Buried many fathoms deep in an LA Times story about the latest American scolding of its unruly satrap in Bactria, we find this little nugget:
Some senior officials are saying privately that they fear their reliance on the Karzai administration could be the weakest link of their strategy to stabilize the country. Government corruption is seen as one of the most important factors driving ordinary Afghans to support the Taliban. …
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the newly appointed head of the international forces in the country, has hired two experts known for their strong emphasis on fighting corruption, Frederick Kagan and Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
That’s right; Frederick Kagan, the neocon architect of the Iraq “surge,” the epitome of the armchair warriors who have sent thousands of human beings (including their fellow Americans) to needless death and plunged millions more into needless suffering, has been hired by the Peace Laureate Administration to serve as guide and counsel to the Laureate’s newly appointed military supremo.
It goes without saying that Kagan — yet another spawn of the Project for a New American Century, that gaggle of bloodthirsty Beltwayers who openly longed, in September 2000, for a “new Pearl Harbor” to scare the American public into supporting the group’s hyper-militarist agenda — is not an expert on “fighting corruption” or on Afghanistan, just as he knew nothing about Iraq. He is an “expert” on one topic only: churning out bullshit to justify war. And that is exactly why he has been hired by Obama and Petraeus.
As I noted here back in January 2007:
Now Bush has drawn on AEI “scholar” Frederick Kagan to fashion his genuinely demented plan for a major escalation of the Iraq War: the famous “surge” that has dominated the shoptalk of the Beltway in the past month – the same month in which American soldiers were dying in near-record numbers while Bush cleared brush on his fake ranch. (The spread was purchased as a campaign prop in 1999 but is invariably referred to by media sycophants as his “beloved” homestead, as if he’d spent years of his life communing with the soil there, rather than the odd month now and then on vacation). While he dithered – consulting with his “brain trust” on the best way to ignore the suggestions of the Iraq Study Group and the clearly expressed will of the American people to bring the American occupation of Iraq to an end – more than 100 U.S. soldiers were shot to death or blown to pieces. An almost equivalent number of Iraqi civilians were murdered every day during December by the death squads of the factions brought to power by Bush and their sectarian opponents in the nationalist insurgency that arose in response to his invasion.
What the Kagan plan called for – and what Bush accepted in a slightly diluted form … – is a re-invasion of Baghdad, with thousands of additional U.S. troops thrown into savage urban warfare in “critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods.” (The latter of which are now practically non-existent, thanks to the virulent “ethnic cleansing” in the city by Bush-backed Shia militias and their Sunni counterparts). In the unintentionally revealing language that permeates so much of the war-porn generated by the well-fed, stay-at-home armchair generals of PNAC, AEI and the White House, Kagan – a young, portly academic with no expertise whatsoever in the Middle East – writes in the Washington Post that “the only ‘surge’ option that makes any sense is both long and large.”
The mass-murdering blandishments that Kagan poured in Bush’s ear demanded that already-overstrained American ground forces “accept longer tours for several years” (italics mine), as he stated in his AEI report, “Choosing Victory.” The citizen-soldiers in National Guard units will also have to “accept increased deployments during this period,” it seems. Meanwhile, Kagan will no doubt continue to discuss the finer points of “counterinsurgency” and “clearing neighborhoods” with congenial colleagues at Washington’s finest restaurants – while also insisting, as he does in “Choosing Victory,” that “the president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this age.”
In this plan – and the version of it Bush adopted for his “New Way Forward” – we see the hideous obscenity of the whole criminal enterprise laid bare. The bloodlust of physical cowards like Bush and Cheney and Kagan – their overpowering need to see other people kill and die – is now reaching genuinely irrational proportions. The war in Iraq was launched solely to serve the political ambitions, personal fortunes and radical ideologies of a small group of American elitists (and the delusions of grandeur of its little handmaiden in the UK). It had no larger strategic benefit or moral purpose, despite all the ever-shifting rhetoric to the contrary. It has not enhanced American security. It has not given the Iraqis a better life. It has not spread freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. It was not designed to do these things. But neither has it accomplished its true aim, as clearly defined by PNAC and others, of establishing a solid American military presence in Iraq as a launching pad for further expansion of the “single sustainable model of national success” and the juicy contracts that would follow.
And so we had Kagan’s “surge,” the sole aim of which was to perpetuate and entrench the American presence by an adroit manipulation of the then-prevailing media “narrative.” What was seen as an appalling “failure” soon became a rousing “success” (or even “an extraordinary achievement,” as the Peace Laureate himself put it) in the American media. Why? Because after the Americans helped its Shiite protégés finish their ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, and bribed other insurgents to change sides (for awhile), the horrific monthly death counts of murdered civilians dropped from the world-historical levels of 2006-2007 to the “merely” abominable levels that afflict Iraq today.
And so here, at last, is the true “mission accomplished”: the establishment of a permanent American military presence in Iraq — which was one of the stated aims of PNAC’s 2000 blueprint for an expanded militarist empire. Although America’s “combat role” in Iraq was declared over this month, 50,000 troops (and an equal number of Washington-paid privateers) remain in the conquered land, carrying out the same missions as before. Meanwhile, the State Department is now amassing its own armed force of up to 50,000, which will be a massive, permanent military presence, even if the Pentagon ever decides to move its troops elsewhere. (Which is highly unlikely, with the American-installed local leaders currently saying that US troops will be needed “at least” until 2020.)
No doubt Kagan’s paymasters, Obama and Petraeus, are hoping they can pull off the same trick in Afghanistan, which at the moment is in roughly the same “narrative” frame as Iraq was in 2007: a five-alarm, full-scale FUBAR. And who knows? They may do it. If they can get the death counts down a bit — and keep St. David the Unquestionable out there awing the ever-credulous media and political establishments — perhaps they can entrench the American military presence, in all those “supersize me” bases they are now building, for years and years to come.
And once again, we are left to wonder: How many times, and in how many ways, must we be shown the true nature of the Obama Administration — its absolute, steely determination to perpetuate and expand a militarist empire, no matter what it costs in human life abroad and internal rot at home — before we can see and acknowledge the reality before us? So much sound and fury is expended on the hair-splitting differences (or the appearance of differences) between our political factions, but the fact remains is that they are all one party: the party of imperial power. As Andrew Bacevich noted recently:
For the last 50 years, the U.S. national security establishment has remained essentially unchanged. It is a worldwide military presence configured not to defend the nation but to project power around the globe. That standing force fosters a penchant for interventionism, whether overt or covert. … The [bipartisan] consensus no longer makes sense, yet it persists—not because it produces effective policies but because of deeply ingrained habits, and because it serves a variety of purposes…
It produces profit for companies. It provides status prerogatives for the military. It justifies the budgets of the Defense Department and the intelligence community. It provides a sustainable source of funding for congressional campaigns. And it provides people with opportunities to participate in what they think are great historical events.
No one is allowed anywhere near the halls of power or the levers of influence if they do not subscribe to this consensus. Anyone who questions it is automatically relegated to the margins. Barack Obama would not have been nominated by his faction or elected president if he was not a zealous adherent of the imperial agenda, and all that it entails: endless war, erosion of liberty, endemic corruption, and economic injustice.
And that is why Obama is happy to employ figures from the Bush Regime, like David Petraeus (and his death-squad wingman, Stanley McChrystal), like Robert Gates, like the odious toady Frederick Kagan — because he and they are part of the same system, the same agenda. This is the underlying reality of American politics today.