Looking to 2010

Looking ahead to 2010, past the college basketball national championship (but you should still vote in the poll) and the debut of Steven Strasburg, to the mid-term elections I think things will eventually turn out well for President Obama and the nation.


This non-sports blog was prompted by yesterday's Frank Rich column, The Missing Link from Killeen to Kabul.  The column was about the double standard conservatives apply to the war on terror and how the United States relates to Muslims, both in the U.S. and in south Asia and the Middle East.  On one hand conservatives see the killings at Ft. Hood as proof that we can never work with or help Muslims.  On the other, they say they want more troops in Afghanistan, but those troops would be deployed to work with and help Muslims.


So which one is it? If conservatives think working with Muslims is hopeless, they should support pulling out all of troops - from both Iraq and Afghanistan (and I assume from Bosnia, where I think we still have troops, and Egypt, too).


But Rich's column reminded me of John McNamara's book "In Retrospective."  I remember reading that book on the beach in Cape Hatteras one summer and feeling equal parts sympathy and disgust for McNamara as he tried to deflect the blame for Vietnam.


However, Rich's column did not prompt me to blog about the parallel's between Afghanistan and Vietnam, though there are some obvious ones: long meandering wars initially supported by a public that eventually elects a president who pledges to end it - though in fairness that would make Obama Nixon even though Obama pledged to get us out of Iraq NOT Afghanistan; in order to win, we end up pushing the war into a neighboring country, Cambodia/Pakistan, with terrible consequences.  


For a number of reasons let's hope none of THAT happens, especially to nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country with a moderate and modern Muslim majority.


Of course, the big difference is that Vietnam wanted to be modern, and post-war integrated itself into the world economy so fast that the country is now full of factories cranking out sneakers for Nike and linens for Crate and Barrel.  Whereas many Afghans think the west is out to destroy Islam and therefore want nothing to do with us or any other infidels (silly Taliban; the only infidels are folks who root against the Tar Heels!  Had to get the Heels in here somewhere).


Anyway, back to McNamara's book.  One thing he noted, an item I have repeated ever since, is that politics is physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In "In Retrospective" McNamara claims that around 1967 LBJ and the administration had concluded that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and that we should start to pull our troops out and reduce the aerial bombing of North Vietnam.  


But when the President floated this idea with members of Congress, hawks like John Stennis and others on the Armed Services committee teamed up with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to resist.  They pushed back even though they did not have a plan to win the war.  They did not want to stop fighting it - Stennis wanted to escalate the bombings, which the US did after Nixon was elected in 1968 - even though we were not winning the war.  


The Johnson Administration was afraid Congressional hawks would call a peaceful retreat from Vietnam a defeat, America's first lost war. The President did not have the stomach for that political fight, did not withdraw our troops, and the war went on for another 5 years.   


I'm certainly not eloquent enough to blog about how tragic Johnson's decision to continue the war - even though his team of advisors knew we were losing - was.   But remember that half the names on the Vietnam Memorial, half of the 56,000 dead Americans, happened AFTER 1968.  As John Kerry asked in 1971, "how do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?"


I hope President Obama has the political courage to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.  There will be a fierce reaction from hawks like Cheney, Beck and others.  But it is the right thing to do.  We've been mired in Afghanistan for eight years, with almost nothing to show for it.  I agree with Vice President Biden, who has proposed drastically drawing down troop levels but actively pursuing the Taliban and other terrorists there using Special Forces, the CIA, etc.  


Pulling our troops out would also force the Afghans to fix their politics - something the South Vietnamese never did. 


Finally, pulling out is good politics.  The public is way ahead of Washington on this one, and I think the unease about Obama is coming as much from the NPR left as it is from the loony right.  I'm confident that the Obama folks will remember that, and nothing helps an elected official remember like an election.  


So do not be surprised if the President announces drastic troop reductions for both Iraq and Afghanistan next summer, a summer than may end up putting a punctuation mark on two good years for the Obama Administration. Health care will likely pass in December 2009, a green jobs/climate bill in the spring, and hopefully after six months of economic growth folks will start hiring enough to put a meaningful dent in the unemployment rate (Carolina and Hellenic Blue's business plan, for instance, calls for expansion in the summer 2010 so dust off your resumes!).


Doing the right thing in Afghanistan and Iraq a few months before the mid-year elections may be cynical but it is still the right thing to do, and what a democracy should do.