Vietnam Again?

As critics taunt the President about becoming another Jimmy Carter on the economy or Bill Clinton on health care reform, an older generation is haunted by the makings of another LBJ in Afghanistan.

General Stanley McChrystal's call for more troops with the or-else warning that our mission "will likely result in failure" is an invitation to follow the Vietnam path that led to 550,000 Americans fighting and over 50,000 being killed in a tribal war that ended in defeat and humiliation.

LBJ was motivated by the Domino Theory ("If we allow Vietnam to fall, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week in San Francisco"). President Obama is concerned about Afghanistan, and Pakistan, as safe havens for the kind of terrorists who executed 9/11.

He is on the brink of making a commitment but worries out loud: "Are we doing the right thing?" he said on CNN yesterday. "Are we pursuing the right strategy?

"I'm answerable to the parents of those young men and women who I'm sending over there, and I want to make sure that it's for the right reason."

His hesitation is well-founded. Beyond all the political blather is the reality that Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is the quintessence of Matthew Arnold's 19th century vision: "on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night."

In today's New York Times, conservative columnist Ross Douthat claims: "On foreign policy, Bush looks a lot like Lyndon Johnson--but only if Johnson, after years of unsuccessful escalation, had bequeathed Richard Nixon a new strategy that enabled U.S. troops to withdraw from Vietnam with their honor largely intact."

But Iraq, a highly developed society, is still wracked by violence with who-knows-what to come after American withdrawal at the price of more than 4300 lives.

How much honor will there be in trying to pacify a country beset by corruption, financed by heroin trade, and coming off a stolen presidential election? Even more to the point, do al Qaeda and its offshoots really need "safe havens" in Afghanistan when there is a world of Yemens, Somalias et al to hide them from exposure?

The President would be well-advised by the history of the last half-century to look beyond military escalation as "the right strategy" in Afghanistan.

Show Biz Strategy for Victory in Iraq

"We can't kill our way out," Gen. David Petraeus has said of Iraq, but now there is an effort to entertain them as we exit

The Defense Department, according to the Washington Post, will pay private U.S. contractors up to $300 million over the next three years "to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to 'engage and inspire' the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government."

The Pentagon was moved by the media operations of al Qaeda, which include slick Web sites with high-tech videos and audio tapes starring Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants.

"We're being out-communicated by a guy in a cave," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has complained.

The media offensive, which will include TV talent-search shows and talk radio programs, "may or may not be non-attributable to coalition forces. If they thought we were doing it, it would not be as effective," an American official says.

So part of the strategy of emerging from Iraq with victory and honor, as John McCain might put it, is flummoxing the locals anonymously with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of "American Idol" and Rush Limbaugh to help them appreciate the fruits of freedom and democracy.

Sounds like a plan.

General Petraeus, Meet President Obama

The human shield that Bush and his true believers have used to prolong the war in Iraq is now speaking out against making the same mistake in Iran.

Gen. David Petraeus, nominated to lead US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, will tell the Senate Armed Services Committee today that he supports continued engagement with international and regional partners to find diplomatic, economic and military leverage to deal with the challenge of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime.

The Washington Post reports that, in written answers to questions posed by the Committee, Petraeus said the possibility of military action against Iran should be retained as a "last resort" but that the US "should make every effort to engage by use of the whole of government, developing further leverage rather than simply targeting discrete threats."

This Senate testimony today may come as a shock to John McCain, Joe Lieberman et al who have been attacking their colleague Barack Obama for saying just that on the Presidential campaign trail.

Cynics may find Petraeus' attitude little more than a political adjustment to the inevitability of a Democratic Commander-in-Chief next year, but the General, despite his fronting for Bush-Cheney policies, has been a closet realist who has always maintained that we "can't kill our way out of Iraq."

It's encouraging to see him coming out of the closet.