The War Democrats

Joe Sestak and the rationale for war
By Justin Raimondo from AntiWar.com

A recent op ed piece by Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.), a former admiral, is typical of the Bushian "logic" which continues to dominate the making of American foreign policy in the age of Obama. The style is different – gone are the preening neocon Napoleons – but, given American’s war-weariness, Sestak’s "reluctant warrior" routine is subtly insidious:

"I understand the concerns about sending more troops to Afghanistan. No one wants to put more of our service members in harm’s way. No one wants to be spending more of our resources abroad when there is so much to be done at home."

I would add: no one wants to kill thousands of Afghans for no good reason except the Obama administration’s goal of proving its virility in the realm of national security, but a) Sestak seems not to give a flying [expletive deleted] about the lives of non-Americans, since he didn’t see fit to mention it, and b) he has been critical of the Obama stimulus plan, complaining that it hasn’t shown enough results quickly enough, but perhaps he thinks a good shot of military Keynesianism is what’s required. After all, as he acknowledged in an interview with talkingpointsmemo.com, about 20 percent of a typical congressional representative’s district – presumably he was speaking about local conditions – is economically dependent on the armaments industry. Thanks to John Murtha and his confreres in the state’s Democratic congressional delegation, Pennsylvania has an outsized share of the "defense" industry’s government subsidies, and this undoubtedly plays a big role in Sestak’s primary bid to unseat newly-converted Democratic Senator Arlen Specter – who opposes the Afghan escalation.

Sestak is going after Specter on this issue, appealing to conservative Democrats, the sort who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and are prone to go Republican. Unable to garner the White House’s endorsement – Obama is going along with the party leadership in supporting Specter – the spurned Sestak is nevertheless holding high the banner of Obama-ism in echoing the same tired arguments trotted out by the Dear Leader in his let’s-escalate speech. Yes, "after eight years and significant missteps, concern is justified," Sestak avers. "But the American people should be assured of three things:

"This mission is necessary: If we were to leave now, Afghanistan would return to the conditions that allowed us to be struck on 9/11. More importantly, a failed Afghanistan would critically destabilize Pakistan, which currently faces an existential threat from al Qaeda and allied extremists."

"The conditions that allowed us to be struck on 9/11" existed not in Afghanistan, but right here in the US. Those conditions had nothing to do with Afghanistan’s lack of a central government, and everything to do with the laxness of our security measures here at home. The Taliban may have been in the drivers’ seat in Kabul, but what really enabled al-Qaeda wasn’t Mullah Omar but rather the ease [.pdf] with which our immigration laws allowed al-Qaeda to enter the country – and the complete cluelessness of and lack of coordination between the various intelligence-gathering and law enforcement agencies upon whom billions had been lavished to prevent just such a catastrophe.
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