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.
Well, what’s he waiting for. Grab and gun, a teleprompter, camera’s to hand out to the Taliban supporters, and get over there.
That picture should ban your forevermore from posting pictures. You should be ashamed of yourself.
:)
FReepmail me if you'd like to be added to the list.
EEEEEKKKK! lol
Helen, you are the gift that keeps on giving.
Right now the lamestream media are still pretty much in love with their messiah. When they realize that they made him and they can break him, they will smell blood and it won’t be pretty.
Except from our perspective. I only pray that comes sooner rather than later.
How many fake leopards died th make the witch’s clothing?
Yeah. You’d think someone who has been a “journalist” for six decades would at least be able to employ proper English, wouldn’t you? The headline should read “Afghanistan Is Now Obama’s War.” Sheesh!
Bush determined early on that fighting the war on terror primarily in Afghanistan would be a mistake of immense magnitude. Afghanistan has been the death of armies for centuries. Iraq was a far better battlefield in which to fight the war, and was the main reason we have had so much success to date in the war on terror.
-8bama and the libs never understood this and will now pay the price in american soldier lives for their shortsightedness.
Speaking of HT, here are a couple of old threads I ran across recently.
Helen Thomas ‘Miffed’ at Doonesbury, Wanted to Be Rumored as ‘JFK’s Lover’# 39
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1874571/posts
Helen Thomas: Vince Foster was murdered in the white house # 22 #41 #61
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1780706/posts
I know you warned me but you never really can be prepared for that.
Helen looks more beautiful every day.Like an old wine, she matures well.
I wish I were the President of the U.S.A. I would let Helen question and probe me each and everyday.
Thank you for the picture.
It was indeed, 1968.
I didn’t know Bob Newhart was a White House press reporter during Johnson’s tenure.
Began January 30, 1968.
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.
Despite haveing lived through it, Helen is no student of
history.
The VC Tet offensive was a debacle, a debacle for the communists! The influx of 240,000 more american troops
at that time would have meant the rout of the communist forces, that combined with the mining of Haipong harbor
would have meant the end of the war. Johnson however, lacked the fortitude to stay with a winning strategy and
QUIT in the middle of the struggle to appease the very people his party nurtured.
She is right on one thing though it IS Obama’s war now.
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