Obama is Not FDR, Not JFK - He's LBJ

The parallels are fucking terrifying.

Down with Tyranny has been reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, and keeps finding

how similar the tragically hubristic war in Afghanistan is to the tragically hubristic war in Vietnam.

On the third anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [which passed on August 7, 1964-- only two heroic senators objecting], the president announced the authorization of forty-seven thousand more soldiers and made William Westmoreland stand on his hind legs and tell the press that that was all he'd ask for. We'd rain more bombs instead. The public overwhelmingly approved of that.

On September 3 [almost 42 years to the week before the Afghan elections which were so very, very similar], the South Vietnamese would go to the polls to elect a government for the first time since Ngo Dihn Diem won the fishy balloting of 1961, then was overthrown by the first of several military juntas. That an election was planned was proactively used to declare South Vietnamese democracy a reality. The vice-presidential candidate Nguyen Cao Ky [currently a liquor store owner in Orange County] had deployed the South Vietnamese air force to smuggle opium and gold: asked who his political heroes were, he replied, "I have only one-- Hitler." He was running for vice president virtually unchallenged and won-- and had fixed the constitution to give the real power to a military council run by the vice president. Meanwhile, back in America, that an election had just taken place was retroactively used to declare South Vietnamese democracy a reality.

...Reader's Digest's Vietnam was a nonstop procession of school reconstructions and orphanage visits by American doughboys; a typical story was about the beloved mess cook who caught a VC grenade while planning a Christmas feast for the local children... Lyndon Johnson invited a covey of Senate doves to the White House for a stag dinner. George McGovern subsequently wrote in his diary, "The president is a tortured and confused man-- literally tortured by the mess he has gotten into in Vietnam."

According to the Telegraph in the U.K., Obama has already made up his mind to escalate the war by sending McChrystal his 45,000 more bodies. If it's true, Obama will be a one-term president. Our most intellectual president in decades will have turned out to be the worst dunce since... well not counting Bush, Ulysses S Grant. He and McChrystal brushed aside the objections of Joe Biden who knows more about Afghanistan than the two of them combined. Tomorrow's NY Times Magazine features the skinny-- in 13 pages-- on this decade's General Westmoreland.

SNIP

McChrystal's strategy sounds good on paper-- "protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents." But it's absolutely doomed to tragic failure. The Afghan people only want one thing from America-- a quick departure and-- in the words of Rep. Alan Grayson-- "to be left alone." The Americans are alien beings in every way and seen by the Afs as the installers of the illegitimate government in Kabul.

McChrystal doesn't get it and neither does President Hope-and-Change. Are there enough members of Congress to just say no to more funding for escalation? It's building. Help it grow.

Read the whole thing.

Not to mention that LBJ's refusal to shut down a war that was lost before it started destroyed not just his presidency, but the Great Society itself, and doomed the nation to the depredations of Nixon, Reagan, H.W. and Smirky, thus bringing us full circle.

Think it's impossible for a president to fail more spectacularly than Smirky did? Wait until Obama outdoes LBJ. We'll be cursing his name for generations.