> I don't know why you are surprised. Obama never promised to leave
> Afghanistan. He has always supported this war as the "good war".
I am not surprised. I know he threatened upfront to go after Afghanistan. And I didn't have any particular reason to doubt he'd actually do it.
But the fact that there is no surprise involved doesn't relieve him -- or me, or us -- of the moral and political responsibility for *actually* escalating the war. There is a crucial difference between a threat and the realization of a threat.
I voted for him and asked others to do so. I still believe, better him than the alternative -- which I know it wasn't going to be Karl Marx in the White House. It wasn't a decision in the abstract. But *precisely* because I supported his candidacy, I feel more compelled to denounce his decision in the strongest terms possible, for whatever that may be worth.
And that is all I am saying about it.
Talking about moral responsibility, I recently decided to start reading Istvan Meszaros, a task that I had joyfully postponed. I started with his new book, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, much smaller than his Beyond Capital. Still, it's a very difficult book for me, because of the way it's written. With time, I've grown much more impatient with the *unnecessarily* speculative, post-Hegelian, Lukacsian jargon. Back in the mid 1990s, I even sat in Agnes Heller's class at the New School. Believe me, it was painful. But I knew that at some point I had to go and read what actually-existing Marxists had been writing in the last twelve years or so, since I last checked them out. In spite of Lukacs, the essence of Marxism doesn't lie in a "method." Instead, it lies in whatever the hell actually-existing Marxists are doing (or failing to do) with their *time*. Anyway, to be fair with Meszaros, form is not everything in a book. He writes things like this, with which I agree wholeheartedly:
"The role of morality, in its ability to fight for the realization of humanity's positive potentialities and against the structurally entrenched forces of counter-value inherent in capital's deepening structural crisis, has never been greater than it is today." (p. 39.)