Speaking of Barack Obama’s middling 100-Days report card, we’ve all been so distracted by the shitty economy that not much attention has been paid to his willingness to pour money, people, and materiel into Afghanistan to continue the same war against the Taliban that ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union. And, it seems reasonably apparent that this same war is going to escalate from the current situation of border raids into Pakistan to a pretty-much full-fledged battle theater in Pakistan before its all over.
Now, you may not realize it, especially if you’re not over the age of 50, but that’s not a lot different from what happened with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all those years ago before Hanoi Jane lost the war. Lyndon Johnson took JFK’s little adventure in Southeast Asia and turned it into a big ol’ mess thinking he could just muscle his way through it (which was LBJ’s standard M.O. and had worked for him up to that point in his career). You know a war has turned into a debacle when a guy like Richard Nixon has to be the one to get out of it.
Back in the 1960s, public sentiment was generally in favor of the war in Vietnam until things started to go wrong. Legend has it that LBJ himself knew the jig was up when Walter Cronkite came out against the war in a news commentary. In the heady days of 1968, folk singer Pete Seeger got himself and the Smothers Brothers into a heap of trouble by singing a song called “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy”, which was a thinly-veiled swipe at LBJ (oh, and Happy 90th Birthday to Pete Seeger, while I’m thinking of it).
Even though Nixon won in 1968 with a “Secret Plan” to get out of Vietnam, by 1972 we were still there, albeit not for too much longer, and George McGovern ran against Nixon in the presidential election by also running against Lyndon Johnson. That didn’t work out too well for McGovern, unfortunately. But, unlike Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern is still with us today and he’s a little bit concerned that Barack Obama could be setting himself up for the same sort of debacle in Afghanistan that Johnson did in Vietnam. Here he is in a recent interview:
Frankly, I think it’s working to Obama’s long-term advantage that this is not a front-burner topic, because it does give him some room to change his mind; I’m just not sure if he will get a dose of sense and actually change his mind before he commits us to yet another quagmire.
