Someday we may have an American president that has the ability to learn from history. Barack Obama has a chance to do just that in the most critical test of his presidency. He has a clear choice; he can take this tremendous opportunity to turn America in a new direction, away from its deeply ingrained war mentality; or he can completely fail this great test by leading this nation into a massive quagmire.
By now the location of that graveyard of empires is widely known; it is, of course, Afghanistan. You know, it's that country in which we American taxpayers have been depositing hundreds of billions of our hard-earned dollars; yes, dollars that are desperately needed here in America to restore our economy. Unfortunately, the return on our investment in Afghanistan is zero, no interest, only death and destruction.
That barren, mountainous country that has expelled five great invading powers from its borders, from Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., to the Mongols, the British (twice) to Russia in the 1980,s, is now preparing a place for the latest nation to occupy it; the United States of America.
There's an old saying "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Let's use an analogy to illustrate the magnitude of the issue on which he must make a decision. During the Vietnam War Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was preparing a major speech on defense policy and when asked by President Lyndon Johnson as to what he was going to say about Vietnam, McNamara said, "the problem is just what to say about it.
Johnson said, "I'll tell you what to say. Say that we have a commitment to the freedom of the Vietnamese. We could pull out of there; the dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Communists. Nobody really understands what is out there. Our purpose is to train the South Vietnamese people, and our training's going real good.
Now let's take that exact quote, change the main characters' names, reverse the roles and see what we get. In this case let's say its Obama preparing a speech about the Afghan war and asking Defense Secretary Gates for advice.
Defense Secretary Gates says to Obama, "I'll tell you what to say about it. Say that we have a commitment to the freedom of the Afghan people. We could pull out of there; the dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Nobody really understands what is out there. Our purpose is to train the Afghan military and police, and our training's going real good.
In another historical military scenario Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Carter, initiated a plan to trap Russia into its own "Vietnam debacle by baiting them into invading Afghanistan in 1979, and he actually pulled it off.
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