The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel have published a huge cache of secret military files from the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, detailing the war in Afghanistan. Follow reaction to the Afghanistan war logs here. More here. Also, more here.
Read the Whitehouse condemnation of the leak here. Evidently, Wikileaks published a CIA document last year that gave us a gleam of CIA strategy to keep Western Europe from pulling out of Afghanistan: use the popularity of Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Obama is the willing heir to Bush's wars, and I think its fair to say at this point that they're are fully his. He's certainly given the war in Afghanistan a warm embrace since day one, and it may actually turn out that the only campaign promise Obama kept was to escalate that conflict.
What other reaction could the administration have to such a leak? They've invested a lot of time and energy embracing the war as their own. What could they do at this point, come out and commend the press and admit that the war is an ugly, costly, human disaster waged on the basis of imperialist motives?
Unlike some of the liberal commentariat, I don't think that the Obama Administration's hawkish positions re: Afghanistan are "strategic" moves they made in order to massage public opinion polls. This is quite obviously false. Polls, on the contrary, have shown for some time that the war is unpopular, and many enthusiastic Obama supporters (mistakenly, although somewhat understandably) took him to be "anti-war." This is not as egregious as the claim in 2004 that John Kerry was "anti-war", but its bad (recall Kerry's frequent insistence that he would have voted for the Iraq War all over again, even if he'd known ahead of time that there were no weapons of mass destruction, which he probably did).
But the bigger point is this. The Democratic Party is, and always has been, a firm supporter of US imperialism abroad. Their historical record is impeccable on this score. As is well-known among the foreign policy establishment in Washington, there is virtually no distinction between the parties on the goals of foreign policy, there are only minor disagreements over how to achieve them from time to time. Now there are, to be sure, left-ish members of the Democratic Party who dissent from this consensus, but they are a marginal force and always, at the end of the day, go with the imperialist flow of the institution of which they're a passive appendage.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Cat's out of the bag
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Remembering the Rosenbergs and the Reds
The history and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have always been simultaneously fascinating and horrifying to me. Part of what keeps me so intrigued with the story is that my Generation Y brain can just not wrap itself around the time period and context that produced such a sad, sad scandal. The New York Times has an article today that helps humanize the Rosenbergs' side of the story a little more than I've ever heard before, by highlighting the Rosenbergs' sons' (who are both apparently committed socialists) reactions to new information which confirms their father had spied for the Soviets. There are the unanswered questions that remain: Did Julius actually give the Soviets nuclear secrets? Did Ethel Rosenberg actually commit any crime?
But what still seems to bother me about this case is I really cannot grasp the fear and passion that led to the federal government's orphaning Michael and Robert by electrocuting their communist parents. It's almost like the more I read about it, the more bizarre and other-dimension-like the entire event seems. How can there be such a historical disconnect in my imagination just a generation after the infamous case? How much had to change in just a few decades in the historical and political thought 0f the nation to make this context so out of reach for me? Obviously I know the by-the-book history of the Cold War and McCarthyism...but...I still can't make all the pieces add up.
