Aug 16, 2009

My Post on the Hawblog: "Are We Still Historians Against the War?"

by Liberty and Power

Here is my post at the blog of Historians Against the War:

Or are we now just Historians Against the Republicans?
Since it took power, the new administration has ordered bombings that killed twenty-four Afghan civilians (including several children), promised that an attack on Iran remains “on the table," vowed to double U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan, and proposed an increase of forty-billion dollars in the already bloated Pentagon budget.
Meanwhile, Richard Holbrooke, the new special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan has predicted that the Afghan war will last longer than the fourteen years of the Vietnam War, Vice President Biden has matter-of-factly promised an"uptick" in American casualties, and the American commander of NATO forces announced that all Afghan drug dealers, regardless of any connection to the insurgency, will be killed on sight.
Even the good news is less hopeful than it seemed on first appearance. Though President Obama has begun plans to close Gitmo and end torture, he also issued executive orders to continue the policy of "rendition."
All of these developments should be of grave concern to all advocates of peace. Despite this, the official face of HAW on the front page of the website highlights a cartoon of Michael Steele, a person who has nothing to do with setting U.S. foreign policy. It is not the first cartoon of this type to appear. If this continues, readers will naturally start to wonder if HAW still takes a firm stand against the pro-war policies of the United States.

More Comments:

Tim Sydney - 2/9/2009

Obama isn't ending the war at all. He is merely shifting US troop deployments from one theatre to another.

Jonathan Dresner - 2/3/2009

I guess the first question has to be whether HAW is "Historians Against The War In Iraq" or "Historians Against War." My impression, when it started, is that HAW was the former -- a narrowly defined organization capable of putting together a real coalition -- but is on the cusp of evolving into either the latter or "Historians Against Republican Policies."

I left MoveOn when it shifted from being a single-purpose anti-impeachment movement to being a pro-Democrat fundraising/lobbying group. If they were true to their original mission statement, they would have disbanded after the impeachment discussion was over.

HAW seems unlikely to simply disband, so I suppose you're going to battle for it's "soul" but the responsible, honest thing to do would be to limit it to continuing pressure to end our adventurism in Iraq.