Charlie Rose

REMant  01/12/2010 06:09 PM Report

It seemed to me that he's saying he doesn't really want this war, but we owe it to the Afghanis and Pakistanis and it is in our interest to help eliminate al Qaeda, and besides the American ppl will almost certainly not re-elect me if I don't try. However, it is going to cost more than we can afford, and he does not intend to get trapped in an attempt to either carry the ppl there, or to make them over in our image. Unfortunately he really doesn't understand Vietnam, but it's less likely to matter, because it seems he has rejected the counterinsurgency advocates, and is sending far fewer troops than they wanted, and only for a limited time. While he is rejecting the Vietnam analogy, he is accepting an Iraq one, which is probably not applicable, and I doubt this will be successful, not the least because they will never get two divisions in there that fast. I didn't like the rhetoric, phrases such as "reason to hope" (after years of oppression or something like that), "a noble struggle for freedom," "our cause is just," etc, but it is window dressing for something far less than what the military and do-gooders wanted. I am afraid that they will pay a high price for asking. The speech tried to cover too much territory and was at points defensive and pretty obtuse, plus the references to Lincoln were pretentious. I thought it poorly staged, but I've thought that of all his speeches. Not as bad as Reagan or Bush Jr, admittedly. It seems, too, that there was some attempt at applause management, however I don't suppose anyone in the Corps would applaud unless led to.

I did little research while he was speaking. Do you realize that while Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr wore the uniform, only two of them actually saw combat in the combat arms: JFK and Bush Sr, both as very junior officers. Though Ford was serving on an aircraft carrier, which was in combat, he was not a combatant, while LBJ was shot at once while on an inspection tour for FDR (and awarded a Silver Star for it, by MacArthur). And while Ike was commander in the ETO, he never saw combat in either WWI or WWII or anything in-between. Neither did Nixon or Reagan, and, of course, Carter served during peacetime, while Bush Jr was in the Air Guard in the US during Vietnam. Clinton and Obama were never in the military. Besides JFK and H W Bush you have to go back to Truman to find someone who was a frontline combatant, and before that, Teddy Roosevelt. And we expect the president to be commander-in-chief?!

The above was written before the show. I was surprised that on Al Jazeera after the speech Hillary Mann Leverett made the same point I have twice now, that the counterinsurgency plan was rejected, and that seems to have just dawned on Brooks. Haass, I think, understood really nothing at all about the strategy, which has clearly moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the president even said as much, which this panel seems to have missed entirely at least for the first half hour mentioned once and then forgotten again. No one mentioned the number of contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan either. Like GB in the 18th c, we've been hiring mercenaries. Greenfield, tho, I see, agrees about the politics and the prolixity, and Filkins about the comparison with the Iraq strategy. Actually there were some troops from other nations in Vietnam: Thais, Koreans, Filipinos, Australians and New Zealanders come to mind, but there were also offers of troops from Nicaragua and Paraguay I find.