Reply #86: No coincidence. [View All]

[Octafish]

Team Evil

The War Last Time

By THOMAS POWERS
South Royalton, Vt.
November 30, 2006
NYT Op-Ed Contributor

THE chaotic war in Iraq is the great piece of unfinished business that will soon face Robert M. Gates, President Bush’s choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He will assume the difficult charge of halting the collapse of American strategy at a moment when the president’s freedom to maneuver has been curtailed by the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and by the free-for-all sectarian killing in Iraq.

Mr. Gates arrives at the Pentagon with no background in running the immense American military establishment, no broad political constituency, and no experience fighting or managing a big ground war. What he does bring is a survivor’s knowledge of how to push forward a controversial policy — President Ronald Reagan’s campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s — and a history of close association with President Bush’s father. It was President George H. W. Bush who appointed Mr. Gates to his biggest job — running the Central Intelligence Agency.

Simple realism — totting up the Congressional votes the president can count on to back or oppose him — suggests that a turning point has been reached in Iraq. Getting in is over, and getting out is about to begin. I am reminded of a similar moment 41 years ago, when Lyndon Johnson was facing the bleak but imminent prospect of his South Vietnamese allies’ collapse in Saigon. The year was 1965, and Johnson had just been overwhelmingly re-elected president over Senator Barry Goldwater on the oft-repeated campaign pledge not to send American boys thousands of miles away to fight a war that Asian boys ought to fight.

Johnson’s advisers put it to him straight: Saigon was going to lose, Hanoi was going to win, and there wasn’t much time to waste. The choice was clear: lose the war or expand the war, find a formula of words to mask failure or send more troops and increase the bet on the table. Johnson chose to expand the war.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/opinion/30powers.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

The same turd mentality holds today. The odd thing is, there's a direct line between the turds who made Vietnam into a money-making quagmire. Their heirs and political descendants today also are doing their damndest to make an illegal war into a money-making quagmire.