Regretfully, US liberals now out-hawk conservatives in eagerness for aggression & war

You might have noticed something curious following Biden's apparent election win – liberal politicians and media are sounding the alarm that Trump may use his remaining months in office to draw down our troops from Afghanistan.

For example, the New York Times ran a piece on November 12 claiming that “both in Kabul and Washington, officials with knowledge of security briefings said there was fear that President Trump might try to accelerate an all-out troop withdrawal in his final days in office” before the more “responsible” Biden can take over and try to stop or at least slow this. It is clear now that it is the liberal establishment, and the Democratic Party, which is more wedded to war than their counterparts across the aisle, and that should be disturbing to people hoping for progressive change with the incoming Administration.

First of all, we must start with this discussion with the undisputed fact that our leaders do not know, and have not known for some time, what the US’ goals and strategy in Afghanistan even are. One would be forgiven for not knowing, or for forgetting this fact because the incontrovertible evidence of it – the so-called “Afghanistan Papers” – received scant and only momentary attention when they were exposed last year by the Washington Post.

As these documents, consisting of interviews with hundreds of insiders responsible for prosecuting the war show, the American public was intentionally lied to about the alleged “progress” of this war, even as our leaders were unsure what “progress” meant. 

As the Washington Post noted, the US government never even decided who it was really fighting there: “Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the US government never settled on an answer.” Almost to a person, everyone involved in this morass agreed that the billions of dollars spent, and thousands of lives lost, have been in vain. It has all been a colossal waste.

Now, however, we are being told to panic that Trump may end this disastrous conflict. For example, the quite liberal and almost blatantly pro-Biden news outlet, National Public Radio (NPR) ran segments all last week about female soccer teams in Afghanistan. The message of these segments was clear – these soccer teams are (allegedly) proof of women’s advances in Afghanistan as a result of the US’ intervention since 2001, and these advances are in jeopardy if Trump ends this intervention. 

Such manipulative stories of course obscure the real fact that the US has been undermining women’s rights in Afghanistan since it began intervening there in 1979, and Afghanistan still ranks at the very bottom of all countries for women’s rights. But there is no doubt that such stories will warm the hearts of many Biden supporters to continue war there.

Meanwhile, it is not only Afghanistan which is the focus of the liberal enthusiasm for war. Thus, as the Grayzone has reported, Dana Stroul, the Democratic co-chair of the Congressionally-appointed Syria Study Group, recently outlined the plans for even deeper US intervention in Syria – an intervention which Trump has at least paid lip service to ending. 

Specifically, Stroul emphasized that “one-third of Syrian territory was owned via the US military, with its local partner the Syrian Democratic Forces,” that this territory happened to be the richest in Syria in terms of oil and agriculture, and that the US would intensify its intervention in and against Syria to keep its control of this territory and its resources. Of course, taking over other nations’ resources is a violation of international law, including the Geneva Conventions prohibition against “plunder,” but that seems to be of no concern.

The liberal media is also elated by the prospect of a Biden White House being more aggressive in its foreign policy towards both Russia and China. 

As CNBC explains, “Now there is likely to be a change in the air when it comes to U.S.-Russia relations. At the very least, analysts told CNBC before the result that they expected a Biden win to increase tensions between Washington and Moscow, and to raise the probability of new sanctions on Russia...Experts from risk consultancy Teneo Intelligence said they expected more cooperation between Biden and Europe on global issues such as ‘countering China, Russia’.”

While one might think that increased tensions with two major nuclear powers would not be a welcome development, years of the false Russiagate narrative have groomed liberals for such tensions. 

Incredibly, Trump has been portrayed as being soft on Russia, even as he backed out of a major anti-proliferation treaty (The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) which had been signed with the Kremlin back in 1987, and even as he sent the largest contingent of US troops (20,000) in a quarter of a century to train with European soldiers on the Russian border. I must note here that the converse – Russia’s sending tens of thousands of troops to the border with the US – is simply inconceivable and would indeed be seen in Washington as an occasion for war. I, for one, am quite alarmed to think of what a Biden policy of “getting tougher” with Russia would look like, and what kind of catastrophe it could bring about.

Regretfully, I now live in a country in which liberals outflanking conservatives in terms of their tolerance and even eagerness for aggression and war, especially when that aggression and war is being led by officials who, as I’m sure we will see in the new Biden Administration, happen to be women or people of color. For the first time recently, I have seen the concept of “intersectional imperialism” being used to describe this situation, and I believe this to be a very real phenomenon; to be but another means of making war that much easier to swallow for broad swaths of the American public. 

The irony, of course, is that the bombs dropped by the US in war, no matter who happens to be in charge of the US government at the time, disproportionately fall upon women and children of a darker skin hue, and they maim and kill just as much as those dropped by old white male Republicans. Sadly, few seem to understand or care about this.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.