..a fleetingly (beautiful) photo, pulled from FR. 
Posted on 07/16/2009 9:24:22 AM PDT by seanmerc
WASHINGTON -- I had an historical flashback recently when I read a Washington Post news story about how the U.S. commander in Afghanistan thinks he may need many thousands more troops to win the war.
Shades of Vietnam. Do we ever learn?
It brought back memories of the late Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Southeast Asia, who kept escalating the troop numbers after the 1967 Tet offensive in Vietnam. His strategy produced a debacle for us.
When the besieged Westmoreland requested 240,000 more troops, President Lyndon B. Johnson was shocked. The command in Vietnam had been giving him rosy reports about U.S. military progress that he wanted to believe.
Johnson had been preparing to run for reelection in 1968. However, after the devastating Westmoreland request, Johnson threw in the towel and made the electrifying announcement that he would not seek another term.
Fast forward to Afghanistan, 2009.
Now seven years into the war there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is in the middle of a 60-day assessment of the war, due next month. But the Washington Post article says he has been giving Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates weekly updates about the need to bolster the size of the Afghan army and police force and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. trainers and advisers.
The present Pentagon plan calls for about 68,000 U.S. troops to be in Afghanistan by late this year.
Afghanistan, which once harbored Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida training camps, has been on Obama’s agenda since his presidential campaign. Now it’s his war -- big time -- even as it takes on the appearance of another quagmire for U.S. forces in their effort to quell the Taliban and al Qaida fighters.
Gates is expected to go along with whatever McChrystal concludes is necessary. So is President Barack Obama, a neophyte who has taken on the mission defined by the Bush administration, apparently without hesitation.
Maybe the president should have asked the Russians on his recent journey to Moscow how it was that a superpower like the Soviet Union could have been forced to retreat from Afghanistan in the 1980s, despite its modern military might.
Granted the U.S. was supporting the Afghans with arms and training but the war proved to be too much for the Soviet forces.
The late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in the Kennedy and Johnson eras delivered public mea culpas in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. His guilt was that he stayed with the U.S. military strategy in Vietnam, even though he was convinced that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
Speaking of the war in his 1995 memoir, McNamara said: "We were wrong, terribly wrong."
I don’t expect the same kind of acknowledgement from the neoconservatives who got us into Iraq. That would be the day.
According to Bradley Graham, a biographer of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and an ex-Washington Post Pentagon reporter, Rumsfeld never wavered in his conviction that he did the right thing by invading Iraq. Graham said Rumsfeld had no regrets about his conduct of the war and dismissed his question about what was his biggest mistake.
Nor will former President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or their hawkish team of architects show any remorse for their terrible mistake in attacking Iraq.
The buck now stops with Obama, who is making a big deal about how he doesn’t want to look back at past mistakes. He could end up repeating those mistakes.
“Johnson was not interested in winning or losing the war - he and his inner circle wanted to perpetuate it for as long as politically viable for the benefit of certain contractors...”
I don’t know enough about this to say whether I agree or disagree with you, but I wonder what you think of JFK’s involvement in this, because I thought our military efforts in Viet Nam began under his watch. The historical impression I have of JFK (I was two when he was assassinated) was that he was strongly anti-communist so that he acted in good faith in trying to halt the expansion of communism in southeast asia. Although he was a democrat, it seems to me that he was much more conservative than the rest of the Kennedy family.
Tet began Jan. 30, 1968. It resulted in the death of about 50,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. The U.S. lost around 1,500 troops (KIA) and the South Vietnamese forces less than 3,000. North Vietnamese Gen. Giap tried to apply a strategy, used by Mao in China and Castro in Cuba, that predicted urban populations would revolt and turn against the South Vietnamese government when the NVA and VC attacked the cities. But most South Vietnamese had an opposite reaction and the offensive was a defeat for Giap. However, the U.S. news media immediately began to spin the Tet Offensive as a communist victory. Instead of exploiting the crippling losses suffered by the NVA President Lyndon Johnson threw in the towel. He suspended U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese logistics centers and the supply lines that would be used to slowly rebuild the NVA presence in the South.
The real “debacle” took place in 1975 when a cabal of Democrat traitors—including Church, McGovern, and Kennedy—led Congress in cutting all funding and U.S. military support to South Vietnam. After beating back two massive North Vietnamese offensives, the South was finally overrun by the North which was equipped and supplied by the Soviets. This led to systematic genocide and a huge refugee flood out of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Two Democrat presidents, a Democrat Congress, and their ignorant enablers in the news media, like Thomas, authored this debacle.
“The Face That Sank A Thousand Ships”
Seems as though Hellen is continuing to hold a grudge. Journalists should be ashamed that this is one of the most hard-hitting articles Obama has had to face- and it’s pretty weak sauce!
..a fleetingly (beautiful) photo, pulled from FR.
Don’t tell me even Helen Thomas is turning against Obortion Obama.
yhea, pretty much "sums" it all up.
Marxist ("Progressive Socialist" Democrats)
Liberals, Enemy of Freedom and Liberty.....
she won't be the last....Zer0 et al shall retire her...
stripping her... *NO!* (banish that mental thought :), of her Press Cred.
George McGovern couldn't stand the fact that Richard Nixon, who inherited LBJ's “lost cause,” bombed Hanoi into submission, ended the draft, instituted Vietnamization of the war, began withdrawing U.S. forces, and created the All-Volunteer Army. Even after Nixon was ousted by Watergate, the continued existence of a free South Vietnam threatened to become one of his positive legacies.
Almost 40 years later Obama and the Democrats are experiencing Deja Vu. If Iraq remains stable and it preserves its budding democracy it becomes a lasting legacy to Bush and the incredible sacrifices of our military. Two weeks ago Joe Biden was in Iraq. He told Iraqis that if there was a return to terrorist violence “you are on your own.”
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