Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 8:29 PM
Subject: Olbermann in fierce denunciation of Congress,
also calls Obama out, says he will not sign up.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34455431
"FIRST, DO NO HARM"
Dear Friends ---
You really should log onto MSNBC's Countdown and listen to Keith
Olbermann's fierce denunciation of the current health care bill and
the pathetic political weakness that allowed it. This fierceness is very
satisfying---and *SHOULD* have been coming from Obama for months
already.
It is powerful and well-reasoned. This is the strongest most direct
criticism by any prominent "responsible" liberal voice so far, certainly
stronger and more targeted than Dean's needed words yesterday (and
again today on MSNBC with Keith), and more articulated. He has strong
specific criticisms for Reid, Obama, Baucus, the Republicans, others,
calling Liebermann simply a prostitute. He is respectful toward Obama
as President, but also calls him out. Which has been needed.
And he promises, if the law passes without public aspect and keeps the
mandate, then he will break the law, and urges all people of conscience
to consider what they should do. He challenges the Congress, and dares
the President: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34455431
Michael
***
This is one to keep and reread in two years. It's deep, well-written,
and almost surely accurate. If not, it's a cataclysm, as with Vietnam.
ed
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/10/sorry_obama_afghanistans_your_vietnam?page=0,0
Obama's Indecent Interval
Despite the U.S. president's pleas to the contrary, the war in Afghanistan
looks more like Vietnam than ever.
BY THOMAS H. JOHNSON, M. CHRIS MASON
Foreign Policy Magazine: December 15, 2009
As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, truth is ridiculed,
then denied, and then "accepted as having been obvious to everyone from the
beginning." So let's start with the obvious: There isn't the slightest
possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech
will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan.
None. The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and
brought forth old wine in bigger bottles. The speech contained not one
single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a
conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing. Instead, the
administration deliberated for 94 days to deliver essentially "more men,
more money, try harder." It sounded ominously similar to Mikhail Gorbachev's
"bloody wound" speech that led to a similar-sized, temporary Soviet troop
surge in Afghanistan in 1986.
But the Soviet experience in Afghanistan isn't what everyone is comparing
Obama's current predicament to; it's Vietnam. The president knows it, and
part of his speech was a rebuttal of those comparisons. It was a valiant
effort, but to no avail. Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again.
In his speech, the president offered three reasons why the two conflicts are
different. And all are dead wrong. First, Obama noted that Afghanistan is
being conducted by a "coalition" of 43 countries -- as if war by committee
would magically change the outcome (a throwback to former President George
W. Bush's "Iraq coalition" mathematics). The truth is, outside of a handful
of countries, it's basically a coalition of pacifists. In fact, more foreign
troops fought alongside the United States in Vietnam than are now actually
fighting with Americans today. Only nine countries in today's 43-country
coalition have more than 1,000 personnel there; nine others have 10 (yes,
not even a dozen people) -- or fewer. And although Australia and New Zealand
have sent a handful of excellent special operations troops to Afghanistan,
only Britain, Canada, and France are providing significant forces willing to
conduct conventional offensive military operations. That brings the
coalition's combat-troop contribution to approximately 17,000. Most of the
other 38 "partners" have strict rules prohibiting them from ever doing
anything actually dangerous. Turkish troops, for example, never leave their
firebase in Wardak province, according to U.S. personnel who monitor it.
In Vietnam, by contrast, there were six countries fighting with the United
States. South Korea alone had three times more combat troops in that country
(50,000) than the entire coalition has in Afghanistan today. The Philippines
(10,500), Australia (7,600), New Zealand (500), Thailand (about 1,000), and
Taiwan also had boots on the ground. So the idea that Afghanistan's
coalition sets it apart doesn't hold water.
The president went on to assert that the Taliban are not popular in
Afghanistan, whereas the Viet Cong represented a broadly popular nationalist
movement with the support of a majority of the Vietnamese. But this is also
wrong. Neither the Viet Cong then, nor the Taliban now, have ever enjoyed
the popular support of more than 15 percent of the population, according to
Daniel Ellsberg, the senior Pentagon official who courageously leaked the
Pentagon Papers revealing the military's endemic deceit in the Vietnam War.
The president's final argument, that Afghanistan is different because
Vietnam never attacked American soil, is a red herring. History is
overflowing with examples of just causes that have gone down in defeat. To
suggest that the two conflicts will have different outcomes because the U.S.
cause in Afghanistan is just (whereas, presumably from the speech, the war
in Vietnam was not) is simply specious. The courses and outcomes of wars are
determined by strategy, not the justness of causes or the courage of troops.
The reality on the ground is that Afghanistan is Vietnam redux. Afghan
President Hamid Karzai's regime is an utterly illegitimate, incompetent
kleptocracy. The Afghan National Army (ANA) -- slotted to take over the
conflict when the coalition pulls out -- will not even be able to feed
itself in five years, much less turn back the mounting Taliban tide. The
U.S. Center for Army Lessons Learned determined by statistical analysis that
the ANA will never grow larger than 100,000 men because nearly 30 percent
either desert or fail to re-enlist each year. The ANA is disproportionately
Tajik, drug use is a major problem, all recruits are illiterate, and last
month the ANA reached only half its modest recruiting goal despite 40
percent unemployment nationwide. The American media, in its own regression
to 1963, simply regurgitates Pentagon press releases that vastly inflate the
actual size of the Afghan military, which is actually less than 60,000 men,
just 32,000 of whom are combat troops.
The strategy's other component for dealing with the Taliban, "negotiating
with moderates," is also ludicrous to anyone who is familiar with the
insurgents. The Taliban are a virus. There is no one to negotiate with, and
from their perspective, nothing to discuss. And the Taliban know they are
winning. Meanwhile, commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plan to secure the
urban areas (rather than the rural countryside where the insurgency is
actually metastasizing) is plagiarized from the famous never-written
textbook, How to Lose a War in Afghanistan, authored jointly by Alexander
the Great, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union.
Most critically of all, Pakistan's reaction to Obama's speech was to order
its top military intelligence service, the ISI, to immediately begin
rebuilding and strengthening covert ties to the Afghan Taliban in
anticipation of their eventual return to power, according to a highly placed
Pakistani official. There will be no more genuine cooperation from Pakistan
(if there ever was).
And that is why the United States is now headed for certain defeat in
Afghanistan. Obama's new "strategy" is no strategy at all. It is a cynical
and politically motivated rehash of Iraq policy: Toss in a few more troops,
throw together something resembling local security forces, buy off the
enemies, and get the hell out before it all blows up. Even the dimmest bulb
listening to the president's speech could not have missed the obvious link
between the withdrawal date for combat troops from Iraq (2010), the date for
beginning troop reductions in Afghanistan (2011), and the domestic U.S.
election cycle.
So we are faced with a conundrum. Obama is one of the most intelligent men
ever to hold the U.S. presidency. But no intelligent person could really
believe that adding 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, a country four times
larger than Vietnam, for a year or two, following the same game plan that
has resulted in dismal failure there for the past eight years, could
possibly have any impact on the outcome of the conflict.
Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes used to say that "when you
have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must
be the truth." The only conclusion one can reach from the president's
speech, after eliminating the impossible, is that the administration has
made a difficult but pragmatic decision: The war in Afghanistan is
unwinnable, and the president's second term and progressive domestic agenda
cannot be sacrificed to a lost cause the way that President Lyndon B.
Johnson's was for Vietnam. The result of that calculation was what we heard
on Dec. 1: platitudes about commitment and a just cause; historical amnesia;
and a continuation of the exact same failed policies that got the United
States into this mess back in 2001, concocted by the same ship of fools,
many of whom are still providing remarkably bad advice to this
administration.
We believe the president knows perfectly well that Afghanistan is Vietnam
all over again, both domestically and, as we wrote in Military Review this
month, in Kabul and out in the Afghan hills, where good men are bleeding and
dying. And he's seeking the same cynical exit strategy that Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger did in 1968: negotiating the best possible second-place
position and a "decent interval" between withdrawal and collapse. In office
less than a year, the Obama administration has already been seduced by the
old beltway calculus that sometimes a little wrong must be done to get
re-elected and achieve a greater good.
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