So THAT'S why we're in Afghanistan! It's "military Keynesianism"

"This is what the American dream has come to? Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom. And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it." (Ian Welsh, today -- see below)

"Obama has to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. The economy is in bad shape, and it needs that stimulus. Since he can’t get a new large stimulus through Congress that means he MUST keep the Afghan war going if he doesn’t want an economic disaster, which would then lead to an electoral disaster."

-- Ian Welsh, in a recent blogpost,

"Actually, Afghanistan is a war of choice"

by Ken

If I told you that you could get the wisdom of one of the smartest people I know of, right in your e-mailbox, at absolutely no cost to you, I bet you would say "Surely you jest" or perhaps "You're drunk." But no I don't and no I'm not. Just go to the Ian Welsh website and click the link to subscribe, by either RSS feed or e-mail.

Yesterday Ian was writing about RNC Chair Michael Steele's surprisingly unstupid comments about the president and Afghanistan, which reminded him of "my favorite definition of a gaffe: 'saying the truth in the worst way possible.'"

After making the point that, much as Chairman Michael said, our involvement in Afghanistan is "a war of choice for Obama," even if it had first been a war of George W. Bush's choosing, and noting that "being the RNC chairman, Steele isn’t allowed to say things that make sense and contradict Republican warmongering," Ian proceeds to "a truth that Steele didn't tell."

Obama has to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. The economy is in bad shape, and it needs that stimulus. Since he can’t get a new large stimulus through Congress that means he MUST keep the Afghan war going if he doesn’t want an economic disaster, which would then lead to an electoral disaster.

This is the sad truth of America: the only acceptable form of Keynesian spending is military Keynesianism. Instead of hiring tens of thousands of teachers, building a high speed rail network across the country, refitting every building to be energy efficient and doing a massive solar and wind build-out to reduce dependence on oil, well, the US would rather turn Afghans and Pakistanis into a fine red mist.

That fine red mist is what’s keeping the American economy from going under entirely. And so, even if it’s the wrong thing to do, even if it’s the graveyard of America’s Empire, the war will continue.

I should note once again that I'm one of the few people I know who doesn't claim to have implacably opposed the idea of an invasion of Iraq, and who similarly isn't reflexively opposed to the idea of military intervention in Afghanistan. In both cases, though, I do require a believable understanding of purpose: what we hope to accomplish and, at least roughly, how we expect to accomplish it.

The Bush regime tried several substantially different explanations for why we had to invade Iraq, but all of them were so far from credible that it seemed clear the regimistas didn't believe any of them either. (Even with the shoddy job most of the Infotainment News media were doing "reporting" the issues, it was hard not to see that even if you tried to take any of the regime justifications for war seriously, the "evidence" presented was dubious, to put it mildly.) What was clear was that, for reasons we were free to speculate about, the various subspecies of the Far Right that made up the regime were of one mind that an invasion was a splendid idea, and all that remained to determine was how to sell it to, or slip it past, a somewhat cranky American public. It's well to remember that, until the actual invasion, the most persistent objections to the idea came not from the Left but from the Right.

(It surely didn't help that Chimpy the Presidential Candidate had sought so often to score cheap political points by denouncing soft-headed Democrats' inclination to "nation-building." Perhaps in retrospect some of the regime strategists may have appreciated that the essentially isolationist rhetoric of the campaign may not have been the ideal way to prepared the country for a foreign policy that was going to feature unilateral American intervention anywhere and everywhere in the world that the regime felt like.)

In the case of Afghanistan, I believe that the original American intervention made sense and produced some real accomplishments, starting with the removal from power of the Taliban. That those accomplishments were shallower and less durable than they may have appeared at the time is undeniable. Could they have been built on, if the Bush regime had chosen to stay the course in Afghanistan rather than instigate a war in Iraq? I guess we'll never know.

At the same time, that doesn't mean that the case for military involvement now is in any way established. It has seemed increasingly clear that if the Obama administration actually has a defined plan of action for Afghanistan, it is afraid or simply unwilling to share it with the American people. And given the cost to the country in so many ways, if we don't have a reason for being there, we shouldn't be there.

Except that perhaps we can't afford to leave, because our own queasy economic disequilibrium depends on the money the war is pumping into it. As Ian puts it in an addendum to the above post he offered today ("American War Economics 101"):

I recently wrote that Obama has chosen to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. I am baffled by many of the responses to that article. What do readers think would happen to the US economy if all that spending stopped and wasn’t replaced by anything?

POSTSCRIPT: FOURTH OF JULY THOUGHTS FROM IAN --
"WHAT WE SEE TODAY IS THE AMERICAN DREAM DYING"

Today Ian has some thoughts -- "American cannot be America at perpetual war" -- as a Canadian on Fourth of July:

I don’t primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

I sometimes think that many of us who aren’t Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do. We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion. We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.

He recognizes that we haven't been terribly assiduous about living up to those lofty ideals, but argues that "both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards."

America’s ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope. If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.

But what we see today is the American Dream dying. Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that’s dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.

Then he invokes Thomas Jefferson's "prescient" warning "that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."

I’m not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.

The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you’ve got one, politicians are always tempted to use it. When it’s a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases. When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.

War by necessity concentrates power in the executive, Ian cautions, which leads to the multitude of basic rights tramplings we've talked about so much here.

This is America?

This is what the American dream has come to?

Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.

And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.

Are Americans who don’t believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?

That is my question to you on July 4th.

Happy Independence Day.

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