More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney's recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney's torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, "At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."
Today, MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org joined the growing movement to amplify the testimonies of former interrogators and reveal the repercussions of treating prisoners inhumanely. Their joint campaign features a video with Jay Bagwell, an Afghanistan veteran and counterintelligence agent, who reaffirmed Alexander's assessment of Cheney's torture policy. According to Bagwell, "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo."
U.S. airstrikes slaughtered 95 Afghan children in the Farah province last week, leaving a total of 140 civilians dead. And yet as Tom Hayden pointed out in The Nation this week, our Democrat-dominated Congress seems unwilling to criticize the Obama administration as it rushes to approve $94.2 billion in supplemental wartime funding. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has been holding hearings over the past few weeks with U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani military advisers, assessed that the supplemental only "exacerbates" failed strategies by allocating $84 billion to military escalation, leaving $10 billion for foreign aid.
At a time when we're facing soaring unemployment and an economic crisis, it's incredible to me that Congress is so quick to simply go along with Obama on this one, particularly when the run up to the war in Iraq is so fresh in our minds and when we've seen this pattern before from Democratic Presidents. And there are many who share this incredulity.
The same neocons who orchestrated the war in Iraq and undermined US efforts in Afghanistan the first time around are at it again, determined to sink us deeper into the costly Afghan quagmire. They have resurfaced in the form of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington think tank headed by Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Dan Senor. As Sam Stein reported last week on The Huffington Post, the FPI will hold a summit today titled "Afghanistan: Planning for Success." And slated to attend the event are powerful Republicans and Democrats like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Rep. John M. McHugh (R-NY), and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA). What's particularly troubling about McCain and a think tank like the FPI is that they are trying to manipulate President Obama's plans for military escalation into a massive, limitless war of Iraq proportions.
We already know where McCain stands on Afghanistan. He and fellow warmonger Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) celebrated the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war by urging the Obama administration to support an all-out military commitment in Afghanistan, regardless of cost. McCain clearly shares the FPI's warped notion of "success" in Afghanistan, which he has discussed everywhere from the Op-Ed pages of the Washington Post to his recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He envisions a Utopian outcome to this war, one in which our military engages in a broad-based, long-term counterinsurgency to create "a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary." Compounding that highly improbable scenario is the fact that McCain and the FPI are getting away with defining "success" in Afghanistan because not enough mainstream journalists or members of Congress are contesting their views.
Where is the public outcry for congressional oversight hearings on the war in Afghanistan? Granted, the words "congressional oversight hearings" aren't particularly sexy--certainly not as alluring as "shock and awe," "insurgency," "counterinsirgency," "airstrikes," and "Hellfire missiles." But one thing that is always sexy is power, and Congress has the power to prevent these airstrikes and missiles from killing thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thereby removing some of the hostility toward our country and reasons for joining the Taliban's insurgency. As Tom Hayden wrote his week, Congress has the power to bring in experts to examine the overall goals for this war; costs and budgeting; skyrocketing casualty rates; use of private contractors; human rights violations and torture. If that kind of power isn't sexy, I don't know what is, but the fact of the matter is Congress won't call for oversight hearings until we make them.
Now there are some true leaders in Congress who have already shown a willingness to oppose the Obama administration, the Pentagon, and a corporate press that has remained largely uncritical of the administration's plans for military escalation. Senator Bernie Sanders is one of those leaders. Though he doesn't approve of President Obama's decision to send an additional 17,000 soldiers to Afghanistan, here's how he tactfully voiced his dissent:
The last thing in the world that I want to see is our new President -- who I have a lot of confidence in in many respects -- we don't want to see him bogged down the way LBJ was bogged down in Vietnam. We don't want to see another war in Iraq, which was so disastrous in so many respects.
I was hanging out at home this weekend, being relatively lazy, and one of the things I did was listen to some classic baby boom rock and roll from the 1960s and early '70s: Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Clapton (in his passionate, fucked-up, in-love-with-my-best-friend's-girl Derek and the Dominos phase, not the mellow stuff he's done more recently). Being a baby boomer raised on all that, it's still the best music there is in my book.
I'm not sure what got me in the mood for all that, but perhaps it was Tom Hayden's eloquent open letter to Barack Obama last week, which had gotten me thinking about the last big progressive moment in American history, and how it compares to today.
I'm not going to write about Obama's odd triangulation strategy, which many others have been discussing for months now. I'm more interested in how the entire political culture keeps looking back to that period as a reference point. From progressive activists comparing their tactics and strategies to the civil rights and anti-war movements of that era, to progressive politicians constantly invoking Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the DLC types who scream "McGovern" every time a Democrat stands strongly against the Iraq war, to right-wingers who, to this very day still get their rocks off attacking Hayden and Fonda for taking that trip to Hanoi, everybody is obsessed with that era of politics. Perhaps it's because that was the last time that society fundamentally shifted in a positive way.
What haunts me more than anything about the era is why the progressive movement lost the momentum, and the country's politics turned so far to the right. Unlike the 1930s, whose progressive accomplishments set the stage for a New Deal coalition that dominated American politics for two generations, the 1960s generated a backlash that gave us Nixon, then Reagan, then Gingrich, then the 2nd Bush, each one worst than the one before in terms of their right-wing politics and their negative impact on the nation.
The study of history is not well-served by offering simple explanations, and there are many factors in the toxic stew of right-wing political success. The racial backlash is a very big factor, and in combination with the general white-male, working-class backlash against feminism and "hippies", has been a central dynamic. The rise of the carefully constructed right-wing infrastructure discussed by Rob Stein and many others has been a very big factor as well, along with the failings of single-interest group politics that Markos wrote about in Crashing the Gates. My own larger analysis of these dynamics is posted here.
All of these problems, and more, have been written about at nauseum. Something that I think has gotten less attention is the individuality of the movement in the latter '60s and early '70s. While the earlier civil rights movement was very focused on community, and the 1962 Port Huron Statement was written by Hayden and the other SDS founders was all about building progressive communitarian power, I am often stuck when I read or watch documentaries about the late'60s how often protestors say things like "I just want to do my own thing" or even "we don't want to go to war, we just want the government to leave us alone." The identity politics which flourished in that era was often about individual rights, not about expanding the sense of mutual obligation we have to each other.
As these baby boomers aged, and the threat of being drafted and personally going to war ended, it's easy to see how too many of that generation became part of Grover Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" coalition. Indeed, white people in my age cohor who are of a decent income level tend to be as Republican a group as there is in terms of age- and if you are a white guy my age who is not a union member, gay or Jewish, you're in Republican base voter territory.
As we build the modern progressive movement, using online activism and communication as our most important tools, we should take care to learn this lesson from the last great movement era. The internet is a great tool for collective action, but the highly individualistic libertarians love it too, as Ron Paul's supporters have shown. We have the potential to build community and collective engagement as never before, but the individuality of doing your own thing typing away at home on your computer can also lead to the "leave me alone, let me do my own thing" syndrome. We should do all in our power to build that good old community feeling, to build a movement that works well together on behalf of goals that benefit all of us.
In my diary earlier today on Ron Paul, I noted how he fell among the 0.2% of people totally opposed to federal social welfare policies--a remarkably far-right fringe position from which to launch a campaign that even seeks to appeal to progressives distressed with the Democrats' inept and confused response to the Iraq War. While Ron Paul stands zero chance of being elected President, he is doing a bang-up job of expanding the rightwing extremist base of influence, which is what a hegemonic cultural warrior ought to be doing. Too bad he is on the other side.
Now I want to flip to the other side, and take a look at how a much better positioned progressive candidate--Barack Obama--has managed to do the exact opposite: take a majoritarian position and cut it to pieces. He, too, will probably not be President. But unlike Paul, he is doing virtually nothing to build influence for ideological base. In fact, he's doing the exact opposite: his funciton is to divide and sometimes even demonize that base.
My points of reference here are how Obama himself has characterized the divisions in foreign policy as he sees them, and how he responds.
In a MyDD diary last December, The Two Obamas and Me, Part One, Chris contrasted the principle-driven Obama who first inspired tremendous netroots support with the compromise-driven Obama were seen since, who often seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start. Chris cited this example:
In town-hall meetings, when those who opposed the war get shrill, Obama makes a point of noting that while he, too, opposed the war, he's "not one of those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil."
Chis followed up:
Did anyone with any power every say that? Did any leading Democrats ever say that? Did any progressive or liberal of any public stature ever say that? If they did, I'd love to see the quote.
In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a "new international economic order." But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party. "The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam," he said to me on the campaign plane, "which means that either you're a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you're a Tom Hayden Democrat and you're suspicious of any military action. And that's just not my framework."
The cut points that Obama makes are, I will argue, fundamentally misguided and destructive. Even if the dividions were accurate, the only reason to focus on such divisions in the first place should be to heal them, not simply highlight them. Besides, Ron Paul's example clearly shows that the most effective strategy is not even to talk about divisions. But I don't want to simply be negative. I want to illuminate what the real cut points are, and why it makes so much more sense to focus on them realistically in forming our policy.
