[Fresh Ink] Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan

[Richard Menec]

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3923

Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan

By Norman Solomon Zspace                July 11, 2009

The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 
For now.

That's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for 
how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, 
deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 
U.S. troops in that country.

But "escalation" isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's 
happening outside the United States.

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at 
home to the idea of more military intervention abroad -- nothing too sudden, 
just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper --  
nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions 
more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "demonic 
suction tube," complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on 
a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse 
rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized 
extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that 
President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to 
Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, 
he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may 
not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation 
in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans 
for add-on deployments weren't already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual -- a repetition 
compulsion of the warfare state -- carefully timing and titrating each dose 
of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique 
is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to 
send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the 
number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he'd 
decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was 
heeding the advice from something called a "Special National Security 
Estimate" -- a secret document, issued days earlier about the already- 
approved new deployment, urging that "in order to mitigate somewhat the 
crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . 
announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis 
than necessary."

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of 
U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday 
that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: "There is not a 
ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan."

Mullen's comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become 
old news without ever being news in the first place.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home 
front. News of further escalation will come "piecemeal" -- "with no more 
high-level emphasis than necessary."

Norman Solomon, co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, is 
the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and 
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For more information, go to: 
www.normansolomon.com

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives