8-08-07, 9:28 am
The press is running with a story in which a few Democratic presidential hopefuls have criticized Senator Obama’s comments that he would not use nuclear weapons against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Obama has been accused of showing a lack of “experience” in dealing with military matters and “unilaterally” rejecting a military option. It should be more important for progressive people to note that Senator Obama didn’t at all rule out military action against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and also supported continued non-military aid to the country. But there really are other far more important issues here than the obvious point that no one who rejects the use of nuclear weapons as a “military option” in today’s world deserves serious criticism.
The first is a U.S. foreign policy today that turns to military options as a matter of course and seems to think that actions in the post cold war era when the Soviet Union no longer exists don’t have reactions.
Al Qaeda was created in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region in which the CIA and the Pakistani ISI organized tens of thousands of right-wing Muslim Jihadists whom the Reagan and Bush administrations called “freedom fighters” in the 1980s. They fought a counter-revolutionary war against the Communist Party government of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, which had sent the Red Army across the Soviet-Afghan border to save that government from being destroyed by Muslim guerilla fighters already being supported by both the Pakistani military dictatorship and the U.S. Carter administration. Without understanding that historical context one cannot understand the events since September 11.
The conflict between rightist military regimes and religious rightist “insurgents” which tragically characterizes events in many of the countries from South Asia to North Africa is an ongoing tragedy and threat to both progress and peace under any system. The Democratic candidates should be addressing those issues, that is, coming forward with programs to build both a regional peace process and a regional developmental process that help the peoples of the region defeat both the military regimes and the clerical right. If that doesn’t happen, a group like Al Qaeda can regroup somewhere else, as it did when the Bush administration invaded Iraq. It can also take new and different forms in what after all was the country where its leadership and money came from, “Saudi” Arabia, and where a clerically based feudal monarchy still sits in alliance with transnational oil companies over a large chunk of the world’s oil reserves.
Then there is the issue of nuclear weapons itself.
The candidates who made self-serving criticisms of Senator Obama seem to have more interest in throwing stones at him than remembering what nuclear weapons are really all about, that is Albert Einstein's famous comment (concerning the inevitable use of nuclear weapons in WWIII) that WWIV would be fought with sticks and stones, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's statement that nuclear war was the only kind of war where the survivors would even the dead.
One might remind these candidates that even those politicians who have no compunctions against building, stockpiling, and at least threatening to use nuclear weapons saw those weapons as either deterrents to or a vital part of major wars, which have always been their purpose, not a weapon against suicide bombers and saboteurs
They might also remember, if history has any interest to them, that right-wingers from the inception of the nuclear era muttered about using nuclear weapons as part of a preventive war against the Soviet Union, and 'selectively' in the Korean War against North Korean and Chinese forces. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the 1950s used nuclear blackmail which he called 'brinkmanship' to threaten Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese (but not the Soviet Union, which even he understood had nuclear weapons of their own by then) and boasted about 'going to the brink.'
Such statements and the policies they represented horrified most liberals and progressives at the time, even those who had accepted the cold war and was implicitly challenged by the two time Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson.
Barry Goldwater picked up on a theme that many right-wing military fans used to talk about when he advocated giving field commanders the power to use 'tactical nuclear weapons' (that concept itself has a Dr. Strangelove quality to it and helped to inspire the 1964 movie). The Democrats brilliant answer in 1964 was a commercial (pulled because of protests after it was shown but it had its effects) or a little girl in a field as the nuclear countdown began.
The lesson for these candidates should be that when Democrats hide from or try to pretend that they are no different on foreign policy than the Republicans, they usually lose, as they did in presidential elections through the majority of the cold war era. When they focus on domestic progressive issues and de-emphasize militarism and war, in short, they represent policies that their voters support, they usually win.
On this issue at least, I think it is time to ask Democratic candidates, including Senator Obama, the question that Casey Stengel famously asked to a very bad New York Mets team in the early 1960s – does anyone here know how to play this game? Are they more interested in emulating Bush's fear tactics and advancing their chances for the nomination by offering “alternative” military solutions to Bush than they are in beating Bush? Do they implicitly accept Bush and right-wing Republicans propaganda that the Democratic Party is 'soft' on terrorism as right-wing Republicans proclaimed throughout the cold war era that they were 'soft' on Communism and revolution to the point that they have to say that they will never 'tie the hands of the military' even if those hands are on nuclear buttons.
Or don’t they understand that even many of the champions of nuclear warfare, Dulles, Herman Kahn, and all those Cold War enablers and implementers who saw military escalation both conventional (as an alternative to nuclear) and nuclear (as cheaper than conventional) as 'tough-minded' responses to the 'real world” never imagined using such weapons outside of what were major wars against a powerful enemy or its allies.
Al Qaeda isn't a country like the U.S. or the USSR or a military alliance system like NAT0 or the Warsaw Treaty. Don't they realize that 'terrorism' is a tactic used by groups who cannot or will not fight conventional wars or guerrilla wars? That point has been made by most serious strategic thinkers for more than a century now, and is still central to the thinking of British and European planners against terrorist groups. But it is rarely made here, since the 'war against terrorism' has become both an enormous political pork barrel and a fixed idea against serious thought on a wide variety of questions.
Even suggesting that nuclear weapons are part of a sane foreign or even military policy today would be giving Al Qaeda what it wants, besides letting the genie of nuclear warfare out of the bottle where it has stayed since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.
Although most of the Democratic candidates refrained from this participating in this nonsense, those who did, or, like Hilary Clinton, saw these issues as 'hypothetical' are hurting the people who regularly vote for their party and helping the Republicans. By using such absurd arguments they can only give the discredited right-wing Republican administration and party time to regroup and make better use of their traditional large financial edge for the 2008 elections.
As a final point, I might note that I showed the Battle of Algiers, to a summer class that I am teaching recently. I mentioned to the class that the army had U.S. troops in Iraq watch the film to get a greater understanding about how to fight terrorism immediately after the beginning of the Iraq occupation (ironic, since the film is clearly against the French colonialists and for the Algerians).
The film (which the U.S. military may not have completely comprehended) has the French elite paratroop commander directing the counter-insurgency make the point over and over again that the military factor is very secondary in fighting the insurgents and their terrorist tactics. Terrorism, the French military authorities in the film make clear a police problem and police tactics are necessary to defeat the enemy.
Al Qaeda and similar groups today represent a genuine global danger. But the “war on terrorism” and the ocean of political BS that floods U.S. media about it has to be overcome and gotten away from if these groups, their funding sources, and the social conditions and regimes that nurture them are to be defeated on the world scene.
Although all of the Democratic candidates were far better students than GW Bush, (and they could afford the tuition for my summer courses, although I would like to see them revive the idea of free tuition public higher education) those who attacked Obama might see the Battle of Algiers and see if they can learn something
The French knew what they were doing in Algeria and they lost because they could not deal with the underlying social-economic questions or the allied question of national liberation. The French were actually successful by using both brutal (widespread torture) and sophisticated police methods in suppressing the urban insurrection and they still lost because of their failure to deal with the exploitation and dehumanizing social oppression that colonialism had meant for many generations in Algeria.
The Bush administration hasn't known much of anything about what it has been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism, national or international, is still a police matter, not significantly, much less primarily a military matter.
The 'war on terrorism' the Bush administration proclaimed in 2001 is for domestic political consumption and the politicians who go along with it to the tune of the 460 billion 'military budget' this year and verbal arms races to prove that they are 'stronger' on terrorism than their opponents get further and further away from both doing the cooperative international police work necessary to really eliminate such groups and developing a foreign policy and an international economic that will support democratic and progressive forces in countries like Pakistan who are their enemies and will undertake reforms that will undercut the support that groups like Al Qaeda have not supporting regimes and ruling groups.
These are the issues, along with addressing the needs of the working people of our country which the Democratic candidates should be addressing rather than attacking one of their number not talking like a crackpot and/or a member of the Bush administration.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
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