Netroots Nation And Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

Derrick Crowe notes that, in a straw poll at Netroots Nation, only one percent of the collected progressive bloggers listed �working to end our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan� as their number one writing priority. That seems both correct and far lower than it should be to me, especially considering recent polling that shows 73% of Democrats opposed to the Afghan occupation. Of the various possible reasons Derrick advances as to why this is the case, this one rings truest:

The fact that a Democratic president presides over this ever-expanding military policy depresses attendees� enthusiasm for challenging it.

It remains true that if Bush (or McCain) were the one in charge of the escalating, decades-long, ill-conceived occupation plan advanced by the Obama administration, progressive bloggers and pundits would be far more likely to be vocal in opposition. Yet Obama's plan is essentially Bush's plan from '08. Derrick writes:

If you look at the election as a win or a loss through the lens of particular issues, then the 2008 election was a win for Republicans on Afghanistan. The policy supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats is the policy being enacted.

If we want a progressive foreign policy, we�re going to have to fight for it. Correction, we�re going to have to fight him for it. Policymakers always portray their elections as blanket public endorsements of their entire agenda, but as CNN�s recent poll shows, that�s not the case. It�s our job as activists to support the policies with which we agree and to work to excise those policies with which we disagree, even if they are policies on which the President campaigned. This straw poll shows that we still haven�t got that particular memo.

... We need progressive activists to work to enact many aspects of President Obama�s agenda, that�s true. But just as important�perhaps more importantly�we need progressives to fight to create political space for the President to grow even beyond his original platform, and we need progressives to drag him out of the worst paradigms of the Bush years.

In the field of progressive blogging, that's mostly going to take a bunch of new bloggers taking the time to learn the issues and the arguments and step up to the plate. The progressive bloggers we most relied upon to protest Bush's Iraq stratergy have been largely co-opted by an alliance of the military COIN cabal and CNAS liberal interventionists. Those groups afforded them access they'd never dreamed of as they used the bloggers to push their interventionist, nation building vision of counter-insurgency for both Iraq and Afghanistan - a vision that still assumed massive military invasions and occupations were the correct response to international terrorism. Flattered by the attention, many prominent progressive bloggers on military and foreign policy issues repeated the CNAS/Petraeus line wholesale and now find themselves unable to retract or recant even when their progressive instincts lead them to question neoliberal mission creep. The best they can manage is "agnostic" and that's not sufficient to pressure the Obama administration to steer a more progressive course.

The war in Afghanistan will eclipse the cost of the Iraq war, with all of the opportunity cost that implies. It�s killing massive numbers of civilians and dragging us into moral culpability for the actions of a warlord-ridden narco-state. And as recent statements by senior Obama Administration officials show, no one in the administration has any idea what success looks like or how the war will end.

Not to mention, there are still 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, whose generals daily hatch new schemes to reinvigorate the apparatus of the occupation.

The election was a win for the anti-war movement in this country, but it was not the win. We�ve made great strides, including the election of Barack Obama. It would be a catastrophe if we blew it now, after we�ve come so far, because we took our eye off the ball.

The bloggers we relied upon two years ago to point out the errors of the establishment's interventionist ways have largely failed to do so this last six months - and for mostly self-interested, partisan reasons. Yes, I'll name names: Brian Katulis, Ilan Goldenberg, the folk at Think Progress, Matthew Ygglesias, Spencer Ackerman, Phil Carter (who is now in the administration), Brandon Friedman, among others. Several I regard as friends, people I respect as thinkers and writers in general but who I believe have regretfully become partially blinkered by the prominence having access to policy movers and shakers gave them. That's a perennial media problem - the way in which journalists must protect their access in order to preserve their positions too often leads to stenography - and I can't say for certain that in similiar circumstances I wouldn't do the same, but thankfully I've always been a small fish, enabling me to be grumpy and piss people off at will.

And thankfully there are other bloggers who are willing to buck the Obama-supporting (which is, unfortunately, neoliberal and interventionist foreign policy supporting) line. Michael Cohen, Derrick Crowe, Joshua Foust, Alex Thurston and Jason Rosenbaum's team at The Seminal, Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films and others. And some of the establishment proggie foreign policy/military policy bloggers - notably Spencer - are having visible second thoughts. But the attempt to prevent mission creep in Afghanistan, and to pressure the Obama administration to find clear exit ramps rather than enmiring America for the next four decades, needs more progressives to find their blogging voices.

The Right's line is easy to read: silence will be taken for assent.