Marjorie Cohn, Consortiumnews.com, July 7, 2010
Editor’s Note: Official Washington (including the mainstream news media) is thrilled that Gen. David Petraeus is now commanding U.S. forces in Afghanistan. There’s also a consensus that Republican National Chairman Michael Steele put his foot in his mouth by criticizing “the war of Obama’s choosing.”
But the conventional wisdom may be wrong again, as Marjorie Cohn argues in this guest essay:
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the President a blank check.
One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan.
Peace and Justice Post 
It’s Obama’s Empire Now
July 16, 2010By Stanley Kutler, truthdig.com, July 13, 2010
The American Empire is alive and well—and as expansive as ever. We have established more than 700 military bases across the world, largely encircling the peripheries of Russia and China, which are now central to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The Cold War in the aftermath of World War II drove the expansion as we searched for security—and markets, to be sure.
Perhaps we now are the largest imperial power the world ever has known. Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan trivializes the once-massive naval and air facility at Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War, and we have developed “permanent” mega-bases in Iraq. We engage in denial, and euphemisms abound. Stumping for the colonial takeover of the Philippines in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, so fashionable today, insisted that “there is not an imperialist in the country. … Expansion? Yes. … Expansion has been the law of our national growth.” Chalmers Johnson reminds us of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s liberal “idealist imperialism,” which would make the world safe for democracy. (See Johnson’s “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic” and other works.) Deceit comes from the top.
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Tags:Afghanistan, empire, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, McChrystal, Obama, Pentagon, Theodore Roosevelt
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