Re-reporting, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett
Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. With politicians and public affairs, international affairs, foreign policy, politicians repeat the same ole policy and expect the citizenry to think they are getting something new, different, even progressive, or to just make-believe. Insanity becomes at least two-dimensional.
University of California history professor Mark LeVine writes in an opinion piece this week that U.S. president Barack Obama “was elected to do hard things, and given the urgency of the escalating recession and the souring of public opinion regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan, he could have taken control of the national discourse surrounding the ‘Really Existing War on Terror’. [He could have] begun a process of steering the country … towards some measure of fiscal and moral sanity.”
The president’s run for the U.S. presidency had reached national prominence on the strength of his pledge to end the war in Iraq — “which should logically have meant a major reduction in the military budget — but his defense spending from the start outstripped that of his predecessor.
Can one consider annual defense spending “upwards of a trillion dollars — enough money to cure most of economic and social woes of the United States (indeed, much of the world’s woes) — anything less than insane?”
Policy out of step with global realities
In its Annual Review of World Affairs report, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies put the issue more broadly global. The Obama government’s counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy for Afghanistan was a grand strategy that is “too ambitious, too removed from the core security goals that need to be met, and too sapping of diplomatic and military energies needed both in the region and elsewhere.”
The report maintains, “For Western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests. …
“The challenge of Afghanistan must be viewed and addressed in proportion to other threats to international security and other requirements for foreign-policy investment. With economic, financial and diplomatic activity moving at such a pace and with such varied outcomes internationally, military operations in general have to be all the more carefully considered. … Heavy, large, military deployment, the [long duration] will be seen as an attitude for other times, other centuries.”
Decent man’s “folly”
LeVine continued his opinion piece. By all accounts, “President Obama is a decent man who … does not enjoy leading his country in wartime. His political future and legacy depend in large part on successfully navigating the United States away from a war economy, towards rebuilding it along more innovative and sustainable lines. Yet he is deepening the War in Afghanistan even though he and his senior advisors and commanders must know that doing so is a disastrous folly.”
They must understand that deepening the war “will likely produce precisely the outcome their policies were supposed to avoid: greater hatred and violence against the United States in the heart of Central Asia; and from there, across the Muslim world.”
Sources and notes
“Obama edges to the dark side — As consensus grows regarding the futility of US national security policy, concerns arise over Barack Obama’s strategy” (Opinion: Mark LeVine at Al Jazeera) September 16, 2010 [“views expressed in the article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy], http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2010/09/2010916104022372281.html
Author Mark LeVine is professor of history at University of California, Irvine.
“Strategic Survey 2010: The Annual Review of World Affairs” [Director-General, Chief Executive Dr John Chipman, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, Press Statement], September 7, 2010, http://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-survey/about-strategic-survey/
The Strategic Survey, a tool for interpreting worldwide strategic developments, is the London-headquartered International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual review of world affairs. The Survey has provided for government policy makers, journalists, business leaders and academics an essential one-volume analysis of the year’s key events in international relations since 1966.
Based in London and registered as a limited company in UK law and a charity with offices in the United States, Singapore and Bahrain, the “International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) (founded in 1958) is the world’s leading authority on political-military conflict.” Nuclear deterrence and arms control was the focus of much of the Institute’s early work. http://www.iiss.org/about-us/
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