Vietnam Redux

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It's become obvious that Barack Obama is not another FDR but is he another LBJ?  Normon Solomon sees some similarities when it comes to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he'd decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a "Special National Security Estimate" -- a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that "in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary."

Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

But "escalation" isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States.

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad -- nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper -- nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "demonic suction tube," complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren't already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual -- a repetition compulsion of the warfare state -- carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

This is even trickier for Obama than it was for LBJ.  The American people and the congress are already war weary.  It's essential that Afghanistan be kept off the front pages.  The deterioration of support for the mis-adventure in Afghanistan will occur even faster than it did for Iraq.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come "piecemeal" -- "with no more high-level emphasis than necessary."

 

Comments

[anna missed]

Turning ceilings into floors, turning more war into media wallpaper, and turning lead into gold - it all http://annamissed.com/?p=1008>alchemy I tell yah!

[geoff]

What I don't understand with Obama is why he'd continue on the Bush war road at all.

My gut tells me it's nothing more than keeping the military senior echelon, now in power, amused with their Afghan play toy so they won't be saying naughty things to Congress about American pride, defeat, implied shame, etc. etc. etc.. which could derail Obama's questionable domestic aspirations.

LBJ, as I recall reading, didn't trust the joint chiefs and their assessment of Vietnam but he needed to keep them happy first with "rolling thunder" and then boots on the ground so as not to sour Congress on his road to The Great Society - where did that go anyway?

This stuff is ultimately empire thrashing around - called foreign policy now though - and seems to me what you can only get with a military industrial state. In effect, domestic policy sapped by militarism. The new twist is that though modern military play things are expensive in dollars terms, good for the economy if you can pay for it, they really are not so in American blood - i.e. casualty rates are really really low relative to other so-called wars, declared or not.

However the host country's civilians, where the military get to play, take an awful shit-kicking but the homeland sees little of that blood. (You might guess I'd been reading Geoffrey Wheatcroff's July 7th piece in the Guardian in typing up the last line)