We've been tightly-and rightly-focused on the stimulus and the bailout of late. But if Obama's economic moves, reflecting his economic team ("no one could have foreseen...") have been disappointing tilted towards the conventional stupidity that got us into this mess in the first place, that's not the only realm in which this pattern holds true, as was signaled most blatantly by his retention of Bush's Secretary of Defense, Iran/Contra second-string player Robert Gates.
It took less than a week for Obama to start bombing civilians, just like his predecessor. Thankfully, for small favors, Bill Moyers, as LBJ's one-time press secretary, has seen this movie before, up close and personal, and he put on one helluva segment last night directly taking on this ominous step into darkness. His guests included Marilyn Young, whose book, Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 is, for my money, the best single overview of the war ever written, and Pierre Sprey, one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids" who went on to help found the military reform movement in the last 1970s, and between the two of them they left little doubt of just how disastrous a course of action Obama appears to have set out on.
BILL MOYERS: LBJ said we want no wider war, but wider war is what we got, eleven years of it.
Now military analysts and historians, including my two guests are wondering aloud - could Afghanistan become "Obama's war," a quagmire that threatens to define his presidency, as Vietnam defined LBJ's?
Marilyn Young is a professor of history at New York University. She's published numerous books and essays on foreign policy, including The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, The New American Empire and Iraq And The Lessons Of Vietnam. She is the co-editor of a collection of essays to be released next month titled Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History.
Pierre Sprey is a former Pentagon official, one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's famous "whiz kids" who helped design and develop two of the military's most successful airplanes, the F-16 Falcon Fighter and the A-10 Warthog Tankbuster. But in the late 1970s, with a handful of Pentagon and congressional insiders, Sprey helped found the military reform movement. They risked their careers taking issue with a defense bureaucracy spending more and more money for fewer and fewer, often ineffective weapons.
You will find an essay with his shared by-line in this new book, America's Defense Meltdown, published by the Center for Defense Information.
So why isn't Obama listening to people like them? People who've actually learned from history? People who can actually remember history?
Because they might be disappointed with him?
BILL MOYERS: Marilyn, what did you think last weekend when four days into the Obama administration we read those reports of the strikes in Pakistan?
MARILYN YOUNG: My heart sank. It absolutely sank. It had been very high. I had been, like I think the rest of the country, feeling immensely encouraged and inspired by this new administration and by the energy and vigor with which he began. And then comes this piece of old stuff on approach to a complicated question that in comes in the form of a bomb and a bomb in the most dangerous of all places. And, yeah, my heart sank, literally.
Because they can't be bull-shitted?
BILL MOYERS: Our military, Pierre, says it's sure that it's striking militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And that they're not targeting civilians. Can they be sure? From your experience, can they be sure?
PIERRE SPREY: I'm sure that their purpose is to strike militants. I have no doubt of that whatsoever. But with the weapons they use and with the extremely flawed intelligence they have.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yes.
PIERRE SPREY: I'd be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact, a militant.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean "flawed intelligence"?
PIERRE SPREY: You can't tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody's a Taliban. In the end, you're relying on either, you know, some form of intercepted communications, which doesn't point at a person. It just, you know, points at a radio or a cell phone or something like that. Or, most likely, you're relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.
Because they would tell him that "acting tough and decisive" the way a Democrat "has to do" is just incredibly stupid?
PIERRE SPREY: And what happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we're trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have turned rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of, you know, other killing of civilians from ground forces....
BILL MOYERS: Are you suggesting that these strikes could be contributed to the destabilization of Pakistan, one of our allies?
MARILYN YOUNG: It's clear that they're doing that. I mean, there never was before an organization called Taliban in Pakistan. This didn't exist as an organization. It does now. It's unclear to me as well the relationship between our punitive enemy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. That's unclear. And it's, it's very unclear what American policy will be with respect to either group. Mainly what's unclear is what our goal is in Afghanistan. It's really unclear.
Because they would tell him, "You've already squandered your good name? And-utterly without realizing it-you've potentially set off on a policy that could be as dangerous as anything that Dick Cheney ever dreamed up"?
BILL MOYERS: There was a photo the other day of a protest in Pakistan, a few days after a drone attacked. The banner reads, quote, "Bombing on tribes. Obama's first gift to Pakistan." Now, that's part of the blowback, isn't it?
PIERRE SPREY: That's incredibly dangerous.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: I mean, I don't think people in America have any sense of how dangerous that is. By bombing into those areas, those traditional Pashtun areas, that the Pakistani government long ago made a pact, you know, at the founding of the state of Pakistan to never invade those areas and to leave the Pashtun to govern themselves. And we are forcing the Pakistanis to break that pact, both on the ground with their army. And we're breaking it by bombing the Pashtun in Pakistan. That is taking a weak and also rotten Pakistani government and crumbling it. That's putting them on the horns of a dilemma that they don't need. Why is that so dangerous to us? Because this is a nuclear armed country. And when they fall apart and fall into the hands of people like, people that are running Afghanistan, you could have a nuclear war with India, you know? I mean, we're talking about not just blowback but we're talking about catastrophe could result.
Because they might say, "Everything Bush did was utterly, and totally wrongheaded, and millions of people flocked to you, because they thought that you realized that, just like they did. Only now it turns out that behind the façade of technical competent, you're basically just as clueless as Bush"?
PIERRE SPREY: This is not a war on terror. You know? And anybody who starts from the premise that it's a war on terror is heading straight into disasters error.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: And he said-
BILL MOYERS: I don't understand that because George W. Bush defined this as a war on terror. And I think Obama must be using the same invocation, you know?
PIERRE SPREY: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: This is all part of the war on terror. He said it in his inaugural address.
PIERRE SPREY: Yes, he said that. I was appalled. You talk about our hearts sinking.
PIERRE SPREY: 9/11 was not an act of war.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
PIERRE SPREY: It was a criminal act. It was a simple.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: Criminal act by a bunch of lunatic fanatic violent people who needed to be tracked down and apprehended and tried exactly as you would with any other lunatic violent person, like we do with our own domestic terrorists, like the guy who bombed the Oklahoma federal building.
BILL MOYERS: Federal building. Right.
PIERRE SPREY: You know? Exactly the same thing we did to him is what we should have launched on a huge basis, of course, on a huge international police basis and not called it.
MARILYN YOUNG: And there would have been totally international support.
PIERRE SPREY: It's not a war.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: We, by calling it a war, we have glorified al Qaeda. We have glorified the cause of violent radical Islam. All that tiny minority have become heroes. And we made them heroes. We made their propaganda. We made their case for them.
And, because they might tell Obama, "When you're finished not learning the lessons of Bush's folly, you're busy not learning the lessons of the Soviet's folly"?
BILL MOYERS: Let me read you an excerpt from the official White House statement on foreign policy under President Obama. Quote, "Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on the greatest threat to our security, the resurgence of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They will increase our troop levels in Afghanistan, press our allies in NATO to do the same, and dedicate more resources to revitalize Afghanistan's economic development." There you have a very clear statement of their intentions that we're going to concentrate on the war. And in fact by the end of this year there'll be 60,000, not 30,000 American troops in Afghanistan. And there's no indication the strikes, the air strikes that are killing civilians are going to stop.
PIERRE SPREY: And the 60,000-
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: -will be useless.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: You know, the Russians at the peak of their invasion - who dealt with the Afghanis a good deal more brutally than we did - had over 150,000 and a trained a 250,000 man Afghan army. And they lost. 60,000 is a recipe for failure, defeat, and ultimately a disgraceful withdrawal by the United States. One way or another, no matter how nice a face we put on it, we'll be kicked out of there just like we were kicked out of Vietnam.
And because these two experts would remind Obama that there is absolutely no history of the strategy you're now embracing ever working?
PIERRE SPREY: There's a moral dimension to every kind of bombing that destroys civilians, particularly bombing that destroys more civilians than military people. You can't avoid it. There's nothing notable about the drones that changes that. And the moral dimension is very simple. And it dates back to the original theologian of bombing, Julio Doue, a rather fanatical Italian from World War I who first hypothesized, wrongly, that you could destroy an enemy's morale, exactly what you said, and win victories without any ground armies if you simply bombed them enough. And secondly, that the bombers would always get through, that they would always defeat fighter opposition and antiaircraft opposition. Both propositions have been provided in history over and over and over again to be not only wrong but thumpingly wrong.
BILL MOYERS: Has civilian bombing ever been effective, Marilyn?
MARILYN YOUNG: I can't think. Can you?
PIERRE SPREY: The answer is no.
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: Very simply, no.
Is that why Obama doesn't listen to them?
I can certainly understand that. Because if Obama listened to them, he'd have to do something else.
And that would make David Broder & Company very, very mad. They might even want to find some pretext to impeach him.
And that could get very, very messy. Best to just keep bombing the hell out of whoever it is who's on the receiving end this week, this month, this year.
