THE ANGUISH OF PERPETUAL WAR

by H. N. Burdett

When American liberals went ballistic over President Obama's decision to prolong rather than abruptly shut down United States presence in West Asia, their opposition to preemptive war blocked common sense.

Whether one agreed with George W. Bush's constantly changing rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or deemed them as the sheer lunacy of a son obsessed with completing his father's unfinished business, precipitous withdrawal from the region would guarantee the worst possible outcome -- one featuring hitherto unseen carnage and the triumphal return of the Taliban.

Whenever American troops leave that beleaguered region, there is no assurance that the Taliban or a fundamentalist equivalent will not flood back into Afghanistan, or that a despotic heir to Saddam Hussein will not emerge in Iraq.

If the loss of thousands of young men and women Bush and Obama have sent halfway around the world to defend and promote freedom and democracy is to have any meaning, perhaps we owe it to the memory of this lost treasure to exert a final effort to show that they did not die in vain. Those who contend that it is insanity to even consider the risk of compounding a hideous mistake make the valid case that the senseless bloodshed must end, that allowing it to continue is patently unacceptable.

President Obama has sent the nation's most successful warrior, Gen. David H. Petraeus, to replace the disgraced Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as the head of our military operations in Afghanistan. Still, the odds are not in our favor.

The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is not the issue and it is not scheduled to change. Gen. McChrystal was cashiered for insolence, not incompetence. One might pause to reflect on how some of our nation's great generals -- from Ulysses S. Grant to George S. Patton -- might have fared had the equivalent of a Rolling Stone reporter been present when they and their staffs were letting off steam.

Petraeus doubtless has the political skills McChrystal lacked, though the latter is said to have gotten along swimmingly with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which perhaps had more than a little to do with their both feeling a longer U.S. presence in that country is required.

Karzai is reportedly making his own deal with the Taliban, which has the earmarks of his willingness to become their puppet just as he is now that of the Americans. What choice does the duly elected but thoroughly corrupt leader of the land "where empires come to die" really have?

If Obama holds to his July 2011 timetable to begin the U.S. troop withdrawal, Karzai's options are reduced to effecting detente with his enemies under their nefarious terms, or returning to exile.

Meanwhile, Petraeus has said the test of strategic leaders is in their ability to perform three enormous tasks: "get big ideas right," "communicate the big ideas throughout the organization" and "proper execution of big ideas."

With the cooperation of American diplomats, the Obama administration and Karzai, the general may well be able to carry out the first two tasks in his new post. The third -- "proper execution" -- is the unknown quantity.

Petraeus is wise enough to understand that conditions in Afghanistan today are not the same as they were in Iraq when he launched his celebrated game-changing surge. For starters, it is foolhardy to even begin to compare the two neighboring countries. Iraq, prior to the invasion by the U.S. and its allies, was among the more secular states in the region; Afghanistan is one of the more fundamentalist.

The "big idea" Petraeus's leadership must "get right" is to convert Afghanistan into, at very least, something far less than a haven where terrorists may train and establish headquarters, and, at best, a democratic nation. As unlikely as the latter proposition may seem, rank-and-file Afghans, exhausted from 30 years of war, may yet embrace it.

For all of his corruption and questionable leadership ability, Karzai is likely correct when he postulates that it will require 10-15 years to complete the change the United States and presumably much of the rest of the world would like to see happen in Afghanistan.

There is also a growing body of opinion that the current problem with the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the American people hardly notice that we are fighting a perpetual war there. This may be at least partially attributable to the distractions of an imploded economy and nearly one of every 10 employable Americans unable to obtain a job. It may have even more to do with a level of detachment resulting from the war being fought by a standing army of professionals rather than citizen soldiers conscripted to fight it.

The bottom line is that the war in West Asia is not receiving the serious attention, much less adequate support, of the American people.

As it became painfully evident in the McChrystal affair, the military has been known to assume moral superiority during protracted wars. This is unlikely to change much under Petraeus. It would be more surprising if disrespect for civilian authorities were not widespread among U.S. military forces today. The problem may not be so much with the generals, their staffs and the fighting men and women they command, as it is with the situation in which their political leaders have placed them.

Former U.S. Army colonel, Vietnam veteran and Pentagon intellectual, Andrew J. Bacevich, now a history and international relations professor at Boston University, is among the few experts looking beyond Afghanistan. He provides us with the following two options for the future and the dismal consequence for failing to choose one or the other:

"The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly 'at war' with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course -- and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse -- the damge to the army and to American democracy will be severe."

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THE GENERAL'S GAMBIT

by H. N. Burdett

There is no conceivable way that Gen. Stanley McChrystal committed a gaffe.

He knew exactly what he was doing when he gave a writer on assignment with Rolling Stone magazine access to himself and his staff. He was fully aware that President Obama would order him to explain his behavior and that his position as top commander in Afghanistan would be at stake. He also knew that the story would dominate the headlines, even pushing aside the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and Congressional efforts to regulate Wall Street. It was beyond the shadow of a doubt a calculated risk.

With his career on the line, McChrystal, who has taken pride in his brashness at least since his West Point days when he was a century man (having chalked up more than 100 demerits), rolled the dice and bet the President wouldn't fire him.

After all, Obama had given him almost everything he asked for to assure the success of his counterinsurgency, namely the 20,000 troops to effect the surge the general feels is critical to his regime change scheme.

What the President has not given McChrystal is the rescission of his pledge to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by July 2011. The general and his staff don't feel this is adequate time to accomplish their mission. Obama administration officials are turning a deaf ear to their arguments, reminding the general that the President was elected to end the war. McChrystal and his staff also want to end the war, but with a victory -- regime change in Afghanistan -- only first the timetable must be scrapped.

Though a timetable for removing U.S. armed presence from that perpetually beleagured country served the political purpose of the tipping point that won the 2008 election for the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, it is not supported by a scintilla of logic.

It does not require the military insight of Carl von Clausewitz to figure out that announcing to your enemy the date when you intend to stop fighting is not such a great idea. Is there anyone who really doubts that the Taliban will be back fighting desperately for control of Afghanistan within days if not hours after American troops leave?

Somehow Bush the Younger sold the preemptive invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as necessary to prevent the United States and their allies from having to fight Al Qaeda on our home turf. It was as though there would be landing barges in New York, Philadelphia and Boston harbors with Bin Laden's troops pouring out, armed to the teeth, and more of them parachuting into Miami and Atlanta. None of this was the kind of military capability to which Bin Laden has access, or perhaps even wants. Al Qaeda seems perfectly content perpetrating random acts of terrorism.

Though most of the so-called Coalition of the Willing bailed out of West Asia, Bush's salesmanship was sufficient to win re-election to the presidency. Barack Obama, despite his vow to disengage our troops from that incredible misadventure as soon as possible, apparently bought into the Bush administration's faulty premise. Since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been no major acts of terrorism within the confines of the continental United States. Not that the bad guys haven't tried -- most recently, of course, in Times Square. Our much maligned homeland security capabilities combined with great dollops of good luck have kept us safe.

Meanwhile, the war has dragged on longer than our involvement in Vietnam, which tore the country apart more than any other event since the Civil War. Besides being obviously unwinnable, the preemptive war in West Asia, considering the long and slow recovery from the implosion of the global economy, is clearly unaffordable. Yet it continues. Gen. McChrystal is among a distinct minority who still seems to believe the war can be won and Afghanistan can be converted into a democracy. He appears determined to drive home that point one way or another.

But, as the Rolling Stone article makes clear, the general deplores decorum and diplomacy. If he's unable to buy more time from Obama, McChrystal may try to find a way to take his case to the American people. The nation, however, is weary of this war, which has bogged down to a stalemate. An expensive stalemate that voraciously gobbles down millions of dollars at a time of barely perceivable recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The general may have to resort to showcasing his macho persona. Rather than convince the public that we need a foothold for democracy in West Asia to quench our thirst for oil, he may have to sell himself. Americans love nothing more than a macho hero. In McChrystal, they would have a reasonable facsimile of the second coming of General Patton or John Wayne. He's genuinely tough as nails and outspoken, tough enough to badmouth the Vice President in front of a magazine reporter; no one should bet against him trying to speak his mind to the country's ultimate power figure.

It has been reported that when Obama, who had never served in the military, had his first meeting with the nation's top brass he was intimidated by all those uniforms, ribbons and medals. Indeed this is the reason given for his moving the war to Afghanistan rather than bringing the troops home and restructuring the hunt for Bin Laden and dissolution of Al Qaeda as the international police action it should have been from the beginning.

While it is true enough that President Obama inherited a veritable plethora of unmitigated crises from the previous administation -- from the wreckage of the economy, to energy dependence on foreign oil, to near double-digit unemployment -- the so-called 'war on terrorism' was the issue that got the most attention, along with the resolve for disengagement. It was, after all, supposed to be a slam dunk. Practically in the blink of an eye, the mission was to be accomplished, as the cartoonish leader of the free world announced nine years ago.

Though Abraham Lincoln was frustrated with Gen. George McClellan, who commanded the Union army from a perpetually defensive posture, he declined demands to replace him because he simply had no one better. Finally Lincoln ordered McClellan to stand down, turning his post over to Ulysses S. Grant, who justified the President's confidence by moving aggressively to win the Civil War. When Harry Truman finally had had enough of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's arrogance and insolence, he replaced him with Matthew Ridgway, who had instilled morale and a fighting spirit into the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea which MacArthur insisted was demoralized and weary. McChrystal is risking his career and perhaps his place in history on his wager that Obama has no Grant or Ridgway waiting in the wings.

When MacArthur, a household name who had defeated Japan in World War II, took it upon himself to announce, in defiance of President Truman, his intention to expand the Korean conflict into mainland China, the President relieved him of his command. Truman later said he regarded that decision as among the most important of his presidency and that his biggest mistake in the White House was not having done it months earlier.

Those who agreed with the decision heralded it as an act of great courage, considering the enormous esteem MacArthur had earned as perhaps the most famous contemporary American warrior. "Courage didn't have anything to do with it," Truman said. " General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That's all there was to it."

Looking back upon it years later, Truman wrote, "If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military. If I allowed him to defy the civil authorities in this manner, I myself would be violating my oath to uphold and defend the Constitution."

Both Gen. McChrystal and President Obama might do well to reflect upon those words.

WHEN TRAGEDY OFFERS OPPORTUNITY

By H. N. Burdett

My friend of some 40 years -- let's call him Ted -- sides with the Palestinians in their every confrontation with the Israelis these days. So it's hardly a surprise to find him absolutely livid about the nine people killed by Israeli commandos who recently boarded a Turkish ship attempting to run Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Ted is emphatically not anti-Semitic. He has solid progressive credentials. There's no one I'd more want fighting at my side in the trenches on issues ranging from civil rights to environmental sanity.

Yet he has something akin to a blind spot when it comes to Middle East politics. It is a blind spot I understand. But first a few words about my own blind spot leading to near knee-jerk support of Israel.

My father and mother emigrated from Russia and Lithuania respectively during the first decade of the twentieth century. Economic opportunity certainly had a role in their abandonment of their respective homelands. But there were other reasons.

Not unlike many if not most young Jewish men in czarist Russia, my father was determined to avoid military conscription which he described as "a life sentence -- once you were in it, you were in it forever." Furthermore, to discourage desertion, he told me, pains were taken to post soldiers as distant from their home villages as possible.

A cousin from my father's village I first met when I was a teenager supplied me with a detail that my father had until then never bothered to share about his earlier life. As a very young man, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky, who following the 1917 revolution, some eight years after my father arrived in the United States, served as provisional prime minister prior to Lenin's election.

My father recalled that he was initially attracted to Kerensky based on the then young lawyer's brilliant defense of political prisoners in the czar's courts, and, later, because of his vision to recreate Russia in the image of America. Glowing letters from relatives in the United States caused Kerensky's promise to resonate with my father. But, as more and more Jews were conscripted into the Russian army, my father would not be around for the revolution in his homeland

Meanwhile, my mother, then only nine years old, accompanied her aunt and uncle to America to escape the more and more frequent pogroms in Lithuania in which Jewish villages were routinely pillaged, Jewish men routinely beaten or slaughtered and Jewish women and girls routinely raped.

Interminable persecution and brutalization was the plight of Eastern European Jews well before the rise of Hitler. After my father and mother emigrated to the United States, the families they left behind, other than his brother and two sisters he was able, after years of hard work, to bring to the U.S., were wiped out in the World War II Nazi Holocaust.

Though I've never been a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu -- the attack on the Free Gaza flotilla was precisely the sort of tragedy I feared when he was elected -- I am generally supportive of Israel.

Arguments over whether Israel even has a right to exist I find to be in the same category with those concerning the legitimacy of the United States. The major difference, it seems to me, is less a matter of morality than duration -- one, rightly and wrongly, has been around more than 230 years, the other a little more than 60.

Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist organization which has controlled the Gaza Strip since the 2006 legislative elections, has never accepted the Jewish state. They have called for a hudna or truce with Israel, based on the Prophet Mohammed's similar respite with Jews some 1,400 years ago. Hamas's entrenched refusal to fully accept Israel is construed by Israelis to mean that when the Palestinians gain sufficient strength their intention is to overtake Israel.

While Hamas operates mosques, schools, clinics and social programs, its military wing has carried out numerous terrorist acts, including suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Hamas opposed the 1993 accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Authority and its charter dating back to 1988 continues to call for replacement of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with an Islamic Palestinian state.

Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, said following the April 2006 elections, that he dreamed of "hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel. . .there is no place for the state of Israel in this land."

In my travels over the years, I've visited Turkey twice. I clearly remember a huge banner strung across a main thoroughfare in Istanbul in 1992, proclaiming 500 years of Turkish and Jewish friendship. I recall wondering how many other countries could make a similar claim, much less a predominately Islamic country.

If any country needs every friend it can get, it is Israel. But the commando raid on the Turkish ship has seriously strained relations between the two countries. World opinion, mostly favoring Israel since 1948 when it was reborn as a nation, today favors Palestinians more than it does Israel .

The raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara has engendered a reevaluation of the country's relationship with Israel. Ironically, the fact that Turkey is an Islamic country with a long-term reputation of friendship with Israel would seem to make it an ideal honest broker in negotiations leading to a two-state solution to the region's most vexing problem.

Liberals are preternaturally disposed to supporting the oppressed and dispossessed. When they see Palestinians in displaced persons' camps, they instinctively know what side they are on.

My friend Ted sees video footage of Israeli tanks rolling over Palestinian shelters in the refugee camps where there are women and children, contrasts it with home-made rockets from the Palestinian territories landing harmlessly in fields inside of Israel.

What Ted and many liberals see is Palestinians in ghettoes at the mercy of Jews, and they wonder how this is different from Nazi oppression of Jews sixty-five to seventy years ago. We do not hear Israeli hard-liners calling for mass extermination of Palestinians; in fact, when considering fundamentalist organizations like Hamas, it is just the opposite. But fundamentalist Arabs and reactionary Israelis are motivated by the same emotion: boundless, unswerving distrust.

My only visit to Israel was more than 40 years ago. As a secular Jew, proud of my heritage, I am both wary and weary of the intolerance organized religion, for all of its well-intentioned advocacy of peace, goodwill and harmony, almost invariably fosters.

I came away from that one trip to Israel with the hope that the Jewish state would one day set a positive example for the entire Middle East -- not because it had a surfeit of bullets and bombs, but that the Jewish experience in the diaspora, so much of its population having lived among people of different religious, ethnic and political backgrounds, might serve as a beacon for showing the way toward regional if not global peace. It bode well that Jews, wherever they have lived, have demonstrated leadership in the arts, sciences and culture disproportionate to their numbers. But four decades later that hope remains on tenuous hold.

Meanwhile, Palestinian frustration over being subjected to generations of refugee status is more than understandable; so too is the liberal identification with the suppressed. This time Israel appears to be the aggressor, if for no other reason than it is the Israelis wearing the boots and the uniforms and who are supported by an arsenal of sophisticated weaponry. And the stateless Palestinians are cast as freedom fighters. If one picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of one video of a family's home crushed by a tank?

Nor is the retribution ideology of both the Torah and the Quran helpful in the effort to bring about peace. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King observed that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

History is not without precedence in which hardline leaders have succeeded in advancing a progressive agenda where more moderate ones might not have. There is strong doubt that had liberal Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 United States presidential election, he could have achieved U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China that came about through the unlikely Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy.

Is it too much to hope that Netanyahu can lead his country to the two-state solution -- the only possibility, fraught with risk though it may be, for creating an environment conducive to peace and prosperity. "From this nettle danger, we pluck this flower safety," Shakespeare wrote. The time for lip service to a Palestinian state has long passed.

It should be evident to Israel that the blockade strengthens rather than weakens Hamas, and that it has now jeopardized more than five centuries of friendship with an Islamic nation. Moreover, the only result that can possibly come from the blockade is not a bridge to a more harmonious future but a treadmill of dismal stagnation.

Israel's continuing blockade of Gaza ensures the status quo. But what nation in a similar position would risk the mass importation of arms to a country controlled by an organization whose founder wants it to vanish from his map? There is an opportunity for the United Nations to repair its own diminished image as a peacekeeping force by assuming security responsibilities and ensuring against weapons pouring into Gaza to be used against Israel.

Considering their long, heartbreaking history of bitterness, animosity and violence, it is long overdue for Arabs and Jews to live side by side, not as suspicious and fearful neighbors but as the brothers they were always meant to be. The risks of the two-state solution may be immense, but no greater than those of the the perpetual standoff that serves only to compound mutual resentment and hostility, and which has proved nothing other than that it is unworkable, untenable and unjustifiable.

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THE END OF OBAMA'S HONEYMOON

by H. N. Burdett

Pressed to come up with a specific day when President Obama's honeymoon ended with the liberal chattering class, Sunday, May 30, might do as well as any.

On that day, it appeared that the New York Times's triumvirate of left-of-center opinionators -- Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman -- had huddled and determined it was time to spit out the mouthpieces, remove the gloves and go after the decider-in-chief tooth and nail.

More to the point, they obviously had had it up to there with what seemed to be the president channeling his inept predecessor with inexplicable inaction regarding BP's inability to plug the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil leak.

The headline over Rich's weekly essay -- "Obama's Katrina? Maybe Worse" -- minced no words in setting the tone for the hymnal that was rendered in three-part op-ed harmony.

Rich recalled that one glaring difference between then and now was that George W. Bush was in his second term when Hurricane Katrina pounded the gulf region relentlessly; the country was more or less prepared for his bungling having already “witnessed two-plus years of his mismanagement of the Iraq war.” He added that W's "laissez-fair response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall of big business.

Lest his readers become fidgety about the audacity of comparing Obama and Bush, Rich reaffirmed his awareness that the two are cut from very different cloth. "Whatever Obama's failings," he writes, "he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor."

With sardonic delight, the column goes on to revisit the horrific late summer of 2005and Bush's emulation of Nero fiddling while Rome was ablaze.By contrast, Rich concludes that the Obama administration was, at least, "engaged with the oil spill from the start" and that "it's still not clear what the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to a cosmetic difference in plugging the hole."

Running out of steam after admitting that he hadn't the foggiest idea of what he wanted the president to do other than something, the essay resorted to criticizing as "at least three weeks overdue" the press conference Obama held three days earlier. The president used that occasion to announce the government's response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its relationship with BP.

Rich concluded that Obama is "stuck between a rock and a Tea Party" and that his "credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video footage from the gulf."

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd typically delights in taking power to task without suggesting, nor even offering a bare hint about what it should be doing that it is not.

She righteously thunders: "For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history, a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching." An especially nice line for those who enjoy confusing metaphor for substance. Dorothy Parker once said the difference between wit and wisecracking is that the former "has truth in it," while the latter is "simply calisthenics with words." If there were an Olympic medal for those calisthenics, Dowd would be a serious contender.

Dowd took the occasion to scold Obama "and top aides who believe in his divinity" for dismissing "complaints of his aloofness as Washington white noise. He treats the press as a nuisance rather than examining his inability to encapsulate America's feelings." The press seldom embarrasses itself more than when it whines about how it is mistreated by those it routinely skewers. No one bothered to inform Maureen that adversarial relationships -- such as that between the press and politicians -- are two-way streets. The press seems to understand this even less than do politicians.

Dowd closes her column by offering Obama truly bizarre advice. The president, she says, should offer Bill Clinton, who "would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire," a "cameo" role as "Feeler in Chief" because "the post is open." Her haughtily supercilious reference is to the inability of the "aloof" Obama to publicly display his compassion, which, incidentally, has never been known to plug an oil leak.

I hardly ever read a Maureen Dowd column without shedding a tear of longing for her sisters-in-arms, Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins, may they rest in peace, and thanking the heavens above and each and every star therein for Rachel Maddow.

So it was left to Tom Friedman to once again fill the role of the newspaper’s most consistent, if not only, op-ed page grownup.

He wisely pointed out that the oil leak is not the president’s fault, that it is BP’s responsibility and, moreover, that firm has “the best access to the best technology to plug it.”

But Friedman stressed that Obama has yet to tackle his most important job, which is to exploit the opportunity “to change our national conversation on energy.“ In this line alone, Friedman shows why, though he sometimes may be out-written by his op-ed colleagues, he is seldom out-thought.

"Obama realists” keep telling the president that the Democrats in Congress are suffering from “legislative fatigue” after casting a hard vote for health care, he says, and “they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon -- the essential first step in getting off oil." Actually lawmakers who feel that way should waste no time seeking employment elsewhere.

Friedman reminds us, as though we need to be, that “the GOP today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.” Score another bulls-eye for Tom. Friedman concludes: ”As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.”
　
Just two days later, a front page off-lead article in The Washington Post announced that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. had been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to meet with federal and state prosecutors. His mission, according to the Post's Joel Achenbach and Jerry Markon, was to determine whether the environmental calamity "might become the subject of a criminal investigation." When power responds to constructive criticism, it is nearly as beautiful as a Beethoven sonata and far more rare.