Yeah, this Parenti piece, because it needs to be said. Parenti writes:
The real purpose of these 300,000 [sic] soldiers is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next US presidential election.
[…]
There is nothing else to Obama’s Afghan strategy.
Actually, there is nothing else to Parenti’s analysis of Obama’s Afghan strategy. And the careless error on the number of troops, still yet to be corrected by HuffPo, is in fact telling: for Parenti, that number and other such details don’t matter at all. What matters is his shallow, one-note narrative and his melodramatic, slanderous claim that President Obama is about to “kill many thousands of Afghan civilians.”
We get no real analysis of Afghanistan or Pakistan. No, it all comes down to Obama doing a “masculine war dance.” I’d like to point out once again that on Monday, someone did a masculine war dance all over the Moon Market in Lahore, where women were shopping for clothes. Survivors who tried to flee the scene were raked with gunfire. Attacks like these are happening nearly every day, and they far outstrip any Predator drone strike in terms of immorality. And let’s be clear: the perpetrators are not avenging the deaths of Muslims. They are causing the deaths of Muslims.
So instead of condemning a hypothetical civilian death toll from Obama’s escalation (when U.S.-provided military security in the villages might in fact reduce the civilian death toll currently being racked up by the Taliban), Parenti ought to acknowledge the carnage in Lahore, and Peshawar, and elsewhere throughout this region, voice a bit of moral outrage if he has any decency, and allow that maybe, just maybe, this spectacle of extremist violence had something to do with Obama’s decision.
One Comment
Here's the part that absolutely baffles me.
Wait, you say, most Americans want out of Afghanistan! So what.
US Presidential Elections are not decided by the majority of voters but rather by swing voters, in swing states. By "Reagan Democrats" and "Clinton Conservatives." By a sliver of older, whiter, middle and working-class men and (less so) women, in rural and suburban Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, etc.
Right now Gallup is reporting that Obama's numbers are the lowest first-year ratings in history. And a great deal of that slide came after the escalation announcement….so it's not helping him at all. But hey! Must be a part of the grand strategy: Losing ground among the electorate = path to victory.
This is why I don't read The Nation, a magazine that was publishing fawning interviews with Osama bin Laden in summer 2001 yet still straightfacedly serves up left-wing cliches like "masculine war dance" for Obama. (A shame his hue precludes that other favorite, "White male bloodlust.")