The Silent Winter of Escalation

By Norman Solomon

Sunday morning, before dawn, I read in the New York Times that “the
Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan”
within the next 18 months -- “raising American force levels to about
58,000” in that country. Then I scraped ice off a windshield and
drove to the C-SPAN studios, where a picture window showed a serene
daybreak over the Capitol dome.

While I was on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” for a live interview,
the program aired some rarely seen footage with the voices of two
courageous politicians who challenged the warfare state.

So, on Sunday morning, viewers across the country saw Barbara Lee
speaking on the House floor three days after 9/11 -- just before she
became the only member of Congress to vote against the president’s
green-light resolution to begin the U.S. military attack on
Afghanistan.

“However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of
restraint,” she said. The date was Sept. 14, 2001. Congresswoman Lee
continued: “Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must
say, Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause just for a
minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so
that this does not spiral out of control.”

And she said: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

The footage of Barbara Lee was an excerpt from the “War Made Easy”
documentary film (based on my book of the same name). As she appeared
on a TV monitor, I glanced out the picture window. The glowing blue
sky and streaky clouds above the Hill looked postcard-serene.

But the silence now enveloping the political non-response to plans
for the Afghanistan war is a message of acquiescence that echoes what
happened when the escalation of the Vietnam War gathered momentum.

During the mid-1960s, the conventional wisdom was what everyone with
a modicum of smarts kept saying: higher U.S. troop levels in Vietnam
were absolutely necessary. Today, the conventional wisdom is that
higher U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are absolutely necessary.

Many people who think otherwise -- including, I’d guess, quite a few
members of Congress -- are keeping their thoughts to themselves,
heads down and mouths shut, for roughly the same reasons that so many
remained quiet as the deployment numbers rolled upward like an
odometer of political mileage on the road to death in Vietnam.

Right now, the basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in
place -- including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate
over Washington’s options. In an atmosphere reminiscent of 1965, when
almost all of the esteemed public voices concurred with the decision
by newly elected President Lyndon Johnson to deploy more troops to
Vietnam, the tenet that the United States must send additional troops
to Afghanistan is axiomatic in U.S. news media, on Capitol Hill and
-- as far as can be discerned -- at the top of the incoming
administration.

But the problem with such a foreign-policy “no brainer” is that the
parameters of thinking have already been put in the rough equivalent
of a lockbox. Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson
approached Vietnam policy options no more rigidly than Hillary
Clinton, Robert Gates and Barack Obama appear poised to pursue
Afghanistan policy options.

I was thinking about this when I left the C-SPAN building in the full
light of day. The morning glow made the Capitol look majestic. Yet it
was almost possible to see, streaked across the dome, an invisible
new stain of blood and shattered bones.

Along with the grim patterns, there’s a tradition of brave dissent on
Capitol Hill. It’s epitomized by Barbara Lee’s prophetic statement
just after 9/11 -- and by an earlier kindred spirit, the fierce
Vietnam War opponent Senator Wayne Morse. If you’d like to see
historic footage of them, retrieved from the nation’s Orwellian
memory hole, watch the “Washington Journal” segment by clicking here.
http://www.cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-13214

On Monday, USA Today reported that the top U.S. commander in
Afghanistan “has asked the Pentagon for more than 20,000 soldiers,
Marines and airmen” to raise the U.S. troop level in Afghanistan to
55,000 or 60,000. General David McKiernan says that is “needed until
we get to this tipping point where the Afghan army and the Afghan
police have both the capacity and capability to provide security for
their people.” Such a tipping point “is at least three or four more
years away,” the general explained. So, “if we put these additional
forces in here, it's going to be for the next few years. It’s not a
temporary increase of combat strength.”

Is Afghanistan the same as Vietnam? Of course, competent geographers
would say no. But the United States is the United States -- with
domestic continuity between two eras of military intervention,
spanning five decades, much more significant than we might think.

Bedrock faith in the Pentagon’s massive capacity for inflicting
violence is implicit in the nostrums from anointed foreign-policy
experts. The echo chamber is echoing: the Afghanistan war is worth
the cost that others will pay.

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Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Information about the documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is posted at
www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org. To view the C-SPAN “Washington Journal”
interview that included excerpts from the film, go to:
http://www.cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-13214