>>Of course the Taliban endangered US interests, such as the interest
>>in not having planes being rammed into large towers full of people.
>
>I remember making this argument in this space many years ago. I now
>wonder why.
>
>Dennis
Earlier I posted something from Juan Cole on "Obama's domino theory." Alexander Cockburn has a similar take:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/alexander-cockburn/from-twin-towers-to-twin-camelots.html
[...]
As Obama proudly flourished his alliterative triad ("to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan"), I listened with the same dismayed frisson as I did more than four decades ago to Kennedy's similarly childish rhetoric of intervention, whose dark underbelly was the murder of the Diem brothers, and the birth of the Phoenix assassination program of "Viet Cong infrastructure."
Obama's brisk sentences commit thousands of fresh U.S. troops to overwhelm the Taliban, oblivious of the judgment of sensible observers that it's precisely the presence of foreign troops that prompts Pashtuns to support the Taliban and join their ranks. More brisk sentences summoned Pakistan to the crusade against terror, as if Pakistan's intelligence establishment does not work hand in glove with the Taliban and protects al-Qaida leaders.
The march of folly is under way. Bush and Cheney's "war on terror" is now married to Clintonian blueprints for nation building and social engineering, a wedding officiated over by Petraeus, whose mythical surge in Iraq was hailed last year by Obama as having "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." The fantasy of America's healing kiss smolders and flares in Obama's heart just as it did in Kennedy's. Ray McGovern quotes Gen. Douglas MacArthur as telling Kennedy in 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." True then, true now.