Sold by the President as a temporary "surge," it now appears the Pentagon has overruled any thought of significantly diminishing its bootprint in Afghanistan at the end of the President's 18 month window.
This morning's Washington Post
McChrystal's Afghanistan plan stays mainly intact
Even the most specific change by the White House in McChrystal's war plan -- that U.S. forces begin leaving Afghanistan by July 2011 -- may be less of a turning point than envisioned. Senior administration officials said in television interviews broadcast Sunday the date would be only the beginning of a gradual withdrawal.
"We will have 100,000 forces, troops there," Gates said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "and they are not leaving in July of 2011."
They'll destroy the Obama Presidency as they did Lyndon Johnson's. It'll come home in the form of a bloody police riot outside the next Democratic Convention. We know how that turns out.
Forget about the FBI keeping an eye on domestic rightwing terrorists, they'll be too busy surveilling the anti-war movement.
President Johnson's April 7, 1965 address, preceding his second escalation sounds an awful lot like the speech President Obama gave the nation last week. At the time, US casualties in Vietnam numbered a bit over 400.
Peace Without Conquest
Why must we take this painful road?
Why must this Nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away?
We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.
This kind of world will never be built by bombs or bullets. Yet the infirmities of man are such that force must often precede reason, and the waste of war, the works of peace.
We wish that this were not so. But we must deal with the world as it is, if it is ever to be as we wish.
The world as it is in Asia is not a serene or peaceful place.
While the President sought to distinguish his exoansion of the Afghan War from the Vietnam quagmire, even Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense under Nixon, finds parallels. August 29 interview with Milwaukee Journal/Sentinal's Craig Gilbert
Laird sees similarities between Afghanistan, Vietnam
Ultimate political insider says Obama is trying to do too much and offers his views on Afghanistan and today's political culture
Almost four decades after he presided over the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, former defense secretary Melvin R. Laird finds himself deeply wary of another lengthy American war in Asia, this one in Afghanistan.
"I would say, 'Be careful,' " says the Republican Laird, 86, when asked what his advice would be for Democratic President Barack Obama. "You're not going to gain a helluva lot, and we're going to lose a lot of people."...
Laird did not categorically oppose more troops, but warned against an open-ended military presence, citing the limits of interventionism ("We can't be the policeman all over the world") and Afghanistan's historic resistance to outside influence.
"It's a helluva place to send American forces," he says. "In the long run, do you gain anything? Or does it revert back?"
Laird has argued that Vietnam analogies are overused, but says the parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan is that "they're both bad places to go to war. You know, if you're going to pick a bad place, you pick those countries."...
Laird's mantra about war today is a product of his experience in Vietnam.
"Wars are very easy to get into," he says, "but they're awfully hard to get out of."