Tonight President Obama will announce his new Afghanistan policy. By all accounts it will be one of military escalation. This is a tragic moment--both for the nation and his presidency--and it is one I had hoped the President would avoid by courageously leading us in a wiser direction, one that views 21st century challenges anew, in fresh and necessary ways.

(...) Instead, with this escalation, we see the continuing grip of the National Security State--whose premises have been shared by the conservative and liberal hawks for close to 60 years, and which essentially remain unchallenged among the establishment and the mainstream media. Obama will now be held hostage to this mindset as a war bequeathed to him by a reckless and destructive administration becomes his own war.

This retro thinking and failure to explore real alternatives to military escalation reveal a deeper structural problem--the fact that there are too few countervailing voices or centers of power and authority to challenge the liberal hawks and interventionists, and very few if any are allowed to enter the halls of power. The political establishment works from its narrow consensus; meanwhile, the media fails to offer a full range of views.

(...) How do we build pressure for structural reforms and the changes we believe in? How do we change the paradigm so that we expose the retro National Security State as the failure it is? The structural problem demands action on several fronts. We need a serious think/do tank on national security issues which is capable of contesting the underlying premises for specific interventions, and also challenging the prevailing assumptions underlying the National Security state. (...)

If we don't look at the structural issues, we will always be fighting against the latest, newest, terrible, bad person/country that requires invading, occupying, or bombing with the latest weapon. We will also continue to lose reform-minded leaders to the powerful post-Cold War Military-Industrial-Terrorism complex. Its not hard to see how a Democratic candidate and now President like Obama--relatively unschooled in security issues--got caught up in establishment thinking. In choosing his foreign policy team, he looked to experienced advisors from the last Democratic presidency--a Clinton administration replete with establishment Democrats. (...)

I believe we progressives/ethical realists/clear-minded people/citizens who believe in common sense share some blame in not building a more powerful alternative foreign policy bench to compete with these counterinsurgency experts populating DC think tanks and Congress. (...)