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.
Who knew?
My EYES, Thanks, I can see again.
I know there’s a joke here with pictures of Helen Thomas and the german shepherd dog, but whatever it is, I just don’t get it. If the joke is that Helen Thomas is a dog, I have to say that many dogs are very beautiful, including German Shepherds. Is the joke that the dog would rather go down fighting than to become a pet for Helen Thomas?
The joke is the horrified expression on the dog’s face when he gets a look at Helen Thomas.
My God! Who is that?
“The joke is the horrified expression on the dog’s face when he gets a look at Helen Thomas.”
Come to think of it, that would put a horrified expression on just about anybody’s face.
I think it's a little of both.
ROFL! I thought the same thing!
>.IMO we can never win the war in Afghanistan
Then we should get the hell out.
...”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.”...
Of course, the Tet offensive started at the end of January, 1968, not 1967. Helen Thomas has no credibility.
Looks like Andrea Tantaros to me...
(ah bestill my heart!!!@@!)
The minute we started withdrawing troops out of Iraq, we need to get of Afghanistan IMHO. Wouldn’t shock me to see the Brits draw way down there. It is an impossible terrain and the rules of engagement have changed to make the soldiers fight with one hand behind their back. When you have to stay away from civilian areas to bomb when you know the enemy is there, you have lost the war IMO. That means the Taliban just has to hide in villages and they are safe to go out pick off our troops and return to the village.
ZERO doesn’t have a clue and his plan is going to get American soldiers killed needlessly IMHO. Vietnam was micromanged by LBJ and we lost soldiers needlessly there as well.
1 just happens to let loose on the personal insults when 1 despises the unquestionably bad judgement of the subject.
Of course, I'm not "horrified" really. It's just a reaction to all the nonsense she constantly spills out.
She’s still getting used to American dialect as she is old enough to have used the King’ english (George the Third) She can remember the British offensive to put down that pesky group in Boston Harbor too!
you suck
“-8obama and the libs never understood this...”
I disagree. Their motivation has nothing to do with liberation or stability in that region, which is why the liberals did nothing about Sadam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”.
The issue is hegemony, and the liberals desire to maintain instability. They do not want a democracy, let alone a democratic republic to be established. It is a complex issue, but at the end of the day you must remember that Marxism is at the root of their ideology.
“The joke is the horrified expression on the dog’s face when he gets a look at Helen Thomas.”
Thanks for explaining; I should have been able to figure it out, the dog does look pretty scared.
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