Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan, the anti-war movement in America looks remarkably similar to what it was in 1972 – ten years after the US invaded South Vietnam. In each case, more than two-thirds of the American public oppose the war, but the press and ‘educated opinion’ – hence the ideological institutions, notably the universities – support it. Our rulers’ task, in cases 40 years apart, is therefore to make sure that democracy is ineffective.
Afghanistan (“Pipelinistan,” as Pepe Escobar says) is much more important to the US elite than Vietnam ever was. It’s the keystone of the region that the US State Department in 1945 said contained “the world’s greatest material prize” – Mideast oil. Today the US government is threatening, invading, and occupying countries from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent, and from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa – a vast circle with a 2,000-mile radius – the Greater Middle East. (The US military calls it “Central Command.”) Control and not just access to those energy resources is what the US government demands: the US in fact imports very little oil from the Mideast, but control gives the US government an unparalleled advantage over its oil-hungry rivals in Europe and Asia. We’re killing people in the Mideast and North Africa because China needs oil, and our government wants to control where they get it. Our government says that we’re conducting these vastly expensive wars to stop terrorism and protect civilians; but it’s obvious that, instead, we’re killing civilians and creating terrorists.
Finally, the US is a very different country today. In 1972 it was a wealthy and prosperous society, with a self-confident middle class. Forty years of Neoliberal counter-attack to “the Sixties” have seen wages and standards of living stagnate or decline, even before the crisis of 2007/8 – out of which the rich 1% prospered and the 99% declined even further.
The first task of the anti-war movement in 2011 is to overcome its co-option by the Democrats in the elections of 2006 and 2008, and dispel the propaganda fog of the Obama administration. Obama’s killing in the Mideast and Africa is more widespread, efficient, and brutal than Bush’s ever was, but the policy remains what it has been for more than a generation. The anti-war movement must make that clear to the American people – and that it’s being done in our name.
