I’ve been hard pressed to find the language of the bill/referendum. But as you say there is an incredible consciousness on the part of McKinney, Paul and Kucinich regarding military action.

I think we’d be very hard pressed to find three more principled congress people (regardless of what, from a progressive perspective, Paul’s domestic agenda is). In fact, contrary to Obama they are each the most un-Political politicians I know, with the exception of Nader.

But as far as Afghanistan, taking action to fnd who, and move toward bringing some level of justice to bear seems not only plausible but natural. The issue has always been the use of military forces. The military, at best, could only be an auxilary to track down a criminal - who ever that turned out to be. That’s NOT going to war. The US was not attacked in any substantive way on 9/11. Buildings and lives (many/most not US citizens) were destroyed. The natural reaction is to go after the perpetrators. Hijacking a few commercial airliners with box cutters is hardly an act of war - except to the most deviant mind (and perhaps the maddness of the moment).

I do not believe war was declared on the sovereign state of Afghanistan and its people. And I do NOT think McKinney (nor Kucinich nor Paul) ever thought it was.

You do see the difference between McKinney and Obama?

Where does Obama stand on getting out (bases and all) of Iraq? Afghanistan? And McKinney?

But you raise a conundrum, which are these two questions: Is it that you really think McKinney is not a progressive (as you seem to insist she is not) OR are you simply trying to apologize for the conservative corporate candidate Obama as someone BAR should not be disparaging?

Before this recent repeat of McKinney’s vote, you were regularly attacking BAR and Glenn Ford on DV with regard to Obama. So, there is, for me, a credibility issue here. Maybe you can clear this up.

IMO, Afghanistan is just as illegal a war as Iraq. I do recall at the time it was stated that the FBI had no solid evidence against Bin Laden and the former Afghan government offered to extradite Bin Laden if the Bush Administration would provide such evidence.

What needs to be remembered is that neither the people of Afghanistan nor the government of Afghanistan was involved in the 9-11 plot therefore the U.S. has no right to invade Afghanistan much less to topple their government and to install the puppet — Karzai.

I find it extremely ironic that the folks at Black Agenda Report who has nothing but disdain for Obama cannot advice folks to support Cynthia McKinney and describe her as the “most progressive” when she voted to give Bush the authorization to attack Afghanistan.

Thanks Ron for this article. The “Left” clearly needs to be reminded about Afghanistan.

…every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised–sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score.

Nicholas Dirks has written recently about the ‘missionary fervor about issues such as sati and thuggee (not to mention the much larger, though not unrelated, global fervor about slavery) to make empire not just better, but a necessary feature of British identity.’

Noam Chomsky also asks a pertinent comparative question related to plight of women in this clip. (starts at 0:17 and relevant comments are between 2:20 and 3:45).

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

-Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.