A scary thought just occurred to me. I'm at a loss to understand Obama's embrace of the Afganistan "war" in practical terms. Sure, we can argue all day long about the POLITICAL consequences of admitting the futility and ending it, of admitting it is a criminal enterprise, whatever-- but that entails accepting that we are killing our own service men and women, as well as countless (and largely uncounted) Afghans for no better purpose than preserving the vanity of our leaders. There must be a practical reason as well as a political one.
One that gets aired regularly is Afghanistan's purported wealth of natural resources and it's location astride a potential pipeline route for extracting fossil fuels from the Caspian region. But accepting that means turning a blind eye to all those U.S. service personnel being involved in what is essentially piracy, and makes the deaths of Afghans even more difficult to justify. Theft of resources for American corporations is a longstanding plank in U.S. foreign policy, of course, and should never be ruled out when American boots and guns are on the ground, but still, it's hard to imagine the spinning a democratic party administration would have to engage in to sell this. I don't discount it for a minute, but the attraction would have to be pretty shiny to justify this misbegotten war on that account alone.
That led me to wonder what present, practical underpinning might be so compelling that even a democratic president-- who gave every indication during his political rise of having principles that would interfere with wholesale slaughter for naked greed or for mundane political cover-- would be compelled to prosecute an unjust war. It occurred to me that in the present economic downturn, the military industrial complex might be the United States' single biggest remaining economic force. Without much large-scale heavy or light manufacturing left in this country except the auto industry, and that being at least partly on the ropes and facing an uncertain future in any event, what economic drivers might the administration rely on to counter the unemployment and recession that is gripping the nation? Government spending, of course, but where does the government spend most of its money? On the Pentagon, which provides a broad bore money pipeline directly to the corporate wings of the military-industrial complex.
Dumping money into the economy via the MIC serves lots of additional purposes as well. It rewards the already wealthy and powerful, keeping them happy. The opposition party, which is generally a much more effective opposition party than the democrats are when they're the "loyal opposition," supports it almost without question. It reinforces existing power structures and relationships rather than threatening them with reform.
I know some DUers will argue that there aren't any underlying justifications, that the stated justifications are sufficient: defeating the Taliban, stabilizing a puppet government, denying a haven for al-Qaeda. But all of those justifications are transparently impractical or unachievable. Few are fooled by them, so they're just eye-wash and sound-bite material to gloss over the real reasons we're spending billions of dollars a month to stay in the clusterfuck.
While I don't doubt for a minute that there are ridiculous and shallow political forces at work protecting the reputations of failed U.S. leadership AND naked greed for Afghan resources in play-- there's no reason any of these justifications for war are mutually exclusive-- I wonder whether it has also occurred to Obama and his advisers that America's wars are among the few major economic drivers we have left. Has ignoring Ike's warnings about the MIC and shadow government led us to the point where they are them most important growth industries we have left?
