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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

PBS, last night, Lyndon Johnson's presidency - "winning" in Vietnam and the McCain answer to the Bush war legacy.

In the debates, McCain kept saying Iraq is "winnable" despite all indications that is false. It struck me that in response Obama never disputed the remark. He simply let it stand, as the McCain position - stay until we win.

The PBS item on Johnson, when I tuned in, was talking first of Great Society, civil rights and voting rights. Then it moved to escalation of the war. It moved to dissent over the war and the lack of quick and real civil rights action, the riots and burning and soldiers in the streets of our cities. It moved to an entrenched will to win in Vietnam. To the truth that Ho Chi Mihn realized at some point the Americans would leave. And then, if not sooner, he would win. Johnson failed, Vietnam won. The long and extremely costly and corrosive occupation ended - as it did, where it could have ended differently but it was inevitable that Johnson knew and Ho knew the occupation would end. The indigenous forces would win. Civil war would work itself out on its own terms after the occupation ended. That was the lesson of Vietnam.

All of that is the extreme burden of persuasion that McCain and his position bear, the burden of history, the burden of reality.

To tell people we will win Iraq, and have the situation as it is, is too much a stretch. Particularly so for those who lived through the Vietnam years. The full cost of that to our society and how it might have grown to have us a better nation is felt by many and fully grasped in all aspects by no one.

And the Bush-neocon fools went in. McCain, saying he is not George W. Bush, says stay and win. Too many of us have heard too much falsehood to not recognize it for what it is. Obama showed a brilliant understanding by simply leaving McCain's statements as they were on the debate record. No counter comment was really needed.

________UPDATE________
For a capsule view of what is "winnable" and not, the Immelman campaign website excerpts a recent report from Mosul, Iraq:

Iraqis Await Resurrection of Scarred Mosul
REUTERS - Oct. 26, 2008

MOSUL, Iraq – Five years of war have reduced much of Mosul to rubble, and U.S. and Iraqi authorities are pledging to deliver on long-time promises to rebuild as they launch a new campaign to rout a stubborn insurgency. …

Near a giant U.S. military base, American humvees rumble down “Baghdad Highway.” The thoroughfare is lined by buildings flattened into heaps of cinderblock or pockmarked by mortar blasts and bullets.

Sewage runs freely and cows graze around mounds of litter. Shops keep their metal gates shut tight, and people stay indoors. At dusk the air is thick with burning trash. …

“When anyone arrives in Mosul today, he would think it is a battleground,” said the minister, Farouq Abdul-Qadir, ticking off a list of problems: an ancient sewage system, a woefully inadequate power supply, high unemployment, and a slowing but still grim drumbeat of assassinations and bomb attacks.

“In the past, the problem for reconstruction was security, and the same problem exists now. We still don’t have full security in Mosul,” he said.

“Abject failure”

Since 2003, the United States has spent millions of dollars in Mosul to improve electricity, overhaul army facilities, rehabilitate schools and on other works. …

U.S. Brigadier General Tony Thomas, commander of U.S. forces in Mosul, said a recent Iraqi initiative to follow military operations with millions of dollars’ worth of reconstruction had been an “abject failure.” …

On October 15, Iraqi and U.S. forces began their third major military operation in Mosul since May. They will go house to house in search of insurgents and weapons caches. …

Violence and decay

Rebuilding a city still marred by violence is not easy.

Earlier this year, U.S. soldiers visited a school in western Mosul they were planning to renovate. Soon afterwards, the headmaster received a call warning him to send the children home early. A car bomb flattened the school that afternoon. …


Rubble, not being rebuilt while the occupation continues, occupation troops visiting a school then eliminated as "damaged goods," it all fits a story of a leadership faction making the occupation always harder than pre-occupation times to keep "on message" for the Iraqi people. It appears the universal sentiment among Iraqi factions is to end the occupation and have a US troop withdrawal, and then by civil war or measures short of that to work out their future among themselves, for themselves. Talking "surge" or otherwise does not seem to counter or undo that reality.