The Moral Argument.
Washington Bureau Chief John Bussey, WSJ, makes a rare and welcome video to present this strangely academic moment in the young Obama administration, in which we are told, with White House cooperation, that the split in Washington over the Afghanistan war can be viewed as the war between two books. This is laughable and entertaining of the Obama administration, to sell books while debating policy based upon memoirs. Gordon Goldstein is a careful scholar, and he developed his book from notes left by McGeorge Bundy on Bundy's memory (Bundy died in 1995) of serving JFK and LBJ in the Vietnam fiasco. Not a word in Gordon's book is devoted to the Pashtuns or Kabul or the stooge Karzai's theft of the election. It is a book about Vietnam and mistakes made forty years ago by the White House decisions to end the war with contrivances and short-cuts and grotesque policies -- chiefly the mistake of launching a CIA coup against the Diem Brothers in November 1963, and then the mistake of growing MACV to half-a-million GIs, mostly draftees. Lewis Sorley's "A Better War" is also about Vietnam, but from the point of view of generals and diplomats who fought to save the country from being overrun by the Communist tyrants. Sorley's book makes the moral point that saving the Vietnamese was worth the fight. Goldstein's book lets Bundy make the moral point that murdering the Diem brothers was a collossal crime against the country that wrecked all American moral suasion. After that, it was the American empire invades colonial Vietnam with the cosmetic assistance of hirelings, stooges, careerists, devils and a deaf Congress of self-confident crones and their lapdogs.
Why the Book Club at the White House?
The rambling, clumsy, foggy national discussion about Afghanistan is itself the measure of the Obama administration's foreign policy. POTUS is a conventional thinker. This is not a negative, though it is unusually predictable. The negative is that POTUS pauses to make a show of his conventional, predictable, overcooked indecision. Two months ago, POTUS called Afghanistan a "war of necessity," -- as opposed to witless George Bush's "war of choice" in Afghanistan. Since then, POTUS has been back-pedaling and drifting. Now the so-called debate. About two books? Not entirely about the books, more about the Hyde Park professorial style of the man who is POTUS. POTUS does not know diplomacy. POTUS is a junior senator who was ushered into the White House without notes. He did not pay dues. He did not arrive with a foreign policy. POTUS must construct a foreign policy from the advice of his rivals and adversaries (presidents do not have friends unless they love their dogs) and selfish dependents. POTUS chooses also to read books about what he is told was a similar senator who arrived in the White House without a foreign policy -- not much of one, somthing about the missile gap (didn't exist) and the Straits of Taiwan (empty) and standing up to Khrushchev (JFK did not). POTUS is welcome to dog-ear the pages about the JFK decision to eliminate the absurd kleptocrats the Diem brothers. POTUS is stuck with the same characters in the kleptocrat Karzai brothers. The loud hint is that a coup against the Karzais is probably not shrewd. POTUS can learn what not to do from Gordon Goldstein's book. POTUS can learn from Lewis Sorley's book what is to be gained by sticking by people who will otherwise be abandoned to the depravity of Taliban vice. Neither of these books can tell POTUS what to decide. They are not about the Hindu Kush or the Pashtuns. Sherlock Holmes's colleague Dr. Watson knows about Afghanistan, since he was a veteran. POTUS is not yet reading "A Study in Scarlet."
I can see that there are a few parallels between the Vietnam War and the Afgha conflict, but, not many.
Again, I wonder and ask whether or not we would pull out if there was an acceptable peace and calm in the region for a couple of years? I think I know the answer... still, mine is just a somewhat educated guess.
Now comes word that the Taliban is saying, almost apologetically, that there is no reason to worry about them because they really don't want to hurt anyone. They just want the foreigners to leave the land and until this happens they will continue to fight with utmost patience. Hmm, hmmm... the thing is 99.99% of the citizens of the land want the Taliban to leave and permanently disappear. They know how the T-ban work. They know because they have lived through it before.
OshKosh has begun delivering by airlift 300-500 of the new M-ATV that was contracted to them only three months ago. 1500 or more will begin moving by sea to the area in the next few months. The new land mine resistant and off road design will replace all the modified Humvees currently being used.
I speculate that the good Generals get what they believe they need at this moment in history... to put an end to the nonsense.
Remember how Reagan was asked at a presser if he had read any good books lately (or something like that?)
He answered that he was reading a "perfect yarn" at the time and it was "The Hunt for Red October"
Prior to that comment, the novel was obscurely known only as the first work of fiction that the Naval Institute Press ever published. Clancy had been given a $5000 advance.
Conventional wisdom has it that we need not re-live the mistakes of the past if we allow history to inform us. A practical way of doing this is to examine the historical record as it is outlined in books. Now we find that the historical record itself is flawed because it was written by men with conflicting views and motives. We also see - as Spencer points out - that, whereas there might be parallels, each situation differs in significant ways.
The lesson here is that history alone does not absolve the decision maker from doing his duty. Neither can history provide a shield for the consequences of any decision he might have to make.
Clearly, our president is not up to the task of being commander-in-chief. He appears not to trust himself or anyone around him. Still, with respect to Afghanistan, whether to send in more troops or throw in the towel is a decision only he can make. As such, only he can bear the blame should something go wrong.
I believe, that Obama never thought he'd be in this predicament. I believe he always envisioned that doing nothing was a credible out - a third way. Now he knows that this is not merely an academic exercise in which deus ex machina always works on paper and is always dismissively marked 'genius' - given the affirmative action factor - by exhausted and cynical ivy league rug rats.
Obama will have to call it, one way or the other. It's what he signed up for. Suddenly, he no longer seems as cocky as he was during the campaign. I wonder if he might not be considering picking up the phone and asking Bush. Nah, that would be too easy. Or would it?
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Here's something to ponder while we watch for and anticipate all the failings and shortcomings involving the current administration.
What if someone was writing a temporal futuristic novel and after several years they began seeing that the most important events elaborated in the writing were actually coming true and it appeared that the once futuristic conjectures had been written as if they were just superficial reports loosely based on recent historic happenings?
Could the author ever finish without betraying himself by writing predictions he believes cannot ever come true? For instance, an author begins writing a temporal futuristic novel where the most important events elaborated in the writing begin to come true and he can never call the work finally completed.
Decisions of life, death, war, and peace must be so easy when you are a neo-con.
Now he knows that this is not merely an academic exercise in which deus ex machina always works on paper and is always dismissively marked 'genius' - given the affirmative action factor - by exhausted and cynical ivy league rug rats.
Umm... have you ever heard of George W. Bush?
Protestant racism, fostered in those ivory New England towers, is the undercurrent of both the left and right. The veiled slurs of neo-con(Jew) and bleeding-heart(Catholic) go not unnoticed. Indeed the repentant self-flagellatory guilt trip of the left stems from their Protestant ideology*. Leading to the belief in the need for the South-Side Messiah, who will repent for all sins (real and imagined) while saving the world from famine, war, disease and America herself. America, which is now being stripped so she can lay bare on their altar as the final sacrifice. Will God accept?
*Whether you are a follower or not, as the foundation of our society, the laws and morals, you are surrounded and informed by it.
~Do what thou wilt.
To smear someone as an anti-Semite because he refers to the term "neconservative"--a label embraced by thinkers such as Irving Kristol and Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Samuel Huntington to describe their own political orientation--is the sort of tactic resorted to by those liberals who call opponents of affirmative action and Obamacare racist. Not a very impressive display on your part.
As for the rest of your post, including the bit about the how "the repentant self-flagellatory guilt trip of the left stems from their Protestant ideology," it was even harder to decipher than the usual run of posts on this blog. At least you did not refer to the Protestant South as a hotbad of liberalism.
Perhaps I'll resume my attempt to figure out what you were struggling to say after I've at last read all of that great conservtiveTed Kennedy's obituaries. There's quite a stack of them to get through.
No smear intended. Regardless of who dons the term neo-con, it's use by detractors is often code. Last I heard Ted Kennedy was a bleeding heart liberal, and why in hell would you bother reading a single one of his obits. The Martin Luther self whipping repentance is the foundation of all their policies, an attempt to make good via self sacrifice (or in this case the sacrifice of others). Those liberals that support affirmative action and Obamacare are the racist. A lot of people are still waiting for their 40 acres and mule.
"At least you did not refer to the Protestant South as a hotbed of liberalism." ~Saving that for another day.
>Regardless of who dons the term neo-con, it's use by detractors is often code.
I take you to mean that if Irving Kristol, author of "Confessions of a Neoconservative," refers to himself a neoconservative, that's okay, but if a detractor calls him that, then the the opponent stands revealed as an anti-Semite. Does that remarkable formulation apply to Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Samuel Hunginton--the latter of whom I admire a great deal, incidentally--as well? If not, why?
Not "a" detractor as in any, but certain detractors (usually liberal, but also popular among the far-right). Their standing as an anti-Semite or anti-Catholic should be a case by case bases. Often given away by the wink and nod. Years of listening, for insight and laughs, to the local (NYC) left radio has admittedly turned much of my mind to mush. What's clear is that they* are vehement anti-Semites and mild anti-Catholics, which is to say they are not very Catholic at all. Though strangely Jews and Catholics make up their mix (self-haters?) most come from Protestant backgrounds, even with many of them having abandoned religion, they still keep its tenets. Hence the creeping meatballism of their collective guilt trip. Or maybe I have tunnel vision?
*the community activist/organizers, the street, the student rebels with their flags of red, the front men, the bag holders, and the money that keeps all this going
Do you mean to say that if an opponent of the Iraq invasion refers to Neoconservative advocates of the war as Neoconservatives, then he is guilty of anti-Semitism, but that if a supporter of the war refers to his Neoconservative allies as Neoconservatives, then he is innocent of anti-Semitism?
Is the use of certain words, then, to be denied to those of one political disposition but allowed by others, much as blacks may freely speak the N-word, but whites--Quentin Tarantino excepted, of course--must not?
Simply astonishing.
No you are correct all things need names or they would be no-things. Neoconservative will do find for anyone to use. You have my permission.
On a previous thread someone, I'm not sure who, wrote "pig-ignorant neo-cons". Pig-headed would imply pig iron, that they are dense blockheads. Pig-ignorant implies those that know not swine. How should this be construed?
Be not spellbound.
The things that you learn reading this blog. I had no idea that Kellogg's still put decoder rings in each box of Rice Krispies.
There's no such thing as neoanything because it's already gone. Anything "new" has arrived too late.
How 'bout Nowacon with headphones?
Whacha fitin 'bowt?
Spence makes sense. Pop!
It's always good when two like-minded souls find each other in this lonely world.
Hey, you've been readin' & postin' for goin' on 6 hours!
~free Tibet!
Don't get your pressure up TftT... Kenneth never has anything to say that's not commenting on someone elses comments.
Indeed. I had a not-very-interesting freelance piece to finish writing tonight, and kept looking here because I bore very, very easily. Happily, I have just finished with the damned thing, which means that I get to eat next week.
"And so to bed," as the diarist Samuel Pepys used to put it. (Speaking of people who really do write in code.)
I hate to even mention this, but (sic), the story on the suicide bomber that tried to hurt that Saudi Prince recently had placed the explosives in his rectum and detonated them with his cellphone. Eewwww... they say it blew him into 70 pieces.
Imagine what this means for the future!!! Arrgghhh!!!
おはよう。Tak mucho 4 z link. Yo inta kneaded dar crosslations. Mysterioso?
We were lucky enough to have Gordon Goldstein, the author of “Lessons on Disaster” on our show last spring. As the debate about Afghanistan continues to grow along with the comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan, we edited together a 27 minute segment of our two hour interview with Mr. Goldstein that addresses those comparisons specifically.
You can find the video, for free of course, on our youtube/edu channel :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdp6K9reBSg
Kathryn Jones
mslaw.edu
— kathryn jones