[R-G] Obama’s Good and “Proper” War

[Anthony Fenton]

Obama’s Good and “Proper” War
March 05, 2008 By Paul Street
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16760

Throughout his Senate career and the presidential campaign, the  
supposed “peace candidate” Barack Obama has reassured the U.S.  
foreign policy establishment of his willingness to stay firmly within  
the spectrum of acceptable imperial opinion by voicing strong support  
for the U.S.-led bombing and invasion of Afghanistan that followed in  
the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  According to Obama throughout the  
current ongoing contest, one of the main problems with George W.  
Bush’s “mistake” (the Democratic presidential front runner never  
calls it a crime or immoral) of invading Iraq was that it has  
“diverted” U.S. military resources that should have been dedicated to  
the smart and just war in (on) Afghanistan.  Like other official  
“doves” on the “bad war” in Iraq, he was a hawk on the supposedly  
“good war” in Afghanistan.

BUSH “RESPONDED PROPERLY WHEN IT CAME TO AFGHANISTAN”

Here he has articulated a widely shared elite sentiment reflecting  
the sharp limits of what passes for “left” opinion in the bipartisan  
U.S. governing class. As very few Americans beyond the so-called  
“extreme left” seemed to know or care, the Bush administration’s  
heavily Democratic Party-supported bombing and invasion of the  
Afghanistan took place in bold defiance of international law  
forbidding aggressive war.  Sold as a legitimate defensive response  
to the jetliner attacks, it was undertaken without definitive proof  
or knowledge that that country’s Taliban government was responsible  
in any way for 9/11.  It occurred after the Bush administration  
rebuffed efforts by that government to possibly extradite accused  
9/11 planners to stand trial in the U.S. It sought to destroy the  
Taliban government with no legal claim to introduce regime change in  
another sovereign state.  It took place over the protest of numerous  
Afghan opposition leaders and in defiance of aid organizations who  
expected a U.S. attack to produce a humanitarian catastrophe.  And,  
as Noam Chomsky noted in 2003, U.S. claims to possess the right to  
bomb Afghanistan – an action certain to produce significant  
casualties – raised the interesting question of whether Cuba and  
Nicaragua were entitled to set off bombs in the U.S. given the fact  
that the U.S. provided shelter to well-known terrorists shown to have  
conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban and Nicaraguan people and  
governments.

As Rahul Mahajan observed, the United States’ attack on Afghanistan  
met none of the standard international moral and legal criteria for  
justifiable self-defense and occurred without reasonable consultation  
with the United Nations Security Council.  Many defenders of the  
invasion, Democrats as well as Republicans, upheld Bush’s right to  
attack prior to such consultation by making the analogy of a maniac  
who had broken into your house and already killed some residents: “do  
you sit and around a negotiate with the murderers while they kill  
more or do you go in and take them out?” But, as Mahajan argued, “the  
analogy to the U.S. action would have been better if the maniac had  
died in the attack, and your response was to bomb a neighborhood he  
had been staying in, killing many people who didn’t even know of his  
existence – even though you had your own police force constantly on  
the watch for more attacks.”1

Not surprisingly, an international Gallup poll released after the  
bombing was announced showed that global opposition was  
overwhelming.  “In Latin America, which has some experience with US  
behavior,” Chomsky notes, “support [for the U.S. assault] ranged from  
2% in Mexico, to 18% in Panama, and that support was conditional on  
the culprits being identified (they still weren’t eight months  
latter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported) and civilian  
targets being spared (they were attacked at once).  There was an  
overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial  
measures, rejected out of hand by [Washington, claiming to represent]  
‘the world.’”2

But according to Obama, speaking on ABC Television’s “Nightline” the  
night before the four critical primaries of March 4, 2008 (Ohio,  
Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island and Vermont), Afghanistan was George  
W. Bush’s good war.  The president “responded properly when it came  
to Afghanistan,” Obama told ABC, but “he responded ideologically when  
it came to Iraq” – not criminally, but rather “ideologically,”  
according to a candidate who deceptively claimed to stand above  
“ideology.”

“BECAUSE WE WANTED THEM DEAD”

According to University of New Hampshire business professor Marc  
Herold, who monitored press accounts in the first half-year of  
Obama’s “proper” war, the “U.S. air war on Afghanistan” produced a  
high level of civilian casualties, producing at least 3,000 civilian  
documented civil deaths, between October 7, 2001 and March 31,  
2002.3  When U.S. warplanes strafed the unprotected Afghan farming  
village of Chowkar-Karez, 25 miles north of Kandahar on October  
22-23rd 2001, killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official  
said, "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead."  
Queried about the Chowkar killings, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald  
Rumsfeld replied, "I cannot deal with that particular village."4

On February 22, 2008 in Austin Texas, Obama used the platform of a  
CNN Democratic presidential candidates’ “debate” (consisting of two  
heavily corporate, centrist, and imperial Democrats)  to criticize  
the Bush administration for dropping the ball of the good and smart  
war on terror in (on) Afghanistan by choosing to wage its “dumb” and  
“ideological” war in (on) Iraq.

The Sunday after the debate the New York Times Magazine published  
what ought to have been widely perceived as a shocking account of the  
hidden reality of the first and war. Times Magazine writer Elizabeth  
Rubin went to Afghanistan “with a question: why, with all our  
technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes.”   
Noting that the United States’ “flying war machines are saviors to  
U.S. soldiers” in that country but “cannot distinguish between  
insurgents and civilians,” Rubin calmly observed that “the sheer  
tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a  
million pounds between January and September 2007, compared with half  
a million in all of 2006.” Remarking casually that “the jets that  
defeated the Taliban were [now] wiping out innocent families as well”  
– here Rubin forgot to note that U.S. air power slaughtered innocent  
civilians from the very beginning of the American assault – the  
embedded Times writer recounted how U.S. Special Forces “rocketed and  
bombed an engagement party” in the mountains of Oruzgan in July of  
2002, resulting in the death of forty civilians and the wounding of  
one hundred.

“I ENDED UP KILLING THAT MOM AND THE KID”

By Rubin’s account based on months “alongside soldiers making life  
and death decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and  
civilians,” Obama’s “good war” in Afghanistan did not seem to have  
gotten much better more than five years later. Seeking to determine  
“why so many American troops were being killed in Afghanistan,” she  
found (predictably enough for those who resisted the original and  
continuing U.S. justifications for the assault) that “seven years of  
air strikes, civilian casualties, humiliating house searches, and  
arbitrary detentions have pushed many families and tribes to  
revenge.” Imagine that! Rubin’s article focused heavily on the story  
of the Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in  
Afghanistan’s Kunar Province and its leader Capt. Dan Kearny in the  
fall of 2007.  Kearny described his duties as analogous to the Los  
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in a “tough neighborhood.”  But  
Kearny had significantly more lethal resources with which to fight  
“bad guys” (as he described those who dared to resist U.S. invasion)  
than the LAPD.  Rubin described how Kearny responded to “insurgent”  
fire in a Kuna village by calling in bombs and missiles that resulted  
in significant civilian casualties.  “I ended up killing that mom and  
kid,” Kearny told Rubin, recounting his destruction of a three-story  
mansion purported to contain “people moving weapons around” as well  
as a woman and a child.  “I kept asking for a bomb drop on [the]  
house,” Kearny stated, “but no one wanted to sign off on the  
collateral damage.”  Finally, Kearny told Rubin, “he shot a javelin  
and a tow” – armor-piercing missiles – that resulted in the death of  
“that mom and the kid.”

THUMBS UP FOR “COLLATERAL DAMAGE” FROM “A NEBRASKA SOCIAL SCIENTIST”

Later in Rubin’s narrative she related the story of how Kearny got  
“his boss, Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund, a Nebraska social scientist,” to  
“sign off on collateral damage” by approving a B-1 bomber attack on  
Yaka China, a “notorious” Afghan village thought to contain  
“insurgents.”  On the morning of the attack, Kearny told Rubin,  
“Okay, I’ve done my killing for the week.  I’m ready to go home.” He  
estimated that U.S. forces had killed 20 people, adding, “I’m not  
going to lie to you.  Some are probably civilians.”

He was right.  According to Rubin, “the tally was bad: 5 killed and  
11 wounded, all of them women, girls, and boys” [emphasis added].  
Reflecting on this grisly outcome, hardly novel in the long and  
bloody history of the “good war” on Afghanistan, Rubin coolly  
explained that “killing civilians” is a “political issue.  If  
[Kearny] didn’t explain his actions to Yaka China villagers and get  
them to understand his intentions, he could lose them to the enemy.”5

Thank God for the noble intentions of benevolent empires.

“I SAID IT WAS GOING TO OVERSTRETCH OUR MILITARY”

This one snapshot among many predictable (and predicted) criminal  
atrocities from the war whose launching Obama and other top Democrats  
saw as a “proper” action on Bush’s part, so supposedly different from  
his “mistake” (never a crime) of invading Iraq. In the Austin debate,  
Obama made a special point of condemning the under-funding and under- 
equipping of the allegedly just and intelligent war Kearny and  
Ostlund were ordered to fight in Afghanistan.  Obama criticized  
Clinton for authorizing a war that “diverted [U.S.] attention from  
Afghanistan, where al Qaeda, that killed 3,000 Americans, are  
stronger now than at any time since 2001.” After relating the story  
of an Army captain facing a shortage of weapons, troops, and Humvees  
in Afghanistan, Obama reprised his imperial, not so peace-oriented  
reasons for opposing the invasion of Iraq: “I said this is going to  
distract us from Afghanistan; this is going to fan the flames of anti- 
American sentiment; it’s going to cost us billions of dollars and  
thousands of lives and overstretch our military.  And I was right.”

There was nothing in Obama’s widely praised Austin oratory about the  
much larger number – far beyond 3,000 – of Afghans and Iraqis (some  
social-scientific estimates placed Iraqi deaths resulting from the  
U.S. invasion over 1 million) killed by U.S. actions since 9/11.  
There was no sense of the role that persistent U.S. killing of Afghan  
civilians and the original and continuing illegal U.S attack on those  
civilians’ country had played in fueling so-called “anti- 
Americanism” (actually hatred of imperial U.S. government policies)  
and no acknowledgement that the majority of the world opposed the  
attack from the outset.

Obama’s establishment foreign policy team might argue that a more  
“properly” funded and equipped “war on terror” would have avoided  
such atrocities in Afghanistan.  But this ignores both the  
possibility (if not likelihood) that more military hardware in the  
hands of more U.S. occupation forces would have actually increased  
civilian deaths there and the deeper truth that the U.S. attack on  
that country was illegal and widely hated from the beginning, within  
and beyond Afghanistan, before Bush and Cheney “diverted’ America  
away from its “good” and “proper” war on that suffering nation and  
towards its “bad” (strategically, but not morally in the language of  
leading Democrats)and  “ideological” war on Iraq.

Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian  
and independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa  
City, IA.  He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the  
World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 2005); Segregated Schools: Educational  
Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial  
Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefied 2007).  Street  
is currently completing a book on U.S. political culture and the  
Barack Obama phenomenon.

NOTES

1. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America’s Quest for Global  
Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206; Rahul Mahajan,  
The New Crusade: America’s War on Terror (New York: Monthly Review,  
2002), p. 21.
2. Noam Chomsky, “The World According to Washington,” Asia Times 
(February 28, 2008).
3 Dr. Marc Herold, A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States  
Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan (Durham, New Hampshire, 2002), read  
online at http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm
4. Murray Campbell, "Bombing of Farming Village Undermines U.S  
Credibility," Toronto Globe & Mail, 3 November, 2001; Herold, A  
Dossier, p.1.
5. Elizabeth Rubin, “Battle Company is Out There,” New York Times  
Magazine, February 24, 2008.