Alarm Bells, Empire and Obama

The friend of my enemy is my enemy: if NYT publishes an opinion praising Obama's foreign policy stands as sensible, then I know we're in trouble. (The NYT particularly likes his commitment to retaining the ominously titled "residual force" in Iraq, and his commitment to "surge" American forces in Afghanistan.  (Obama's "plan" is here.)

Here Tom Hayden takes the time to actually learn something about Afghanistan so as to better explain why sending more American forces there is not a good idea. And here Howard Zinn offers a more general critic of war and militarism.  

And here Corey B. Walker, Asst Prof of Africana studies at Brown and the author of the forthcoming The Noble Fight: African American Freemasons and the Struggle for Democracy in America offers a critique of American imperialism in both it Democratic and Republican guises. 

Juan Cole, a man with very deep knowledge of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and who is generally very supportive of the whole Obama enterprise offers what he calls a "friendly critique" of Obama's "plan." But while he calls it a "friendly critique," what he has to say is really quite devastating. It reveals the depth of Obama's ignorance (as well as some political and character flaws), and leads me to wonder,  if you really have no concept or capacity to comprehend social, political, and military developments in places like Iraq and Afghanistan why on god's green earth would you expend massive amounts of US blood and treasure to remake them in "America's image"? And if Obama is not motivated by a idealistic/ neo-conservative/ interventionist ideology (call it idealism with a knife) of spreading American values (whatever those are... ) at gunpoint, but he is rather driven by a realist concern for American power and security, then his strategy is even worse, as it reveals deep ignorance regarding the geopolitical forces at work in those places where he'd like to send American forces, and suggests that he really has no idea how to work carrots and sticks to achieve stated geo-political objectives. The danger here is the JFK/LBJ effect trying to prove your tough by beating up on some foreign country for what are essentially domestic political reasons only to be drawn into a quagmire with devastating consequences for your political brand-name (not to mention domestic policy objectives). its not just bad policy, its bad politics.