Franklin's Focus 6/29/10 wsws

A Fine Title for the New Campaign

Patrick Martin refers to it as 'the Hitler option'.

I read several pieces that were guessing as to what was likely to
occur in Afghanistan following the firing of McChrystal. As I often
do, I read a piece by Patrick Martin. He and I nearly always seem to
have minds going down the same track. As expected, he had written a
piece on this very subject.

The title of his piece characterizes the mindset of both Obama and
Petraeus. Martin includes under this resuscitated mindset the
jingoistic, mindless enthusiasm of the so called liberals supporting
Obama and his ways. With both left and right on the same page, we can
look to seeing a horrendous mode of warfare by Amerika in a poor third
world country that has never done any harm to Amerika. Those poor
people had nothing to do with 9/11, which is the standard phony reason
put forth by Herr Obama and friends, not to mention most of the
American people, who still idiotically believe Afghanistan was somehow
behind Bush's 9/11 false flag op.

Think for a moment about the following reality: I've heard more than
one expert on Afghanistan authoritatively declare that there are no
more than 100 so called 'al Qaeda fighters' in Afghanistan today. Chew
on that for a while!

Martin persuasively claims that Obama is now set on entering a new
stage in the war that will include far greater ferocity and far less
concern for civilian deaths and casualties. That change in policy
guidelines will undoubtedly please Petraeus, who engineered the
Fallujah massacre, which murdered a massive number of civilians and
most likely no 'al Qaeda' fighters. This massacre greatly pleased
Obama's puppet 'liberal' followers who bragged about what a great
American triumph Fallujah had been. (Somebody pass me the vomit bag.)

Martin summons up an image of latter day Hitlerian blitzkriegs as the
nouveau mode of conquest in Afghanistan. His analogy is right on the
mark. That the alleged crew of liberals supporting Obama's policies
fail to see the true qualitative and quantitative dimensions of what
has now infused American foreign policy is disturbing. That a highly
intelligent critic like Martin would deem the path Obama is heading
down as 'Hitlerian' says loads about the place to which Obama has
taken this country. Are we at a point in history where our government
views Arabs in much the same way that Hitler viewed Jews?

Of course, the mindset that says little Muslims grow up to be big
Muslims and one might as well kill the little ones right now has roots
that go back as far as the U.S. conquest and occupation of the Spanish
controlled Philippines. Children were massacred quite readily as being
future guerrillas that are best snuffed before they grow up. More
recently, in Vietnam, the CIA's Operation Phoenix slaughtered 40,000
South Vietnamese civilian men, women, and children. A CIA agent
characterized that op thusly: 'It was a sterile, depersonalized murder
program. It was completely indiscriminate.' The number of civilians
killed in Africa as a result of CIA activities on that continent
remains to be calculated, but that number is unquestionably fearsome.

I'm necessarily supplementing Martin's comparison of Hitlerian
blitzkriegs with past programs of the U.S. Here's the real kicker:
according to a fine study by Herman and Chomsky: the American CIA was
directly or indirectly responsible for 50 million civilian deaths
around the world from 1950 to 2000. I say it is not irresponsible to
bring up Hitlerian blitzkriegs when discussing American imperialism.

If you catch me saying 'Herr Obama' one of these days, it won't be a
'Freudian slip'.

No quotation here. I slipped one in above.

Warmest regards,
Richard

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6/29/10 wsws.org

The “Hitler” option in Afghanistan

by Patrick Martin

The removal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the US commander in
Afghanistan and his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus is not, as
portrayed by Obama’s political apologists, a principled defense of
civilian control over the military. Nor is it, as the official line
emanating from the White House would have it, a change in personnel
only, not in policy.
There is every indication that the change in command is the result of
growing dissatisfaction with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency methods,
which have failed to dislodge the Taliban-led guerrilla forces that
control the bulk of southern and eastern Afghanistan. It presages a
drastic increase in the level of US military violence, and especially
the scale of civilian casualties among the Afghan population. Their
“crime” is to sympathize with and support the anti-US insurgency.
Petraeus is already, according to one media report, preparing to
modify the rules of engagement to allow for greater use of force.
According to a report Sunday in the British Independent, McChrystal
had grown increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for success,
particularly after he was compelled to postpone the planned offensive
into the key southern city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He
reportedly briefed NATO defense ministers earlier this month “and
warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months.”
The newspaper writes: “It was this briefing, according to informed
sources, as much as the Rolling Stone article, which convinced Mr.
Obama to move against” McChrystal. The article adds, “The general was
judged to be ‘off message’ in his warning to ministers not to expect
quick results and that they were facing a ‘resilient and growing
insurgency.’”
A media campaign has begun in the United States, spearheaded by the
New York Times, portraying McChrystal as excessively concerned about
the deaths of Afghan civilians caught in the escalating warfare
between US and NATO forces and the Taliban-led guerrilla forces.
This began with an article June 22 by C. J. Chivers which described
growing frustration among field officers, NCOs and rank-and-file
soldiers in Afghanistan over being “handcuffed” by McChrystal. The
general’s tactics supposedly restricted “the use of Western firepower—
airstrikes and guided rocket attacks, artillery barrages and even
mortar fire—to support troops on the ground.”
This theme was taken up by several Times correspondents in online
commentaries on the newspaper’s web site—Robert Mackey, John Burns and
Dexter Filkins all chimed in—and then by the newspaper’s op-ed
columnists, both liberal and conservative.
Bob Herbert, a liberal columnist, suddenly discovered his vocation as
an adviser on military tactics in a column Saturday headlined “Worse
Than a Nightmare.” He denounced the counterinsurgency strategy of
McChrystal and Petraeus, declaring that its advocates “seem to have
lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war
half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this
ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if
you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.
The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren’t trying to win the
hearts and minds of anyone.”
He continued: “Among the downsides of this battlefield caution is a
disturbing unwillingness to give our own combat troops the supportive
airstrikes and artillery cover that they feel is needed.”
Ross Douthat, a conservative Times columnist, raised the same issue
Monday, arguing that “success is our only ticket out” of Afghanistan.
The Obama administration “hasn’t been choosing between remaining in
Afghanistan and withdrawing from the fight. It’s been choosing between
two ways of staying”—i.e., a prolonged stalemate, or outright military
victory.
Douthat noted that the Rolling Stone article which provided the
occasion for McChrystal’s ouster was “ostensibly a left-wing, antiwar
critique of counterinsurgency.” But it actually gave voice to
“complaints that the current strategy places too much value on
innocent Afghan lives.” He cited another analyst summing up the
article as criticizing the current strategy “because it doesn’t allow
our soldiers to kill enough people.”
It might appear farfetched that General McChrystal, a longtime
commander of Special Operations forces who was responsible for the
assassination of thousands of insurgents during his years in Iraq,
should be deemed insufficiently bloodthirsty. The logic of such
criticism was spelled out in a significant analysis in the July 2010
issue of Washington Quarterly, the magazine of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a major policy think tank in the
US capital.
Written by Lorenzo Zambernardi, an Italian academic now working in the
US, the article discusses what it calls “Counterinsurgency’s
Impossible Trilemma.”
Zambernardi argues: “Counterinsurgency involves three main goals, but
in real practice a counterinsurgent needs to choose two out of three.
… The impossible trilemma in counterinsurgency is that, in this type
of conflict, it is impossible to simultaneously achieve: 1) force
protection, 2) distinction between enemy combatants and noncombatants,
and 3) the physical elimination of insurgents.”
According to this schema, McChrystal had chosen the second and third
goals, with the resulting spike in US-NATO casualties and increasing
dissatisfaction among the rank-and-file soldiers ordered to take
greater risks to avoid civilian casualties. The alternative, the
author writes, is to focus on the first and third goals instead: “A
state can protect its armed forces while destroying insurgents, but
only by indiscriminately killing civilians as the Ottomans, Italians,
and Nazis did in the Balkans, Libya, and Eastern Europe, respectively.”
This choice, what the author later calls “a policy of barbarism,”
could perhaps be described as “the Hitler option.”
That is where American policy in Afghanistan is now headed: towards a
dramatic escalation of violence in a war that has always been
characterized by extreme brutality and disregard for the destruction
of innocent lives.
Such is the response of US imperialism to its failure to suppress
popular opposition in Afghanistan to Washington’s neo-colonial war and
occupation. The push to escalate the bloodbath arises because the anti-
US insurgency has mass popular support. This struggle of the Afghan
masses against foreign occupation is entirely legitimate.
Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed in more than
nine years of warfare, the longest single military engagement in
American history. US air strikes have hit wedding celebrations, family
outings, even funeral ceremonies.
Thousands of Afghans have been seized and detained and tortured at the
infamous Bagram prison camp and at other such facilities throughout
the country. US Predator missiles have been fired from drone aircraft
at villages on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with
hundreds, probably thousands, dead.
This is the bloodbath that Obama publicly supported as the “good war”
in his presidential campaign, and which the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party embraces enthusiastically to this day, in the face of
growing popular opposition within the US. Those who are making the
decisions to continue and escalate this conflict are guilty of war
crimes. Those who supply the political rationalizations to “sell” this
war to the American people are their accomplices. [I would add that
those who vote for lawmakers or presidents with imperialistic mindsets
also are accomplices.]

End