Americans would thwart their Al Qaeda rivals while providing protection against the Shi'a majority. They were right, and 100,000 of the so-called Sons of Iraq were paid $20 million per month not to shoot at Americans. On the other hand, the Shi'a who already were installed in power by the Americans had no reason to fight their sponsors, especially when even the militias loyal to Moktada al-Sadr chose to take a political path to power, at least for the moment. The Iranians will be pleased to see the US troops depart on any schedule, and enjoy good relations with whichever Shi'a party prevails in Iraq. The festering Kurdish crisis could boil over, but is localized. Things could change, but most Iraqis have an interest in seeing the Americans implement the "withdrawal agreement." Who knows, they may even throw flowers to the retreating troops instead of shoes.

The greater danger from Iraq for Obama may lie at home politically if Republicans and the generals, echoed by the mainstream media, protest Obama's withdrawal plan as naïve or worse. In Ricks's analysis, Obama would not want to risk a confrontation with the military early in his presidency:

"Like Clinton, Obama would also face the prospect of a de facto alliance between the military and congressional Republicans to stop him from making any major changes. "

Since Ricks was wrong about Obama's fortitude, he may be wrong on the danger of a backlash as well. The American people are in no mood for a "forever war" in Iraq, whatever the malcontents believe in Washington think tanks.

That leaves Afghanistan and Pakistan, both in flames. In those places, the politics are reversed, with Obama having promised to defeat Al Qaeda by using Predators in Pakistan and more ground troops in Afghanistan. So far he is keeping his campaign pledges, while still proceeding cautiously in developing an overall plan. Neither the neoconservatives nor the generals are fully happy with Obama's early approach, which they see as pointed towards a diplomatic settlement instead of "winning" militarily. On this point, Secretary Gates seems to have the president's back, repeatedly warning that no military solution is possible.

Nevertheless, Obama is beginning an escalation with 17,000 troops bringing the American total in Afghanistan to over 50,000. Except for its political rationale, this is a puzzling military gesture. By comparison:

• In South Vietnam, the US deployed 500,000 troops on a battlefield of 67,000 square miles containing 19 million people

•n Iraq, we deployed 160,000 troops on a battlefield of 168,745 square miles, with 26 million people

•n Afghanistan, Obama plans to deploy some 60,000 US troops on a battlefield of 250,001 sqare miles with 30 million people

• And in Pakistan he has 100 special ops on the ground, with $400 million allocated for 85,000 tribal paramilitaries.

The geography and demographics are staggering. Obama cannot possibly be considering a military solution while deploying fewer American troops on larger and larger battlefields. It is hard to imagine that he plans a Vietnam-style escalation either. At the current rate of Afghanistan spending, the costs will reach over $1 trillion by the end of Obama's first term, while he risks his presidency on economic recovery.

Until a brave few in Congress begin to catch up, the critics of Afghanistan policy will have to launch a passionate and substantive debate over the "long war" ahead, oppose the 17,000 new troops as simply 17,000 more targets for the Taliban, sketch in the content of a diplomatic settlement and propose an exit strategy. The first arena for debate, recalling the 1965 Vietnam teach-ins on campuses, will be the blogosphere. The second will be Congressional hearings, with critics at the table. And the third phase is likely to be direct dialogue and engagement in the 2010 elections, district by district. At this point, however, the movement will have to engage MoveOn and many liberal Democrats who are mired in the lingering belief that Afghanistan is the "good war." (We might ask, what does that make Pakistan?)

There are still more battlefields in the long war. Obama will have to be persuaded to say no to an Israeli strike on Iran while he tries to engage Tehran on stability in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately, Obama will also find ways to increase support for Palestinian aspirations, as the most effective approach to lessening Arab and Islamic support for jihad. It's a long way down the road, but his choices of George Mitchell as an envoy along with Charles Freeman to a high intelligence post are the most progressive and independent Middle East appointments in a generation.

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Obama: The Day of Reckoning Is Upon Us

Prosecute Bush
Officials Behind
Torture Policy

By Michael Ratner
The Progressive

Dec. 3, 2008 - One of Barack Obama's first acts as president should be to instruct his attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush Administration officials who gave the green light to torture.

At Obama's press conference on Dec. 1, he spoke of upholding America's highest values as he introduced Eric Holder as his choice for attorney general. Holder insisted there was no tension between protecting the people of the United States and adhering to our Constitution.

A few months ago, Holder was even more explicit. "Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution," he said. "We owe the American people a reckoning."


The day of reckoning is fast upon us.

If Obama and Holder want to adhere to our Constitution and uphold our highest values, they must pursue those in the Bush Administration who violated that Constitution, broke our laws, and tarnished our values.

Read the words of Lt. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal for the Pentagon.

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," he concluded.
"The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Despite Taguba's words and reams of documentation supporting his statement, there has been little discussion about holding officials accountable for their design and implementation of the torture program.

We need to make it clear, just as we do in cases with the most minor offenses, that actions have consequences. To simply let those officials walk off the stage sends a message of impunity that will only encourage future law breaking. The message that we need to send is that they will be held accountable.

A popular refrain in Washington these days is that criminal prosecutions would be an unnecessary look backward. Some argue that in order for the new administration to move forward, presidential pardons should be granted and a Truth Commission assembled to investigate the circumstances that gave rise to the brutal interrogations and deaths of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites around the world.

But pardons would be the final refuge for an administration whose egregious violations of human rights have, for all too long, gone unpunished. And a Truth Commission is not applicable.

This is not Latin America; this is not South Africa. We are not trying to end a civil war, heal a wounded country and reconcile warring factions. We are a democracy trying to hold accountable officials that led our country down the road to torture. And in a democracy, it is the job of a prosecutor and not the pundits to determine whether crimes were committed.

Criminal prosecutions are not about looking to the past; they are about creating a future world without torture. They will be the mark of the new dawn of America's leadership and our new era of accountability.

Prosecuting these officials would help the United States regain its moral standing in the world and to prove our commitment to upholding international human rights standards.

In his first nationally televised interview, President- elect Barack Obama made this promise: "I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm going to make sure that we don't torture."

The best way to do that is to prosecute those who designed the torture policies.


Copyright 2008 The Progressive Magazine

[Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of "The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book."]

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Note to Obama: Quagmires Ruin Everything Else

Photo: US Soldiers and Iraqi 'Detainee'

US-Iraq Pact:
Challenge for
the Anti-War
Movement

By Tom Hayden

What does the US-Iraq Pact mean for the anti-war movement? It certainly may cement an American perception that the war is finally over, stranding the peace movement as public opinion turns its attention to the economy and the Obama administration.

The agreement forces the Bush Administration and Pentagon to back down from long-held positions, especially over deadlines. The barracking of American troops in remote areas by June 2009 will be a retreat from offensive operations. More important, the language of the agreement in Arabic stipulates that all American forces, not merely combat units, will be withdrawn by 2011.

If these terms are maintained, President-elect Obama will be acquiescing in a doubling of his 16 month deadline for withdrawal of combat troops, but also for the first time accepting a date for removal of the so-called residual American forces – since “all” means all counter-terrorism units, advisers, trainers and back-up forces that could total 50,000 or more.


Because shrugging off treaty obligations is a custom of state, only informed publics and alert parliamentarians in Washington and Baghdad can ensure that these agreements are implemented.

This is not “out now”, but that was never possible politically or militarily. It’s not literally “ending the war in 2009” as Obama promised. But this pact is officially known as “the withdrawal agreement” to all proud Iraqis. Read carefully, it is an agreed 2009 timetable for ending the war, the occupation, the troop presence and closing the military bases in three years.

What’s wrong with this picture?

First, it is too slow. Only a few weeks ago Prime Minister al-Maliki was praising Obama’s 16-month timetable. Obviously something or someone got to him. American embassy officials, according to press accounts, were button-holing Iraqi parliamentarians in the hallways in the days before the final voter. There are no registered lobbyists or even lobbying laws in Baghdad.

Second, one can predict with certainty that there will be pressures to extend the occupation despite the pact, using “instability” as justification. Fully and truly ending the occupation is simply not an option in the mentality of the national security bureaucracy.

The reason for this goes beyond a chronic mendacity and trail of broken treaties. The balance of forces in Baghdad rests entirely on the American occupation, and always has. Described by Stephen Biddle, an adviser to Gen. Petraeus, in 2006 articles in Foreign Affairs, the US occupation purports to protect the Iraqi Shi’a regime of former exiles from a coup d’etat while also presenting itself to the insurgent Sunnis as the only protection against the vengeful repression of the majority Shi’a.

“The Sunnis are roadkill.” – American official in Diyala province.

It is unpredictable how a gradual American withdrawal might alter this balance of power. It could simply leave a US-backed sectarian Shi’a police state in Baghdad, holding 40-50,000 Sunnis in detention. “The Sunnis are roadkill”, according to an American official quoted last week in the Los Angeles Times. That is why the non-binding side agreement pledging amnesty for Sunni political detainees is of great importance – if it is enforceable. The continued granting of funds and relative autonomy to the 99,000 former Sunni insurgents who the Americans currently pay not to shoot our troops is equally important, as are restored employment opportunities for former Baathists.

The provincial elections now set for January could consolidate Sunni power bases in at least three provinces where they have been disenfranchised since 2005. The referendum on the pact scheduled in six months provides greater leverage for two opposite poles of discontent with the occupation – the minority Sunnis and the much larger number of Shi’a followers of Moktada al-Sadr whose demand is to accelerate the withdrawal.

Here at home, the agreement will force the anti-war movement into careful consideration of a broader agenda. Unless the pact is violated, it is difficult to imagine hundreds of thousands demonstrating to bring the troops home in 2010 instead of 2011. There will be continued attention to implementing the pact and pressuring for human rights standards in Baghdad, but the steady return of thousands of American soldiers will send a powerful message to most Americans that the Iraq War is ending, perhaps not soon enough, but ending nonetheless.

But it is possible to imagine broad and intense public support for a movement questioning Obama’s multiple wars – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, not to mention Iran and the Israel-Palestine conflict – as unwinnable quagmires which alienate countless Muslims and cost over $200 billion annually that taxpayers cannot afford amidst a collapsing economy. In this different framing, the anti-war movement could include the Iraq withdrawal and diplomatic solutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan within a new progressive agenda demanding a turn away from policing a world of quagmires to addressing our spiralling economic, trade, health care and energy crises.'

[Tom Hayden is a founder of Progressives for Obama]

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Empire Through the Athens-Sparta Prism

Photo: The Unconquered Afghans

Obama-McCain
Dilemma: Warriors
or Statesman?

By Tom Hayden

ATHENS, July 30, 2008 - As Barack Obama swept Europe politically this week, my vantage point was the ancient Agora of Athens, where I could muse whether the young conquerer might become more Athenian or Spartan.

Athens today still evokes a powerful historical parallel with the present American experience. Here, more than 2,000 years ago, an open participatory democracy was born, with lasting artistic, scientific and philosophic achievements, but in tandem with a system of slave labor. Obama strides the same historical contradiction.

The city-state of Sparta, on the other hand, birthed today’s military ideal, turning young boys into warrior-patriots, becoming the vanguard of “the 300” against the Persian advance at Thermopolae, but eventually succumbing to decay as their hyper-militarism led to over-extension.


The parallels between the Athenian Obama and the Spartan John McCain [and his neo-conservative allies] seem obvious.


After George Bush and the Iraq War, the vast majority of Greeks and Europeans long for the restoration of democratic, free-thinking Athens – with the Harvard scholar Obama symbolizing the overcoming the legacy of a slave-state underclass. Instead of Spartan militarism, and its echoes in Pax Romana, Nicolo Machiavelli, or Pax Americana, the dream here is of a Pax Humana led by Barack Obama. The "new Athenian" will have to negotiate with the modern Persians, not fight them at a modern Thermopolae.

The Republican incarnation of the Spartans is seen here as an insanely-dangerous neo-conservative faction attempting to hold off the terrorist throngs at a new Thermopolae, somewhere near the Khyber Pass. Sparta's vanguard units in those times were known as the Crypteria, which roughly translates as "special ops brigade." The hard lessons learned at Thermopolae, however, have been ignored by neo-conservative discourse, including the recent Hollywood film glorifying Sparta's 300.

The Greek worldview is helpful here, in permitting a distinction between the Mythic Obama and the Literal Obama. The rapture in Europe is for the mythic Obama, whose candidacy suggests a possible transcendence of the world's woes over racism and immigration. But support for Obama's insistence that Europe join America in sending thousands of troops to Afghanistan, in a new, aggressive combat mission, meets with heavy resistance even among hard-core Obama supporters.

“The bottom line is an abhorrence with Bush”, says Spyros Draenos, a Greek researcher writing a history of the 1960s’ Greek reformer, Andreas Papandreou, overthrown and imprisoned with the cooperation of the American CIA. Draenos’ familiarity with the sadness of modern history places him as an interested, but by no means passionate, supporter of the Illinois senator who was two years old when the Greek generals jailed Papandreou and installed a dictatorship in 1967.

“But that leaves open the question of why the fascination with Obama”, Draenos admits. “We are in awe of the fact that a black could be elected president of the US, because America is so associated with racism. Yet underneath the deep anti-US sentiment here is a desire to believe. Back in the Sixties it was the same, it was the rise of a movement among those who were disillusioned pro-Americans.”

Obama is likely to be mistaken in his stated belief that his popularity in Europe will translate into support for more combat troops in Afganistan. Here the Mythic Obama faces the real world. There is little European desire to shed blood in Afghanistan or Pakistan, not even among the British who carved the two countries into existence. Those are seen as reputational interests of the American superpower, not global interests in securing peace. ***The literal Obama would have fared better in Europe if he had acknowledged America’s stakes in Pakistan’s garment sweatshops, which receive privileged trade status, or America’s tolerance of Afghanistan's monopoly on opium.***

Dreanos notes his “amazement that young people here are actually following Obama when he makes compromises, and asking the same questions” as the older, more critical generation. “There is an underlying cynicism” that Obama has not yet addressed, “about America playing a different role in the world” from the Middle East to Afghanistan. “The Greeks are fatalistic about getting ***f-d over”*** by a varied series of masters, he bluntly says. They are not likely to understand the imperial goal of dying in Afghanistan. They think they have been here before, for centuries.

As Obama made his near-perfect pitch, for example, a top US official was confirming European skepticism by writing in the New York Times that Afghanistan is a “virtual narco-state” with collusion at “the top of government” and complete indifference from the Pentagon. [NYT, Global, July 25, 2008]. From any perspective, Obama’s proposal is to join a coalition in quagmire, a token form of Spartan resolve, designed to protect him through the next American election.

Obama also is asking NATO to sign up for combat, not peacekeeping, in the global war on terrorism [GWOT, in original Pentagon terminology], a haunting reminder of Greece’s experience with the first CIA subversion of a European government under the cover of the fledgling NATO.

In brief, Communist-led nationalist forces would have defeated the Nazis and taken power in 1944 were it not for British military intervention, a task soon handed off to the Americans. It is not clear what an anti-Nazi victory of the Left would have meant for Greece, but it is known that the Soviet Union left the Greek partisans on their own. As a result, a radical and turbulent Greece came under NATO control, with a royalist government that included an army, police and civil service purged of anyone suspected of anti-monarchist or left-wing sympathies.

In the Cold War dichotomy, neutralism was unacceptable to the Americans, a policy that foreshadowed the Bush/GWOT era’s pronouncements that governments and parties were “either for us or against us.” But the Greek passions for national sovereignty and social justice gave rise to a Center-Left resistance led by George Papandreaou and his son, the American-educated economist Andreas [and his Chicago-born wife Margaret] in the early Sixties. Following the US-supported overthrow of the democratically-elected governments of Iran, Guatemala and Brazil, the "colonels' coup" in Greece was a preview of the violent overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973. In those years, right-wing generals seemed to be the solution to the rise of neutralism and non-alignment. The hubris was astounding, as recently-declassified CIA and State Department documents, never before reported in America’s mainstream media, reveal:

According to a CIA cable of January 21, 1965, retrieved from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, “the [Greek] king believes that the [Papandreaou] government’s move to the left and the apparent rise of leftist activity are dangerous developments and that preventive action should begin now.” And further: “the king wants Papandreou’s image destroyed…but he does not want to become involved or blamed if the attacks fail.” Another document, dated September 5, 1965, stated that the American "embassy has concluded George Papandreou's return to power should be avoided if this can be done without a direct and open confrontation with him."

A memo drafted by the CIA station chief in Athens concluded that "the anti-monarchists [led by Papandreou] would draw some 70 to 80 percent of the vote." The CIA reported favorably on articles by the New York Time's C.L. Sulzberger "highly critical of Andreas Papandreou and his father [as] a fair reflection of the U.S. [government view and were probably inspired by U.S. officials. [NYT, July 28, Aug. 4,5,6,1965]

Andreas Papandreou was an unlikely reformer or revolutionary, but a Greek patriot who sought alternatives to the Cold War divisions. Chairman of the economics faculty at UC Berkeley, he blended Greek destiny with the Sixties’szeitgeist.
He was closely aligned with the Galbraithean wing of the Kennedy administration, and ***later*** with more progressive economists like Stanley Sheinbaum, then extricating himself from a CIA-funded Vietnam police training program at Michigan State University.

Like Obama, Andreas Papandreou developed what he called a “mystagogical” relationship with his fervent audiences at mass rallies in Greece. Despite a 53 percent electoral mandate for his father's Center Union coalition, its ascendance was destabilized, thwarted and ultimately overthrown by a Greek junta with CIA support in 1967***. Andreas Papandreau’s life was saved by the passionate intervention by Americans like Sheinbaum. President Johnson told Arthur Schlesinger at the time that he ordered that the Greeks “not kill that son of a bitch”, according to later interviews and documents.

After being released from prison, Andreas Papandreou came to power on a democratic electoral tide in the 1980s. Ten years earlier he had written a prophetic book, Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front, which contains a compelling challenge to today’s humanitarian hawks gathering around the Obama candidacy.

Caught between two powers [then the Cold War, now the Global War on Terrorism], Papandreou wrote that “democracy is indeed at the gunpoint; and the sooner that the democratic, progressive forces of the world perceive that situation, the greater is the chance that the trigger will not be pulled.”

I visited Papandreou’s widow, the American-born former first lady of Greece, at her shoreline home in Corinth as Obama passed through Europe last week. Now 85, Margaret Papandreou remains a charismatic proponent of human rights, particularly women’s rights, on a global basis. She finds Obama, a resident of her native city of Chicago, a fascinating new force in global politics. But aware of the haunted chapters of the Papandreou’s progressive legacy, she wonders aloud if Obama can achieve his idealistic origins, become more Athenian than Spartan.

Wishing him well and not waiting for a Delphic oracle, she already is planning conferences on how to organize community leadership for the next generation. She hopes to contact the Obama organizers for their advice.

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Warning to Obama: Avoid the 'Great Game'

Photo: Afghan Fighters

Stop One War
by Starting
Two More?

By Tom Hayden
Huffington Post

Barack Obama restated his Iraq phased withdrawal play in response to public questioning today but committed himself to expanding the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Any proposal to transfer American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan is sure to cause debate and questions among peace activists and rank-and-file Democrats. The proposal potentially represents a wider quagmire for the US government and military.

On Iraq, Obama said nothing especially new in his July 14 New York Times' op-ed piece, but it was a forceful restatement of his commitment to combat troop withdrawals after his recent statements suggesting that he would "refine" his views when he consults military commanders on the ground.


Obama neglected to address how many American "residual forces" he would leave behind in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda and "protect American service members," though he made additional US trainers conditional on the Iraqis making "political progress." It was a proposal that seemed to promise a phased diminishing of the American military presence, not a complete withdrawal.

Many independent analysts question leaving some 50,000 American troops as advisers, trainers and counter-terrorism units in Iraq after the withdrawal of 140,000 by 2010. Those forces will be protecting a sectarian political regime that is linked to death squads, militias and a detention system now holding 50,000 Iraqis in violation of human rights standards.

It is quite possible that Obama's regional diplomacy, including hard-bargaining with Iran, could facilitate a decent interval for American troop withdrawals and a more stabilized Iraq, as suggested by former CIA director John Deutch. [interview with Deutch, in Ending the War in Iraq, 2007]

Obama smartly exploited the recent call by Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Malaki for a US withdrawal deadline, although al-Maliki's time line was twice as long as Obama's. In this face-saving scenario, the Pentagon would follow "the Philippine option" in which the client government formally requested that the US close its bases. This option was advocated openly by the Marines' commander in Iraq in 2004. [NYT, Nov. 29, 2006]. The US only withdrew obsolete naval forces from the Philippines, however; today the US spends hundreds of millions on a secret war against Islamic forces in the southern Philippines. Obama might do the same.

These public policy ambiguities are not simply Obama's problem, but are caused by a mainstream media which stubbornly refuses to ask any questions about those "residual forces." For example, how will "residual forces," tied to the regime the Americans put in power, be more successful on the battlefield than the departing 170,000 combat troops?

But Obama's proposals for Afghanistan and Pakistan are far more problematic. They can described in everyday language as either out of the frying pan and into the fire, or attacking needles by burning down haystacks.

The Pentagon paradigm is to defeat al-Qaeda militarily while refusing to address, and thereby worsening, the dire conditions that gave rise to the Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in the first place. Ahmed Rashid's new Descent into Chaos [Viking, 2008] provides a horrific portrait of Afghanistan in careful prose based on reputable sources;

- It is estimated by RAND that $100 per capita is the minimum required to stabilize a country evolving out of war. Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526, while Afghanistan received $57 per capita in the key years, 2001-2003;
- When the US installed the Hamid Karzai government, Afghanistan ranked 172nd out of 178 nations on the United Nation's Human Development Index, having the highest rate of infant mortality in the world, a life expectancy rate of 44-45 years, and the youngest population of any country; in 2005 95 percent of Kabul's residents were living without electrical power.
- Seven hundred civilians were killed in the first five months of 2008 alone, according to the United Nations.

Despite some gains in media and currency reform, plus a modest increase in children in school, this was the path of least reconstruction.

And despite images of Afghan democracy that made loya jirga tribal gatherings appear to be the birth of participatory democracy, a warlord state was entrenched by the CIA.

There are some 36,000 US troops stretched across Afghanistan, another 17,500 under NATO command, and 18,000 in counterinsurgency and training roles [NYT, July 14]. They are so aggressively combat-oriented that the Afghan government itself continually objects to the rate of civilian casualties. It costs the Pentagon $2 billion per month to support 30,000 American troops. According to Rashid, "Afghanistan is not going to be able to pay for its own army for many years to come -- perhaps never."

As of 2006, Afghanistan's economy still rested on producing 90 percent of the world's opium, an eerie narco-state parallel with the US counterinsurgency in Colombia from where most of America's supply of cocaine originates.

Afghanistan is an unstable police state. By 2005, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission cited 800 cases of detainee abuse at some thirty U.S. firebases. "The CIA operates its own secret detention centers, which were off limits to the US military." Ghost prisoners, known as Persons Under Control [PUCs] are held permanently without any public records of their existence. Warlords operate their own prisons with "unprecedented abuse, torture, and death of Taliban prisoners." And as the US lowered the number of prisoners at Guantanamo, it increased the numbers held at Bagram, near Kabul. As of January, 2008, there were 630 incarcerated at Bagram, "including some who had been there for five years and whom the ICRC had still not been given access to." After weeks of hunger strikes about detention conditions, the Taliban recently orchestrated a jailbreak of hundreds of Afghanis from the Kandahar prison, an inside job.

As in Iraq, the US contracted for police training in Afghanistan with DynCorp International; between 2003 and 2005, the US spent $860 million to train 40,000 Afghan police, "but the results were totally useless" according to Rashid. Even Richard Holbrooke described the DynCorp training program as "an appalling joke...a complete shambles."

When the Taliban government was overthrown, the US installed a Westernized Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, a former lobbyist for Unocal, who had been out of the country during the jihad against the Soviet Union. But the Pashtun tribes themselves were violently displaced from power for the first time in 300 years. They remain by far the largest Afghan minority at 42 percent of the population, heavily concentrated in Kandahar and the southern provinces and across the federally-administered tribal areas in western Pakistan. These are the areas that the Pentagon, the New York Times, and Barack Obama [like John Kerry before him] designate as the central battlefront of the war on terrorism.

The question is not simply a moral one, but whether the expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueled by troop transfers from Iraq, is winnable, and in what sense?

Transferring 10,000 American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, which Obama proposes, is symbolic, a potential downpayment on the treadmill of further escalation. [In his statement, Obama supports "at least" two additional brigades for Afghanistan]. The future of the Pentagon's "rear" in Iraq will be questionable if 15 combat brigades are withdrawn under Obama's plan, while the Pentagon's new "front" line cannot be secured with two brigades sent to southern and eastern Afghanistan. At best these might be holding actions until the next administration makes a decision about its ultimate strategy. Obama may be proposing an escalation simply in order not to lose, a pattern well-documented in Daniel Ellsberg's history of the Vietnam War.

But the US escalation policy already is deepening rapidly, with bipartisan support [or silence, so far]. In keeping with counterinsurgency strategies going back to America's long wars against native tribes, the Pentagon has fostered the ascension of a new Pakistani general, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, whose background includes training at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth. An unnamed US military official praises Kayani "for embracing new counterinsurgency training and tactics that could be more effective in countering militants in the country's tribal areas. [NYT, Jan. 7. 2008] Over $400 million is being spent to recruit a "frontier corps" of to "turn local tribes against militants" [NYT, Mar. 4, 2008] CIA and Special Forces operatives already have invaded Pakistan to set up a secret base from which to hunt Osama bin Laden "before Mr. Bush leaves office" as well as fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground and from pilotless Predator drones. [NYT, Feb. 22, 2008].

All this constitutes yet another preventive war by the United States, this one in violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and against the stated policies of the newly-elected Pakistani government, not to mention the overwhelming sentiment among Pakistan's people. On the Afghan front, the Taliban will be able to retreat in the face of greater US firepower, or attack like Lilliputians from multiple sides if the US concentrates its forces around the Pakistan border. Further violence and tides of anti-American sentiment could sweep across the region into Pakistan with unpredictable results.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official once charged with tracking down Osama bin Laden, suggests that the American delusion is that "by establishing a minority-dominated semisecular, pro-Indian government [in Kabul], we would neither threaten the identity nor raise the ire of the Pashtun tribes nor endanger Pakistan's national security." Scheuer wrote this year that "for the United States, the war in Afghanistan has been lost. By failing to recognize that the only achievable US mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their leaders and get out, Washington is now faced with fighting a protracted and growing insurgency. The only upside of this coming defeat is that it is a debacle of our own making. We are not being defeated by our enemies; we are in the midst of defeating ourselves." [Marching Toward Hell, 2008]

The beginning of an alternative may require unfreezing American diplomacy towards Iran and considering a "grand bargain" instead. Teheran is the single power, according to CIA director Deutch, who could destabilize the US withdrawal from Iraq. It happens that they were America's ally against Afghanistan not so long ago. The Iranians have lost thousands of police and soldiers themselves in a border war against Afghan drug lords. According to William Polk, "ironically, the only effective deterrent to the trade is Iran." [Violent Politics, 2008] In exchange for security guarantees against a US-directed regime change, Iran may be willing to discuss cooperation with the "Great Satan" to stabilize its borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Improbable? That depends on whether one thinks the alternative is unthinkable.

Only a short time ago, historically, the US was supporting the jihadists in the same tribal areas as they ventured to destroy the Soviet occupation. In the same years, the US was hosting the Taliban for talks on a possible oil pipeline across Afghanistan. Since twists and turns seem to be the only pattern in divide-and-conquer strategies, it is possible that Obama thinks being tough towards Afghanistan and Pakistan is a defensive cover for withdrawing from Iraq, and he later will follow up with unspecified diplomacy after he takes office. But history shows that creeping escalations create a momentum and constituency of their own. Obama might get lucky, lower the level of the visible wars, and embrace a diplomatic offensive. But North and South Waziristan could be his Bay of Pigs.

In summary, to borrow a popular phrase of the season, ending one war [Iraq] to start two more [in Afghanistan and Pakistan] seems to be a dumb idea.

TOM HAYDEN is the author of Ending the War in Iraq [2007], The Voices of the Chicago Eight [2008], and Writing for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader [2008]

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No Retreat: If You Want to Win, Stop The War!

Photo: 'Out Now! Antiwar Crowd in Chicago

Barack
at Risk

By Tom Hayden
Progressives for Obama

Call him slippery or nuanced, Barack Obama's core position on Iraq has always been more ambiguous than audacious. Now it is catching up with him as his latest remarks are questioned by the Republicans, the mainstream media, and the antiwar movement. He could put his candidacy at risk if his audacity continues to shrivel.

I first endorsed Obama because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues. The excitement among African-Americans and young people, the audacity of their hope, still holds the promise of a new era of social activism. The force of their rising expectations, i believe, could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements.

And of course, there is the need to end the Republican reign that began with a stolen election followed by eight years of war and torture, corporate gouging, environmental decay, domestic spying and right-wing court appointments, just in case we forget who Obama is running against.




Besides the transforming nature of an African-American presidency, the issue that matters most to me is achieving a peaceful settlement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and preventing American escalations in Iran and Latin America. From the beginning, Obama's symbolic 2002 position on Iraq has been very promising, reinforced again and again by his campaign pledge to "end the war" in 2009.

But that pledge also has been laced with loopholes all along, caveats that the mainstream media and his opponents [excepting Bill Richardson] have ignored or avoided until now. As I pointed out in Ending the War in Iraq [2007], Obama's 2002 speech opposed the coming war with Iraq as "dumb", while avoiding what position he would take once the war was underway. Then he wrote of almost changing his position from anti- to pro-war after a trip to Iraq. He never took as forthright a position as Senator Russ Feingold, among others. Then he adopted the safe, nonpartisan formula of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group, which advocated the withdrawal of combat troops while leaving thousands of American counter-terrorism units, advisers and trainers behind.

That would mean at least 50,000 Americans, including back up forces, engaged in counter-insurgency after the withdrawal of combat troops, a contradiction the media and Hillary Clinton failed to explore in the primary debates. To his credit, Obama said that these American units would not become caught up in a lengthy sectarian civil war, leaving the question of their role unanswered.

The most shocking aspect of Samantha Powers' forced resignation earlier this year was not that she called Hillary Clinton a "monster" off-camera, but that she flatly stated that Obama would review his whole position on Iraq once becoming president. Again, no one in the media or rival campaigns questioned whether this assertion by Powers was true. Since Obama credited Powers with helping for months in writing his book, The Audacity of Hope, her comments on his inner thinking should have been pounced upon by the pundits.

Finally, it has taken the pressure of the general election to raise questions about whether his parsed and lawyerly language is empty of credible meaning. Consider carefully his July 4 statements:

The first one, promising a "thorough reassessment" of his Iraq position later this summer:

"I've always said that the pace of our withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability" - two conditions that could justify leaving American troops in combat indefinitely. "And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I'm sure I'll have more information and will continue to refine my policies" - another loophole which could allow the war to drag on.

Then there came the later "clarification":

"Let me be as clear as I can be" [not, "let me be absolutely clear"].

"I intend to end this war." [intention only].

"My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war - responsibly, deliberately, but decisively." [ Sounds positive, but "decisively" can mean by military threat in the worst case. And it's pure theatre, borrowed from Clinton, since the plans most likely will be drafted and finalized immediately after the November election.]

"And I have seen no information that contradicts the notion that we can bring our troops out safely at a pace of one or two brigades a month..." [but what if the military commanders on the ground assert that it is too dangerous to pull out those troops?]

Obama's position, which always left a trail of unasked questions, now plants a seed of doubt, justifiably, among the peace bloc of American voters who harbor a legacy of betrayals beginning with Lyndon Johnson's 1064 pledge of "no wider war" through Richard Nixon's "secret plan for peace" to Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal and the deep complicity of Democrats in the evolution of the Iraq War.

It is difficult to understand Obama's motivation. Perhaps it is his lifetime success at straddling positions and disarming potential opponents. Perhaps it is a lawyer's training. Perhaps being surrounded by national security advisers who oppose what they call "precipitous withdrawal", and pragmatic Democrats distinctly uncomfortable with their antiwar roots.

What is clear is that Obama is responsive to pressures from the grass-roots base of a party that is overwhelmingly in favor of a shorter timetable for withdrawal than his, and favoring diplomatic rather than military solutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At a time that public interest in the war is receeding before economic concerns, it is time for the strongest possible reassertion of voter demands for peace.

The challenge for the peace and justice movement is to avoid falling into Republican divide-and-conquer traps while maintaining a powerful and independent presence in key electoral states, including Congressional battlegrounds, between now and November. There should be at the least:

- A demand that Obama talk to legitimate representatives of the peace movement, not simply hawkish national security advisers.

- A Democratic platform debate and plank that is unequivocal in pledging to end the war and avoid military escalation elsewhere.

- An energized antiwar voter education campaign that builds towards a clear November peace mandate to end the military occupation and shifr to political and diplomatic approraches.

- An organizational strategy to widen the base of the antiwar movement through the presidential campaign in preparation for a massive peace mobilization in early 2009.

Grass-roots people power is the only force that can keep alive the astute sense of pragmatism that led Obama to criticize the coming war in 2002. The stakes are higher now, and the enemies far more shrewd, wishing to rip asunder the Obama coalition. The peace movement assumption should be that there is no one in Obama's inner circle of advisers to be counted on, no mainstream columnist to catch his eye with a persuasive column favoring withdrawal. They never have. Only the voice of the peace voters - and the countless activists who have volunteered on his behalf - can command his attention now.

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