[Peace-discuss] Obama kills to avoid Vietnam parallel

[C. G. Estabrook]

	"But the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America
	at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts
	Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while
	enacting an expansive domestic program" (NYT, below).

First, "salvaging" Afghanistan is typical NYT agitprop.  Remember how LBJ 
"salvaged" South Vietnam -- several million people dead and a peasant society 
destroyed with more ordnance used than in all of WWII.

Second, Obama is aware of the comparison, as is clear form his book Audacity of 
Hope.  He thinks he's found LBJ standing on his head -- losing Vietnam while 
trying for the "Great Society" -- and seeks to set the pattern upright for his 
own presidency: Obama is determined to *win* the Long War in the Middle East and 
is willing to sacrifice his domestic promises, notably healthcare, to that end.

He'll accept whatever healthcare bill emerges from the Congress, which will 
primarily benefit the financial/medical complex who support him. It will have 
some sops for the populace, or seem to, but the real beneficiaries will be 
obvious, while Obama gets his war on.

The healthcare "debate" is a necessary cover, since the majority of Americans 
oppose his war.  But Obama doesn't want to look like LBJ or Nixon, and he's 
willing to have a lot of people die to avoid that.  --CGE

============

	August 23, 2009 - NYT
	Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam?
	By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama had not even taken office before supporters were 
etching his likeness onto Mount Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the 
second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yet what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr. Obama is fated to be 
another Lyndon B. Johnson instead?

To be sure, such historical analogies are overly simplistic and fatally flawed, 
if only because each presidency is distinct in its own way. But the L.B.J. model 
— a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war 
abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage 
Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program.

In this summer of discontent for Mr. Obama, as the heady early days give way to 
the grinding battle for elusive goals, he looks ahead to an uncertain future not 
only for his legislative agenda but for what has indisputably become his war. 
Last week’s elections in Afghanistan played out at the same time as the debate 
over health care heated up in Washington, producing one of those split-screen 
moments that could not help but remind some of Mr. Johnson’s struggles to build 
a Great Society while fighting in Vietnam.

“The analogy of Lyndon Johnson suggests itself very profoundly,” said David M. 
Kennedy, the Stanford University historian. Mr. Obama, he said, must avoid 
letting Afghanistan shadow his presidency as Vietnam did Mr. Johnson’s. “He 
needs to worry about the outcome of that intervention and policy and how it 
could spill over into everything else he wants to accomplish.”

By several accounts, that risk weighs on Mr. Obama these days. Mr. Kennedy was 
among a group of historians who had dinner with Mr. Obama at the White House 
earlier this summer where the president expressed concern that Afghanistan could 
yet hijack his presidency. Although Mr. Kennedy said he could not discuss the 
off-the-record conversation, others in the room said Mr. Obama acknowledged the 
L.B.J. risk.

“He said he has a problem,” said one person who attended that dinner at the end 
of June, insisting on anonymity to share private discussions. “This is not just 
something he can turn his back on and walk away from. But it’s an issue he 
understands could be a danger to his administration.”

Another person there was Robert Caro, the L.B.J. biographer who was struck that 
Mr. Johnson made some of his most fateful decisions about Vietnam in the same 
dining room. “All I could think of when I was sitting there and this subject 
came up was the setting,” he said. “You had such an awareness of how things can 
go wrong.”

Without quoting what the president said, Mr. Caro said it was clear Mr. Obama 
understood that precedent. “Any president with a grasp of history — and it seems 
to me President Obama has a deep understanding of history — would have to be 
very aware of what happened in another war to derail a great domestic agenda,” 
he said.

Afghanistan, of course, is not exactly Vietnam. At its peak, the United States 
had about 500,000 troops in Vietnam, compared with about 68,000 now set for 
Afghanistan, and most of those fighting in the 1960s were draftees as opposed to 
volunteer soldiers. Vietnam, therefore, reached deeper into American society, 
touching more homes and involving more unwilling participants. But the politics 
of the two seem to evoke comparisons.

Just as Mr. Johnson believed he had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain 
communism, Mr. Obama last week portrayed Afghanistan as the bulwark against 
international terrorism. “This is not a war of choice,” he told the Veterans of 
Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix. “This is a war of necessity. Those 
who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the 
Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would 
plot to kill more Americans.”

But while many Americans once shared that view, polls suggest that conviction is 
fading nearly eight years into the war. The share of Americans who said the war 
in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipped below 50 percent in a survey released 
last week by The Washington Post and ABC News. A July poll by the New York Times 
and CBS News showed that 57 percent of Americans think things are going badly 
for the United States in Afghanistan, compared with 33 percent who think they 
are going well.

That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in 
Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the 
Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more columns questioning America’s 
involvement. The cover of the latest Economist is headlined “Afghanistan: The 
Growing Threat of Failure.”

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in 
The New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has 
become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now 
alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected 
terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and 
soldiers.

His former boss, George W. Bush, learned first-hand how political capital can 
slip away when an overseas war loses popular backing. With Iraq in flames, Mr. 
Bush found little support for his second-term domestic agenda of overhauling 
Social Security and liberalizing immigration laws. L.B.J. managed to create 
Medicare and enact landmark civil rights legislation but some historians have 
argued that the Great Society ultimately stalled because of Vietnam.

Mr. Obama has launched a new strategy intended to turn Afghanistan around, 
sending an additional 21,000 troops, installing a new commander, promising more 
civilian reconstruction help, shifting to more protection of the population and 
building up Afghan security forces. It is a strategy that some who study 
Afghanistan believe could make a difference.

But even some who agree worry that time is running out at home, particularly if 
the strategy does not produce results quickly. Success is so hard to imagine 
that Richard Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan, this 
month came up with this definition: “We’ll know it when we see it.”

The consequences of failure go beyond just Afghanistan. Next door is its 
volatile neighbor Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons and already seething with 
radical anti-American elements.

“It could all go belly up and we could run out of public support,” said Ronald 
E. Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and now president of the American 
Academy of Diplomacy. “The immediate danger is we don’t explain to Americans how 
long things take. I certainly get questions like, ‘Is the new strategy turning 
things around? Is the civilian surge working?’ We’re not going to even get all 
of those people on the ground for months.”

Others are not so sure that the new strategy will make a difference regardless 
of how much time it is given. No matter who is eventually declared the winner of 
last week’s election in Afghanistan, the government there remains so plagued by 
corruption and inefficiency that it has limited legitimacy with the Afghan 
public. Just as America was frustrated with successive South Vietnamese 
governments, it has grown sour on Afghanistan’s leaders with little obvious 
recourse.

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant, a retired Army officer who worked on Iraq on the 
National Security Council staff first for Mr. Bush and then for Mr. Obama, said 
Afghanistan may be “several orders of magnitude” harder. It has none of the 
infrastructure, education and natural resources of Iraq, he noted, nor is the 
political leadership as aligned in its goals with those of America’s leadership.

“We’re in a place where we don’t have good options and that’s what everyone is 
struggling with,” Colonel Ollivant said. “Sticking it out seems to be a 10-year 
project and I’m not sure we have the political capital and financial capital to 
do that. Yet withdrawing, the cost of that seems awfully high as well. So we 
have the wolf by the ear.”

And as L.B.J. discovered, the wolf has sharp teeth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/weekinreview/23baker.html?scp=2&sq=lbj&st=cse