From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots The world falls in love with a
charismatic young president, his
stylish wife and their charming young
children. In the campaign for the
presidency, he defeated his opponent
in part by charging Republican failure
in the war against America’s enemies.
In the dawn of his administration,
this Harvard man musters strategic
buttress from intellectuals bunkered
in think tanks and academe, for a
decisive escalation by which the foe
will be routed. Counterinsurgency will
go hand in hand with nation building.
Corruption will be banished and local
troops trained to shoulder the burden
of the war.
To be sure, there are differences between Jack Kennedy’s America in 1961 and Barack Obama’s in 2009. At the start of the ´60s, the US economy in its productive phase hadn’t crested. It was still on the way up to its peak in about 1969. The mantra was “guns and butter.” In 1961, the best and the brightest, defeating Vietnamese guerillas in their Top Secret memos to Kennedy and his commanders, invoked Britain’s defeat of the Communist insurgency in Malaya, courtesy of Frank Kitson’s supposed counterinsurgency tactics and America’s victory over the Huks in the Philippines, with Edward Lansdale claiming the achievement. In 2009, veterans’ hospitals here offer bleak testimony that in Iraq, 150,000 US troops, lavishly equipped with advanced weaponry, were held down for years in Iraq by the guerillas’ rudimentary curbside explosives. Woe betide a president who believes his own stump speeches. In his campaign, Obama outflanked charges initially from Hillary Clinton and then from John McCain that he was a peacenik and a wimp by declaring week after week that Iraq was the wrong battlefield, that the enemy was al-Qaida and their sanctuary Afghanistan. An excited vibrancy colored the community organizer’s rhetoric as he spoke of his determination to “kill bin Laden.”
Most people thought this pledge would get lobbed into the trashcan the moment McCain conceded. But no. On April 3, I drove down Interstate 5 through the early spring blossom in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, listening to Obama on the radio marching through his schedule for escalation and victory in Afghanistan. He was born in the year JFK became president, but has this supposedly smart fellow not read a single decent history of the Vietnam War and of America’s defeat? Apparently not. Otherwise, how could he blithely announce that “We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan Army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011.... Going forward, we will not blindly
Continued on page 24
To be sure, there are differences between Jack Kennedy’s America in 1961 and Barack Obama’s in 2009. At the start of the ´60s, the US economy in its productive phase hadn’t crested. It was still on the way up to its peak in about 1969. The mantra was “guns and butter.” In 1961, the best and the brightest, defeating Vietnamese guerillas in their Top Secret memos to Kennedy and his commanders, invoked Britain’s defeat of the Communist insurgency in Malaya, courtesy of Frank Kitson’s supposed counterinsurgency tactics and America’s victory over the Huks in the Philippines, with Edward Lansdale claiming the achievement. In 2009, veterans’ hospitals here offer bleak testimony that in Iraq, 150,000 US troops, lavishly equipped with advanced weaponry, were held down for years in Iraq by the guerillas’ rudimentary curbside explosives. Woe betide a president who believes his own stump speeches. In his campaign, Obama outflanked charges initially from Hillary Clinton and then from John McCain that he was a peacenik and a wimp by declaring week after week that Iraq was the wrong battlefield, that the enemy was al-Qaida and their sanctuary Afghanistan. An excited vibrancy colored the community organizer’s rhetoric as he spoke of his determination to “kill bin Laden.”
Most people thought this pledge would get lobbed into the trashcan the moment McCain conceded. But no. On April 3, I drove down Interstate 5 through the early spring blossom in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, listening to Obama on the radio marching through his schedule for escalation and victory in Afghanistan. He was born in the year JFK became president, but has this supposedly smart fellow not read a single decent history of the Vietnam War and of America’s defeat? Apparently not. Otherwise, how could he blithely announce that “We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan Army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011.... Going forward, we will not blindly
Continued on page 24
