Obama finally gets to have his own war!

[FL Patriot]

Well, it looks like our Commander in Chief is going to get his wish. He will get to send young men to their death, in a Country that had nothing to do with 9/11

US soldiers in Afghanistan, where they will soon be joined by 30,000 additional troops. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Barack Obama is to set an ambitious timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, with the first troops pulling out by July 2011. The announcement is aimed at countering US public fears that the country is being sucked into a Vietnam-style morass.

Reflecting the increased sense of urgency, Obama is to speed deployment of an extra 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan within the next six months – a much faster timetable than the 12 to 18 months that had been briefed by US officials up until today.

The 30,000 figure is lower than requested by the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, but the Obama administration is hoping that other Nato countries will make up the difference. A senior administration official said the Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, will announce the deployment of extra troops on Friday.

The additional US forces are intended to counter Taliban expansion and help the Afghan army and police take over responsibility for security faster.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, spoke today of "an accelerated timetable". During a round of television interviews he said the faster the US forces move in, the faster they will move out. "We can't be there forever," he said.

Obama was looking for an "end game" and wanted to "get in there quickly" and transfer responsibility for security to the Afghan military as rapidly as possible, Gibbs said. An administration official said the US aimed to begin winding down troop numbers in July 2011.

Gibbs indicated that there would be no further escalations beyond the one Obama approved on Sunday. Asked on Good Morning America if this would be the last order for extra troops, he said: "The president sure believes so."

US officials said Obama wants almost all the US troops out before the end of his first term in office in January 2013, leaving behind a small contingency force. Gibbs said the president did not want to leave the problem to his successor.

The new strategy comes at the end of three months of intensive debate in Washington over the future of Afghanistan, an issue that has swamped the rest of Obama's agenda. The president, in the biggest decision of his term so far, had to choose between options ranging from sending only a few thousand more troops to the 40,000 requested by McChrystal. The president was set to expand on the thinking behind the new strategy in a speech last night at the US military academy at West Point, New York state.

The risk for Obama is that the extra 30,000 troops may not be enough to counter an increasingly confident Taliban and that the timetable for training the Afghan army and police is over-optimistic.

Two brigades, one from the US marines and one from the army, plus reserves, amounting to 30,000, are to be sent to Afghanistan over the next six months, bringing American troops in the country to 100,000. They are to be based in the south and east, where US and British forces are under pressure and badly in need of reinforcements. The first of the marines are due to arrive before Christmas.

Britain has already committed to sending more troops. Extra troops for Afghanistan will be on the agenda at a Nato meeting scheduled for next week.

There are 95,000 Afghan troops at present and the US wants that number up to 134,000 by October 2010, three years earlier than originally envisaged, and then to 240,000 by 2013. There are about 92,000 Afghan police and the US target is 160,000 by 2013.

There is scepticism about whether the Afghan army and police can be trained up that quickly to take over. At present, the Afghan army has a loss rate of about 25% of its members trained by US and its Nato allies, the bulk of whom just walk away.

Obama, who has already set a timetable for withdrawal of a sizeable chunk of US forces from Iraq by 2011, is keen to shed the label of "war president" and increase his chances of re-election to a second term. Public opinion in the US is steadily turning against the Afghanistan war in the face of mounting American casualties and lack of faith in Hamid Karzai's government.

Obama spoke to Karzai for an hour late on Monday night to brief him about the new strategy that will include "benchmarks" for the Afghan government not only to train more members of the Afghan army and police but also to take steps to tackle government corruption.

Obama's speech is to be followed by appearances at Congress by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Michael Mullen.

[FL Patriot]

Who am I? At present, I am a center director at the Free Congress Foundation. But in 1976 I began the debate over maneuver warfare that became a central part of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps finally adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the late `80s (I wrote most of their new tactics manual).

In 1989, I began the debate over Fourth Generation warfare—war waged by non-state entities—which is what paid us a visit on September 11, 2001. The article I co-authored then for the Marine Corps Gazette was formally cited last year by al Quaeda, who said, "This is our doctrine." My Maneuver Warfare Handbook, published in 1985, is now used by military academies all over the world, and I lecture internationally on military strategy, doctrine and tactics.

In this series, I propose to look at what is happening—with Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan and other outposts of the new American imperium—from the standpoint of military theory. Hopefully, that will enable us all to make sense out of the bits and pieces we get each day as "news." One of the most important things military theory offers to this end is a framework developed by Col. John Boyd, USAF, who was the greatest military theorist America ever produced. Col. Boyd said that war is fought at three levels: moral, mental and physical. The moral level is the most powerful, the physical level is the least powerful, and the mental level is in between. The American way of war, which is Second Generation warfare—there will be more on the Four Generations of Modern War in future commentaries—is physical: "putting steel on target," as our soldiers like to say.

But how does the coming war with Iraq look at the moral level? Here, the U.S. seems to be leading with its chin. Why? Because the Administration in Washington has yet to come up with a convincing rationale for why the United States should attack Iraq.

The argument that Iraq, a small, poor (it didn't used to be, but it is now), Third World country halfway around the world is a direct threat to the U.S.A. is not credible. Yes, Saddam probably has some chemical and biological weapons. But few tyrants are bent on suicide, and the notion that he would use them to attack the United States, except in self-defense, makes no sense. Nor does it seem likely he would give them to non-state actors like al Quaeda—again, except in self-defense—because non-state forces and Fourth Generation warfare are as much a threat to him as to us.

It is of course true that Saddam is a tyrant (his model, by the way, is obviously Stalin, not Hitler). So what? Mesopotamia has been ruled by tyrants since before history began, and it will be ruled by tyrants long after North America is once again tribal territories. The last President who tried to export democracy on American bayonets was Woodrow Wilson. That's one of the reasons he counts as America's worst President, ever. Very few people, in America or the rest of the world, wish to see us revive the practice.

Most importantly, the real threat we face is the Fourth Generation, non-state players such as al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. They can only benefit from an American war against Iraq—regardless of how it turns out. If we win, the state is further discredited in the Islamic world, and more young men give their allegiance to non-state forces. If Saddam wins, their own governments look even less legitimate, because they failed to stand with him against the hated Crusaders. A recent cartoon showed Osama bin Laden, dressed as Uncle Sam, saying, "I want you to invade Iraq!" Undoubtedly, he does.

So what is the real reason for this war? Oil? Revenge for Saddam surviving the first Gulf War? Israel? The ordinary Americans I know are wondering, because the reasons stated by the Administration don't add up.

Military theory says that, in a democracy, a government cannot successfully wage war unless the war has popular support. In turn, a war cannot obtain popular support if the people do no understand why it is being fought. Today, the people, at home and overseas, do not understand why America wants to go to war with Iraq. That means the Administration is losing this war before the first bomb is dropped.

[FL Patriot]

Last week, I looked at the moral level of war from the American perspective. Now I want to turn the telescope around: how does this war look at the moral level—the highest and most powerful level of war—from an Iraqi perspective?

Of course, I have to speculate: Iraq is not big on opinion polls. But the question is important, because it relates directly to whether or nor Iraqis fight us when we invade their country. The key to our almost bloodless success in the first Gulf War was the fact that the most Iraqi soldiers did not fight (the Republican Guard did, but we did not encounter many Guard units). Make no mistake: if the Iraqis do fight this time, the second Gulf War will be very different from the first.

Washington is so confident that the Iraqis will not fight that our operational plan depends on them not doing so. We will invade Iraq with a force as small as two Army divisions and one division from the Marine Corps. That is enough Americans to take Iraq's surrender, but nowhere near enough to defeat Iraq if Iraqis fight (which also says that our operational plan is very fragile.). Washington's reason for believing the Iraqis will not fight is moral: Saddam is a tyrant, and many, perhaps most Iraqis hate him. They will welcome as liberators anyone who promises to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

That may prove correct. But counting on it could prove dangerous. Many Iraqis may feel, "Yea, Saddam is an SOB, but at least he is our SOB." Not without reason, Iraqis may see our invasion having more to do with oil than with spreading democracy. Nationalism and tribalism may also work for Saddam, as many people unite to fight a foreign invader. After all, an earlier Saddam Hussein named Joe Stalin was also a tyrant. Many Russians hated him. Many welcomed the Germans and even fought for Germany against the Soviet Union. But enough Russians stayed loyal for Stalin to win that war.

We also need to ask, "Which Iraqis are we talking about?" The Kurds, in northern Iraq, are unlikely to fight for Saddam, unless he seems to be winning. Their real fear, in any case, is ending up inside Turkey after Iraq breaks apart. In the south of Iraq, the Shiites have suffered heavily under Saddam; they may welcome us, or at least stay neutral.

But Iraq's real military, the Republican Guard, is made up almost entirely of Sunnis from the middle of the country. By saying we will bring democracy to Iraq, we are also saying that we will throw the Sunnis out of power, since they are a minority. In a country like Iraq, if you lose political power, you lose everything else too, including maybe your life. My bet is that the Sunnis will fight us. If they fight us in the cities, this will not be an easy war. Perhaps the most important question, looking at the moral level of war from the other side's perspective, is not what Iraqis think, but how this war will look in the larger Islamic world. Here, the U.S. has some important strikes against it, even if no one loves Saddam. We are a powerful country attacking a weak country (and offering no credible reason for doing so). We are a rich country bringing more misery to a poor country. We boast that because of our technology, we can wage a war in safety, killing other people while taking no risks ourselves. And we are seen as a Christian country (would we still were) attacking a Moslem country.

This could bring us serious trouble in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. The most critical place to watch is Pakistan. If the current pro-American government of Pakistan is ousted and replaced with one aligned with Islamic non-state forces against the West, the whole American position in the region will collapse. Osama or his buddies will have nukes and the most competent conventional armed forces in the Islamic world. If that occurs, we will have lost even if we take Baghdad and hang Saddam Hussein from a sour apple tree.

One vignette of how this war may look from the Sunni Iraqi perspective comes from an incident in the first Gulf War, told to me by a U.S. Marine who witnessed it. The Marines were attacked by a small unit of the Republican Guard. They shot up the lead Iraqi personnel carrier, which caught fire. The Republican Guard infantry poured out of it on fire, and assaulted the Marines as they burned. One Iraqi was shot numerous times, but did not fall. A Marine finally brought him down with a football tackle and beat out the flames on his back. With the American Marines standing around him, the Iraqi sat up and said in perfect English, "I am thirsty, and I love Saddam." And he died.

I guarantee you that those Marines respected their enemy. Before this is over, Washington may come to do the same.

[FL Patriot]

When I had lunch last week with the thoughtful foreign policy columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, the first thing she asked me was, "Can you make any sense out of what is going on?" I assured her that, like most of the people I know, I could not. Washington seems hell-bent on war with Iraq, and nobody (including my friends in the military) understands why.

Secretary of State Powell's speech to the U.N. did not answer the question. Considering that we are talking about war here, the grounds he offered for it were trifling. It brought to mind the War of Jenkins' Ear, when in the 18th century England declared war on Spain over the ear of a British merchant captain named Jenkins, supposedly sliced off his head by a Spanish coast guardsman (Jenkins presented the ear, pickled in a bottle, to Parliament). After the war was over, no one really understood why it had been fought.

The mismatch between causes and means raises a deeply troubling question: is Washington playing at war? Make no mistake: war is the most perilous and unpredictable of all human endeavors. Playing with war is more dangerous than playing with fire, because fire can usually be contained; war, too often, cannot. Wars have an unpleasant habit of evolving in ways that none of the participants anticipated. When, in the summer of 1914, Europe resounded with cries of "A Berlin!" or "Nach Paris!", no one imagined the Somme, or Verdun, or the starvation blockade of Germany that killed 750,000 civilians.

The sense that Washington is playing at war is strengthened if we analyze the politics. If the Bush Administration were in desperate political trouble, one could at least see a rationale for a wild gamble on war. But politically, the Administration could hardly be riding higher. It just gained strength in Congress in an off-year election, a rare event. Bush's poll numbers are more than comfortable. Yet the White House is risking it all on a single throw of the dice. If this war goes badly, it is the end of George W. Bush and any hope of a Republican ascendancy for the next twenty years. Our next President might well be Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Rumsfeld recently said that a war with Iraq would be over in six days or perhaps six weeks; it almost certainly would not last six months. Here, too one senses someone playing at war. What if Iraq fights in the cities, where the built environment negates "hi-tech" weaponry? What if we take Baghdad, only to have a suitcase nuke go off in Seattle? What if Willie says to Joe, "Hey, Joe, you got a case of the sniffles?", and we find thousands of our troops dying from a genetically engineered disease? All these possibilities are quite real. But the War Party in Washington dismisses them with a shrug.

If anyone should be cautious about playing at war, it is conservatives. The greatest conservative catastrophe in the 20th Century was World War I. The three conservative monarchies that had kept the poisons of the French Revolution in check through the 19th century, Russia, Prussia and Austria, were all swept away by that disastrous war. As the Marxist historian Arno Mayer has correctly argued, the result was a vast spectrum shift to the left. Before World War I, America and France, because they were republics, represented the international left. By 1919, they represented the international right, not because they had changed, but because the world had shifted around them. The reason Americans today find themselves living in a moral and cultural sewer, is, in the end, World War I.

Then, too, in that fateful summer of 1914, governments played at war. Austria saw a chance to restore her image as a Great Power. Russia perceived an opportunity to take revenge on Austria for her humiliation in the Bosnian Annexation Crisis of 1908. The Kaiser, rightly, told the Chief of the German General Staff, Moltke the younger, that he wanted to stay on the defensive in the west and attack in the east, which would have kept Britain out of the war. Moltke collapsed on a couch and said it could not be done (the plans were actually in the file), and the Kaiser gave in. Everyone agreed that the troops would be home before the leaves fell.

Four miserable years and millions of dead later, the Kaiser was an exile in Holland, the Tsar and his family were dead and Austria-Hungary had ceased to exist. The British empire had bled to death in the mud of Flanders, and on the streets of Paris, there were no young men. The future belonged to people no one had ever heard of, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin.

If there is a game conservatives should never allow their government to play, it is playing at war.

[FL Patriot]

In what increasingly appears to be Washington's war against everyone, everywhere, 3,000 American troops are now in the Philippines where they are to fight a small Islamic rebel group called Abu Sayyaf. Abu Sayyaf is supposed to have about 200 fighters; an American victory would seem to be assured.

But here is where we are likely to find that war is changing. When the U.S. Army was fighting Philippine insurgents a hundred years ago, the Philippine forces tried to fight stand-up battles, copying the Western way of war. Not surprisingly, they lost.

I suspect Abu Sayyaf will address the problem differently, in a way that reflects non-Western approaches to war. If they do, we are likely to see a conflict that unfolds along the same general lines as the war in Afghanistan— which is not going well (by some reports, we have been forced out of five forts on the Afghan-Pakistan border; we have admitted the loss of one).

What will happen? First, when the Americans appear, Abu Sayyaf will disappear. They will refuse to engage us, and simply blend back in to the civilian population. The American way of war, which is Second Generation warfare, is based on putting fire on targets. Abu Sayyaf will respond by making itself untargetable.

Second, Abu Sayyaf will wait. It will know that time is on its side. Why? Because it lives there, and we will eventually go home. But its waiting will be watchful waiting. It will watch our forces to determine their patterns of operation—what they do, and when and how they do it. Second Generation warfare tactics are formulistic; they follow set patterns (which really means our Second Generation military confuses tactics with techniques). That makes us predictable—the same thing that led to our humiliation in Mogadishu.

Once Abu Sayyaf has determined our patterns, it will move to take advantage of them. It will not offer us the stand-up battle we want; it will still try to remain untargetable. But we will suffer from a landmine here, an ambush there, a grenade tossed into a humvee somewhere else. We will begin taking casualties. But each time we reach out and try to grab them, we will come up with a handful of air.

Abu Sayyaf may never escalate beyond this sort of petite guerre, as it used to be called. The U.S. will not lose, but neither will it win. And as the conflict continues, Abu Sayyaf will take advantage of the greatest recruiting tool it was ever given: our presence. To Philippine nationalists, we will be foreign invaders. To Islamics in the southern Philippines, where Abu Sayyaf operates, we will also be Christian dogs, crusaders. To everyone, even the local people fighting against Abu Sayyaf, we will gradually become bullies, as we fight a weak enemy with attack helicopters, jet aircraft with smart bombs, the whole panoply of American firepower (the best book on that subject, Firepower in Limited War, makes one basic point: don't use it).

What if we get lucky and take out the leadership of Abu Sayyaf? New leaders and different organizations will take up the fight. In the Philippines as elsewhere, the spread of Fourth Generation warfare (remember, America's armed forces are still stuck in the Second Generation) means more and more people are transferring their primary loyalty away from the state to other entities and causes. For those new loyalties, they will fight.

If America is going to send in Marines or Special Forces against all Fourth Generation forces it can find, we will indeed find ourselves fighting against everyone, everywhere (keep your eyes on Columbia for the next round). Washington fails to see the danger because Washington defines the problem as merely "terrorism." Terrorism is only a technique, and what we are really facing is the greatest change in warfare since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 gave the state the monopoly on war it is now losing.

Remember, if you don't get the question right, your answer doesn't matter.

[FL Patriot]

Do they think that Iran is going to be like Iraq? Obama has been listening to the wrong people. He will stand by and salute many time more if he keeps up this non-sense.

An American war on Iraq now seems certain. Even if Saddam Hussein agrees to step down and go into exile, it is not clear that Washington would forgo the occupation of Iraq and the installation of an American military government. Wilsonianism is in full flower, in what is likely to prove a false spring. As we watch events unfold, it may be useful to keep two points in mind. First, the center of gravity of this war—the place or places where a decision is likely to occur—are not in Iraq. As is also true of the war in Afghanistan, the centers of gravity of a war with Iraq are in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Of these three, Pakistan is the most important.

Strategically, Iraq is not a key to very much. One might argue that as Iraq goes, so goes Syria, but that is not saying a lot. Iraq is not a key to Iran; on the contrary, their rivalry goes back centuries. All Iraq means to Turkey is an increased threat of an independent Kurdish state and maybe a chance to grab Iraq's northern oil fields. The notion that an American-conquered Iraq can blossom into a Swiss-style democracy that will remake the Middle East comes from Cloud Coockoo Land. If you want to see what democracy in that region would really mean for American interests, look at the Turkish parliament's vote this weekend against allowing U.S. forces to invade Iraq from Turkey. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, in contrast, are keys to many other things. Pakistan has nukes, Saudi Arabia controls world oil prices and Egypt offers

Israel its only hope of some kind of (temporary) deal with the Arabs. If the pro-western regime in any of those nations falls, we will have suffered a strategic disaster. If they all go, our position in the region will collapse. The central strategic question, therefore, is what effect an American attack on Iraq will have on the stability and tenure of the Pakistani, Saudi and Egyptian regimes.

That leads to point number two: if and when American forces capture Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein, the real war will not end but begin. It will be fought in Iraq in part, as an array of non-state elements begin to fight America and each other. It will be fought in part in the rest of the Islamic world where the targets will not only be Americans but any local regime that is friendly to America. And, of course, it will be fought here in America, as the sons of Mohammed remind Americans that war is a two-way street.

This kind of war, Fourth Generation war, is something American and other state armed forces do not know how to fight. It is not going to go well, and among the casualties are likely to be the pro-American governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In short, an American victory over the state of Iraq (which is itself no sure thing) is more likely to lead to a strategic failure for America than to a strategic success. In a somewhat more famous On War, Clausewitz wrote:

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman and Commander have to make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking: neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

With the invasion of Iraq, Washington is trying to turn a Fourth Generation war, a war with non-state entities, into a Second Generation war, a war against another state that can be conquered by the simple application of firepower to targets. If Clausewitz were still with us, I suspect he would warn that we are marching toward Jena*

Jena was the battle where Napoleon decisively defeated Prussia in 1806.

[FL Patriot]

Between 1809 and 1945, the Prussian and, later, German armies developed what is often called maneuver warfare of Third Generation warfare. For the past quarter century, the U.S. military has been trying to adopt this German way of war, and failing. Instead, we now appear to be copying two fatal German mistakes: thinking that a lower level of war trumps a higher, and initiating a war on two fronts. There are several ways of defining levels of war. One is John Boyd's trinity of moral, mental and physical. Another is the more traditional strategic, operational and tactical. One of the reasons Germany lost both world wars was that she thought operational excellence would trump strategic failure. In reality, a higher level of war always trumps a lower.

America seems now to have taken this German error and extended it. The present American way of war assumes that superiority at the tactical (or perhaps merely technical) level, manifested in high technology, will overcome massive failures at the strategic and moral levels. Strategically, a war with Iraq will help, not hurt, our real enemies, non-state forces such as al-Quaeda. Morally, we are launching an aggressive war against a weak enemy for no clear reason. Putting the two together leads to self-isolation, which is exactly what happened to Germany. The notion that Wunderwaffe will somehow overcome isolation and strategic failure will prove as viable for Washington now as it did for Germany in 1944-45.

Not content with duplicating just one fatal German mistake, we are moving to add a second by getting into a war on two fronts. Our eastern front may be Korea. The situation there is steadily getting hotter, and Washington's response so far has been to pretend it is not happening while saying Kim Jong II is a nut case.

Strategically, what North Korea is doing makes perfect sense. North Korea knows it is part of the "axis of evil," and it sees the United States preparing to attack another member of that axis, Iraq. The same voices in Washington that have demanded war with Iraq are beginning to make noises about Iran, accusing it of attempting to develop nuclear weapons and suggesting it should be next on the hit list. If I were a North Korean general, I would certainly assume an American attack is at some point a very real possibility, perhaps an inevitability.

On that basis, North Korea has decided it needs one of two things: a formal, legally binding non-aggression pact with the United States, or nuclear weapons. Washington has turned the idea of a non-aggression pact down flat, which can only lead to greater fear in Pyongyang. So, North Korea is going to build nukes. What other choice does it have?

Everyone in the region—Russia, China, Japan and even South Korea—is desperately urging Washington to talk with North Korea. Washington continues to refuse. Adding fuel to what may soon become a conflagration, President Bush last week spoke openly about the possibility of a military "solution" to the problem of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Far from solving anything, such an action would probably give us a two-front war.

As was the case with Germany, a war on two fronts would leave the American military stretched dangerously thin. Our war plan for Korea assumes South Korea will carry the main burden of a war while Japan offers safe logistical bases. But those assumptions could prove wrong. North Korea has indicated it might attack American forces in the region while offering peace with South Korea; the new South Korean president has said that if the U.S. and North Korea went to war, South Korea might offer to mediate. A North Korean threat of a nuke on Osaka might leads Japan to declare neutrality, in which case we could not use Japanese bases. In such a situation, our options might be initiating the use of nuclear weapons or trying to stage a Dunkirk. Either one would be yet another strategic disaster.

It would be an historical oddity if the United States, having failed to copy the Germans in what they got right, instead duplicated what they got wrong. In view of the almost lighthearted military optimism that currently prevails in Washington, one cannot help remembering Marx's comment about history occurring as tragedy, then repeating itself as farce.

[FL Patriot]

As I said in an earlier column, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are already lost. Nothing the United States can do can yield an American victory in either place.

In all probability, both wars were lost before the first bomb was dropped or the first shot fired. They were lost because, in an era when the state is in decline, our wares on the Afghan and Iraqi states were doomed to be too successful. We fought to destroy two regimes, but what we ended up doing was destroying two states. Neither in Afghanistan nor in Iraq are we able to recreate the state, which means that Fourth Generation, non-state forces will come to dominate both places. And neither we nor any other state knows how to defeat Fourth Generation enemies.

To the degree America had a chance of real victory in either war, we lost that chance through early mistakes. In Afghanistan, we failed to bring the Pashtun into the new government, which means we remain allied with the Uzbeks and Tajiks against the Pashtun. Unfortunately, in the end the Pashtun always win Afghan wars.

In Iraq, the two fatal early errors were outlawing the Baath Party and disbanding the Iraqi army. Outlawing the Baath deprived the Sunni community of its only political vehicle, which meant it had no choice but to fight us. Disbanding the Iraqi army left us with no native force that could maintain order, and also provided the resistance with a large pool of armed and trained fighters. Washington is now making noises about reversing both of those early decisions, but it is simply too late. As von Moltke said, a mistake in initial dispositions can seldom be put right.

What is interesting is that the most powerful man in Washington, Karl Rove, who is President George W. Bush’s political advisor, has apparently figured out that the Iraq war is lost (Afghanistan is not on his political radar screen). Further, he has discerned that if Mr. Bush goes into the 2004 election with the war in Iraq still going on, and still going badly, Mr. Bush is toast. The result was the recent decision to turn back to the Iraqi’s sometime next summer.

Will it work? Probably not. Mr. Rove still faces two big fights, and neither will be easy. The first will be a nasty political brawl with the so-called “neo-cons,” more accurately neo-Jacobins, who gave us the Iraq War in the first place. Their political future is at stake in Iraq, and if we are defeated, they go straight into history’s wastebasket. They are determined to fight down to the last American paratrooper, and once they figure out that Mr. Rove wants out, they will go after him with everything they have.

The other fight will be in Iraq itself, where we will see a race between American efforts to create at least the fig leaf of a functioning Iraqi state so we can get out with some tail feathers intact and a resistance movement that is rapidly gaining strength. My bet is that, unfortunately, we will lose. Again, the root problem is that in a Fourth Generation world, once you have destroyed a state recreating it is very difficult. More, as is typical of a power facing defeat, our moves are too little and too late. By next summer, when we hope to transfer sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, it is likely to represent a frustration of the Shiites’ hope to use their majority status to create a Shiite Islamic Republic. That may deprive us, and the new Iraqi government, of the one prop we still have, a relatively quiescent Shiite population.

The upshot of all of this is that despite Mr. Rove’s belated wakening to political reality, Mr. Bush will go into the 2004 election with one of two albatrosses around his neck: a continuing, losing guerilla war, with ever-increasing American casualties, or an out-and-out American defeat, where we have left Iraq very much the way the Soviets left Afghanistan. Which is, by the way, the way we will also leave Afghanistan itself.

The neo-cons’ parting gift to real American conservatives will be President Hillary Clinton. Thanks a lot, guys.

[FL Patriot]

Obama Approval on Afghanistan, at 35%, Trails Other Issues
Decline from 49% in September far exceeds that for other issues and for approval more broadly
by Jeffrey M. Jones

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans are far less approving of President Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan than they have been in recent months, with 35% currently approving, down from 49% in September and 56% in July.





"The decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is evident among all party groups, with double-digit decreases since September among Republicans (17 points), independents (16 points), and Democrats (10 points)."

Tuesday, Obama outlines his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan in a nationally televised address. The policy has been months in the making as Obama held numerous meetings with his military and foreign policy advisers, drawing some criticism for the delay in formulating a new strategy. The commanding U.S. general in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has recommended that the United States increase the number of troops it has in that country by about 40,000. Obama is expected to announce a slightly smaller increase.

The decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is evident among all party groups, with double-digit decreases since September among Republicans (17 points), independents (16 points), and Democrats (10 points).





While a slim majority of Obama's fellow Democrats approve of his handling of the issue, his new policy may not be well-received by Democrats, who have indicated opposition to troop-level increases in Afghanistan. The details of the policy will likely be more appealing to Republicans, who are supportive of putting more U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The question about Afghanistan comes from a Nov. 20-22 USA Today/Gallup poll that also asked Americans to rate Obama's handling of six other issues. The president registers less than majority approval for his performance on all seven issues, with Afghanistan his worst rating. His best rating is on energy policy, with 49% approval.



Obama's overall job approval rating has also been below the majority level for most of the time since Nov. 20 in Gallup Daily tracking, though it has inched back above the 50% mark in recent days.

The 14-point decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan stands in contrast to the trend lines on other issues, including the economy, healthcare, and energy. While his current ratings on these issues are down since September, the declines have been fairly minimal.



Bottom Line

The president's decisions on U.S. military action in Afghanistan are arguably among the most important and difficult of his presidency. He met several times with his advisers in recent weeks before outlining his new policy to the American public Tuesday night. The speech gives the president a chance to regain the confidence of Americans on the issue, after a sharp drop in his ratings over the past two months.

But the decline in Americans' evaluations of Obama on Afghanistan does not appear to have greatly affected their more general views of him, as his overall job approval rating -- though down slightly since September -- has not declined to nearly the same degree as his rating on Afghanistan.

Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,017 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Nov. 20-22, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

[FL Patriot]

Barack Obama's announcement of an Afghan "surge" is his frantic bid to rescue what promises to be a stumbling re-election campaign that must start in 2011. It oozes with his desperation not to be in Afghanistan. The question is how best to disengage. As in Vietnam and as the Russians found, withdrawal tends to be possible here in Afghanistan only after the generals on the ground have been given a last chance to claim victory.

The chance is generous. With 30,000 more troops at a staggering cost of $1m per soldier per year, Obama's generals are charged with giving the Taliban a "knock-out" blow sufficient to send them reeling back into the mountains. This is supposed to allow the Kabul government to establish its sovereignty over its nation or, more plausibly, at least to give Nato a breathing space to escape.

This surge bears no relation to that in Iraq, except as an exit strategy. In Iraq it involved the intensive policing of the Baghdad suburbs plus the blatant recruitment of Saddam Hussein's old Sunni militias to keep the peace in their enclaves, despite the potential threat this posed to the al-Maliki government of Shias. It gave Baghdad's enclaves a measure of security and established a new, if tenuous, balance of power in the provinces. Above all, it took Iraq and its continued deaths and bombings out of the headlines.

In Afghanistan the strategy advanced by General Stanley McChrystal is not new. It involves flooding the towns with soldiers and money and hoping the Taliban will go away for the time being. The conditionals of army retraining and corruption eradication mean nothing. Afghan history says that "training" an Afghan army to fight Pashtun insurgents is futile. Afghans fight only for their tribe and its land, which is why the Taliban manages to train a ferocious soldier in days, while Nato has failed in years. Equally futile is to make withdrawal dependent on ridding the Kabul government of corruption. These conditions are just a smokescreen behind which Nato hopes to retreat. There is no more talk of 20-30 years. Obama needs to be leaving in 18 months.

If the Taliban commanders are wise, and they usually are in these matters, they will simply wait, controlling the country areas and killing Nato patrols with sufficient regularity to keep western public opinion demoralised. As the saying goes, Nato has the watches but the Taliban has the time.

Obama himself – and those round him – clearly has no stomach for this fight, any more than does Gordon Brown or the European allies. Afghanistan was a punitive raid that turned into an occupation that was not just mishandled but ill-conceived from the start. The operation now commencing is exit with dignity. Dignity will be the hard part.

[FL Patriot]

Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. He has followed Obama's speech with a pledge to convince the Taliban they can't win. Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images

US and Nato forces will move quickly to engage the Taliban with "greater vigour" following the unveiling of President Barack Obama's revamped Afghanistan strategy, the senior American commander in the country has said.

"Now is the time to go for it," General Stanley McChrystal told his senior commanders during a briefing at his Kabul headquarters this morning.

He said his aim was "to convince Taliban militants they cannot win" and allow them to reintegrate into Afghan society with "dignity and respect".

McChrystal said US and Nato forces will move rapidly to implement nationwide partnerships with Afghan security forces as part of a drive to fight the Taliban insurgency.

The general stressed that the 43-nation UN-backed alliance's most important challenge was to persuade the Afghan people that winning the war would make a lasting, positive difference to their lives.

"In the end the outcome of this campaign will be decided in the minds of the Afghan people. It's not the number of people you kill, it's the number you convince," he said.

"This is not a war for conquest, this is not a war for glory, this is not a war for profit. It's a war to give people a chance."

McChrystal made his comments in a video conference with regional Isaf (International Security and Assistance Force) commanders hours after Obama announced he was authorising a speedy deployment of 30,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan while at the same time setting a timeline for the start of a withdrawal of American forces of July, 2011.

Obama also called for a more effective civilian strategy, including outreach to local and tribal leaders in an effort to improve government accountability and boost economic prosperity in one of the world's poorest countries.

His call was accompanied by a blunt warning to the central government of President Hamid Karzai, which is widely seen here as corrupt and incompetent, that its performance over the next 18 months would be closely monitored. "The days of the blank cheque are over," Obama said.

Speaking to reporters after the video-conference and prior to a tour of Isaf bases, McChrystal said he planned to partner American and Nato forces with "fielded" Afghan army units across the country in the next six to eight months. Additional resources would also be poured into training and mentoring the Afghan army, whose overall size is due to grow to 134,000 by next year.

"Our Afghan partners need the support of coalition forces while we grow and develop the capacity of the Afghan army and police. That will be the main focus of our campaign in the months ahead."

McChrystal drew a distinction between al-Qaida terrorists operating in Afghanistan, who he said were few in number and largely limited to non-combat support roles, and insurgents such as the Taliban. "What we are actually going to do is degrade al-Qaida and prevent them being a threat and build up Afghan national security forces so they can deal with it effectively and so they will need less help.

"We can significantly impact Taliban capacity in the timeframe of 18 months. We need to convince them … that [the insurgency] is a losing proposition."

Taliban numbers and support had risen "significantly" in recent years, McChrystal said. But he was convinced that given better employment opportunities, higher incomes, a better quality of life, and improved and lawful governance, "the vast majority" could be persuaded to give up violence.

"Sometimes the insurgency seems insurmountable. It isn't," he said. The alliance needed to show Taliban fighters that it was not solely a choice of "fight or die … This is how counter-insurgencies end."

While declining to go into specifics, McChrystal said many of the extra 30,000 US troops would be deployed in "the most threatened areas", an apparent reference to Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan and Khost in the east, bordering Pakistan.

But he added that a large proportion of the US and Nato reinforcements would be assigned to training newly recruited Afghan forces, including increased "embedding" of such forces with allied units.

McChrystal reportedly annoyed the White House this year when he spoke in London about a stepped-up, long-term military commitment, while Obama's Afghan strategy review was still underway. He is also said to have differed sharply with Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, over the scale of troop reinforcements.

Asked whether he fully backed Obama's revamped approach, McChrystal said he was "absolutely supportive of the time line" and denied the nature of the mission had been changed by Obama's speech at West Point. The president had brought new clarity to the task, increased capability, and placed a welcome emphasis on competence, both American and Afghan.

"The president has provided me with a clear military mission and the resources to accomplish the task … The coalition is encouraged by President Obama's commitment."

But, McChrystal noted: "The 18-month timeline is not an absolute. It's not as though everybody leaves [at that date]". The US had pledged itself to a long-term commitment, though its nature would change as and when insurgent violence declined.

Despite discouraging signals from Germany and France about sending extra troops, McChrystal said he expected all Nato members "to look at what they can do to expand their capabilities" in Afghanistan.

He was cautious about Gordon Brown's proposal last week that five provinces be ready to be turned over to Afghan control by the end of next year. Some trouble-free areas were already effectively under local control already, McChrystal said. Handing over in more problematic areas was "a process that we want to move forward" – but only, he suggested, when the time was right.

McChrystal said he was looking at ways of increasing co-operation with Pakistani forces fighting Taliban groups on the other side of the border and said he had a good relationship with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani.

[FL Patriot]

In The Twilight of the Idols (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche proposed to teach “how to philosophize with a hammer.” Hammers find their predestined use, according to Nietzsche, in the smashing of idols, by which he meant the assortment of falsehoods and platitudes that constituted, in his view, the shabby existing dominant representation of life and the world. Nietzsche never practiced anything like systematic philosophy – he wrote as he thought, aphoristically and in paragraphs. One must take him unsystematically, too, or rather selectively – because, having atomized all the images, as he supposed himself to have done, and having found nothing behind them, as he convinced himself, the devilish idea that everything is nothing strongly tempted him. He wrote of it under the image of “the abyss.” If the Nietzschean philosophical impulse transmigrated for the good in souls like Oswald Spengler and H. L. Mencken, who were skeptics and iconoclasts, it would regrettably also have done so in souls, if that were the word, like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida, to whom harsher labels must apply. Spengler and Mencken warned against nihilism; the polysyllabic abolishers of logic and morality taught the faddishly inclined to crave for l’abîme and Das Ungrund. The legion of cipher-minions has been craving thusly, and arrogantly on behalf of everyone else, ever since.

The British solicitor and scholar Owen Barfield (1898-1997), born two years before Nietzsche’s death, was another idol-breaker, with intellectual roots in the same German Idealism against which Nietzsche reacted even as he absorbed and continued it. Part of Barfield’s German orientation, his devotion to Rudolph Steiner’s “Anthroposophy,” has constituted itself a stumbling block in the way of his appreciation for some self-consciously “modern” people. Yet Barfield’s thought, or better yet his thinking, is every bit as iconoclastic as Nietzsche’s and even more so.



I. Barfield’s two best books, Worlds Apart (1963) and Unancestral Voice (1965), both take their model in the conversational vivaciousness of Plato’s dialogues, with their dramatic play of personalities and ideas. Any introduction to an account of Barfield must come to terms with those two titles, as this one will presently. Barfield’s most succinct articulation of his thinking occurs, however, in Saving the Appearance (1957), which carries the Nietzschean subtitle of A Study in Idolatry. In Saving the Appearances – the phrase comes from medieval scholasticism where it refers to differences between what we see and what we know – Barfield makes his most concerted assault on dogmatic positivism and naturalism and on the pervasive scientism that they have established in the modern mind; necessarily then the book also launches a skeptical inquiry into Darwin’s hypothesis about speciation and certain notions about time and physical existence that belong to evolutionary geology. Darwinism, its adherents increasingly militant, is the main doctrinal assertion of a hardened and literalistic liberalism-materialism.

Let it swiftly be said, however, that Barfield never traffics with the Bishop-Ussher type of Creationism or its modern fundamentalist re-expressions: he would have found that as crude and self-contradictory as any reductively mechanistic or puritanically “positive” misprision of mental or organic processes. On the other hand, it would hardly violate fairness to refer to Barfield as one of the subtlest advocates for a “Cosmic Anthropic Principle” or for “Intelligent Design” although he did not use those terms.

Barfield understood scientism in its dogmatic character and stultifying pervasiveness as few others did in his time; he grasped, for example, that a kind of positivism-materialism so fully constitutes the intellectual atmosphere in which modern Westerners live and breathe that they notice it as little as the proverbial fish notices the ocean. In the textbook definitions, scientific investigation works humbly and tentatively by the procedure of hypothesis, experiment, and either validation or the opposite; and where the opposite, then the researcher must revise the hypothesis. But public discourse increasingly tends to take for granted, in Barfield’s words, that, “modern science, so far from being disentitled to claim the status of knowledge, is the only reliable knowledge available to us.” Barfield died before people like Richard Dawkins and Peter Hitchens became priestly spokesmen for science so-called as untouchable dogma, yet he foresaw them in the likes, say, of H. G. Wells and A. J. Ayer. In novels and didactic books Wells assumes that technical capacity coincides with knowledge but Ayer reduces logic to an instrumentality beyond whose competence confusion and ignorance reign. The curbing of allowable predication in Logical Positivism that might appear to honor the much-lauded principle of tentativity is, thus, a sweeping truth-claim tied to the most pedantic of methods.[i]

Barfield sees modern science as largely practical and technological, such that doing, as in Wells, becomes coextensive with knowing; he also sees modern science as pedantic to the point of stupidity. In the Seventeenth Century, Francis Bacon, as Barfield recalls for his readers, already made knowledge synonymous with power. Bacon’s rhetorical sleight-of-hand required, even while it elided, the demotion of disinterested judgment in favor of the efficiency-mentality: “The key words [Bacon] uses to distinguish the knowledge he praises from the knowledge pursued by the Schoolmen are ‘fruit’ and ‘operation.’ In other words, not only ‘science’ but knowledge itself, that is, the only knowledge worth knowing, is, for him – technology.” Ironically, Bacon fervently denounced idols, providing the taxonomy of them for the edification of those interested in his purely pragmatic New Science. He had nevertheless fashioned alluring new idols eagerly sacralized even by the disciplines that could hardly justify importing the modus operandi of experimental validation. Barfield has particularly in mind the study of the past, as history, and investigations of geology and biology.

When scholarship begins to treat history as though human events were entirely a matter of operational interest, the result is the mechanical crudity of Marxist analysis. When geologists and biologists accept Baconian premises, the result is the dual farrago of random selection and the survival of the fittest.

In Barfield’s characterization, Marx and Darwin reduced existence to “matter and force,” hence also to meaninglessness; they made of the world that abyss, which Nietzsche, responding especially to the latter, then duly named. The Twentieth Century revealed the consequences of that philosophical reduction in the homicidal conduct of the militant so******t polities and, latterly, in the environmentalist movement, by whose increasingly dogmatic tenets humanity begins to appear as a pest of immaculate nature.[ii] Dead nature, mindless matter, is the dominant modern idol, as Barfield sees things. “What were the phenomena of nature at the Darwinian moment in the middle of the nineteenth century,” he asks. “They were objects.” They took their place in a “mechanical model” of the universe created by a collective perception over which “literalness reigned supreme.” For a vital world, the “mechanical model” substitutes mere cause-and-effect, as in the Darwinian vision, as Barfield puts it, of “one damned thing after another.” Even language descends into deadness, or away from “participation,” in Barfield’s coinage.

So then “if we look to [such words as] disposition, influence[,] temper and humour,” we find that “they stem from a time before [the] disjunction [took place] between inner and outer.” That is to say, they acquired their original meaning before the emerging dehumanized abstract mentality – that ultimate fruit of the Baconian project – imposed itself imperiously and destructively on thinking and perception alike. It is a sign of our times, Barfield writes, that we use the ultra-abstract term relation to refer, for example, to our hearty widow-aunt, as though she were a proposition in geometry rather than a baker of cakes and a concocter of savory broths.[iii]

Barfield never denies the principle of evolution, which remains central to his thinking. He insists, however, that proper usage would extend the term to “the evolution of consciousness.” Barfield asserts that, “the evolution of nature is correlative to the evolution of consciousness.” He describes the trend in consciousness-evolution since the Seventeenth Century, for example, as “a more or less continuous progress from a vague but immediate awareness of the ‘meaning’ of phenomena towards an increasing preoccupation with the phenomena themselves.” When Barfield writes about modern image- or fetish-worship, he has in mind the concept of the phenomena as “existing independently of human consciousness.” Barfield admits that, “idolatry is an ugly and emphatic word,” even while he acknowledges that we owe the boon of our instrumentality to the aggressive attitude that the word designates. “Surgery, for example, presupposes an acquaintance with the human anatomy exact in the same mode that our knowledge of a machine is exact.” Of course, in the ultimate exaggerated phase of the surgical perspective, mind regards body as existing independently of itself, and subjectivity becomes alienated from its participation in the objects.[iv]



II. When Saving the Appearances saw print in Britain in the year of Sputnik, a few aficionados of Barfield read it; everyone else ignored it. When republication occurred, it happened in the USA a decade later. Meanwhile, Barfield had issued Worlds Apart, which, because T. S. Eliot drew positive attention to it, people did read or at any rate tried to read. Barfield’s ideas are not intrinsically recondite; they are, however, so at variance with the way modern people habitually conceptualize the world and their situation in it that they seem gnomic. In addition to expositing Barfield’s ideas in the congenial medium of a Platonic seminar, Worlds Apart engages in lively debate with the resistance that those ideas provoke in their contemporary dissemination. In particular, Barfield’s critique of Darwinism solicited rejection, so fixed and vehement had the concepts of random selection, pre-adaptation, and speciation already become. Randomness took precedence in the trinity, pitting itself in contention with mind or Logos or telos. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield had remarked that modern biologists and geologists accept without demurer the dictum of post-Einsteinian physics that the world of particles and waves exhibits no accidental qualities but that it is mind that supplies those qualities – that makes a tree, a tree, rather than a wavering phantasm.[v]

The world objectified by researchers of the fossil record is thus the qualified world represented or “figured,” as Barfield sometimes says, by mind, and by the modern mind most emphatically; but because no such mind existed in the ages of the prehistoric mammals or dinosaurs, to project that world backwards into past time, Barfield argues, must be fallacious.

Yet the fallacy of this anachronism figures less importantly in Barfield’s argument than does the contradiction between the physicist’s view of the world and the biologist’s or geologist’s. All three spe******ts belong to related collegial faculties who share attitudes and prejudices, yet they never come to grips with the logical difficulty that if the physicist were right then the biologist and the geologist would be talking nonsense. At the very least, their assertions come under a colossal as if, which remains suspiciously tacit. And just this, the unspoken noncompossibility of the hypotheses, threatens the coherence of all contemporary thinking, as long as people remain conditioned, as established education sees to it that they are, to take their cognitive cues from science. In Barfield’s summation of his case in Saving the Appearances: “The hypothesis of chance has already crept from the theory of evolution into the theory of the physical foundation of the earth itself; but, more serious perhaps than that, is the rapidly increasing ‘fragmentation of science,’ which occasionally attracts the attention of the British Association.”

Worlds Apart addresses the fragmented “idiocy,” as Barfield names it, of the late Twentieth Century episteme. The book alleges itself to be a transcript of tape recordings made during a three-day country retreat by one Burgeon, a lawyer, who has persuaded a group of acquaintances from divergent disciplines frankly to discuss the clash of views and bluntly to interrogate one another. As in Plato’s dialogues, Barfield’s novel-of-ideas represents not only the various professions, but also the range of distinct character-types. Hunter is “a professor of historical theology and ethics”; Ranger is “a young man employed at a rocket research station”; Sanderson is “a retired schoolmaster” who turns out to be a follower of Anthroposophy. There are others. On the first day of the seminar, Ranger lets on how he sees the scientific revolution of the Seventeenth Century, especially the work of Galileo, as a great “waking up” of human consciousness.

Hunter dismisses as “dangerous nonsense” the assumption, implicit in Ranger’s metaphor, that “modern science is in some way relevant to the dignity of man; that it has a high human value – and very likely the highest.” Hunter distinguishes between “knowledge about things” and “knowledge about man” and believes Ranger “to assume that the first kind necessarily includes the second.”

Ranger is not a Richard Dawkins type – Dunn, a Logical Positivist, comes closer to forecasting that role – but Ranger does express casually, and as it proves redeemably, a typical modern proposition that rarely investigates itself although the slightest critical review would reveal its absurdity: namely that the ages of humanity before Copernicus and Galileo amount to millennia of mental torpor during which men carried the burden of error like some weighty millstone about their necks; or that, indeed, dignity is born only as science gloriously repudiates superstition through the instrumentality of telescopes and microscopes. The celebratory mood nevertheless clashes with the demand that the method be pursued with absolute sobriety. Hunter says of those who speak as scientists: “First they insist on cutting out awe and reverence and wisdom and substituting sophistication as the goal of knowledge; and then they talk about this method of theirs with reverence and awe and expect us to look up at them as wise and venerable men.”

Brodie, a physicist, indirectly supports Hunter. Brodie complicates the debate by quoting two passages from Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems. In the first Galileo says, “In every hypothesis of reason, error may lurk unnoticed, but a discovery of sense cannot be at odds with the truth.” In the second, after praising those who hold to the Copernican theory, Galileo honors “the sprightliness of their judgments” despite “the violence to their own senses” that Heliocentrism entails. The contradiction is remarkable. Yet, as Barfield’s character Brodie puts it, classical physics – the body of knowledge resting on the work of Galileo and Newton and coming right up to Albert Einstein – is taken by its practitioners to be, not merely theory, tentatively held, but rather “a true description of the world.”[vi]

If the description were true, however, then it would also be inalterable; but if it were inalterable it would also be unfalsifiable. It is a supposed tenet of methodical science that an assertion maintains its respectability or scientific status only insofar as the promulgator articulates it in falsifiable terms. I earlier recorded how Barfield sees the dogmatic mood of physics as having gradually spread itself to the other sciences and indeed to the popular contemporary worldview. In Worlds Apart, the discussion now moves from these fissures in the worldview of physics and from the attitude that fails to notice them, or that even suppresses notice of them, to the consequences of imposing the model of physics on the other sciences – especially biology. Coincidental with this shift of the topics is the revival of the notion that any meaningful discussion of evolution must incorporate a discussion of mental evolution, or the development of consciousness.



III. Barfield’s iconoclasm appeals to me strongly because it helps to explain, or at least to put into perspective, something I witnessed during my sojourn in graduate school. Those studies began in 1984 and coincided with the sudden hegemony of Deconstruction in literary studies, the least scientific, most intuitive and tentative of all academic disciplines. Deconstruction, which asserted its unquestionable truth while simultaneously denying validity to the concept of truth, was a pure celebrity-phenomenon: its glamour stemmed from its personalities – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man (who, however, seems hardly to have had a personality), and one or two others – for whom the excited devotees must have felt the same shiver running up the leg that liberal journalists in the USA recently felt respecting Barack Hussein Obama. They acted that way. If one called attention to the absurdity of such sophisms as that there is no such thing as truth or truth is socially constructed and variable, asserted as truths, the proponents would either ignore the remark or attack its speaker as a fascist. Like the Marxists, the Derrideans reduced everything to matter and force. Essentially they stopped thinking.

Poems and stories, items for most people of significance and beauty, became for the deconstructors texts, which they addressed the way an anatomist addresses a corpse during dissection. They declared meaning itself a myth and insisted that, really, there was nothing there except the materiality and prestige of commodity-items circulating in the conspiracy of oppression called Capitalism. At the same time, De la grammatologie acquired for these people Koran-like status, as did Eduard Said’s fraudulent Orientalism. They studied both with monkish devotion. There might be no truth or truths; but once, during the Friday late-afternoon wine-and-cheese party, when quite without wishing to start an argument I voiced casually my skepticism about “random selection” as the engine of speciation, the deniers of any certain knowledge came roaring to the defense of Darwin, whose assertions they must have adjudicated not only as certain and true but also as sacrosanct.

In Worlds Apart, Barfield makes the biologist Upwater a reasonable man, hardly the dogmatic or idolatrous type. He believes himself to agree with Hunter that, “evolution must be taken to cover all the processes of change and development in the universe” and that, “with the appearance of consciousness… an entirely new phase of evolution set in.” Yet that is not quite what Hunter had said. In connection with the last-quoted remark, Upwater shifts into eugenics mode, foreseeing that: “We may well find ourselves able to make conscious use of the biological processes of heredity which have hitherto operated at random… It is impossible to say what sort of altogether new man we might learn to produce in that way.” Hunter shoots back at Upwater that, “you cannot treat thinking,” which is what the term consciousness implies, “as a stage in evolution without cutting away the ground from beneath everything you say – including that thing.” Upwater is brought up short.

As Hunter sees it: “Either Reason is outside the natural process,” as it would be were it to carry out the creation of some new artificial species, the project that Upwater anticipates, “or we might as well stop talking and play Puss-in-the-corner instead!” Hunter adds that Upwater does not, in fact, believe that his own consciousness is inextricably involved in a natural, that is to say in a non-rational, process, “for he believes that his thought at least is independent of irrational causes.” Moreover (this develops later in the dialogue), if Upwater regarded his own thinking as other than a non-rational process and if he also regarded it as in continuity nevertheless with an enormous chain of cause-and-effect the name of which is evolution, and if “continuity” meant what it said, then how could Upwater uphold with certainty the claim that all of evolution prior to the appearance of humanity was non-rational?

Burgeon and Sanderson together argue that when spokesmen for Darwinian theory point to the fossil record as evidence for evolution, they necessarily equivocate their salient term. Evolution means transformation, but transformation requires identity in the thing transformed, which, while altered in the terminus of the event, yet retains the marks of its beginning selfsameness. The fossil record by itself only shows the discontinuity of annihilation and substitution – “one damned thing after another.”

Barfield accepts that geological time has spanned billions of years and that life began with unicellular prokaryotes from which subsequent higher forms evolved; and that somehow the prokaryotes arose from pre-biological matter. So what is Barfield arguing exactly? Burgeon, who speaks for Barfield, puts it to Upwater that “it is your own whole case that nature is one huge, delicate process, of which man and his mind are a part; one delicate structure, in which every part is interdependent.” Burgeon wants to know, “What right have you got to abstract one bit [i.e., mind] and imagine the rest going on just as usual?” This observation restates the idea from Saving the Appearances that investigators of geological time fallaciously project “figured” reality, or nature as perceived, back to a period when, by their theory, no mind yet existed that might have perceived it.

Burgeon and Sanderson again in cooperation now turn their skepticism on the positivistic insistence that reason must dismiss all pre-Galilean science under some sweeping idea of anthropomorphism or a pathetic fallacy, because the pre-Galileans saw active intelligence in phenomena rather than blank quantitative relations in which mind had no participation whatever. The two men urge that modern people should be skeptical of the Pyrrhonism that they think guides but which really hobbles their thinking. Sanderson in particular would prefer the significance view over the dead-matter view of the cosmos on the inability of positive science to prove “the ‘primeval’ inorganic solidity of the earth,” logically ruled out when physics and epistemology together demote solidity to an accident that mind has added to extended reality. It follows, Sanderson submits, that the prehistoric earth must have been, so to speak, all particles and waves, immaterial, and yet a medium in which orderly processes occurred. It was mind, as he says; and over the eons mind gradually concentrated and isolated itself in organic structures. One need not follow Barfield into these Steiner-inspired speculations in order to accept that his critique of existing theory hits home at numerous touchy points.



IV. Even so, Sanderson’s highly rhetorical question whether it is likelier that matter should give rise to mind or mind to matter remains provocative. In Unancestral Voice, Barfield probes further into the epistemological discussion opened up in Worlds Apart. He also opens up the moral dimension to scrutiny. What happens when elites demote “knowledge about man” to “knowledge about things” and start treating human beings like things? Unancestral Voice, where once again Burgeon serves for a point of view, begins with a conversation about the pornography trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Burgeon, culturally conservative, wonders how the jurymen could have failed to recognize obscenity when they saw it: the purgation from descriptions of sexual acts of any spiritual component and the reduction of Eros to nothing but physical contact and sensation. This is mind annihilating itself before the idol of matter.

Burgeon feels doubly puzzled. Writers need words; words have meaning. Why would a talented writer, which Lawrence was, embrace brutal meaninglessness as a value? Burgeon’s two lawyer-friends respond vaguely along the lines of resigned fatalism. Judgments change. What can one do about it? In a conversation with a client who runs a charitable “club” for adolescents in a bad London neighborhood, Burgeon gets a glimpse into the perverse alienation fostered by the welfare state. The beneficiaries of the institution, which offers refuge from the harshness outside, avail themselves of it in a slack-jawed, semi-comatose way, but they also abuse it by deliberately wrecking the furniture and smashing the appurtenances. A professional colleague asks Burgeon to speak to his son, an unemployable twenty-something who wastes his life in front of the “telly” and who responds to amiable inquiry with sarcasm and rolling eyes. These incidents establish a pattern that bothers Burgeon deeply and that seems connected to the issues that arose in the Worlds Apart seminar.

Where Worlds Apart focused on biology, Unancestral Voice devotes much attention to history. Burgeon has read Arnold Toynbee’s Study in the one-volume abridgment, with no little admiration. Toynbee undoubtedly brought a visionary impulse to his field and attracted much supercilious dismissal for having done so, yet Burgeon sees Toynbee as hamstrung finally by the identical literalism that the historian strove to overcome. Barfield has Burgeon say to two interlocutors on a sea-voyage: “He [Toynbee] criticizes H. G. Wells and others for trying to apply the race and environment pattern to later stages of human evolution, where it is obviously inadequate. But is he much better off himself – when he has to start speaking of ‘internal’ responses to ‘internal’ challenges arising from the respondent’s own nature?”

The duality of “Race and Environment,” which Toynbee’s “Challenge and Response” subsumes, is hardly distinguishable from the duality of “Heredity and Environment.” That makes Toynbee’s method an application of Darwinism to history. Toynbee, in Barfield’s words, “is doing the very thing he tells us not to do – applying to living creatures the forms of thought adapted to inanimate objects.” And yet Toynbee “is trying to show a sort of evolution or progress in the quality of the challenge-and-response,” which “he finds in its transference to the interior realm.”

History, for Barfield, grounded in literate expressions of human endeavor, is necessarily – the conclusion will by now be familiar – a history of consciousness, of intentions and purposes and clarity of articulation; and the historian necessarily seeks a merging of minds, that he might interpret the past for the present. Unancestral Voice contains a great deal more. I have entirely omitted to explain the provocative title and I shall only allude once – here – to the book’s recurrent motto: “Interior is Anterior.” The drift of Barfield’s thinking should be sufficiently evident by this point. He is a severe but hopeful critic of the dehumanizing trends in the modern Western civilization, which began to crystallize in the Eighteenth Century but which had taproots in the materialistic, operational attitude to life expressed cogently in Bacon’s New Atlantis, the blueprint of which Western humanity has been seeking rather successfully to realize ever since.

When “Takuan Seiyo,” “Fjordman,” or any other nonconformist thinker writes about the imperiousness of super-state, multiculturalist, and collectivist politics and defends tradition, he is making an argument that at least runs in parallel with a strand in Barfield’s analysis of modernity. When “Fjordman” describes the hatred of Swedish bureaucrats for age-old Swedish tradition or for the very Swedishness of the Swedes, or when “Takuan Seiyo” writes of “Meccania” and “Pod People,” he brings into focus the nightmare of polities whose steering elites see human beings as things, or a mass of things, to be manipulated in the Baconian project. – Hence the determination of those elites to destroy tradition and individuality, the better that they might effect their dead, mechanistic designs. As Barfield writes, the vital force enters into tradition, endowing on tradition itself, through generations of experience, an organic quality, such that tampering with tradition can only damage or kill it and damage or kill those whom tradition had nourished.

I see a close alliance between Takuan Seiyo’s Meccania, in its juggernaut advance, and Deconstruction’s assault on meaning, which I invoked earlier in the essay. Drawing on Barfield’s insight, I see a close fitment – a pattern of ideological mutual reinforcement – involving recrudescent Darwinism, which has definitely attached itself to the body of establish liberal doctrine; the obsession of empowered liberalism to treat society as an object that its acolytes might manipulate according to their will; the assault on meaning in literary studies, legal scholarship, and history; and finally the cult of sex and violence proffered by popular culture, as visual entertainment. The descent of the last into degraded stultification is appropriately abetted by the insipid flatness of its main technique, computer-generated imagery: all surface without depth. Societies “evolve,” as liberals like to say, implying that resistance to the “change” that they relentlessly push is mere reactionary futility. But a thing that evolves must be essentially the same at the end of the process as at the beginning. The real scheme of liberalism is annihilation and substitution, which liberals refer to as evolution.

Barfield anticipated these developments fifty years ago. It turns out in hindsight, for example, that the case of Lady Chatterley in the British courts was replete with meaning and that blithe acceptance of spiritless Eros would indeed exert a baneful influence on culture. Modern society is as full of idols as it is of celebrities. The celebrities are as hollow and idiotic as idols. Barfield, a champion of meaning and of the plenitude of the word – that most human of our human qualities – deserves a new generation of readers. He has much to teach us.





[i] I have little use for A. J. Ayer. H. G. Wells, however, is a more complicated person than most commentators of conservative leaning would grant. He was, among other things, an anti-Communist so******t, who quarreled justifiably with the Fabian Society. A Darwinian atheist, he seems nevertheless to have believed, as it were, in belief; he was sympathetic to religious eccentrics, as his novel Christina Alberta’s Father (1925) suggests, and he seems to have entertained the idea that evolution might be directed – the suspicion of his protagonist in Star Begotten (1937). I will perhaps be obliged to visit the topic of Wells in the near future.

[ii] Is it shocking to link environmentalism, as practiced, with totalitarianism? Consider… The anti-humanism of so-called environmentalism is obvious but rarely remarked; that environmentalism includes in its agenda the notion either of zero-population growth through rigid, state-controlled fertility regimes or, as advocated by a prominent Norwegian “deep ecologist, drastic human population-reduction for the sake of the earth. In the USA, environmentalists have resorted in some cases to terror-tactics, making incendiary attacks on lumberyards and automotive agencies that sell large vehicles and setting booby-traps for loggers. The state of California is currently starving once-productive farmers in a portion of its San Joaquin Valley of water, destroying agricultural productivity to protect a species of swamp minnow. The perverseness of such programs is hard to describe.

[iii] In Poetic Diction (1928), Barfield had first set forth his theory of the evolution of language from the expression of “felt” participation in a world that was distinctly not grasped as separate from the participant to analytic discussion of the world as a congeries of emphatically external objects that stood over-against the observer. Saving the Appearances is, in its way, a belated sequel to Poetic Diction. In addressing directly such topics as biology and geology, however, it widens and makes more explicit the critique of post-Renaissance science implied in the earlier study.

[iv] The ironic renversement entailed by treating phenomena as “independent of human consciousness” is that detached investigation of the appearances, especially by physics since Albert Einstein, has tended to obliterate even the things themselves, whose solidity has vanished into the weird unperceivable and barely conceivable world of subatomic particles and waves – the abyss indeed.

[v] The Kantian character of post-Einsteinian physics deserves an essay all by itself. Undoubtedly several such essays already exist or even many already exist and are languishing on library shelves un-accessed. It is a condition of our culture that the archive is so extensive that no one can embrace it. In Barfield’s conceptual framework, Kant’s three Critiques would be major chapters – no doubt of an ambiguous species – in the gradual desperation of “saving the appearances.” Barfield was, not incidentally, a Samuel Taylor Coleridge scholar. His most read book in academic circles is What Coleridge Thought (1971). Coleridge and Goethe are key figures – heroes, one would say – in Barfield’s history of Western thinking. Coleridge pioneered in channeling Kant and Schelling for Anglophone readers, a mission later assumed by Thomas Carlyle.

[vi] All the italics in these passages are Barfield’s.

[FL Patriot]

Good evening. To the United States Corps of Cadets, to the men and women of our Armed Services, and to my fellow Americans: I want to speak to you tonight about our effort in Afghanistan -- the nature of our commitment there, the scope of our interests, and the strategy that my administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion. It's an extraordinary honor for me to do so here at West Point -- where so many men and women have prepared to stand up for our security, and to represent what is finest about our country.
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The president announces the deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

To address these important issues, it's important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women, and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of passengers onboard one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.

As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda -- a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world's great religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents. Al Qaeda's base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban -- a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them -- an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to nothing. The vote in the House was 420 to 1. For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 -- the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all. And the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks. America, our allies and the world were acting as one to destroy al Qaeda's terrorist network and to protect our common security.

Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy -- and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden -- we sent our troops into Afghanistan. Within a matter of months, al Qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed. The Taliban was driven from power and pushed back on its heels. A place that had known decades of fear now had reason to hope. At a conference convened by the U.N., a provisional government was established under President Hamid Karzai. And an International Security Assistance Force was established to help bring a lasting peace to a war-torn country.

Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war, in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here. It's enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention -- and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011. That we are doing so is a testament to the character of the men and women in uniform. (Applause.) Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.

But while we've achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. After escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, al Qaeda's leadership established a safe haven there. Although a legitimate government was elected by the Afghan people, it's been hampered by corruption, the drug trade, an under-developed economy, and insufficient security forces.

Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with al Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government. Gradually, the Taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan, while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating attacks of terrorism against the Pakistani people.
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Now, throughout this period, our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq. When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan, compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war. Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. And that's why, shortly after taking office, I approved a longstanding request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan and the extremist safe havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies, and pledged to better coordinate our military and civilian efforts.

Since then, we've made progress on some important objectives. High-ranking al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed, and we've stepped up the pressure on al Qaeda worldwide. In Pakistan, that nation's army has gone on its largest offensive in years. In Afghanistan, we and our allies prevented the Taliban from stopping a presidential election, and -- although it was marred by fraud -- that election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan's laws and constitution.

Yet huge challenges remain. Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards. There's no imminent threat of the government being overthrown, but the Taliban has gained momentum. Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border. And our forces lack the full support they need to effectively train and partner with Afghan security forces and better secure the population. Our new commander in Afghanistan -- General McChrystal -- has reported that the security situation is more serious than he anticipated. In short: The status quo is not sustainable. As cadets, you volunteered for service during this time of danger. Some of you fought in Afghanistan. Some of you will deploy there. As your Commander-in-Chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined, and worthy of your service. And that's why, after the Afghan voting was completed, I insisted on a thorough review of our strategy. Now, let me be clear: There has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war during this review period. Instead, the review has allowed me to ask the hard questions, and to explore all the different options, along with my national security team, our military and civilian leadership in Afghanistan, and our key partners. And given the stakes involved, I owed the American people -- and our troops -- no less. This review is now complete. And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan. I do not make this decision lightly. I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions. We have been at war now for eight years, at enormous cost in lives and resources. Years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters, and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort. And having just experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home. Most of all, I know that this decision asks even more of you -- a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens. As President, I have signed a letter of condolence to the family of each American who gives their life in these wars. I have read the letters from the parents and spouses of those who deployed. I visited our courageous wounded warriors at Walter Reed. I've traveled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place. I see firsthand the terrible wages of war. If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. So, no, I do not make this decision lightly. I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region. Of course, this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America's war. Since 9/11, al Qaeda's safe havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali. The people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered. And the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.

Full Transcript: President Obama's Speech on Afghanistan Delivered at West Point - ABC News

[FL Patriot]

An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea -- "Let's invade Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?

Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, "No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish -- the full terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.

We're counting on you.

Yours,
Michael Moore

War President
Obama: 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan

Obama: "We Did Not Ask for This Fight"
Bush: "We Did Not Seek This Conflict"
Obama: "New Attacks are Being Plotted as I Speak"
Bush: "At This Moment ... Terrorists are Planning New Attacks"
Obama: "Our Cause is Just, Our Resolve Unwavering"
Bush: "Our Cause is Just, Our Coalition [is] Determined"
Obama: "This Is No Idle Danger, No Hypothetical Threat"
Bush: "The Enemies of Freedom Are Not Idle"
Obama: "We Have No Interest in Occupying Your Country"
Bush: "I Wouldn't Be Happy if I Were Occupied Either"

Ambush
U.S. troop killed in Afghanistan brings
death toll to 300 so far this year

DO SOMETHING:
CodePink | SDS | United for Peace & Justice | World Can't Wait
*** World Can't Wait Live Blogging from West Point ***

[FL Patriot]

December 2nd, 2009 4:22 AM
30,000 Wrongs Won't Make it Right

By Cindy Sheehan

I have had to reluctantly watch many presidential speeches since my son was killed in Iraq in 2004. I was even dragged out of a Bush State of the Union speech in 2006, that I didn’t want to go to anyway, for just wearing a shirt with an anti-war message.

Now, I knew that Obama was going to announce that he would be condemning 30-35,000 more troops to Afghanistan(Pakistan): that wasn’t exactly a state secret. I also knew that his speech would be filled with jingoistic propaganda—that’s a given with presidential speeches—and the Pope of Hope is no different. However, I was not prepared for the physical sickness that overcame me while he was speaking. His delivery was wooden and not convincing, but the words tore my heart apart like I was a newbie to presidential calumny.

I did not support Obama when he ran for president because he said he was going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He is a rare bird: a president that fulfills a campaign promise. I am not surprised, or disappointed, but I am filled with anger.

I am angry that thousands of more mothers will, without reason or rhyme, be served the unending pain of burying a child.

I was watching O’Bomber’s speech tonight at a bar in Las Vegas after our protest at the Federal Building there and I was punched in the gut with Obama telling the Cadets at West Point that he has:

“As President, I have signed a letter of condolence to the family of each American who gives their life in these wars. I have read the letters from the parents and spouses of those who deployed. I have visited our courageous wounded warriors at Walter Reed. I have travelled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place. I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.”

Just like goddamned George Bush and his evil vice-president, Obama has no freaking idea what the “terrible wages of war,” are. Signing letters, or saluting caskets, or meeting with the wounded are NOT the same thing as receiving one of those letters, lying in one of those caskets or being maimed for the rest of your life. He has only “witnessed” the “terrible wages of war,” from a remote viewing location that is filtered through the gauze of a deep disconnect from the violent pain that he is imposing.

Another thing—no one in our armed forces are “giving” their lives. No one has “given” his or her life for decades now, if ever, in our history. The people who have been killed in the Racket of War have had their lives STOLEN from them and their futures denied by chicken hawks who sign condolence letters in comfortable offices surrounded by millions of dollars of protection and by Congress members who also have no idea of the never-ending ache that is not dulled by time. Don’t even start with the bullshit that our troops are “volunteers.” If they are “volunteers” then I would suggest every one of them, or any one of them try to “volunteer” not to be deployed to Afghanistan.

December 7, 1941 was a day that has lived in “infamy” but it was not used to justify the waging of unending wars, even though our permanent bases still remain in Germany and Japan after 65 years. However, Obama again uses the attacks on 9-11 to justify this absolutely bat-**** crazy occupation of Afghanistan—no matter what he says, it IS an occupation. Tonight, in the speech he gave in front of his Cadet “props,” Obama said that the attack on 9-11 was “vicious.”

I agree that 9-11 was awful and it’s a day that we surely will never forget, but if that was “vicious” then what does Obama call what America has been doing in Iraq-Af-Pak now for twice as many years as WWII lasted? What’s worse than “vicious?” Genocide, that’s what.

Genocide is the systematic killing of a racial or cultural group and please don’t waste your time telling me that Obama has a “good heart” or “great intellect” because if he had either one of those things, the troops would be coming home by now.

Obama is just another coward that has risen to the highest office in the world and I am tired of having to be shoved by crazy people, chased and shot at by police, tear-gassed, arrested, called names that make even me blush, scrimping for every penny to stay afloat in this peace business, traveling and protesting to the point of exhaustion, etc. Not only did Obama condemn 30,000 troops to horror, with just one speech, he also condemned the real anti-war movement that was opposed to his policies from the beginning, to many more years of our sacrifices.

Well, I am not going to stop protesting and doing all of the above things, but I am not doing them for the rest of my life. If you believe in the mythical “drawdown” that Obama has just lied through his teeth about, then I ask you where did the “one combat battalion per month” out of Iraq go? Remember that promise? There has been no significant “drawdown” of troops from Iraq at all.

No matter what Obama says, these wars aren’t “just” and we aren’t “right” and we only have the “might” of the War Machine to open those “new markets” he talked about in his speech.

No matter what Obama says, these ARE open-ended wars, but I am NOT an open-ended anti-war activist.

We have to end them as soon as possible. We have to escalate our peace as the War Machine escalates its violence.

Want to go all the way for peace?

Join us this spring in D.C. for Peace of the Action!


http://peaceoftheaction.org/

[FL Patriot]

The boys can't wait to get their feet wet in blood. What a shame. The soldier should hate war more than any man but in today's society, war is the answer to everything.



Now the New Boss is setting the agenda. He will be sending some of these very boys to Arlington.

[FL Patriot]

LBJ is the name that comes to mind after Obama's decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. When he inherited the Vietnam War from JFK, LBJ had a big domestic program -- the "War on Poverty" -- to push through Congress. To LBJ, Vietnam was a "distraction," in Obama-speak. So LBJ would not make a full-scale commitment to win or to get out: He tried to do both in little dribs and drabs that gave the enemy enough respites to regroup before each carefully deliberated "escalation." Obama says he wants to walk away in eighteen months, but right after the Democrats lose the next congressional elections, will Obama want to be the president who lost AfPak, and therefore left Pakistani nuclear weapons at the mercy of a victorious Sunni Taliban?

And then there are the Shiite "Taliban" next door, the Twelver Cult that runs Tehran. Israeli rumors point to an imminent preemptive assault on Ahmadinejad's nuclear facilities, with the tacit but very real support of the Saudis, who are just fifty miles from the Bushehr nuclear plant and who have been the major target for Khomeinist radicals for thirty years. Israel is the country most vociferously threatened by Ahmadinejad, along with the Great Satan -- that's you and me -- but Iran really wants to control Arabia.

Just look at the map. There are several major reasons for Iran to want Saudi Arabia.

One is the prestige of controlling the holiest cities of Islam -- Mecca and Medina -- which would give Tehran huge religious and political clout throughout the Muslim world. For the first time in history, Shiite Islam would control the emotional center of Islam, which they have been claiming for almost a thousand years.

Two: It's easy to conquer Arabia from Persia. The two countries are effectively nextdoor to each other, with only the Americans standing in the way. The Iraqis can't defend themselves against an armored attack from Iran once the Americans retreat. When Tehran gets nukes, nobody will be able to resist it among its neighboring nations. Therefore, Tehran can gain control over the entire Arabian Peninsula, including the Gulf States. That means enormous oil wealth, which Iran desperately needs. The Saudi family has controlled Arabia for only a century or so, and they do not have a longstanding claim to it.

Three: By conquering Arabia, Iran would become by far the biggest power in the Muslim world. They would control forty percent of the world's oil, especially the flow to Europe and China. By collaborating with Russia, Tehran could control OPEC and have near-monopoly control over oil prices. Russia is approaching domination of natural gas supplies to Europe. The Europeans are chomping at the bit to surrender, having been infiltrated over the last century both by Soviet Marxism and now by Islam. The Left-Islamist alliance that is even now controlling big European cities from Paris to London might well beget a powerful anti-American alliance.

None of this involves Israel, which is a much harder nut to crack than Arabia. Israel has well-prepared defenses and a huge retaliatory capacity. In another five or ten years, it may have enough anti-missile defenses to stop a mid-level nuclear attack from Iran. Israel also has the capacity to retaliate against Iran with nuclear weapons, or perhaps with conventionally exploded electromagnetic pulse weapons. (In theory, any kind of explosive can be used to drive an EMP. You don't have to go nuclear.).

That doesn't mean Ahmadinejad won't attack Israel, but that the military cost of doing it is much higher, and the benefit is much less. Iran has been playing its power games like a careful chessmaster: move by move, to surround and weaken its enemies. That is why three client states controlled by Tehran are now surrrounding Israel: Lebanon via Hezbollah, Syria, and Gaza via Hamas. With that kind of power position, Iran would presumably try to overthrow Fatah on the West Bank in order to fully surround Israel. At some point, that will force Israel into a preemptive war.

What about America? That question gets right back to my title: Is Obama clever or stupid? If he is stupid, he will turn into LBJ and become purely reactive to the clear and present danger of nukes in the hands of an Islamist suicide cult. That danger arises both in AfPak (with Sunni suiciders) and in Iran (with Shiite suiciders). If Obama is clever, his Afghanistan strategy is going to focus on limited but defensible control of the Afghan cities, and constant harassment of Taliban outside of the cities. The real goals will be to deny the Taliban a safe haven and to turn Afghanistan into an American base in order to keep a tight leash on Pakistan, which has its own nukes, not to mention Iran and the Persian Gulf.

Look at the map of that region. There are two hotspots of great danger: Iran and Pakistan. There is one enormous resource that would give a hostile power control over Europe and much else: the oil fields of Arabia.

If Obama is purely reactive, with a self-destructive need to please his peacenik wing, he will lose everything in both foreign and domestic policy. Then Obama becomes Jimmy Carter -- an embittered and vengeful wasp to sting the future administrations that take over America's direction. If Obama is proactive, and if his small Afghan surge is designed to build protected areas in Afghanistan and keep the Taliban on the run, then the United States can exercise a great deal of power at the center of the world's worst troubles: Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, and Arabia. That is a sensible strategy because today, American forces need to replenish their strength for the greater battle to come.

The first indication will come not in Afghanistan, but in the Israel-Iran standoff. Israel is widely expected to strike Iranian nuclear facilities in the coming months. That is not easy, but it is probably within the capacity of the IDF, which has had thirty years to prepare for this day. The key question is whether American air and naval forces will support the Israeli strike, either covertly or overtly, and whether the United States will block Iranian counter-strikes. We control the air and sea in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, though the Iranians constantly try to challenge us. The Saudis will certainly give Israel secret permission to overfly Arabia on their way to Iran because their survival is on the line. The Saudis are no doubt also pressuring the U.S. and Europe to defend them against the hated Persian Shiites.

The question therefore becomes, where are Obama and the United States? We've seen three months of delay and obfuscation from Obama. That is partly to keep his Left flank happy. Militarily, there was no good reason for the delay, and it might well have increased the dangers to American personnel.

But Obama is not well-informed, to say the least, on military and international affairs. Those three months might be his learning curve. BHO is still the bright Harvard graduate student who wants to turn everything into a little seminar, to show how smart he really is. Well, here's a chance to show if he has learned what's important. If he is being clever, he has learned to think strategically -- not just about Afghanistan, but about the entire region. If he is being stupid, he will allow other nations to drive his step-by-step decisions like LBJ and Jimmy Carter did.

The key in politics, including international affairs, is to anticipate events and to shape them before they become irreversible. If that is happening today, then this very odd administration may yet pull a rabbit out of the hat in foreign policy.

[popeye]

He's sending 30 thousand peace keepers. That's allot of peace, that's so much peace he wins the 'peace prize'.

[FL Patriot]

The US administration clearly says plans to start bringing soldiers back from Afghanistan in 18 months might slip and that no deadlines can be set.

"Quite frankly, I detest the phrase exit strategy," US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, promising "a narrow focus" on routing al-Qaeda with "observable progress on clear objectives."

"What is essential -- for our national security -- is that we have two long-term partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said.

"I think the president, as commander in chief, always has the option to adjust his decisions," Gated added a day after US President Barack Obama unveiled a plan to send 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

During hours of questioning by two key committees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also mentioned that withdrawal was not the only strategy left to the US.

"I do not believe we have locked ourselves into leaving," said Clinton, who added the goal was "to signal very clearly to all audiences that the United States is not interested in occupying Afghanistan."

Clinton urged the Afghan government to fight corruption saying the administration has "real concerns about the influence of corrupt officials in the Afghan government, and we will continue to pursue them."

The US president decided on Tuesday to raise the number of American troops in Afghanistan by some 40 percent, the first of which will reach the war in the first half of 2010.

[FL Patriot]

It will cost an additional $30 billion a year. Some antiwar Democrats in Congress talk of a 'war tax,' but the most likely option to fund Obama's Afghanistan war plan is to keep borrowing.


Washington

President Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan may succeed. It may fail. But one thing is sure: It will cost $30 billion a year that at the moment the Pentagon doesn’t have.

As of now, Congress appears poised to just borrow the cash to pay for the deployment of 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, adding to the federal deficit. That’s in contrast to healthcare reform, which lawmakers are struggling to pay for with tax increases and budget cuts.

This shows that years of special supplemental appropriations to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars have made it too easy for lawmakers to avoid making tough fiscal choices on defense, say some deficit hawks.

“Deeming a particular initiative as vital to the national interest should not exempt it from being paid for,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

No payment plan spelled out

In his speech Tuesday night, Mr. Obama himself noted that the cost of his Afghan troop increase would run about $30 billion a year.

“I’ll work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit,” said Obama.

But the president gave no specifics as to what addressing those costs might mean.

It is probably too late for Congress to consider the extra Afghan expenses this year. Lawmakers are close to final approval of the Department of Defense spending bill for fiscal year 2010, which already includes $130 billion for next year’s Afghanistan and Iraqi operations.

That means the most likely option is for the House and Senate to take up a $30 billion supplemental appropriation for Afghanistan sometime after they return from their holiday break. During the Bush administration, annual costs of the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts largely were funded via such supplementals.

From the left, a push for a war tax

Some liberal Democrats who oppose Obama’s new war strategy have vowed to try to enact a war tax to pay for at least part of this extra cost.

Otherwise, the longer-term costs of continuing conflict in the Afghanistan region could “devour virtually any other priorities that the president or anyone in Congress [has],” said Rep. David Obey (D) of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and a war-tax supporter.

But House and Senate Democratic leaders – as well as many Republicans – have sounded less than enthusiastic about a new Afghan-related levy. Instead, key Democrats have said they will try to fund the war effort without raising taxes during an economic downturn. Like the president, they have been vague about what that funding effort might entail.

Given that 2010 is an election year, the war-tax effort is doomed from the start, and its proponents know that, says Gordon Adams, Office of Management and Budget associate director for national security during the Clinton administration. They may be just trying to make a point about their opposition to the new Afghanistan strategy.

Finding places to cut elsewhere in the federal budget and offset the new war costs will be difficult, because the 2010 budget was drawn up long ago, adds Mr. Adams.

So, how will Congress ultimately pay for the Afghan spending?

“Yeah, they’ll borrow it,” says Adams, a professor of international relations at the American University and co-author of a new book on defense budgeting.

$1 trillion and counting

Meanwhile, the new spending seems set to push the total cost of the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars over the $1 trillion mark, according to the Congressional Research Service.

While the larger Iraq war has been more expensive overall, the Afghan conflict is much more expensive on a per-soldier basis, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Over the past five years, the cost per troop in Iraq has been about $556,000 per year, while the same figure for Afghanistan has been $1.1 million, according to CSBA.

The differential might be explained by the economies of scale inherent in the larger forces in Iraq, said CSBA analyst Todd Harrison. It might also be due to the longer and more difficult-to-traverse supply lines of the Afghan conflict.

The cost of fuel is one of the most expensive aspects of maintaining deployed forces in the region. Due to fuel-gulping weapons and bases, each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan needs about 8,000 gallons of fuel per year. Due to the need to protect fuel convoys with heavy security, the delivered cost of fuel in the region is from $25 to $45 per gallon.

“Fuel costs alone make up some $200-350 thousand of the cost per troop per year,” writes Todd Harrison in a new analysis of estimated Afghanistan funding.