Obama referenced the vast scale of military spending as compared with the human scale of spending on education while continuing to beat the “need for security” war drums. His claim to agree with ending the wars and cutting the military budget is clearly disingenuous given the administration’s war policies and recent insignificant Afghan drawdown. #AskObama: Is bankrupting the country while continuing old wars and starting new ones your 2012 platform?

Amongst the many issues that weren’t addressed, despite an outpouring of tweets was Bradley Manning. CODEPINK’s Truth Set Free campaign joined Bradley Manning supporters in a Facebook group dedicated to posting and commenting on #AskObama tweets about the alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower. Questions ranged from “#AskObama Will you pass your nobel prize to Brad Manning for exposing the truth?” to “#AskObama Why did you state that Bradley Manning broke the law when he has been in prison for over a year now without a trial?” Manning’s case represents yet another way that tax dollars are being wasted on over-classification of government documents and an unprecedented attack on whistleblowers resulting in unwarranted and costly investigations, trials, and incarceration. Unsurprisingly, the Bradley Manning tweets weren’t addressed.

Also omitted was the tragic treatment of the Freedom Flotilla II and how the US government aided Israel in pressuring the Greek government to impede a humanitarian mission to lift the blockade on Gaza. Obama’s reference to US aid in his discussion of the budget certainly didn’t address the billions of dollars Israel receives every year despite the human rights abuses of the apartheid regime.

The day after the Obama Twitter town hall, comments and analysis with #AskObama hashtag continue to cycle through page after page, though tweets of holding former Bush administration officials accountable for creating the “gulag” known as Guantanamo and leading the global community into an unjust and illegal war on Iraq fall silent with other topics taking priority. Barack Obama blazed a path to the White House on a platform that promised a complete break with the Bush presidency, yet in reality he has outstripped his predecessor.

It had been hard to sit through hours of Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s storytelling about some far-off land he called Afghanistan. In his Afghanistan, there were new gains in agriculture and a reduction on poppy production for opium. We were empowering women and rebuilding everything from the rule of law to the electrical grid. President Karzai was really intent on tackling corruption. There was an exciting soon-to-be-unveiled program to integrate the lower-level Taliban. We were making significant gains in training the Afghan security forces, and we had real commitments from the Pakistani government to crush Al Qaeda.

We’ve heard this tall tale for the past eight years, which made some of the Senators a bit skeptical—although not skeptical enough to stop funding the war.

The most skeptical were the Republicans, who also happen to be the most anxious to keep fighting there, indefinitely. Senator Bob Corker said that despite more than an hour of testimony by Holbrooke, “I have heard nothing, nothing” about how progress will be measured. “I have no earthly idea what our objectives are on the civilian front.”
Ranking Republican Richard Lugar was also confused about our objectives. Sometimes, he said, it seems that we are trying to “remake Afghan economic, political and security culture”, which is “beyond our resources and powers.” Other times it seems the goal is simply to prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorists. Either way, Lugar didn’t think we could accomplish the President’s desire to begin withdrawal by July 2011.

Holbrooke, while trying to support the President, admitted that he was leery of setting a date certain for leaving. This is, after all, “not where you would choose to defend the American homeland…It’s the most remote and logistically difficult place the U.S. has ever fought in our history,” Holbrooke said, adding that “Fate and destiny have put us there.”

Senator John Kerry, the Committee chair, showed his imperial stripes when he complained that the Afghans weren’t stepping up to the plate. “The problem is that the key element of this strategy is the one over which we have the least control, and that is the willingness and ability of Afghans to assume ownership of the efforts,” Kerry lamented. All the billions and our best efforts are irrelevant, he said, if the Afghans continue to be bystanders in what they perceive as a fight between the West and Al Qaeda.

Holbrooke chided his predecessors who had trained Afghan security forces for years, at enormous costs, without realizing that we had to also teach them to read and write. Literacy, he assured the senators, is now part of our training. No one asked why the Taliban fighters, who are also illiterate, were outmaneuvering both the Afghan security forces and U.S. military.

Referring to the pending U.S. offensive in Kandahar, Kerry admitted that the presence of the U.S. military whips up the insurgency. “Prior to American troops announcing they were going to go in (to Kandahar), there were not assassinations. There was not a level of violence,” Kerry said. “The mere announcement has now brought on the process of assassination and intimidation, and I doubt that we are going to have enough troops to be able to pacify the city.”

Several times during the hearing Holbrooke insisted that Afghanistan was not the unwinnable war of Vietnam, and that we had real security issues in Afghanistan. Ironically, on the very same day of the hearing, Senator Kerry released—for the first time ever—some 1,200 pages of transcripts from private meetings 40 years ago of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Vietnam War. They showed the Senators expressing the same concerns about not having a reliable partner, getting overly-rosy reports from the administration, wondering how much the war would cost in lives and dollars, and having hard time picturing what victory might look like.

“Some of the parallels are almost eerie,” Kerry said, insisting the lawmakers should learn from the past. But that learning has escaped Kerry himself, who continues to support what has now become Obama’s Vietnam and America’s longest war.

The most concrete rationale for staying in Afghanistan emerged when the senators asked about recent reports of enormous mineral wealth such as copper and lithium. Holbrooke said the mineral wealth not a new discovery, but there were now modern techniques that now allowed the minerals to be more easily mined. Holbrooke assured the senators that we are helping Afghans develop their resources and strengthen their economy. Oh yes, he added, we want to make sure that the U.S. has “a level playing field” in getting access to those minerals.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Afghanistan, young soldiers are assuring that “level playing field” with their lives. On the day of the hearing, eight soldiers were killed, bringing to 33 the number of American troops killed this month amid the worst bloodshed of the nine-year conflict.

The young intern who spoke to me about La La Land has more sense than Obama, Holbrooke or the Congress that continues to fund this disaster. Or maybe he is just less jaded than politicians like Senator Lugar who supports the war but remarked, during the hearing, that the U.S. had become stuck in a “slow-motion caravan to ultimate failure.” La La Land, it seems, is not poor Afghanistan, but Washington DC, where politicians send our youth off to fight and die in an endless war they themselves don’t believe in.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK (www.codepink.org) and Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org).

Nope. Not me. Here’s a piece from December of 2009 (so long ago) from McClatchy News “Pelosi: Obama’s on his own to win money for Afghan buildup” and somehow, upon my discovery, I don’t really feel vindicated. More like sick to my stomach OR waiting for the next article that explains there is some sort of virus (or monster) stealing everyone’s memories in Congress. Or possibly revealing that Congress’s way of dealing with the trauma of funding war, occupation, death, destruction and the like, they must suppress their memories (even from 5 months ago) to just get on with business as usual.

Investigative reporters of the world: Do I have to spell it out any clearer? Monsters, memory loss, PTSD…get on it!

Oh and in case you were wondering, here is my favorite quote from today’s article:

“I think he understands full-well how important (success) is to us,” said Pelosi. “We’re only there for our national security.”

Translation: WE MUST WIN. TERRORISTS WILL KILL US IN OUR HOMES IF WE DON’T.

Investigative reporters: Possible instance of brain transplants, cloning, war hawk virus…

Despite Obama’s campaign promise never to ask for war funding as a supplemental bill as opposed to the regular budget, war officials say this supplemental is “necessary” to pay for wars through mid-year. This explanation for the rushed spending, strategically downplayed amid the start of a holiday weekend, reflects the same rush into war six years ago and recent rush into taxpayer bailouts for mismanaged corporations. It leaves no time for Congress to thoroughly analyze the true need for such funds and it ignores the fact that the United States — and the American people — cannot afford to spend $83 billion dollars on war at a time of sky-high unemployment and record deficits.

It also ignores widespread dissent in American and abroad against continuation of the wars, despite Defense Secretary Gates’ statement that he does not know anybody who believes “a sudden and precipitous withdrawal of the United States from both places” to be a good idea. A USA Today/Gallup Poll earlier this spring found 42 percent of Americans felt the Afghanistan war was “a mistake,” an increase of 30 percent earlier this year and 34 percent in August 2008. A March CBS poll found six in 10 Americans now say the U.S. did the wrong thing in entering Iraq.

“A speedy withdrawal is exactly what millions worldwide want and what we need,” said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin. “Prolonged war means more civilian casualties, which means more anger towards the United States and more recruits for al-Qaeda. It’s a vicious cycle that has to end.”

The economic crisis at home lends an added urgency to end these wars. CODEPINK calls for a reallocation of war funds into the needs of the American people: health care, education, green jobs and infrastructure. It calls for the removal of all troops from Iraq, as well as contractors and bases. In the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, it calls for a surge in negotiations, with women at the table, and a surge in economic and humanitarian aid.

For interviews and more information, please call Jean Stevens, national media coordinator, at 508-769-2138 or Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK co-founder, at 415-235-6517.

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