In the President's recent address to cadets at West Point and the world, he dismissed the comparisons of Afghanistan to Vietnam with simplistic rationale (see here for more reasonable comparison). Consider the following quote from page 209 of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.
"What the president was learning, and learning to his displeasure (once again, the Bay of Pigs had been lesson one), was something that his successor Lyndon Johnson would also find out the hard way: that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing. More, its thrust and its drive may not be in any way akin to the desires of the President who initiated it. There is always the drive for more, more force, more tactics, wider latitudes for force."
In this quote the President was John Kennedy who started the Vietnam conflict and allowed it to get out of control. This quote describes exactly how the Afghanistan situation is like Vietnam. How can you expect those who believed you to be a rational man, to continue to follow along with this utter nonsense? Either you have been completely buffalo'd by the Military Industrial Complex or, as I have described previously, you have taken the twisted route to accomplish your social agenda. Either way, it confirms my belief our great ideals are impaired by our dysfunctional implementation of government. It is a sorry situation indeed.
About Me
- doktat
- Following my graduate work in biochemistry which involved computational work, I studied psycho-pharmacology with specific interests in alcohol. I worked as a supervisor in a satellite clinical laboratory (JCAH) at the Zablocki VA Hospital and gave the alcohol lecture to second year medical students for the better part of ten years at The Medical College of Wisconsin. In the Internet boom era, I had a 24/7 connection to the Internet via Northern Illinois University. I was the wizard known as Watson Crick at BioMOO and published on the use of text-based virtual reality as a conferencing/teaching tool. By 1999 I knew as much as anybody about how the Internet worked and quite a bit about object-oriented programming. This helped me secure the academic position at Carroll University where I taught in the Masters of Software Engineering program for the next ten years. My real first name is John but since my oldest son has the same name and is a software developer, I have adopted Dokta as my first name. I retired in 2009.