Af-Pak Fever
The Obamaites go to war
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 The
idea that anything has really changed, at least in the realm of
foreign policy, with the ascension of Barack Obama to the White
House, is now completely debunked by the administration’s
latest pronouncement on the "Af-Pak" war. I quote
from the "white paper" that accompanied the
president's spiel:
"The
ability of extremists in Pakistan to undermine Afghanistan is
proven, while insurgency in Afghanistan feeds instability in Pakistan.
The threat that al-Qaeda poses to the United States and our allies
in Pakistan – including the possibility of extremists obtaining
fissile material – is all too real. Without more effective action
against these groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan will face continuing
instability."
 That's
from the introduction to a curiously obtuse document, one that never
tries to justify its various listed "objectives" with
anything other than the most perfunctory scaremongering – precisely
what the Bushies used to do. Remember the mushroom-cloud
rhetoric that clouded the debate over the Iraq intervention?
Averring that the mere possibility Saddam Hussein possessed
nuclear weapons posed such an imminent threat that definitive
evidence was beside the point, then secretary of state Condoleezza
Rice famously declared:"We
don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." These nukes,
the
White House and its
allies claimed, could pass into the hands of terrorists, who
would then have the capacity to nuke New York. In making the case
for war with Iraq, the Bushies consistently conjured this fear of
radioactive
horror, the mental detritus of late-night sci-fi movies, Cold
War memories of the Cuba missile crisis, and "duck
and cover" drills in the schoolrooms of the Fifties and
early Sixties.
This nuclear threat to the United States, supposedly posed by al-Qaeda
hiding in the Pakistani hinterlands, is nowhere mentioned in the
white paper except in that one instance. In fact, there is zero
evidence that Pakistan's 40-or-so
nukes are in any danger, and none is cited. The idea that al-Qaeda
and its allies are about to seize control of Islamabad and commandeer
the country's nuclear arsenal, is the sort of fantasy one might
expect to find in a paperback thriller, or The
Weekly Standard. As recently as a year ago, Adm. Mike Mullen,
head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opined
that Pakistan's nukes were well-protected and there was little likelihood
of them falling into the hands of al-Qaeda. This could be because,
as Richard Sale reports,
"So while the nukes of any country are allegedly in danger
of hijacking, apparently the new safeguards are such that the
slightest error in procedure renders the weapon null and void,
a system much like the one the Russian used with their portable
nuclear weapons systems."
Read
the rest of the article
April
1, 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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