Clinton as VP? Biden as Secretary of State? A flashback to 2011

Here's an reminder of an interesting moment in politics from 2011.

Tom Hayden, who passed away in 2016, was writing then that he thought the talk about Clinton becoming Obama's Vice Presidential running mate in 2012 wass more than just frivolous media chatter. In Vice President Hillary Clinton? Secretary of State Joe Biden? Peace and Justice Resource Center 10/31/2011, he writes:

Democratic insiders worried about 2012 are discussing a Grand Switch, making Hillary Clinton the vice presidential nominee and Joe Biden the Secretary of State. Nothing is decided, but the talk cannot stay secret for long.

President Obama’s re-election is threatened in the electoral college and by potentially low turnout in key battleground states, including North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. On the face of it, the popular Clinton might help the ticket in several of those states, if only marginally more so than Biden.

But Clinton is seen as bringing a charge to the party’s critical levels of energy, registration and turnout. Enthusiastic support from women alone could make a major difference in an election considered to be dangerously close. It also would boost the 2012 campaign involvement of Bill Clinton, now an elder statesman and a popular campaigner, as well as the significant force of Hillary supporters among women and others seeking to make history. Her presence on the ticket would spare the party a nomination fight in 2016 should she decide to run for president at age 69.

As for Biden, Secretary of State would hardly be a demotion. While Biden has served Obama loyally and effectively, he may want to resume a high profile in foreign policy, his longtime specialty in the US Senate.

This looks now like an interesting suggestion of how much hope and confidence Obama and the Democratic establishment had for Hillary Clinton as the successor to Obama.

Tags: 2012 election, hillary clinton, tom hayden

Tom Hayden on the end of the Iraq War

This is a piece from the recently deceased Tom Hayden on the 2011 withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, In Iraq, Peace at Last Peace Exchange Bulletin 12/15/2011. He recalls the significance of the anti-Iraq War peace movement. And he notes why it was a good thing the withdrawal was happening.

In the years leading up to the 2008 election, there were at least 10 national antiwar demonstrations that drew more than 100,000 participants each. The movement helped Rep. Barbara Lee to rise from a lone war opponent in Congress to the leader of a bloc of as many as 200 representatives calling for an end to the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Those combined forces — the peace movement and lawmakers who opposed continuing the Iraq war — created a political climate that enabled Obama to end the Iraq war over the objections of many in the Pentagon and most of his Republican presidential rivals.

Obama's position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shifted occasionally during the decade, illustrating the powerful conflict of forces in play. In 2008, he seemed ready to accept the advice of the establishment-oriented Iraq Study Group, which recommended leaving a residual force of 10,000 to 15,000 troops in Iraq. After being elected, though, he surprised everyone by announcing in early 2009 that all U.S. forces would be pulled out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

In recent months, the administration seemed to be considering leaving behind a few thousand troops to continue training Iraqi forces, but it abandoned the idea after failing to reach a deal with the Iraqi government on legal immunity for the American troops.

Some peace activists view the fact that thousands of advisors and contractors will remain in Iraq on the U.S. Embassy payroll as evidence of a secret plan to continue the war by other means. But the war is as over as a war can be, and the peace movement should celebrate. Removing troops from Iraq will save tens of billions of dollars a year, and it will also save lives. [my emphasis]

That's the withdrawal Republicans are still criticizing Obama over. Even though it was the Cheney-Bush Administration that negotiated the withdrawal arrangement.

Truthdig's Tom Hayden reprint column today is from 04/09/2006, Revolution, Protest and America. It's the transcript of an interview that appeared in the Cuban publication Juventud Rebelde. One of the questions was about the US peace movement:

Can you explain why the level of protests in the U.S. against the war in Iraq is not as notable as during the war in Vietnam?

The difference is that during Vietnam there was a military draft and the number of casualties was far, far higher. Relatively speaking, therefore, the level of protests today is greater—200,000 in October 2002 in D.C.; 1 million in February 2003; 500,000 in New York in 2004; 300,000 in D.C. in 2005. The reformist presidential campaign of Howard Dean was larger than the antiwar Eugene McCarthy campaign of 1968. A majority of Americans, including a majority of U.S. soldiers, want a troop withdrawal within this year. The “notable” difference, I believe, is that there was a broader radical movement around the world, certainly in 1968, than there is today. That makes the antiwar movement, here and globally, a surprising development, it seems to me.

Tom analyzed the antiwar movement of the 2000s in more detail in Ending the War in Iraq (2007). There, he cites Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential candidacy. "Dean served as an unprecedented threat to the incumbent hierarchy of the Democratic Party. But the campaign had only been possible because the antiwar movement needed an outlet for rising public anger over Iraq. Dean would have gone nowhere if he had campaigned solely on his Vermont health care plan."

He also notes, "For the first time, a grassroots movement of antiwar union activists gained the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, long an accomplice of the neoconservatives and even the CIA in American foreign policy."

And his book is a reminder that the early days of mass blogging coincided with the start of the Iraq War. "Online activism mushroomed, as progressive blogs averaged five million readers a day at the height of the 2004 campaign season, to twenty times the size of its 2003 audience." He also takes note of this comparison to the anti-Vietnam War movement:

Beyond the corridors of a cautious Congress, a June 2005 Harris poll showed that sixty-three percent of Americans supported a one-year withdrawal timetable. By early 2005, while U.S. combat deaths reached nearly 1,500 in Iraq, the percentage who believed the war was a mistake passed the fifty percent level, which had not occurred in the Vietnam era until the Tet Offensive of February 1968, after some 20,000 American deaths. Something had changed.

The following year, antiwar sentiment played a significant role in the Democrats' strong showing and retaking the House in the 2006 midterms.

Tom Hayden had a strong sense of the politics and sociology of change.

Tom Hayden on base and leadership in the Democratic Party

"Just as politics is too important to be left to politicians, so is the Democratic Party too important to be left to the Democratic leadership." - Tom Hayden, Ending the War in Iraq (2007)

Tom Hayden (1939-2016)

Jerry Brown made a brief tribute statement, "Tom took up causes that others avoided. He had a real sense of the underdog and was willing to do battle no matter what the odds." (GOVERNOR BROWN ISSUES STATEMENT ON THE DEATH OF FORMER LEGISLATOR TOM HAYDEN California Governor's website 10/24/2016)

Tom Hayden in April of this year

Christopher Phelps reminds him in Tom Hayden (1939-2016) Jacobin 10/24/2016, where he objects to lazy characterizations of Hayden as coming from the "counterculture" of the 1960s:

Hayden burst out of the Midwest, not Haight-Ashbury. He cut his teeth on the Michigan Daily, not the East Village Other. He was a working-class Catholic from Royal Oak, Michigan, one of the outer rings of Detroit. To see him as a product of the counterculture gets it precisely backwards.

Hayden’s youthful trajectory points, rather, to the early New Left that began awakening in the stiflingly conformist atmosphere of the late 1950s, one whose radicalism was focused in thought and action aiming to surmount race, bureaucracy, and war — and not on the experimentation with hair, dress, music, and psychedelic mind expansion that captivated the hippie counterculture.

The hippies were by and large apolitical; Hayden and his kind were political from start to finish.

Tom was welcoming to the ideas of the counterculture. And there was a great deal of overlap between "hippies" and "politicals." But Phelps characterizes his background correctly. And he offers this intriguing tidbit, "In our present raw moment there is something of comfort to be taken from Hayden’s biography as a radical who emerged from the parish of Father Coughlin, the bilious right-populist of his day. Are there, perhaps, future radicals among the young white male 'deplorables' taken in by today’s bilious demagogue?"

Dan Morain focuses on Tom's later career in Tom Hayden casts a final vote Sacramento Bee 10/23/2016:

I knew him during the final half of his 18 years in the Legislature, when he worked on the inside to bring about change. Hayden, who died Sunday, didn’t always win, and change didn’t come about as rapidly as he wanted. Hayden never became an insider. It wasn’t in his makeup. But he became a surprisingly effective legislator, even if his victories weren’t readily apparent.

In his early years, Hayden’s existence in Sacramento got under the skin of some Republicans, and a few Democrats. Assemblyman Gil Ferguson, an Orange County Republican and a U.S. Marine who since has died, tried to persuade the Assembly to block Hayden from being seated when Santa Monica voters first sent him to the Assembly in 1982. Later, some of his closest allies were Republicans.

In 1987, then-Speaker Willie Brown stripped Hayden of a committee chairmanship when Hayden tried to block Brown’s appointment of developer Mark L. Nathanson to the California Coastal Commission. Hayden was vindicated in 1993 when Nathanson pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. [my emphasis]

In an editorial, the Bee surveys his lifetime accomplishments (Hayden’s legacy of small-d democracy 10/23/2016):

Long after the Vietnam War ended, Hayden made it his business to assert a role in whatever history he saw coming. In the 1970s, his and Fonda’s political organization helped fuel a wave of progressive candidates and causes: rent control, solar energy, no-nukes, environmentalism. In the 1980s and 1990s, he served as a state lawmaker, pushing small-d democracy in a period of rising plutocracy.

He acted globally, speaking at World Trade Organization protests; he acted locally, running for mayor of Los Angeles and advocating for restorative justice for juveniles in that then-gang-ravaged city. He was even an early exemplar for gender equity, pointedly sharing child rearing duties with Fonda and, after that marriage ended, with Barbara Williams, his third wife.

Peter Dreier eulogizes
Tom in Tom Hayden Always Rocked The Boat The American Prospect 10/24/2016. He says of Hayden in 1968:

By the late 1960s, many radicals had begun to view the [Vietnam] war as an inevitable outcome of America’s empire building, lust for profits, and racism toward populations of color. Frustrated, some called for more militant tactics. Although Hayden often shared this perspective, he opposed the violence and bombings that some advocated (and a few perpetrated) and still had faith in the potential of electoral politics, particularly in Senator Robert Kennedy’s 1968 anti-war and anti-poverty campaign for president.

Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968 was traumatic for Hayden. At RFK’s funeral in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Hayden cried over the loss of the one politician he believed had the ability to unite the anti-war and anti-poverty movements, white workers and black militants. That summer, Hayden joined other activists in planning protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Jeff Greenfield's short article on him starts with the RFK funeral, Tom Hayden, the Complicated Radical Politico 10/24/2016.

Earlier this year, I first read Tom's book, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (2004). I posted a quotation from it here: Yes, street gangs have a social context 02/17/2016.

The New York Review of Books has Tom Hayden's 1967 article The Occupation of Newark (08/24/1967 issue) available for the public on its website. Hayden lived in the ghetto area of Newark during a major riot there, sparked off by police misconduct.

Truthdig is running previous pieces of Tom's work daily this week. Today's installment is a piece from 05/02/2006, Tom Hayden: Who Are You Calling an Immigrant?.

Hillary and peace politics

Tom Hayden (even-the-Hillary-supporter-Tom-Hayden!) is not happy with the foreign policy perspective of the Democratic candidate he endorsed during the primaries. He writes in America Needs a New Peace Movement—Especially if Clinton Wins in November The Nation 06/30/2016:

In the campaign — and, if Hillary Clinton wins, during her presidency — Senator Bernie Sanders’s legions should be outspoken against regime change and demand that a new peace-and-diplomacy bloc be forged in Congress. ...

Someone like Representative Barbara Lee will revive a peace-and-diplomacy caucus in the Democratic Party, either as a new leverage point or an extension of the existing Congressional Progressive Caucus. Along with President Obama and Senator Sanders, Lee is pushing hard for a new Authorization to Use Military Force against ISIS, with important incentives for diplomacy and fixed limits on US ground troops. Only the exhaustion of sectarian parties representing Saudi Arabia and Iran will lay the conditions for a stable peace in Syria. As the major powers and their proxies continue bleeding, peace advocates should keep urging a political settlement, including a possible partition.

Hayden sounds somewhat resigned on the prospects for limiting what he calls the 15-year Long War, presumably dating from 9/11:

The real choices now are between a limited and secretive US war against terrorism, which at least preserves most of the New Deal legacy of Social Security, community colleges, and public schools, on the one hand, and expanded funding of Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, including a revived public option. The fight to save the planet from fossil fuels will lead to a final showdown with Big Oil and the denying, lying fundamentalists. The Republicans are gnashing their teeth to destroy those vital social programs during their march to war. The war-presidency model of Franklin Roosevelt could be the best-case scenario for a renewed peace struggle in the midst of new opportunities for labor, environmentalists, and communities of color.

David Bromwich, who has been very perceptive in his criticism of President Obama's obsession for bipartisanship, gives some more specific criticisms of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy perspective in The Roots of Hillary's Infatuation with War The National Interest 07/29/2016. He argues that Hillary has a foreign policy outlook very favorable to so-called humanitarian intervention, including covert regime-change operations. The example of Libya is a key one:

The NATO action to overthrow Muammar el-Qaddafi, in which Clinton played so decisive a role, has turned out to be a catastrophe with strong resemblances to Iraq—a catastrophe smaller in degree but hardly less consequential in its ramifications, from North Africa to the Middle East to southern Europe. The casus belli was the hyperbolic threat by Qaddafi to annihilate a rebel force in Benghazi. His vow to hunt down the rebels “like rats” door to door could be taken to mean a collective punishment of inhabitants of the city, but Qaddafi had marched from the west to the east of Libya, in command of an overwhelming force, without the occurrence of any such massacre, and the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence assigned low credibility to the threat. Clinton took more seriously an alarmist reading of Qaddafi by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, and chose to interpret his threat as a harbinger of “genocide.”

Landler, in his book Alter Egos on the Clinton-Obama relationship, joins the consensus that has lately emerged from the reporting of Patrick Cockburn, Anne Barnard and other journalists on the ground. “Libya,” Landler writes, “has descended into a state of Mad Max – like anarchy”; the country is now “a seedbed for militancy that has spread west and south across Africa”; it “has become the most important Islamic State stronghold outside Syria and Iraq”; “it sends waves of desperate migrants across the Mediterranean, where they drown in capsized vessels within sight of Europe.” Clinton’s most recent comments, however, leave no doubt that she continues to believe in the healing virtue of smart power. The belief appears to be genuine and not tactical.

The fact that Hillary would take seriously anything Bernard-Henri Lévy has to say about foreign policy is scarcy in itself! Glenn Greenwald memorably described BHL as "France's most celebrated (and easily the world’s most overrated) public intellectual." (France Arrests A Comedian for His Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the West's "Free Speech" Celebration The Intercept 01/14/2015)

We have a genuinely bipartisan foreign policy problem in the United States. The US is the most powerful country militarily in the world. And we are operating on a foreign policy strategy that aims at maintaining not just defense of the US, not just being the militarily most powerful country, but at being overwhelmingly the most powerful country. IN foreign policy lingo, it's a hegemonic strategy, very different from a potent but more modest alternative like the off-shore balancing advocated by adherents of the "realist" foreign policy school like Stephen Walt.

Republican foreign policy generally draws more directly on the frankly imperialist "neoconservative" ideas, the Democrats more on the humanitarian interventionist outlook identified with officials like Samantha Power, currently Obama's Ambassador to the United Nations. But part of what we see in Bromwich's analysis is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the practical differences between those two approaches.

Bromwich makes an important point that liberal interventionsists take the Kosovo War as a kind of ideal success story for the humanitarian hawk approach. Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen edited a collection of essays, War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001), that give a very different picture from the success story that the Kosovo War is often taken to be in American commentary. Bromwich observes:

The truth is that the pretext for military intervention was almost as thin in Yugoslavia as it was in Libya. There, too, genocide was said to be in progress—the slaughter of tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians—but the reports were chimerical. In First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, David Gibbs concluded that approximately two thousand had been killed before the NATO bombing; whereas, during the bombing itself and in retaliation for it, Serbian security forces killed approximately ten thousand. Given the status of the episode in liberal mythology, the treatment of Kosovo in Living History is oddly minimal: less than a paragraph, all told, scattered over several chapters. Living History was published in 2003; and it seems possible that Clinton had an inkling of the mob violence that would break out in March 2004 in the nationwide pogrom against the Serbs of Kosovo—violence that would lead in early 2016 to the construction of tent cities in the capital, Pristina, and the firing of tear gas canisters in parliament to protest the abridgment of the political rights of the remaining ethnic minority. The aftermath of the Kosovo intervention has recently entered a new chapter. “How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS” was the astute headline of a New York Times story by Carlotta Gall, on May 21, 2016. Gall’s opening sentence offers a symptomatic tableau:

“Every Friday, just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an impoverished mosque in a former furniture store.”

In his concluding paragraph, Bromwich writes, "An incorrigible belief in the purity of one’s motives is among the most dangerous endowments a politician can possess. Her sentences about NATO could have been written by Tony Blair; and this explains why at least three neoconservatives — Eliot A. Cohen, Max Boot and Robert Kagan, in ascending order of enthusiasm — have indicated that a Clinton presidency would be agreeable to them. She is a reliable option for them."

Bromwich also makes this speculative observation, "Both Clintons have felt pressed to perform supererogatory works to show that liberals can be tough. For Mrs. Clinton, there is the additional need — from self-demand as much as external pressure — to prove that a female leader can be tougher than her male counterpart." This is certainly a common assumption among our punditocracy, that a female President would especially need to show her toughness through military action. But our star pundits also tend consider war as just a normal policy option, not as a failure of foreign policy, as an older formulation had it. There's some reason to believe that Presidents feel a need to show their willingness to use force early in their Presidencies. At this point, I don't see any reason to assume that pressure would be more or less for a female Executive.

Also in The National Interest, Paul Pillar took a look a month ago at The Safety and Sameness of Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy 06/02/2016, just after Hillary's major foreign policy speech of June 2. Since Pillar is critical of reckless military interventions, he has concerns about Hillary's approach. He concludes on a somber note:

This election year evidently is not going to be the year for positive redirection of U.S. national security policy. The first priority needs to be to keep dangerous incoherence out of the White House, because that is where the biggest potential damage to U.S. interests lies. Staying stuck in the rut of conventional wisdom is the relatively safer choice, although it's too bad we won't have a chance for something better.

Yes, it really is too bad.

That's why we really need to kind of robust peace activism that Tom Hayden advocates.

The "Settle for Hillary" conundrum

Hillary Clinton received an odd endorsement from Tom Hayden. It comes in this article, I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My Mind The Nation 04/12/2016.

It's almost a case of damning by faint praise. He sort of says, I prefer Bernie, but I'm endorsing Hillary because I'm thinking about the SDS split in 1969. Or something.

His approach pretty much comes down to the Clinton campaign's basic message in the primaries:

Somehow I'm thinking Hillary's campaign won't be asking to Tom to campaign for her:

There are two Hillary Clintons. First, the early feminist, champion of children’s rights, and chair of the Children’s Defense Fund; and second, the Hillary who has grown more hawkish and prone to seeking “win-win” solutions with corporate America. When she seems to tack back towards her roots, it is usually in response to Bernie and new social movements. She hasn’t changed as much as the Democratic Party has, responding to new and resurgent movements demanding Wall Street reform, police and prison reform, immigrant rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage, fair trade, action on climate change, LGBT rights, and more.

The peace movements from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, too, are a living legacy that fuels the public majority against sending ground troops into the fiery jaws of war another time. Bernie voted for the war in Afghanistan, but correctly faults Hillary for her hawkish impulse towards regime change. We are likely to live under a what amounts to a war presidency until either a new catastrophe or new movement leads to an alternative to the “Long War” on terrorism.

I usually find what Tom Hayden says worth listening to. And that's why I'm paying attention to this. But this argument strikes me as odd. It really sounds like he's just tired of thinking about the primary campaign and wants it to end. Which is kind of the Hillary camp's position, too.

Charlie Pierce reminds us of what worries many Democratic base voters about the idea of another Clinton Presidency (The Clintons Can Have Their Own Opinions, But They Can't Have Their Own History Esquire Politics Blog 04/13/2016):

Since we're going to be arguing about it for a while, let us stipulate that when Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime and Control Act in 1994 he did not single-handedly launch the destructive effects of mass incarceration and racial disparity in our legal system. What he did was put a conservative Democratic gloss on a process that began in the modern era with Lyndon Johnson's Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act in 1968, and that accelerated with Ronald Reagan's Omnibus Crime Bill in 1984. But that very fact clinches the case that the current critics of the 1994 bill — which Clinton himself has admitted was a mistake — are trying to make against it. It was one piece of a decades-old bipartisan "anti-crime" crusade that turned into an unthinking beast in our democracy, the damage from which fell most harshly on racial minorities, especially African Americans. It doesn't lessen the culpability of Clinton's bill that it was part of a 30-year effort that came to what are now seen as inevitably destructive conclusions. It amplifies it.

Let us also stipulate, because we are not five years old, that there were more than a few triangulated political motives for Clinton's having signed the bill. After all, his administration was a triumph for the politics of the Democratic Leadership Council, the famously business-friendly conservative Democratic operation that rose to power first as an opposition force to the New Deal liberalism of people like George McGovern and Walter Mondale, and then evolved into an opposition force to the new progressive coalition that had lined up behind Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. (Jackson memorably once cracked that DLC stood for "Democrats for the Leisure Class.") By the time Clinton came around to run for president, the DLC was dedicated to protecting the victories it had won over McGovern and Mondale against the forces within the party that Jackson's campaigns had empowered. Clinton, because he once was a brilliant politician, managed to keep both of these horses in harness, but there was no doubt where his policy heart lay — hence, the crime bill, which did not launch the era of mass incarceration, but added to it immeasurably. [my emphasis]

Yes, street gangs have a social context

Tom Hayden did a book on gangs, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (2004). Early in the book, he makes this sensible observation, which nevertheless makes Democrats nervous and Republicans don't want to hear at all:

This complete sundering of the subject of gangs from their roots in inner-city poverty is the political and intellectual accomplishment of American conservatives - with the gradual acquiescence of countless moderates and liberals over time. The redefinition of gangs as criminal per se, not a reflection of the institutionalized violence of life in the slums, did in fact begin in the sixties with government policies toward the turmoil of antiestablishment protests and the violent "civil unrest" that affiicted hundreds of cities as the Vietnam war escalated. The idea of a "war on gangs" emerged piecemeal, not as a conspiracy. It began with the vaunted special weapons and antiterrorist (SWAT) units in Los Angeles, then grew to the national level with the 1968 Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, allocating hundreds of millions of dollars for cities to toughen their law enforcement capacities. Richard Ni.xon expanded the secretive war, campaigning for an undefined '1aw and order" in 1968. The apparatus for fighting gangs was institutionalized steadily thereafter by the passage of six multibillon-dollar federal anticrime bills, the drug war's draconian penalties for possession of crack cocaine, mandatory minirnum sentencing laws, three-strikes penalties, and the greatest splurge of prison construction in the nation's history. By the nineties, most police departments in America harbored an aggressive antigang unit and were busy stopping, frisking, profiling, and locking up hundreds of thousands of at-risk youth until the United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, contained perhaps 20 percent of the world's inmates. [my emphasis in bold]

How hawkish would President Hillary be?

My worry at this point on Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that while she's recently being staking out progressive-leaning positions on domestic/economic issues, that she will "balance" that with hawkish foreign policy positions.

Part of this is based on her history and on the record of the Clinton Administration in foreign policy.

The most hopeful sign in this regard is her seeming opposition to the TPP, because she has expressed her rejection of the private-based arbitration procedures that are central to the corporate-deregulation goals of that awful pseudo-"trade" treaty.

But I've become so accustomed to President Obama giving a great speech or taking a progressive position and soon thereafter taking an awful one that I've become conditioned to waiting for the other (conservative) shoe to drop.

Tom Hayden looks at this problem in Hillary & the Peace Movement Peace & Justice Resource Center 04/27/2015, in which he addresses the lack of adequate organized grassroots pressure for a more peaceful foreign policy:

The absence of a powerful Peace Lobby, on the scale of the civil rights, women's and labor lobbies in Washington, leaves a vacuum allowing Hillary Clinton to drift towards neo-conservative military views.

Certainly there are admirable peace groups lobbying Washington today, but none compare with the NAACP for African-Americans, MALDEF for Mexican-Americans and immigrants, the NRDC for environmentalists, nor with NOW, the Feminist Majority or the AFL-CIO. ...

There is a vacuum where a vibrant peace movement should be. Liberal groups like the Center for American Progress (CAP) focus on domestic issues and are somewhere between tepid and unpredictable on foreign policy. With a few exceptions, the well-funded domestic reformers stay away from issues of war and foreign policy, which might cause political or donor problems. During the height of the Iraq War, big Democratic donors were encouraged to fund MoveOn and anti-war work in Republican Congressional districts, but the effort quickly faded. [my emphasis]

As long as we have the same basic policy we've had since 1991 of maintaining the US as the overwhelming hegemon in the world, we're going to have a warlike foreign policy with authoritarian repercussions at home.

That doesn't mean that people shouldn't challenge bad individual policies. It means what Tom Hayden is saying, that we really, really need an active, organized grassroots peace movement in the US, war in and war out.

Infiltrating activist and protest groups

I see that "an undercover law enforcement sting" has resulted in the arrest of two men in an alleged terrorist plot related to Darren Wilson's murder of Michael Brown: Christine Byers, Alleged plot included bombing Arch, killing St. Louis County prosecutor, Ferguson chief St. Louis Post-Dispatch 11/27/2014.

This could be another in a string of busts in which law-enforcement officials cook up a terrorist plot, entice people to participate and then score an arrest against the terrorist plot they created. The bust then becomes a feather in the cap for the agency and the individual police officers participating. And it reminds the public that there are Scary Terrorists out there coming to get us and we need those same law-enforcement agencies to protect us.

I'm sure it's pure coincidence that the arrest came last week just as the grand jury farce over Wilson was coming to a close - and poor County Attorney Robert McCullogh is alleged to be one of the targets of the this supposed terrorist plot. One of the two men charged is associated with the far-right hate group, the New Black Panthers.

It wouldn't be the first time authorities have infiltrated popular movements or used "dirty tricks" to discredit them.

Tom Hayden in a review of a new book on CIA infiltration of student movements in the 1950s and 1960s describes some of the better-known figures who at one time worked knowingly on behalf of the CIA within the student movement in the United States, which included Gloria Steinem and Allard Lowenstein. Hayden's review is The CIA's Student-Activism Phase The Nation 11/26/2014. The he's reviewing is Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism by Karen Paget, scheduled to be published in 2015. Hayden writes:

The story begins in the 1950s, which may leave some to wonder if it's not a stale and useless tale by now. It's relevant today, however, because of the cancerous growth of Big Brother surveillance and the proliferation of clandestine operations branded in the name of "democracy promotion,” from Cuba to the Ukraine. The pervasive rise of secret money in campaigns, moreover, makes it impossible to know whether operatives of our intelligence agencies have any role in harassing radicals or steering social movements, or whether such roles have been passed to private foundations. Democracy is increasingly in the dark. Any light from history can serve as high-beams to illuminate the future.

For more recent official infiltration activity, see: Josh Harkinson, How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF Mother Jones Sept/Oct 2011.

Hayden comments on the contemporary relevance of the recent history Paget's book covers:

One conclusion from this history is that the CIA's illegal infiltration of domestic political groups began long before 9/11 and the present War on Terrorism. It has been a rogue agency for a very long time, masking its agenda by claiming that domestic spying is justified as part of its global duties. Just as the control of NSA was justified for "foreign policy" reasons, so has its wiretapping and spying on domestic sources been justified on the grounds of monitoring international terrorism.

Second, the CIA-NSA revelations created a permanent climate of paranoia among progressives who would never know again who might be "witting." After the many CIA scandals of the 1970s, both political parties created partisan institutes to channel millions of tax-payer dollars to NGOs in countries struggling with democracy issues. The differences are blurred between the CIA and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which spends an annual $20 million on covert "democracy promotion" in Cuba alone. Similar programs are aimed at Russia, Venezuela, and various "color" revolutions in the former Eastern Europe. The US cannot credibly claim a clean foreign policy, and fuels a global opposition to its double standards.

If I were writing a story of a government agency or a rightwing political sugar-daddy setting up an organization in the US to discredit a movement, I would probably use a group like the New Black Panthers as a model.

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the New Black Panther Party (n/d; accessed 11/27/2014) this way:

The New Black Panther Party is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers. Founded in Dallas, the group today is especially active on the East Coast, from Boston to Jacksonville, Fla. The group portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement (it frequently engages in armed protests of alleged police brutality and the like), but principals of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s— a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization — have rejected the new Panthers as a "black racist hate group" and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.

Tom Hayden on liberation theology and the political tone in Latin America

Tom Hayden has some worthwhile observations about Latin American politics and liberation theology in The Pope and Liberation Theology Peace and Justice Resource Center 12/24/2014:

Liberation theology evolved from the radical margins to the very mainstream of the Latin American church in that revolutionary year of 1968. At once the counter-movement began, gathering momentum through Reagan, Casey and the threatened Catholic fundamentalists, including Ratzinger. Their political targets were to dismantle the structures and ranks of the base communities of the poor then being sheltered by many progressive churches. They did not want a syncretic blending with Latin America's social revolution inspired by Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, even if the Marxists were becoming open to the spiritual dimension. They believed Latin America could be their new Poland. In the United States, they targeted white Catholic Democrats for conversion to the new church of Reagan, wiping away messy trace history of the Berrigans or the nuns in El Salvador.

They failed in the longer run. Latin America has stabilized as a progressive and independent continent where its many elected leaders have roots and memories anchored in the insurgent base communities and martyrs of Empire. Latin America is the reason Francis is Pope. Latin America is a ballast against the reactionaries of Europe and the United States. Latin America is the continent most aligned with the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. Latin America is the continent where diplomacy is preferred to war.

Tags: liberation theology, tom hayden

Jerry Brown: the Archimedes of green energy?

Tom Hayden "gets" what Jerry Brown is about when it comes to green energy. In Jerry Brown, Archimedes and the search for an energy tipping point Peace and Justice Resource Center 03/08/2013, he writes:

Gov. Jerry Brown, an early pioneer of solar energy and conservation, once again might become a global leader in the battle against extreme climate change. Fresh from an impressive election triumph last November, and freed at last from a Republican legislative veto, Brown ventured forth to a national governor’s meeting this month and will travel to China in April.

It is possible that Brown might become a modern Archimedes, searching to create the leverage necessary to reach the tipping point in global energy policy ...

Environmentalists, human rights advocates and progressives in search of strategic direction might consider California (or New York, or any communities of concentrated environmental strength) as battlefields vast enough in combination to generate leverage towards a tipping point. Justice Louis Brandeis aptly described states as the "laboratories of reform." Deeper in history is the story of Archimedes, the Greek scientist-philosopher, who lived two centuries BC. Archimedes might have been labeled the "Dr. Moonbeam" of his era. He invented levers and solar heat rays, among other breakthroughs, before being killed by the Roman Empire in one of its Punic Wars. Archimedes is quoted as saying, "Give me a place to stand, and I will rule the world," which remains good advice in politics and strategy two thousand years later. One might say that the Brown Green Plan for California is an Archimedean leverage point in the energy wars ahead.

The future Archimedes of green energy?

Hayden has hopes for Jerry's scheduled April trip to China, which is a key player in the global warming issue:

Global energy politics, from Europe to Latin America, will have a major influence on US policies, too, but none so much as China. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry need to "cut a deal" with China, says former US senator Tim Wirth, for example by reducing methane leaks and phasing out HFCs, which trap more heat than carbon dioxide. (Rolling Stone, January 31, 2013) According to Wirth, "Kerry understands that the best way to unlock the stalemate in Washington is through Beijing," because "that kills the whole argument that cutting carbon in the US would give China an economic advantage."

Brown could be an ideal partner with China on energy efficiency and anti-pollution strategies. Brown is not burdened with the Cold War-like tensions rising between the US and China, but can focus instead on mutually beneficial energy and environmental initiatives, which later might evolve to become US national policy.

Hayden recalls Jerry's historic environmental initiatives of his first governorship, in which Hayden himself played a formal role. And:

California has launched a green energy revolution once before, also under Brown. I was Brown’s solar energy representative in the Seventies, a time when renewables were considered the quaint interest of organic communards living in the redwoods, which they were. But back to the land became forward to the future. Brown in those days opposed the utility plans for some 65 nuclear plants along the California coast, and he personally killed a liquefied-natural-gas terminal on native lands at Point Conception. He was slandered as "Governor Moonbeam" in the national media, and threatened by business and labor with a future of unemployment, lights-out energy shortages, and political defeat.

It was a bum rap. By promoting strict energy standards in transportation fuels, land use planning, architecture and many other fields, the first Brown administration fostered 1.5 million clean energy jobs, saved California consumers $65 billion, and secured California as the center for two-thirds of clean energy venture capital in the US. Jimmy Carter then adopted Brown’s policies and vision, even installing solar collectors on the White House roof. In April 1978, Carter's Council on Environmental Quality concluded it was “now possible to speak realistically of the United States becoming a solar society.”

Then came the Reagan counter-offensive and the Bush energy wars, but those disasters could only frustrate and delay the inevitable. [my emphasis]

Hayden also emphasizes the need to focus on "environmental justice":

Because of California’s emerging communities of color – just 39 percent of Californians are white – the battle against climate disaster will increasingly engage blacks, Latinos, Asians and poor people as well as traditional (white) environmentalists, or be lost in the political lust over privilege and power. The question of “environmental justice” will become central to the future, not simply a box to be checked off on organizational charts or a special earmark for environmental funding.

The issues of justice, pollution, health, and community empowerment are being welded together as California evolves. The process may involve a somewhat wrenching transition in priorities for environmental advocates who have enjoyed great success in recent California politics. For example, a 2010 ballot initiative for state parks funding (Prop. 21) fell short because the traditional environmental sponsors chose to hike automobile license fees by $18. The margin of voter support for Prop. 21 in communities of color fell short of the level needed. The physical separation of state park facilities from communities of color is a stark one.

Tags:
california politics, global climate change, global warming, jerry brown, tom hayden

Tom Hayden on the Kandahar massacre

Longtime peace acdtivist Tom Hayden writes in The Failure of Gradualism in Afghanistan The Nation 03/13/2012:

Killing at least sixteen Afghan civilians as they slept. Urinating on dead Afghan bodies while laughing about it. Setting fire to their Korans. Day after day, a tired American public hears that these are just “isolated acts” and that these incidents “cast shadows” and “complicate” Washington’s plan for a gradual withdrawal of troops over the next thirty-four months. We are told that the raging anger and distrust between many Afghan and American troops is a further sign that the steady plan is at risk.

But what if it’s the other way around, that the repeated acts of madness—and the record number of US military suicides—are signals of distress from an American army that knows it cannot win this war?

Actually, I doubt any were literally sleeping. When the murderer(s) burst into their houses, they were probably awake to know they were about to be gunned down because some American just thought they needed killin'. They were most likely conscious of what was about to happen as what the good Rev. Wade Burleson calls the "sword of vengeance". The American perpetrator(s) needed vengeance because they were Muslims who were alive and breathing.

Tom seems to feel that the Kandahar massacre may also represent a kind of turning point - or at least that it should.

Courage in leadership requires grasping when defeat is inevitable, when it’s too late to worry about political cover because the corpses and the taxes are piled too high, when denial only makes it all worse.

The president has to say that the people of Afghanistan don’t want us there, that our troops can’t defend a country that doesn’t like us, and therefore the time has come for us to leave. We of course should stand ready to assist a war-ravaged country if asked by the Afghans and by a new international coalition. ...

Perhaps this is an over-reaction to recent catastrophes, and the sturdy American war bureaucracy will muddle along and muddy its tracks. But the power of illusion can overpower a superpower to the point of no return—that is the danger we are in.

It's over. Just like with the Soviets in Afghanistan, whatever positive we've accomplishment there has long since been overshadowed by the damage, damage first of all to the Afghan people like the victim's of last weekend's Kandahar massacre, and damage to American soldiers.

Our glorious generals and fat-cat war profiteers, on the other hand, have done very well from this war and will continue to do so if the public doesn't insist on an end to it as soon as possible.

Tags: afghanistan war, kandahar massacre, tom hayden

"We never should have been in Iraq": sounds right to me!

Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald writes that We never should have been in Iraq 10/28/2011:

We all know how that turned out. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Hussein had no connection to the events of Sept. 11. Nor did the war pay for itself. Nor did Iraqis strew rose petals in the path of American tanks. The things we were told on the route to war turned out to be untrue.

What is true is that we fought a war we did not have to fight. It cost as at least $806 billion and more than 36,000 American casualties, including 4,400 fatalities.

Tom Hayden also has a good piece about the end of the Iraq War: After Nearly Nine Years of War and Occupation, Obama to Withdraw All US Troops From Iraq Peace and Justice Resource Center 10/18/2011. While it's important to recognize that a significant American presence remains in Iraq that may bring more problems for the US, the war as such will end for the US with the withdrawal of combat troops this year. Tom calls it "a stunning and largely unexpected victory for the American peace movement and Iraqi opponents of the US occupation".

Tags: iraq war, tom hayden

September 11 retrospective: Tom Hayden on the new militarism

Tom Hayden has a long op-ed with some thoughtful observations and reading suggestions, 9/11 blind Sacramento News and Review 09/08/2011, in which he discusses the very real problem presented by the Pentagon's Long War, the state of permanent war we entered soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001:

The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War. Not enough Americans in the peace movement are literate about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and the debates about "the clash of civilizations" — i.e., the West vs. the Muslim world.

He's not being hyperbolic. I've written here numerous times about theories of war that have become so popular in the officer corps, according to which the "center of gravity" (the most important point of potential weakness) in war is public opinion in the United States. This view of war, based largely on a deeply flawed reading of the experience of the Vietnam War - and for the Pentagon a self-serving one - inevitably encourages maximum emphasis on attempting to manage American public opinion. It's illegal for the government in general, including the military, to propagandize the US public. But the law is not vigorously enforced in the case of the Pentagon, to put it mildly. Hayden writes:

The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets, but our unborn children's future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon.

As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in February 2010, "This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants." David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines "international information operations as part of counterinsurgency."

In his 2010 book, Counterinsurgency, Kilcullen wrote that Gen. Petraeus’ goal is to achieve a "unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community."

This new "war of perceptions," relying on naked media manipulation, such as the treatment of media commentators as "message amplifiers" but also high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment.

And he reminds us that despite the commitment of both parties to the present course of permanent war, the public rejects its assumptions:

The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are citizen volunteers, always immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment. Look at them from the bottom up, and not the top down, and you will see:

• the people who marched in the hundreds of thousands during the Iraq War;

• those who became the enthusiastic consumer base for Michael Moore’s documentaries and the Dixie Chicks'anti-Bush statements;

• the first to support Howard Dean when he opposed the Iraq war, and the stalwarts who formed the anti-war base for then-candidate Barack Obama;

• the online legions of MoveOn who raised millions of dollars and turned out thousands of focused bloggers;

• the voters who dumped a Republican Congress in 2006 on the Iraq issue, when the party experts said it was impossible;

• the millions who elected Obama president by an historic flood of voluntary enthusiasm and get-out-the-vote drives;

• the majorities who still oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and want military spending reversed.

As Juan Cole discusses in Sadrists to Demonstrate in Baghdad against US Troops Remaining Informed Comment 09/08/2011, we may be actually about to get nearly all of the American troops out of Iraq, effectively ending the war we started in 2003. And by "we," I mean the Cheney-Bush Administration. It was a wholly unnecessary war.

He recommends two books I've reviewed here, Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism (2005) and the collection of essays edited by Bacevich, The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II (2007).

Tags: 9/11, long war, tom hayden

Pakistan and the end of Bin Laden

Aljazeera English has a 47-minute discussion on Pakistan, terrorism and the US, posted on YouTube 05/05/2011 PDT:



Here is a 24-minute discussion from a day earlier, which brings out how important India is in Pakistan's foreign policy and how that affects US-Pakistan relations:



Tom Hayden, who has been watching - and opposing - wars for decades, has an interesting speculation based on the fact that Osama bin Laden seems to have been rather surprisingly lightly defended, according to the accounts available when he wrote this. Hayden doesn't present it as anything other than speculation, but it's a clever one (Question: Why was Bin Laden so lightly guarded? Peace and Justice Resource Center 05/03/2011):

Apparently, there was no Internet service at the compound, so online meetings with other Al Qaeda leaders or cadre were difficult or impossible. A courier was Bin Laden's slow mode of communication, not Skype.

Perhaps this suggests a different role by Pakistan. What were they to do? They could not hand Bin Laden over to the Americans. They could not arrest him, jail him, try him, convict him. They could not or would not kill him. But they could shelter him in exchange for an unknown agreement on the parameters of his behavior. They could offer him a life in semi-retirement, perhaps with dialysis treatment. If so, the rent Bin Laden paid must have been significant. This might have been the most pragmatic arrangement at which the Pakistani military could arrive.

Then, last July, the Americans found the trail of the courier and, shortly after, the compound was targeted. This may be the back story of the growing antagonism between the U.S. and Pakistani governments, militaries and spy agencies, even the recent blow-up over the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, arrested and finally released after killing two Pakistani nationals in March. President Obama lied about Davis’ CIA affiliations and American diplomats put on enormous pressure before Davis was released. Davis was investigating Pakistani militants in a top-secret operation, which could mean he was on the trail of Bin Laden.

In this imagined scenario, the Americans became certain that Bin Laden was hidden in the compound, and possibly made Pakistan an offer it could not refuse. We know you have Bin Laden under protective custody, they might have said, and now you must give him up or face the consequences. It remains to be investigated further, but how could it be accidental that the Pakistani military didn’t begin “scrambling their forces,” according to the Times, until the very time the Americans had finished the job, packed up the body, and turned over the women and children to Pakistani soldiers who were conveniently present?

Tags: osama bin laden, pakistan, tom hayden

Tom Hayden on liberal interventionism and the Libya War

Tom Hayden discusses liberal interventionism, with special reference to Obama's advisor Samantha Power, in Samantha Power Goes to War The Nation 03/30/2011; also available at his own blog page.

He gives an interesting sketch of her role as an Obama adviser for the last several years. He gives her credit for her "case for humanitarian intervention" being "serious and well researched." He shares her criticism of the Henry Kissinger-type Realism foreign policy school of thinking, which is that it:

... demotes values in favor of "interests," [and] is a recipe for romancing dictators. That has been the policy of the "long war on terror" which, until recently, listed Muammar el-Qaddafi as a new friend of the United States, along with old friends Hosni Mubarak and dozens of others. On the other hand, the realists are correct that US military force simply cannot be applied against every major massacre across a bloody world. [my emphasis]

This comment points to what would be a more constructive foreign policy, which would be something like a realist-internationalist foreign policy, of which Franklin Roosevelt's vision for post-Second World War policy provides a precedent.

I'm just not much of an admirer of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had a very important role in furthering international law. He articulated a policy framework for an American policy that would promote international peace and stability in the context of international law. But his actual record with the most important piece of international law for which he was directly responsible, the Versailles Treaty, was disastrous. The League of Nations was a good idea. But he had to negotiate it with the European "statesmen" whose main goal was power and plunder, and its practical effects in Europe were catastrophic. John Maynard Keynes, who had been part of the British negotiating team until he resigned in disgust at the robber's peace being negotiated, gave a highly realistic account of the problems with that treaty in his 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which didn't restrict itself to narrow economic concerns.

It's almost Utopian to talk about a basic alternative US foreign policy strategy with the Republican Party currently in the grips of genuine fanaticism, including on foreign policy. Because for it to work over a long time, Republicans would have to agree to the same basic concept. But it's not at all unthinkable that we might have a foreign policy that would make nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear arms reduction and mitigating global climate change central organizing principles. There could be defined policy standards for how far the US would go in its relations with non-democratic countries and those that violated human rights and labor rights, and a separate set of standards for those with a better record. And even the destructiveness of a global dominance strategy could be significantly mitigated if the public, the Congress and the Executive would insist on a more realistic understanding of the real limits of American power.

Hayden looks at the public articulation of what is now being called the Obama Doctrine:

The new Obama doctrine, which could have been scripted from Power’s writings, begins with his refusal "to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action," and while acknowledging that "It’s true that America cannot use its military wherever repression occurs, that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what's right." After expanding the definition of national interest to include preventing a slaughter in Benghazi, however, Obama adheres to the other themes of his emerging doctrine: the politics of multilateralism (the US coalition would "splinter" if the mission was expanded) and the recognition of limits (primarily the costs of another quagmire like Iraq). Human rights thus becomes a triggering criteria in the application of military force, but not an exclusive one. Obama says he won’t bomb or invade Tripoli to take out Qaddafi militarily, disappointing the hawkish audience while relieving his liberal base.

Still, the parts of that balancing act are in a really precarious balance in Libya. And once the military power of the US is committed in a large and public way, the demands of the military mission are very likely to tip the balance in their direction. It's even more clear now in the few days since Hayden's article that regime change is the political goal of the NATO intervention and more doubtful that the military goals are in alignment with it.

James Dubik of the hawkish Institute for the Study of War makes a fairly conventional case for expanding the military mission to align with the political goal in Boots on the Ground Foreign Policy 04/05/2011. I'm opposed to escalating the Libya War. I'd prefer to see the US get out soon. But the problem of the mismatch of political and military goals is a real one, however demagogically some Republicans may use it. I would prefer to see NATO drop its regime change goal. Dubik argues:

The way the United States and its allies have intervened in Libya has placed them on a dangerously slippery slope. Air power alone has not protected Libyan civilians, the declared objective in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized the military intervention. Nor have the rebels proved capable of making significant advances against Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces. To effectively enforce the Security Council resolution, the coalition would need to put combat air controllers, advisors, and trainers on the ground -- steps it appears unwilling to take. Where does that leave the coalition when it comes to developing a coherent war strategy? Mostly empty-handed.

Hayden describes his view of the best case scenario for the Libya War and the Obama Administration:

If the US gets lucky this time, Power will be vindicated. It’s possible that US airpower can protect opposition ground forces on the road to Tripoli until Qaddafi’s regime collapses from within. Even then, the United States will have to take part in an unpredictable occupation of Libya until a new set of governing institutions are created, a process that might take months or years. The cost will climb into the billions in deficit spending while the budget crisis worsens at home. Any triumphant new US allies, like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, will prove to be unsavory. That’s the best-case scenario for the administration.

Yes, and Iraq-like "unpredictable occupation of Libya until a new set of governing institutions are created, a process that might take months or years": and that's the best case under the Administration's current policy. Then there's the other end of the spectrum of possibilities:

In the worst case, the human rights rationale will have served as the initial argument for another long, bloody and expensive quagmire in a Muslim country. In a growing stalemate, the United States will feel impelled to escalate militarily in pursuit of its policy of regime change. That could "splinter" the US coalition and violate the UN mandate, as Obama himself has indicated. It could lead to a bloodbath in Tripoli while preventing one in Benghazi. It could devolve into civil war and an indefinite power vacuum. And speaking of morality in foreign policy, what will Power advise and Obama decide when asked to prevent massacres in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan or elsewhere (anyone for intervention in China or Russia)? [my emphasis]

With that range of probably outcomes, it's hard to even say "let's hope for the best." Because "the best" would be bad enough!

Tags: james dubik, libya war, samantha power, tom hayden, us foreign policy

Democratic defensiveness

Tom Hayden writes in a way that I must admit seems a bit old-fashioned, sometimes kind of a stiff throwback to the New Left of "the Sixties."

But he's a good writer and an experienced activist and politician, among other things a veteran of civil rights activism in the South during the segregation years who knew Shirley Sherrod's husband Charles from that time. In Sherrod, Obama, and the Strength of Roots Huffington Post 07/22/2010, he makes some important observations. One of them is a spot-on description of the chronic defensiveness endemic in today's Democratic Party:

Our leaders today could learn from this strength of long ago. In fairness, government officials and leaders of large organizations, who are beneficiaries of the Southern civil rights legacy, have institutional reputations to protect. They should avoid needlessly provoking the right, and have every right to pick their fights intelligently. But years of battering from the right have bred a defensive anxiety in the ranks of many Democratic liberals. They flinch before they fight. It's as if they internalize the right-wing refrain that they are weak, tea-sipping elitists. They give far greater consideration to conservatives, militarists and bankers who rarely vote for them than to the millions of activists in social movements who actually made their power possible.

This is a moment when roots should be remembered, venerated and restored from oblivion, not airbrushed from polished resumes and histories of our time. [my emphasis]

He also asks an important question about the Obama administration's response to the Shirley Sherrod smear from professional slime-slinger Andrew Breitbart:

It is good that the administration reversed course quickly after the true story was revealed, but that the Obama administration can be spooked so easily by Glenn Beck and FOX News raises a serious question: If they are so tough on national defense, drugs and crime, where is their resolve against the deceitful attack dogs of the right?

Tags: democratic party, tom hayden

The Afghanistan War is unpopular, and getting more so

This was evidenced by an important vote this week in the House of Representatives, as longtime peace activist Tom Hayden explains in House Stands Firm on Afghanistan Withdrawal Timetable The Nation 07/02/2010:

One hundred sixty-two House members, including a large majority of Democrats, sent a significant antiwar message to President Obama last night, forcing the White House to depend for Afghanistan war support on the Republicans who want to unseat the Democrats and Obama himself in upcoming elections.

Despite claims by punditry that the antiwar movement has disappeared, stalwart Representative Barbara Lee gained 100 votes for her amendment rejecting $33 billion for 30,000 new troops already being sent to Afghanistan. Seven of her votes were Republicans. The measure would have redirected the $33 billion to expenses incurred in redeploying the troops out of Afghanistan.

More significant numerically, there were 162 votes cast for Representative Jim McGovern’s amendment, co-authored by representatives David Obey and Walter Jones, which articulated a game plan for ending the war. Only a year ago, the same measure was introduced as a general and non-binding resolution. This time the proposal required, as a condition of funding, an exit proposal including a withdrawal timetable, by next spring, before the president's announced plan to "begin" withdrawals in July. Further, in response to rising pressure to delay withdrawals, the McGovern proposal would require another Congressional vote if the administration succumbed to pressure from Republicans and the military to delay the beginning departure date.

Among Democrats, the vote for McGovern was 153-98, with nine Republican supporters. Significantly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who this week predicted a strong Democratic push for a "substantial drawdown" by next year, voted with McGovern. [my emphasis]

This is important. Of the Democrats voting on the latter measure, 61% opposed continuation of the Afghanistan War. Obama really has achieved his dream of bipartisanship on this war: he can only continue it with the support of Republicans who know that its unpopularity will damage Democrats' electoral prospects by de-motivating their base voters to go to the polls.

For some perceptive observations on the significance of even a failing vote like this, see Dibgy, Scaring the bejezuz out of 'em Hullabaloo 07/02/2010.

Tags: afghanistan war, tom hayden

More on Tom Hayden and Obama's disappointing the base

I posted earlier about the criticism that Joan Walsh directed at Tom Hayden for what she saw as an overly-credulous attitude toward Obama on progressive priorities. I was focusing there on her criticism of his 2008 position. On Thursday, Digby seconded Joan's criticism in Fergawdsake Hullabaloo 12/03/09.

There were a lot of comments to her post, including some good ones gizmo, rilkefan (great screen name!) and Mitchell Freedman. I'm incorporating into this post most of what I said in a comment there. Digby always seems to get a number of commenters lecture shaking their heads at her thinking that anything positive can be accomplished because Big Money has everything locked up and why bother to complain about them. I guessing most of those people fit into the category I call "Republicans and future Republicans".

Here I want to talk more about the substance of Tom Hayden's position on Obama. Because it's actually carefully considered and is not really much different from the analyses that Joan and Digby also make of Obama and the state of the Democratic Party.

It's true that those who were adult New Left activists in the 1960s do sometimes have a tendency to fall back on wooden rhetoric, even someone like Tom with a lot of experience in retail electoral politics. But the "manifesto" quality of that group statement to which Joan and Digby are referring isn't his normal style, either. What he has to say about politics and about both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars is usually worth hearing. In the case of Iraq, he was personally active early on in trying to bring together Iraqis and Americans to promote peace talks. And his book Ending the War in Iraq (2007) is going to be worth reading for a long time. I learned during these last eight years that there was particular value in reading some of the better analyses of the Vietnam War from the time that the war was still going on. And the same will no doubt be true about those from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Joan singles out Tom in her criticism, but the 2008 statement she quotes actually was a four-person manifesto-type endorsement. Tom himself wrote separately at the Huffington Post in 2008 about his endorsement of Obama, titled An Endorsement of the Movement Barack Obama Leads. He wrote there:

As for issues, the differences between Obama and Clinton on Iraq are difficult to pin down. Obama was against the Iraq war five years ago, and favors a more rapid pullout of combat troops than Clinton. But both would replace combat troops with an American counterinsurgency force of tens of thousands, potentially turning Iraq into Central America in the 1970s. Obama seems more supportive of diplomacy than Clinton, but he supports military intervention in Pakistan's tribal areas. Edwards favors a more rapid pullout from Iraq, but is unlikely to prevail. ...

I do not like the Hillary haters in our midst. As president, her court appointees alone would represent a relief from the present rigging of the courts and marginal improvements for working people. On Iraq, I believe she could be pushed to withdraw. She is a centrist, and it will be up to social movements to alter the center. ...

Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agend [sic]. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. [As Gandhi once said of India's liberation movement, "There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."]

That last sentence appears in the original in brackets,for some reason; my emphasis is in bold.

And I think his perspective as he expressed it then, "sixties" rhetoric or not, is basically correct. And it's essentially the same position that Joan Walsh is arguing: Obama is governing as a "centrist", i.e., a corporate Democrat who is far too open to the advice of warmongers on foreign policy and to advocates of what most of the world calls "neoliberalism" on domestic policy. If he becomes the leader of a successful progressive movement, it will be because the base forces him to do so. Politics is still politics, in the 2000s as well in in the 1960s. And it is still "up to social movements to alter the center."

The article which set Joan Walsh and Alex Koppelman and Digby off is Obama Announces Afghanistan Escalation The Nation 12/01/09, which he opens by saying, "It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car."

His immediate comment on the Afghanistan escalation was:

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

He makes it very clear that he would expect to support Obama in 2012 against Sarah Palin or any other Republican candidacy "of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era." But he also stresses the need to actively oppose the Afghanistan War:

Beyond public persuasion and pressuring Congress, activists are sure to be hitting the streets and precincts in the year ahead. The antiwar movement has a certain leverage based on the current doubt in the minds of voters and policy experts, and the potential dissent from within the Obama base. Democratic turnout increased 2.6 percent in 2008 over 2004, while Republican votes dropped by 1.3 percent. Twenty-two million more young people voted in 2008 than in 2004. The unprecedented energies of those young people who volunteered their time, money and hope could drain away by 2012, if not sooner.

In addition, the peace movement will be globalizing its reach as Obama seeks to extract more troop concessions from wary NATO countries. Opposition is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France. When Obama accepts the Nobel Prize in Oslo on December 10, he may address as many as ten thousand protestors. ...

The albatross of the Karzai government will threaten any plans to rapidly expand the Afghan army and police, themselves divided along sectarian lines. In 2005, the Kabul regime ranked 117th on the list compiled by Transparency International; by this year it was 176th. [my emphasis]

His piece is mostly about the Afghanistan War and it's worth reading in full.

The last eight years have reinforced very strongly for me the need for the United States to drastically reduce our military budget and adopt a far more cautious role about military intervention. The Long War is corrupting our democracy and seriously undermining the rule of law. What the constant state of war and manufactured fear is doing to the US is grimly illustrated in this Pew poll commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), reported with the title U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful 12/03/09, as shown by their summary table on description of their findings on American opinions about torture:

The proportion of the public saying torture is at least sometimes justified against suspected terrorists has increased modestly over the past year. Currently, 54% say torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists, compared with 49% in April and 44% in February.

As long as the US is spending half of the world's military budget, the ugly reality is we will have a military establishment closely tied with major economic interests from weapons manufacturers to mercenary companies and war-loving think-tanks who will always be finding new enemies to fear and fight. And the findings of that poll on torture show the kind of baggage it brings with it.

Tags: long war, obama administration, tom hayden, torture

Joan Walsh on adjusting to Obama's disastrous Afghanistan policy

There has been some amount of grumping among antiwar Democrats about whether Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is a betrayal of his campaign and of the trust his supporters put in him.

(I can't help but think in this connection about the phony hissy fit the Republicans threw about MoveOn.org's "General Betray-us" ad. Although that ad was a clumsy conception, no one actually has any trouble distinguishing between the concept of "betraying" the trust of supporters - in fact American politicians routinely accuse their opponents of betraying their supporters' trust - and accusing someone of betraying the country or of being a traitor to the nation.)

Other Democrats who also oppose the Afghanistan War are saying, weren't you people listening to what Obama was actually saying in his campaign of 2008? He said as clear as day that he intended to put more emphasis on the Afghanistan War and to send in more troops. I always expected to disagree with his Afghanistan policy because I disagreed with it during the campaign last year. I had hoped he would reassess his intent to escalate. But this is a campaign position that Obama is keeping and following through with. I hope in 2010 he's as eager to follow through on his 2008 support for the Employee Free Choice Act to protect workers' rights to organize unions.

Phyllis Bennis in her well-argued analysis of President Obama's Afghanistan Escalation Speech 12/02/09 at the Institute for Policy Studies site puts the case fairly, if a bit disingenuously, when she writes that his escalation speech Tuesday did not reflect "accountability ... to President Obama’s base, the extraordinary mobilization of people who swept this anti-war and anti-racist candidate into office."

But Joan Walsh has the better part of this particular little argument in The poster boy for progressive self-delusion Salon 12/02/09 when she scolds Tom Hayden for over-rating Obama's liberalism in his primary endorsement of Obama over Clinton. Joan's main point is this. Even though she voted for Obama over Clinton in the primaries by her own account, she makes a realistic and important point:

I want to be clear here. I am not saying, and I never said, that Clinton was more progressive than Obama on any of these issues. But Hayden, Michael Moore and too many progressives claimed, with zero evidence, that Obama would be more progressive than Clinton. He wasn't, and he isn't. There were many reasons to choose Obama over Clinton, but that he was the better progressive was never one of them.

Still, as entertaining as it may be to read her poking fun at the leaden quality of Tom's endorsement of Obama - "I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama" - I also think she isn't giving enough credit to the point that he was making in his 2008 endorsement. Just as Joan was struck at the time by the tone of it, I was struck by the fact that he was carefully qualifying that what he was really endorsing was the movement that coalesced around Obama's campaign. But she does quote this part:

We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined....

That's an important factor that we shouldn't lose sight of. The hopes that not just Obama activists but a large portion of the majority that voted for him placed in the potential Obama represented were bigger than the cautious candidate's stated positions. And if as President he can't show that he can and will deliver on major elements of those hopes, the Democrats could wind up blowing one of the most promising opportunities for progressive reforms that any American Presidential administration has ever had.

Tags: democratic party, obama administration