Afghanistan

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Saturday September 26, 2009 · 2:58 PM PDT

2009/09/26 · 14:58

Dear President Obama,

The past few nights my girlfriend and I watched the PBS documentary about LBJ. We were hoping to find some examples for you of how he had bullied, bribed, blackmailed, and browbeaten fellow Democrats into voting for elements of his Great Society legislation - because, as you know, he did those things, and because we feel you need to be following his example, particularly with respect to health care reform, which seems headed for disappointment - either a weak bill, a gift to corporate interests, or, more likely, no bill at all. But I digress.

We saw parallels between LBJ's presidency and your own as we watched the documentary, but they were not the parallels we anticipated. The strongest analogy between the presidency of LBJ and yours, thus far, I fear, is the one we must draw between Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Because of Vietnam - the war not the country - LBJ is remembered, not as the great president he might otherwise have been, but as a tragic failure. And rightly so. His fear of appearing weak, or of being called weak by hawkish Republicans; his desire not to be seen as a coward; his misplaced regard for his overeducated advisors - these factors all led him to escalate an unwinnable war we ought never have fought in the first place. And his fear of seeming to dither, of appearing to lack resolve, of simply admitting error; these fears led him to further escalate and to lie to the American people about why our boys were killing and dying in a far off country.

I thought, after watching the documentary, that what LBJ, that crafty expert on legislative process, should have done is this: he should have very publicly asked the Congress for a Declaration of War, then failed to do his usual arm-twisting. In that way he could have been seen as hawkish, but without the harm of actual escalation. Put the blame on the Congress, while actually bringing about a saner policy. And, not entirely incidentally, re-establishing the Constitutional assignment of war power to the appropriate body. I think this would have been brilliant, and would have permitted LBJ to accomplish the great reforms that were his domestic agenda.

As a Constitutional scholar yourself, I imagine you must share my dismay that the Executive branch has, since WWII, essentially usurped the power to declare war that the Constitution gave to the Congress. I would hope that you would want to see this power restored to its rightful place, and I hope you will consider acting - from the Office of the President - to restore it.

Like LBJ, I am sure there is a lot you would like to accomplish domestically as president. I fear that your domestic agenda may, like LBJ's, be destroyed by an expensive bloody pointless foreign war, a quagmire. I hope you have the courage LBJ lacked, to be honest with yourself and the American people, to admit a mistake rather than perpetuating and exacerbating it. I hope you will de-escalate in Afghanistan, and I hope you will help to restore the Congress' rightful power to declare war in the course of doing so.

Thank you for your consideration.

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