Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Introduction to O-bushian Nationalism 101

A decade later and we are still in Afghanistan. Those on the campaign trail for the GOP nomination are pontificating out the sides of their necks, John McCain is inveighing nonsense and the Obama administration is taking hits left and right – and rightly so. I have expressed my view on the US occupation of the central Asian nation eve prior to Obama, but clearly to no avail. I regrettably do not have the ears of the President or media pundits. And God knows I would love to hear urban radio adduce such a discussion with clarity. However, it seems that discussions on the photographs of Whitney Houston in her coffin, her nineteen year old daughter and wondering whether or not Chris Brown and Rihanna will get back together are more important conversations to have in our communities. Not to mention any topic that panders to the absolute support and defense of President Obama regardless of the cost or reality.

First I need to address the assassination recently carried out by a US solider (Robert Bales) in the heart of the region. Since the event, I have only heard sentiments of justification of his behavior, namely that he must have been mentally ill. I agree. But what strikes me as bazaar was that no such acceptance of mental illness (which is obvious to me) was ever pronounced for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who allegedly opened fire inside Fort Hood in Texas killing thirteen people and wounding 30 people. Any who.

To properly understand our central Asian foreign policy, a brief history of our approach to foreign policy philosophy is in order. After World War II, the significance of American exceptionalism supported and justified our interventionist policies. Basically, that as the “cosmic policeman”, righteousness of our nationalism evinced the position that only the U.S. was the last best hope of mankind and the world. This was code for American aspirations of hegemony over much of the world and defined overtly that democratic globalism rather than the national interest of the United States were the central issues at heart when considering the utility of military intervention. As if our self-proclaimed moral righteousness was eugenically paramount over pragmatism.

Although the Cold War mentality was supposedly over, it continued to exist and it legacy revamped, via a conservative movement that pursued no strategic alternatives in our foreign other than military action. That leads us to present day Iraq and Afghanistan. First, we fail to recognize our approach to borders versus the people is setting us for failure. Until we deal with such as a Pashtun issue, we will continue to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. The region is occupied by what history would call the Scythians or the Saka, those folks who live on the land from the Black sea to china. This is where most of our concern is presently and our presence is cloaked under the guise of wanting a stable democratic government fin the region albeit facts assert that the characteristics required for the formulation of such governments are not existent in Afghanistan or Iraq.

This however has not stopped Bush or Obama for attempting to produce such an outcome. Even Bill Clinton, who supposedly was a progressive, had the same approach to foreign policy in Central Asia. All three have never provided any well defined objectives other than perpetual peace through the dream of a universal democratic order on the American model. This desire to see American political structure manifest in other regions is a consequence of our historical imperialistic and colonial roots and is no different under Obama as it was Bush. Look at Yemen for example. It is really just another open ended war designed to make us look good and feel good. But all it accomplishes is to add more debt and more ant-American sentiment in the region. Before this there was Iraq, a nation of only 24 million that was destroyed by U.S. military power with a 12-year U.S.-led economic embargo prior to the war and daily bombing which our Air Force destroyed most of Iraq’s water purification plants and sewage systems, resulting in the deaths of more than 500,000 children from water-borne disease and lack of medicines alone. And all to protect the people and bring about peace through democracy. One thing we were able to accomplish was to increase the presence of Shia death squads that inflicted untold violent acts on Sunnis. Paul Wolfowitz, said that invading Iraq would cost a mere $40 billion and would be paid for by taking over its oil.

Post-Saddam Iraq will not be a pro-Western model of democratic stability. In particularly under the autocratic rule of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, It will be a quasi-democratic state with a strong pro-Iranian orientation. Likewise in Pakistan, we will be left with a corrupt and ineffectual government run by President Hamid Karzai where the Taliban remains at full strength and growing. Was this what was our desire for producing a democracy under of the US model in a pursuit for universal peace?

I can’t answer this, but I will assume the answer is no or else we would have not entered Libya. I mean, it too was based on humanitarian principles, to defend the civilian population based on the “responsibility to protect” doctrine that was used to justify Libya. Strange since it is used selectively – not for Syria or the Sudan. Especially given that such an argument is more valid for Syria and the Sudan than it did in the case of Libya. Assad’s and Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir’s militaries have killed way more people compared to just a few hundred deaths at the time of NATO’s intervention against Gaddafi.

Fact is just as the Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, Obama is on a similar crusade to transform the Middle East. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have hidden the cost of our current Central Asian interventions from the American people by refusing to pay for it through taxes. Both continue the post-cold war legacy of the quest for universal democratic order based on the American democratic model and the desire to transform the Middle East and central Asia. The question is how are American interest defined in these military interventions outside of emotional terms? It is as if we have not received the memo.

Remember it was Hillary Clinton’s State Department who suggested that Egypt appeared stable and opposition forces would not topple Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. WRONG and what we do know after elections is that a democratic Egyptian government won’t be pro-U.S.

This is the definition of O-bushian nationalism. It means we spend trillions of dollars and the lives of thousands for the purposes of accomplishing nothing but establishing and entrenched hatred for America across the Muslim world with nations being more dangerous than when our troops first arrived. And all for merely not wanting to show weakness politically, for wanting to develop a stable democratic government without the request of the occupied nation with merely a threat on our emotions called terror and no US interest involved.

11 comments:

Nalliah said...

On September 10, 2001, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign terrorists, “…the adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.. the Pentagon could not account for 2.3 trillion dollars.” he said. The very next day September 11, 2011 the Pentagon building was hit wiping out the entire accounts department and all the personnel that worked within it, leaving no records of the missing trillions.
The organizers and profiteers of war and death – the past four generations of Bush family – Samuel P Bush, Prescott S Bush, George H W Bush and George W Bush along with a group of international investment bankers and corporate executives, have been instrumental in creating and profiting from extremely costly and destructive wars. Four generations of Bush family have reaped tremendous profits from the wars they orchestrated. The war profiteers of Wall Street are now pushing the US towards a nuclear war with Iran.
On 2012 New Year’s Eve, with almost no mainstream media attention given to it, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, or NDAA, into law codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.
Obama’s administration and all future administrations can now use the military to detain individuals, including political dissidents – even American citizens on US soil – without trial or formal charges. Without court involvement or a jury deciding you are actually guilty. And “detain” is really a euphemism for IMPRISON, of course, in a semi-secret military black site, without access to an attorney, potentially for life.
Obama also signed into law something which attacks American’s First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, or Trespass Bill, signed into law by Barack Obama on March 9, 2012, “potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the US a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.” More specifically, peaceful protest within proximity to those protected by the Secret Service, including presidential candidates and the President, may be a federal felony now.
Even worse a former high-ranking NSA official, who spent more than three decades within the spy agency, just recently came out in a nationally televised interview and asserted that more than 20 trillion of American citizens’ communications have been intercepted – mostly without a warrant or judicial review of any kind.
Furthermore, the NSA is now building a $2 billion data centre in Utah to crunch all of this data. In other words, $2 billion of American taxpayer dollars are going toward spying on American citizens within the US without warrant or court approval. This is not only an outlandish waste of money, it’s illegal.
Also reporters at ridiculously mainstream publication USA Today are now claiming that Pentagon-sponsored “propaganda contractors” have initiated a widespread character assassination and reputation destroying campaign against them.

Nalliah said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
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