Obama's War
Liberal interventionism in the age of Obama
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 The
following is the text of a speech delivered at a forum sponsored
by the Students of American Liberty at East Tennessee State University,
on March 4.
Illusions die
hard. Especially the ideological kind. When the illusion
of Barack Obama, the peacemaker, is finally dispelled, we are going
to wake up and find ourselves waist-deep in a war that will soon
threaten to dwarf the disastrous invasion of Iraq, both in human
and material cost.
We know this
from what he has said he will do, and what he has already done.
He's already announced he's sending 17,000
more troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to nearly 40,000.
Not that this comes as any surprise: his entire
critique of the Bushian foreign policy during the campaign was
that we've been fighting the wrong war: that we had to get out of
Iraq so we could occupy and pacify Afghanistan, and make a proper
job of it. He advocated
going into Pakistan, and outflanked the Republicans on the right.
 Democrats
attacked Republicans
for underestimating the number of troops it would take to topple
Saddam and set up a full-fledged, multi-year occupation, and there
was that controversy
over General Eric Shinseki, the former army chief of staff who resigned
after contradicting the official administration estimate and testifying
that we'd need at least a couple of hundred thousand instead of
Rumsfeld's fifty-thousand
or so. The Democrats made Shinseki into a hero, but one wonders
if they'll ask him about Afghanistan. He's liable to answer half
a million.
Oh, but we're
going to do it with the help
of our allies: NATO is going to take on extra added importance,
once again, just as it did in the Clinton
era, as the favored instrument of US military aggression. That
archaic alliance of nations spawned during the cold war as a defensive
shield against advancing communism, is now venturing into the
former Soviet heartland as a would-be conqueror. Plunging into the
Caucasus region, admitting Georgia and perhaps even Azerbaijan,
the gateway to the oil riches of central Asia – NATO is going to
be our spearhead, not only in Afghanistan but throughout the Eurasian
crescent extending from Gdansk,
in the north to Tbilisi,
in the south, and then eastward to Afghanistan, the graveyard
of empires.
Read
the rest of the article
March
7, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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