A bit oddly, when I jotted this down — knowing I would reference it when Obama gets around to announcing his fulfillment of his Campaign Promise to increase our military presense in Afghanistan (What?  You weren’t paying attention?), I didn’t reference the who for the 3rd paragraph’s counterveiling wisdom.  Circles around which you wander through, I answer now.

It is interesting to make the Vietnam comparisons, and when a president feels he (and maybe sometime in the future she) has to, it does suggest a pretty great political defensiveness — the items in the defensive stance with regards to policy showing the contrast of the Political Moment.  Compare Hamid Karzai with Ngo Dinh Diem.  It has become conventional wisdom that Karzai is corrupt, and that last election was, how do I put it?, illegitimate, with a limited base of power.  I think this is a pretty good departure from circa 2002 – 2003, when I found myself arguring over Karzai with a conservative Fox viewer on a message board.  She had made the pronouncement based on the opinions meted out by Geraldo Rivera on what a Fantastic Commander in Chief the President Bush was, and what a Great Man Karzai was, I believe with the theory that to go to the “left” of Geraldo Rivera would be to run oneself out of mainstream political discourse.  I hastened to add, always a bit tendenciously (“Yes.  Let me tap into my vast resovior of knowledge on Afghanistan.”), and referencing the phrase “President of Kabul” already felt a little cliched and half-cockneyed at the time, as the surreality of proclaiming Freedom with the customs of Sharia Law still being upheld.  (The next thing you know I’ll be throwing out the forewarnings about Afghanistan being known as the “Graveyard of Empires”.)

Times change.  I think even she would have come around to the new popular view on Karzai, and I hasten to ask: Do you think I was kidding when I posted these thoughts?  It is interesting to note that Obama is having to sell a troop surge around Karzai — “No Free Pass for Karzai”,   “He Better Ship UP”, “We’re working around him” — which, correct me if I’m wrong — did Johnson Nixon have that political necessity in talking around the various new governments of South Vietnam?  (Nay.  There we had the scene of various ambassadors parading around with them, giving the Communists propaganda fodder in showing them as American puppets.)

December 2001’s  Tora Bora Policy has re-entered the news, a Senate report timed to match Obama’s speech, [just as the time frame which has military pull-outs starting in time for the 2012 election seems well-timed] — first I knew about it was Seymour Hersh selling the details of a New Yorker article on Bill Moyers.  Every time it inched back into the news as “revelatory” thereafter, I’ve had to scratch my head.  A Congressman was blasted out of CNN for making some remarks connecting it to the coming plans for Iraq —

 Well, forget the Congress member – there’s a book on that.

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