Stan McChrystal-- Leading America Into Its First Great Post-Bush Catastrophe

Lewis Sorley was born in West Point, NY, born into a military family. He went to high school at the Texas Military Institute, and then on to West Point itself. He spent almost his entire life as a desk officer, although he later worked as the chief of Policy and Plans Division at the C.I.A. His revisionist history of the War against Vietnam, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnamwas published in 1999. Obama, Emanuel and Biden all say they've read it. Sorley-- and apparently some in the Obama White House-- seem to feel that Stanley McChrystal in Sorley's mythical hero Creighton Abrams, the general who replaced Westmoreland and won the Vietnamese war (for us)-- because McCrystal, like Abrams, understands the political dimensions of the conflict (something that is basically blasted in every other paragraph of today's NY Times Magazine feature on the general leading America into its first great post-Bush catastrophe. McChrystal (and apparently Sorley) have swallowed Vietnam victor Abrams' dictum that to win the war you must provide the citizens-- whose country is being occupied and destroyed-- security. With a straight face Sorley claims that the CIA chief in Saigon (now known as Abrams City), William Colby, and the U.S. Ambassador there, Ellsworth Bunker (a cheerleader for the disastrous attacks on Laos and Cambodia), helping come up and support the winning strategy and salvage the mess Westmoreland had left behind.

Sorley's (and Abrams') victory in Vietnam was stolen by the traitorous media and rotten politicians who stabbed the military in the back-- what war was ever lost for any other reason ever?-- Nixon, Kissinger (along with Kennedy and Fulbright), who he sees as opportunistic arch-villains, who refused to bomb North Vietnam (further) back into the Stone Age.

Sorley has been all over lately, pushing his theories on a gullible and easy-to-impress public. Last week he held forth on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, where he belongs, and yesterday he was spouting much the same drivel in a NY Times OpEd. Neither the Journal nor the Times puts any of his bullshit in context by saying anything more about him than that he's a retired Lieutenant Colonel and that he wrote A Better War. I hope the information above helps you get a better idea about where he pulled his point of view from.

Right from the start, though, it doesn't take much to see right through Sorley's biases. His first line in the Journal starts with the big whopper of 60s propaganda that Vietnam was two countries, not one: "More than 30 years have passed since North Vietnam, in gross violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, conquered South Vietnam." He then goes on to blame the loss on "America's failure to keep its commitments to the South," although his main target last week was Congress rather than Nixon and Kissinger. Sorley is a dangerous warmonger and extremist whose views have been entirely discredited by history. No wonder Rahm Emanuel digs them! Sorley's advise to Obama would lead to exactly one result: massive Democratic losses in Congress and a Republican White House in 2012.

"Maintain political support at home," he writes to the president-- although maintaining support means what when support for the war is not just minimal but mostly confined to the president's political enemies-- "All that was accomplished on the battlefield in the latter years of Vietnam was lost when Congress, having tired of the whole endeavor, drastically cut support for South Vietnam. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon was able to rally public and press support for the war. President Obama has said that Afghanistan is a war of necessity. If so, he must put his political capital behind it. As he and his advisers plan the new course for the war, he must also come up with a new approach for selling it to Congress and the American people."

More discerning minds see McChrystal's and Sorley's warmongering for what it is and suggest that there will never be a victory in Afghanistan (unless you want to count the glorious victory they think we won in Vietnam as a victory). Gareth Porter, whose book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnamshows a far keener understanding of what actually happened in Vietnam than Sorley's, introduced us to Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis who has spent lots of time in Afghanistan and believes, like many others, that it's too late for us to defeat the insurgency.

"Many experts in and from Afghanistan warn that our presence over the past eight years has already hardened a meaningful percentage of the population into viewing the United States as an army of occupation which should be opposed and resisted," writes Davis.

Providing the additional 40,000 troops that Gen. McChrystal has reportedly requested "is almost certain to further exacerbate" that problem, he warns... In the paper, Davis suggests what he calls a "Go Deep" strategy as an alternative to the recommendation from McChrystal for a larger counterinsurgency effort, which he calls "Go Big."

The "Go Deep" strategy proposed by Davis would establish an 18-month time frame during which the bulk of U.S. and NATO combat forces would be withdrawn from the country. It would leave U.S. Special Forces and their supporting units, and enough conventional forces in Kabul to train Afghan troops and police and provide protection for U.S. personnel.

The forces that continue to operate in insurgent-dominated areas would wage "an aggressive counterterrorism effort" aimed in part at identifying Taliban and al Qaeda operatives. The strategy would also provide support for improved Afghan governance and training for security forces.

Davis argues that a large and growing U.S. military presence would make it more difficult to achieve this counterterrorism objective. By withdrawing conventional forces from the countryside, he suggests, U.S. strategy would deprive the insurgents of "easily identifiable and lucrative targets against which to launch attacks."

Typically insurgents attack U.S. positions not for any tactical military objective, Davis writes, but to gain a propaganda victory.

The "Go Deep" strategy outlined in the paper appears to parallel the shift in strategy from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism being proposed by some officials in discussions in the White House in recent weeks.

After reading Davis's paper, Col. Patrick Lang, formerly the defence intelligence officer for the Middle East, told IPS he regards the "Go Deep" strategy as "a fair representation of the alternative to the one option in General McChrystal's assessment."

Progressive Democrats like Eric Massa, John Conyers, Alan Grayson, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Carol Shea-Porter, Raul Grijalva, Dennis Kucinich, Donna Edwards, James McGovern, Marcy Kaptur, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Mike Capuano, Lynn Woolsey, etc have an entirely different approach. Grayson articulated it very nicely a week or so ago when he reminded us that no matter where people live in the world, they just want to be left alone. They don't want to be occupied. And they don't want to have their families killed and their homes bombed to smithereens by foreigners claiming to be there to save them. Blue America has a page dedicated to proven champions of peace in Afghanistan, the 32 Democrats who made the politically painful decision and voted against Obama's supplemental war budget in June. Please consider forgoing contributions to other politicians and donating to these 32 instead-- here.