By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.

While modern Americans might not know it, with all the boom and
bombast and mindless flag-waving featured in the military parades
popular in today’s warrior culture, November 11 was originally
established by Congress back in 1919, a year after the day the guns of
World War I finally went silent over the blood-drenched fields of
Europe in what was once, in a naïve spasm of optimism, referred to as
the War to End All Wars. In declaring the national holiday Armistice
Day, Congress said it was to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world
peace.”

It’s hard to see how President Obama, who has yet to actually
receive his Nobel Prize as a peacemaker from Norway’s King Harald, is
contributing to peace with the addition of another 34,000 US soldiers
and Marines to the 68,000 already fighting, killing and dying on Afghan
soil. Maybe he thinks holding this escalation to 34,000 instead of
accommodating Afghanistan Theater Commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s
request for 80,000 more troops is an act of pacificistic moderation.

I doubt it. (Incidentally, some Pentagon and White House flaks are
referring to this escalation as another “surge,” but you can’t call a
50% increase in troop commitments a “surge.” It is what it is—a massive
expansion of the current war effort.)

No, sadly, Obama, who has declared the bloody assault on one of the
world’s most remote and impoverished lands to be a “necessary war,”
seems stubbornly and ignorantly and foolishly to be trying to emulate
the mistakes of an earlier Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
who turned a minor conflict in Vietnam into the biggest war, and
biggest disaster, that the US has engaged in since World War II.

Of course, the difference between the two men, Johnson and Obama,
is still enormous. While Obama may be just as bone-headed as was
Johnson in caving to the will of his generals instead of leading them,
he doesn’t hold a candle to Johnson when it comes to leading the charge
for progressive domestic legislation. While Johnson was ginning up the
war in Vietnam, he was simultaneously dragging the racist Democrats of
the southern states kicking and screaming into the post-slavery world
with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which for the first time
enabled African Americans to actually participate in voting. He also
rammed through Congress a truly innovative single-payer health
program—Medicare--to provide health care for all Americans once they
reached 65, or became disabled, as well as a second
program--Medicaid--to care for the poor.

Against these great accomplishments, Obama hasn’t even shown the
resolve to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the
military—something he could do with a phone call to the Joint Chiefs!
That is to say, while he’s willing to pointlessly, on the basis of some
bizarre political calculus, put another 34,000 young Americans in
harm’s way in Afghanistan, he’s not willing to ban discrimination
against those of them who may not be suitably heterosexual.

The signs are grimly clear that this silver-tongued but politically
gutless president is steering the country into yet another military
disaster—one that has killed 200 young men and women under his command,
but which could easily become as costly in blood and fortune as was
Johnson’s Vietnam War four decades ago. Making matters worse is the
fact that while the Vietnam War was fought at a time when America was
at its height as an economic power, today this country is an economic
basket case.

I predict that it will not be long before protesters will be
packing the Washington Mall and jamming the streets surrounding the
White House shouting chants of “Hey, Obama, What Do You Say? How Many
Kids Have You Killed Today?”(How’s he going to explain those shouts to
his daughters, Sasha and Malia?)

The sheen has already warn off this latest huckster for American
militarism and imperial adventure, and, with his increasingly
blood-stained hands tied by the Pentagon and military quagmire, he has
nothing to show domestically to earn him public support and affection.
The man had a chance, nine months ago, to come into office and smash
the criminal banking syndicate, to put Americans back to work with a
serious jobs program, and to finally expand Medicare to all, bringing
America into the modern world on health care. Instead he turned the
financial system completely over to the banksters, helping them to grow
even bigger, left the unemployed to fend for themselves, and fobbed off
the job of health care “reform” on Congress, which predictably did the
bidding of the Medical Establishment, and deep-sixed the whole thing.

It is, I would suggest, time for progressives to start searching
for a serious, gutsy, plain-speaking candidate to challenge Obama for
the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2012. This man needs
to have a new Gene McCarthy or George McGovern breathing down his neck
for the next three years.

Armistice Day would be a good day to launch that search.

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He can
be reached at www.thiscantbehappening.net