William Pfaff: Presidential Posturing Isn't Getting the U.S Anywhere
[William Pfaff is a globally respected political commentator and author on international relations, contemporary history and U.S. policy. He is published in five countries and his column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services.]
President Barack Obama is said to feel he is in trouble politically because his enemies in Congress and among the Washington journalists who decide what the “mood” of Washington is on any given day say he is not tough enough. This is the kind of mind reading about what the public thinks that got him and the rest of us into an escalated war against the Taliban.
During the presidential campaign, he was persuaded by his handlers to combine his promise of Iraq withdrawal—something the voters wanted to hear from him, and that he intended to do—with a promise to escalate the “right war” in Afghanistan, against al-Qaida and the Taliban, so as to show that he could be tough.
This is what he did, but that left him with a promise to fulfill, so he was in the hands of two young and ambitious generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who have never won a war of any kind, but have no lack of confidence in what they can do, given the chance.
They implicitly ignore the fact that no one else has won one against a serious Third World insurrection, among the “white” or Euro-American powers that have tried, except the British, in their decade-long “Emergency” in Malaya: a communist uprising that followed the Second World War.
A savage little affair, it was won mainly by resettling a half-million of the some 3-million-member Chinese minority in Malaya, from among whom the communist rebels came. This drastically reduced the size of the “sea” in which the latter could “swim” (while following the survival advice given by Mao Zedong to his guerrilla followers)....
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President Barack Obama is said to feel he is in trouble politically because his enemies in Congress and among the Washington journalists who decide what the “mood” of Washington is on any given day say he is not tough enough. This is the kind of mind reading about what the public thinks that got him and the rest of us into an escalated war against the Taliban.
During the presidential campaign, he was persuaded by his handlers to combine his promise of Iraq withdrawal—something the voters wanted to hear from him, and that he intended to do—with a promise to escalate the “right war” in Afghanistan, against al-Qaida and the Taliban, so as to show that he could be tough.
This is what he did, but that left him with a promise to fulfill, so he was in the hands of two young and ambitious generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who have never won a war of any kind, but have no lack of confidence in what they can do, given the chance.
They implicitly ignore the fact that no one else has won one against a serious Third World insurrection, among the “white” or Euro-American powers that have tried, except the British, in their decade-long “Emergency” in Malaya: a communist uprising that followed the Second World War.
A savage little affair, it was won mainly by resettling a half-million of the some 3-million-member Chinese minority in Malaya, from among whom the communist rebels came. This drastically reduced the size of the “sea” in which the latter could “swim” (while following the survival advice given by Mao Zedong to his guerrilla followers)....