Pakistan Isn't Cambodia But Afghanistan Really Is A Lot Like Vietnam

I spend a lot of time on the phone with grassroots progressives from all over the country hoping to overcome nearly insurmountable odds and displace reactionary incumbents. Ever since my sewer-like experience with duplicitous Blue Dog Chris Carney, I've learned how to detect when someone is being sincere about their progressiveness or just playing me the way Carney did. Carney-like characters don't get more than the briefest of brittle hearings. So this post isn't about them. It's about good Democrats torn between supporting Obama and breaking with him over Afghanistan.

You've probably seen how difficult it is all through the netroots to find a common approach to this one. As you probably know, Blue America has opened a page strictly for people who go beyond campaign rhetoric against the war. The page, No Means No! highlights the 32 Democrats who voted against Obama's War Supplemental last June. The only way to get on the list is to vote against the war. (We made an exception for Mike Quigley because he campaigned against the war in a special election-- to fill Rahm Emanuel's House seat-- after the supplemental vote was taken and, when he won the seat, he got up on the House floor and made a barn-burning anti-war speech.) This spring there is likely to be another supplemental vote from the Obama Administration and I expect there will be a lot more than 32 (or 33) Democrats who will vote against it.

Candidates have a lot on their plates and I hate to bother them with more books to read. Rick Perlstein's Nixonland is close to 900 pretty dense pages, but it really is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the political lessons of the 70s U.S. involvement in Vietnam and how it applies to Afghanistan. On page 423 Perlstein recounts a letter the NY Times reprinted from 6 of the top Vietnam experts from the Rand Corporation, the country's top defense think tank at the time.

America should withdraw, they said, unilaterally and immediately-- not "conditioned upon agreement or performance by Hanoi or Saigon." They went on, "Short of destroying the entire country and its people, we cannot eliminate the enemy force in Vietnam by military means." Even further, if every enemy soldier or sympathizer was somehow magically eliminated, the other side would still not make "the kinds of concessions currently demanded"-- a divided Vietnam with the South overseen by a government that the people there thought fundamentally illegitimate. "'Military victory' is no longer the U.S. objective," despite what the American government told the American people, and that wasn't even the worst of the lies: "The importance to U.S. national interests of the future political complexion of South Vietnam has been greatly exaggerated as has the negative impact of the unilateral U.S. withdrawal"-- whose risks "will not be less after another year or more of American involvement."

That was less than 40 years ago. It only seems like yesterday to me. But it appears as though it just never happened in Obama's world. The conventional wisdom is about how awesomely smart and well-educated he is. Really? Then he doesn't have the excuse Bush and Cheney did. And Cambodia, unlike Pakistan, didn't have nuclear weapons-- or 173 million pissed off people.