Restitutor Orbis

President Obama has made his long-awaited decision about Afghanistan. The question never really was whether or not to leave, but came down to how many additional troops were we going to send, and how long were they going to stay. There were vague demands that we fight to win from such stalwarts as John McCain, but what constitutes victory?

In modern American wars, that idea seems to be little considered. Take Korea. In the just-concluded Second World War, the United States knew just what it wanted to do: destroy Hitler; destroy Japan. Easy. We knew what we wanted, we knew what the public demanded, and we did it.

But then Korea came along, a war nobody really wanted, except perhaps Douglas MacArthur. And nobody really knew how to win the damn thing. It was in many ways a precursor to Vietnam. Both wars took place in Asia, far away from home, in areas the American public knew little about and cared about even less. And both wars put us in position of creating bigger wars - World Wars - if we tried our WWII strategy of total annihilation.

We couldn't invade North Korea without triggering a Chinese response (as events proved) and we couldn't invade North Vietnam without...you got it, triggering a response, either from China or from Russia, which was busily supplying the North Vietnamese army and even providing, as we had done in the 60's, military advisers.

Afghanistan is different. Again, it is far away. Again, it is in Asia. Again, it is a country the public doesn't really know much about and doesn't seem to care about. Add to that the fact that in all of history, only Alexander the Great seems to have had any luck there, and that was more than two millennia ago.

Not promising.

And here, even if we wanted to, there is nobody to invade. We're already IN the country. Coming to grips with the enemy and destroying him has proved difficult. Promoting the local government and infrastructure seems to be the way to go. We can't just role over the enemy with superior numbers or fire power. "Shock and awe" don't mean much in that remote country. The enemy is neither shocked, nor awed.

The decision could not have been easy for President Obama. The New York Times tells us,

On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.

That visit must have made for a sobering period of reflection. "How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war."

Think about it: eight years. We were in WWI for just two years; in WWII for just four. We fought two world wars in a period of just six years. We have been in Afghanistan for eight. And we're still not entirely done with Iraq.

And Mr. Obama made Afghanistan of central importance during his presidential run. He constantly harped on President Bush's mistake in invading Iraq, saying Afghanistan was where the war should have been fought. You have to wonder, knowing what he knows now, how President Obama feels about those words. He committed himself; now, as president, it was time to put his money where his mouth was.

Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.

“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.

The new plan in a nutshell? Mr. Obama seems to be hoping for a little shock and awe, getting 30,000 additional troops (Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the man on the spot, made a request for 40,000) there as quickly as possible (within the next six months - not exactly Hitler's invasion of Poland or France) in the hopes that we can regain the initiative (if we ever had it to begin with) not to win a crushing victory on the ground, but to buy time. Time in which to permit the Afghan government to establish itself and for their forces to pick up the slack so that our boys and girls can come home, starting in a year.

We have a huge stake in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has a lot to gain (he can win a war the Republicans didn't even try to prosecute, let alone win) and a lot to lose (though the Democrats didn't start the war, they'll certainly take the blame for losing it). And he had already sent additional troops: Even before this decision for a surge he had "ordered the military to send 21,000 more troops there, bringing the force to 68,000."

We already have more men there than Alexander did; and we've been there a lot longer. Of course, Mr. Obama can't cement local alliances by marrying a chieftain's daughter and the enemy is no longer foolish enough to fort up on a convenient mountain top to give us the victories Alexander so often gained.

And, of course, the United States is sadly lacking in spare Alexanders. We haven't had one of those, or even anything close, since WWII.

How will it all end? Can we win the victory we want and need? An end to terrorism? Even if we put a strong Afghan government in place, will the United States have succeeded in its goal?

It's impossible to say.

As the New York Times says, "When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war."

Anyone who has spent any time at all on places like Digg are well aware of the rise of extremism in this country. Until recently, you might not have seen it talked about by the major media outlets. This is despite the fact that one major media outlet, FOX News, has for some time now been a source of right wing hate speech. The fringe has become mainstream. It owns its own political party, the GOP, and its own media outlet, FOX News, all the while spreading a myth about some sort of "liberal media elite" that twists facts and slants the news and is out to get them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports that

The number of hate groups operating in the United States continued to rise in 2008 and has grown by 54 percent since 2000 — an increase fueled last year by immigration fears, a failing economy and the successful campaign of Barack Obama

"The SPLC identified 926 hate groups active in 2008, up more than 4 percent from the 888 groups in 2007 and far above the 602 groups documented in 2000." This is a frightening trend and it should come as no surprise that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report warns that right-wing extremism "may be on the rise." According to CNN:

Though the nine-page report said it has "no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence," it said real-estate foreclosures, unemployment and tight credit "could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past."

The report, prepared in coordination with the FBI and published April 7, was distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement officials under the title "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment."

Of course, the extremists are themselves all up in arms (quite literally, I'm sorry to say) over the release of this report, claiming that "they" are coming to get their guns now, and that the US government has become a repressive regime and that "they" are the true patriots. They're having "tea parties" and pretending witht heir over-inflated egos and imaginations that they are a bunch of 21st century Thomas Paines. It's a sign of how out of touch these people are that while waving their guns around and making terroristic threats they can complain about being labeled as terrorists.

Of course,

A DHS official said the department was not trying to squelch free speech by issuing the report. "There is no link between extremists being talked about in that report and conservative political thinkers, activists and voters," the official said.

Not to be symied by facts, however:

But conservative radio talk show host Roger Hedgecock was not persuaded. "If the Bush administration had done this to left-wing extremists, it would be all over the press as an obvious trampling of the First Amendment rights of folks and dissent," he told CNN.

And the facts? You'll laugh:

In fact, the Obama administration in January did issue a warning about left-wing extremists. Both reports were initiated during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

So once again, Obama is the fall guy for something Bush put into place. But then extremist groups don't care much for facts. Hitler and the Nazis didn't; Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans are no different.

A recommended read: The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (Paperback)
by David Neiwert

Today is the day of the Super Bowl. I don't know if any bigger news will come out of Super Sunday than the name of the victor, which happens to be Pittsburg in a 27-23 game that came down to the last few seconds. President Obama will be happy; he was apparently rooting for the Steelers.

But that does not mean that events around it stand still, and indeed they have not. One bit of news, as reported by MSNBC, is that the catch-phrase "War on Terror" is fading.

The "War on Terror" is losing the war of words. The catchphrase burned into the American lexicon hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is fading away, slowly if not deliberately being replaced by a new administration bent on repairing the U.S. image among Muslim nations.

MSNBC goes on to say that "White House officials say there has been no deliberate ban on the war-on-terror phrase. And it hasn't completely disappeared."

We have lived with this myth of a "war on terror" for seven years now. And it never really was. The invasion of Iraq was not a war on terror but a war of naked aggression against a nation that had done us no harm. I've always equated it with Hitler's invasion of Poland, on equally flimsy justification. If the US fared better than the Third Reich as a result it is only because Bush's Reich lasted only eight years to Hitler's twelve. The US dodged a bullet.

Unlike Bush, Obama is not an ideologue. He understands that the world is far more complex than a black-white dichotomy can explain. The decision-making paradigm of the Bush administration was based on ideology and therefore was flawed. It could not be otherwise. Ideology imposes its will on the world whatever reality itself dictates. Obama is a practical man and I think we can safely say he won't make the same mistakes Bush has made. If war is the result of a failure to listen, we will at least know that Obama HAS listened.

Obama says that there is a sense that the U.S. should be talking more about specific extremist groups — ones that are recognized as militants in the Arab world and that are viewed as threats not just to America or the West, but also within the countries they operate.

The thinking has evolved, he said, to focus on avoiding the kind of rhetoric "which could imply that this was a struggle against a religion or a culture."

As the MSNBC piece observes,

According to the White House, Obama is intent on repairing America's image in the eyes of the Islamic world and addressing issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unrest in Pakistan and India, Arab-Israeli peace talks and tensions with Iran.

The New York Times reports that changes are taking place in Iraq as the US prepares to depart in 16 months, a timetable some still oppose.

Iraqis across the country voted Saturday in provincial elections that will help shape their future, but regardless of the outcome it is clear that the Americans are already drifting offstage — and that most Iraqis are ready to see them go.

As the New York Times article points out, "President Obama has made it plain that Iraq is not his war; he wants to focus on Afghanistan. In an economic crisis, there is simply not enough money for the country to keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars a day in Iraq."