Left Flank

The Young Turks ask a valid question: are six years in the Hanoi Hilton a credential for foreign policy leadership? Is the Obama campaign's message, that John McCain has exercised bad judgment in his foreign policy decisions, enough to puncture McCain's aura as a «war hero»?

This seems an awfully philosophical direction to take this issue. Giving McCain his due as an honorable man is probably necessary not to incur reprisal. But, how can Barack Obama deliver a critique, and Joe Biden, communicate it to independents and fence-sitting Republicans, by informing people about opposing foreign policy visions?

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Forgive me for interrupting the celebration over the al-Maliki «endorsement», or «mental lapse saved by CENTCOM».

Tom Hayden's conclusion, that «...ending one war Iraq to start two more in Afghanistan and Pakistan seems to be a dumb idea» in «Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan» has stuck in my head for days now. But, here's the part that really resonated.

Transferring 10,000 American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, which Obama proposes, is symbolic, a potential down payment 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 The future of the Pentagon's «rear» in Iraq will be questionable if fifteen combat brigades are withdrawn under Obama's plan, while the Pentagon's new «front» line cannot be secured with two brigades sent to southern and eastern Afghanistan.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.

That's because I read Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers years ago. Ellsberg asks additionally, if «we had a right to win».

That unspoken premise underlay one, also unspoken, held by a large and growing number of officials, former officials, and liberal members of the establishment who no longer believed in the practical feasibility of «winning» at acceptable cost. This was the assumption that we had nevertheless a a right to prolong an unwinnable war to postpone defeat or, at the very worst, to lose only gracefully, covertly, slowly, at the cost of an uncounted number of Asian lives, a roll on which they and our policy set no real limit. (p.247)

Yet, the Afghanistan campaign was the righteous mission, right? Or, was it the war to compensate for the mistakes made in the 1980s?

The Catonsville Nine is legendary in my home state of Maryland. Tales were thick with loving tributes of the two brothers. Father Daniel Berrigan remains insightful:

"The fall of the towers [on 9/11] was symbolic as well as actual," he adds. "We are bringing ourselves down by a willful blindness that is astonishing."