A New Vietnam?

Frank Rich writes today in the NYT that Obama has a Kennedyesque decision to make about Afghanistan. He likens it to JFK's decision about Vietnam early in his presidency. The following quote picks up with a possible decision to wind it down:

If Obama instead decides to embrace some variation on the Biden option,
he’ll have a different challenge. He’ll face even more violent attacks than he
did this summer. When George Will wrote a recent column titled “Time to Get Out
of Afghanistan,” he was accused of “urging retreat and accepting defeat” (by
William Kristol) and of “waving the bloody shirt” (by Fred Kagan, an official
adviser to McChrystal who, incredibly enough, freelances as a blogger at
National Review). The editorial page at Will’s home paper, The Washington Post,
declared that deviating from McChrystal’s demand for more troops “would both
dishonor and endanger this country.” If a conservative columnist can provoke
neocon invective this hysterical, just imagine what will be hurled at
Obama.

But the author of “Lessons in Disaster” does not believe that a change
in course in Afghanistan would be a disaster for Obama’s young presidency. “His
greatest qualities as president,” Goldstein says, “are his quality of mind and
his quality of judgment — his dispassionate ability to analyze a situation. If
he was able to do that here, he might more than survive a short-term hit from
the military and right-wing pundits. He would establish his credibility as a
president who will override his advisers when a strategy doesn’t make
sense.”

Either way, it’s up to the president to decide what he thinks is right
for the country’s security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarily
pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of his
own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but of
confidence and strength. It is, perhaps, Obama’s most significant down payment
yet on being, in the most patriotic sense, Kennedyesque.