One term or two - LBJ or ?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Obama has to make a decision of Afghanistan - is he going to make an LBJ decision and be a one term president or.....?  Harvey Wasserman explains the wrong decision will make him a one term president.

As the world awaits Barack Obama's decision on Afghanistan, a lethal
myth has spread. It says that standing up to the military will doom him
to be a single-term president.

The "one if by peace" myth comes most recently from Garry Wills in the
New York Review of Books. Wills mourns that Obama would commit
political suicide by pulling out of both Iraq and Afghanistan because
"the charges from various quarters would be toxic---that he was weak,
unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying
our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure."

Against all that, says Wills, "he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate."

Coming from an astute observer like Wills, this is a stunning analysis---and dead wrong.

In fact, the only way Obama can begin to think about getting
re-elected is to leave the Afghan quagmire and do the same from Iraq.

The key phrase here is "the quarters where such charges would originate."

The battle cries originate with the military which, as Will Rogers once
put it, "never saw a war it didn't like." General Stanley McChrystal
and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have spearheaded an unsavory,
unethical media assault to force a quick escalation.

Their core support comes from the Rogue/Rouge Right now
shattering the Republican Party. This media-based Palin paramilitary
has just driven the GOP to defeat in a New York Congressional district,
Republican for more than a century. It's now assaulting Charlie Crist,
the very popular moderate Governor of Florida, and others like him. Any
Republican caught whispering that Obama is other than a baby-killing
Muslim gay terrorist is being condemned in ways not seen since Salem,
1692.

The Afghan misadventure is going to turn out badly as it has for every other empire.  No matter what he does the "Palin paramilitary" is going to attack him.  "Defeat" will eventually come on his watch no matter what he does now.  Like Johnson's Vietnam Afghanistan will be Obama's Waterloo because there will be a helicopters on the roof moment before 2012.

Afghanistan is the most important issue,  Wasserman continues:

National health care and climate change remain hugely
important. They are divisive and difficult. And there will be no
meaningful progress on either without a draw-down on our overseas
adventurism and the larger military budget.

Thus Afghanistan towers above all. The decline of the Democratic Party
and the US as a whole dates directly to March, 1965, when Lyndon
Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam. The ensuing decade of futility
overflowed with agonized analysis and absurd apologia.

In the end, all the US could do was spend, destroy, kill, die and flee.

So, too, Afghanistan. Be the motive geo-political,
anti-terrorist, petro-chemical, feminist, humanitarian, or just plain
not wanting to "lose," American bombs from the air and boots on the
ground will simply dissolve and disappear in an ocean of shifting sands
and ancient enmities.