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Newsweek: "Obama's Vietnam" Is Afghanistan
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com —
... New York--In an essay opening the February 9 Newsweek cover package, "Obama's Vietnam", National Security Correspondent John Barry and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas lay out the growing parallels between the war in Afghanistan and our long struggle in Vietnam. "The parallels are disturbing: the president, eager to show his toughness, vows to do what it takes to 'win.' The nation that we are supposedly rescuing is no nation at all but rather a deeply divided, semi-failed state with an incompetent, corrupt government held to be illegitimate by a large portion of its population," ...
Newsweek: "Obama's Vietnam" Is Afghanistan
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed —
... New York--In an essay opening the February 9 Newsweek cover package, "Obama's Vietnam", National Security Correspondent John Barry and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas lay out the growing parallels between the war in Afghanistan and our long struggle in Vietnam. "The parallels are disturbing: the president, eager to show his toughness, vows to do what it takes to 'win.' The nation that we are supposedly rescuing is no nation at all but rather a deeply divided, semi-failed state with an incompetent, corrupt government held to be illegitimate by a large portion of its population," ...
Newsweek: Obama Waist Deep In The Big Muddy
BAGnewsNotes —
... "The analogy isn't exact. But the war in Afghanistan is starting to look disturbingly familiar." -- from: Newsweek cover story: "Obama’s Vietnam." ...
More Troops, More Worries, Less Consensus on Afghanistan
Antiwar.com Original —
... world has that kind of time, patience, and money," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. And while Gates insisted that Washington faces a "long slog" to achieve even its minimal aims, fears that Afghanistan could become a "new Vietnam," a deadly quagmire in which already overstretched U.S. forces could become bogged down in an unwinnable war, have gained sudden new currency in the mass media. Indeed, the cover story in the latest edition of Newsweek magazine is headlined, " Obama's Vietnam: The analogy isn't exact. But the war in Afghanistan is starting to look ...
Honeymoon over?
Daily Pundit —
... cover story. Obama’s Vietnam. Interesting choice of words. Not exactly fair to the Won, but then calling Vietnam Nixon’s war wasn’t fair to him either. Perhaps instead of being Carter II, the Won will end up being Nixon Lite. ...
With No End Game in Sight, the Time Has Come to Rethink Afghanistan
Open Left - Front Page —
... to a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will only sustain a Taliban resurgence that until now has thrived off of our military's deeply unwelcomed presence. It will perpetuate a violent conflict while hurting our chances of effectively using reconstructive aid and diplomacy to help the suffering people of Afghanistan.
This war has been called a quagmire. It has been compared--by everyone from Brave New Films bloggers to Newsweek to Senator John Kerry--to the unwinnable war in Vietnam. And public ...
Will Afghanistan Be “Obama’s Vietnam”?
The Moderate Voice —
... The first article, by John Barry and Evan Thomas, “Obama’s Vietnam,” delves with laser-like sharpness into both the similarities and differences between the Vietnam War and our struggle in Afghanistan: ...
"Decades, Even A Century"
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan —
... Afghan government is
bucking like a mule while our government is preparing to pin a
significant amount of our combat power in a landlocked country.
The
sum of many factors leaves me with a bad feeling about all this. The
Iraq war, even during the worst times, never seemed like such a bog.
Yet there is something about our commitment in Afghanistan that feels
wrong, as if a bear trap is hidden under the sand. I feel the same way. The Vietnam analogy is less strained than it was. Fareed's constructive piece persuaded me it's pretty doomed, ...
Big Picture in Afghanistan
Opinionator —
In the Washington Post today, Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that a recent cover story in Newsweek suggesting that Afghanistan might become “ Obama’s Vietnam ” was full of “trite analogies” but “performed a public service by bringing up one of the biggest mistakes the United States made in Vietnam: backing the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam, in 1963.” Boot points out that Diem’s successors were even more damaging to the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, and advises not to make the same mistake in Afghanistan. Given ...
Sahil Kapur: Don't Let Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com —
... This is a call to the mainstream media: don't let this escape you. It was less than a decade ago when journalists refused to challenge former President Bush's Iraq war pretexts and policy. It seems like a fleeting lapse in hindsight but it resulted in a shattered nation, hundreds of thousands dead and America's credibility destroyed. Newsweek exclaims in a detailed expose that the war in Afghanistan is beginning to look "disturbingly familiar" to Vietnam. America cannot afford this. Even those of us who like Obama should not give him a free pass; the consequences of ...
Why Obama Might Be LBJ (and Not JFK)
The Corner on National Review Online —
... for the conflict in Vietnam, calling it that bitch of a war because of the way it distracted him and the American people from the remaking of society, the only issue that truly mattered to him. This pattern should sound familiar. Obama has not kept Bush s foreign policy team, but he has retained key figures including Secretary of Defense Gates and Afghanistan/Iraq war czar Lute and he has adopted even the most controversial of his predecessor s foreign policies. Even the mini escalation in Afghanistan seems eerily similar to LBJ s escalations in 1964-5. Yet Obama has ...
Tomgram: William Astore, Déjà Vu All Over Again in Afghanistan
TomDispatch —
... It didn't take long. Only 11 days after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, a Newsweek cover story proclaimed the Afghan War "Obama's Vietnam." And there wasn't even a question mark. As John Barry and Evan Thomas wrote grimly in that January piece, "[T]here is this stark similarity: in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, we may now be facing a situation where we can win every battle and still not win the war -- at least not within a time frame and at a cost that is acceptable to the American people." In the two and a half months since that piece appeared, the President and ...
Obama's Vietnam? Hardly
Political Animal —
... he has taken ownership of the Afghan conflict by appointing new leadership to oversee the war and embarking on a new strategy, including the deployment of some 70,000 American soldiers by year's end and a push for billions of dollars in additional aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Will this strategy be enough? There's no shortage of skeptics. Some congressional Democrats are running out of patience; the media have openly wondered whether Afghanistan is, as Newsweek put it, " Obama's Vietnam "; and 42 percent of Americans now believe the Afghan war was a mistake. In the ...
Some Good News About Afghanistan?
MoJo Blog Posts: mojo —
... The notion that Afghanistan could become Obama's Vietnam has been picking up supporters lately—see this Newsweek cover, plus more airings ...
Kennedy Was a Lion, but War Remains King
Antiwar.com Original —
... but reports called it a "mixed bag" that would in essence call for an entire shift in strategy. Again. "The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort," McChrystal said in a statement. Meanwhile, the avalanche of demanding but hardly challenging mainstream headlines: Is Afghanistan really in our national interest? How important is it? And the perennial, is this Obama’s Vietnam ? Senators ...
