Watching Barack Obama’s press conferences over the last three days and his interview with Barbara Walters tonight, I really could not be any more impressed. He is a truly gifted politician…even more gifted than Bill Clinton, for all his astonishing talents. Yet, even while Obama inspires a tremendous amount of trust, I join some of my progressive comrades in their concern about the relative lack of truly progressive voices in his economic and foreign policy shops. The precedent I keep going back to is George Ball, who served as Undersecretary of State in the administration’s of JFK and LBJ, and was a prescient skeptic about our involvement in Vietnam.
Here’s a little history of his skeptical role during the Kennedy administration.
Ball expressed his concern over this issue in November 1961. Following a proposal from General Maxwell D. Taylor and Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Walt W. Rostow to dispatch combat troops to Vietnam, Ball spoke candidly to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Roswell L. Gilpatric, the deputy secretary at the Pentagon:
[W]e must not commit forces to South Vietnam or we would find ourselves in a protracted conflict far more serious than Korea. The Viet Cong were mean and tough, as the French had learned to their sorrow, and there was always danger of provoking Chinese intervention as we had in Korea….The Vietnam problem was not one of repelling overt invasion but of mixing ourselves up in a revolutionary situation with strong anticolonialist overtones.
A few days later Ball took his case to JFK. “Within five years we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles [of Vietnam] and never find them again,” he warned the president, if the Taylor-Rostow proposals were implemented. Ball also emphasized the precedent of the French defeat in Vietnam. Kennedy seemed unimpressed by Ball’s arguments: “George, you’re just crazier than Hell…. That just isn’t going to happen.”
After Kennedy called him ‘crazier than hell’ he became more reticent about voicing his dissent. Yet, when the real decision came in 1965 on whether or not to really commit to a land war in Indochina, Ball stepped up to plate again. His memorandum to the president, arguing against escalation, was part of the Pentagon Papers, and it stands as one of the most brilliant pieces of foreign policy analysis that we have in the archives.
In fairness, George Ball’s record on Vietnam is mixed. But the point that I want to make is that Barack Obama needs a dissenting voice in his administration that will press back against the conventional wisdom. Ultimately, Ball’s advice was ignored by both Kennedy and Johnson, but they were better off for having someone in their midst who was willing to challenge the prevailing winds.
I think Obama has great instincts and I think he is exhibiting a lot of wisdom in seeking to unite the country by including centrists and center-rightists in his administration. But Obama needs allies and dissenters that will bring a progressive point of view to foreign policy debates. I won’t presume to suggest who those voices should be, but they should be people that, like Obama, opposed the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning.
Isn’t he his own George Ball with the others offsetting him rather than the other way around?
I hope he is his own George Ball, but I’d prefer it if he had at least one additional George Ball in these internal debates.
I hate the idea of reaching out to the Republicans and engaging them, given the fact that they are ignorant, incompetent assholes. But by including the more sensible GOP types in the conversation, Obama is marginalizing the real crazies, and that is a good thing. I’m a liberal who thinks that the best thing that could happen in this country is an overhaul of the Republican Party, and if it happens it will be because Obama drew them toward the center, not because of any internal developments within the GOP. We’ll be a lot better off if Pawlenty and Jindal are the face of the new GOP, rather than the hard-core wingnuts.
As of the last poll Sarah Palin was the choice of the majority of Republicans as the face of their party. And we thought it could not get worse than Bush!
Methinks, Sarah Palin and her wing of the Republican party are an example of evolution in reverse. Good thing Darwin studied fauna and flora and all kinds of animals and not the political process.
Evolution isn’t about improving ethics or intelligence; it’s about maximizing offspring. Palin has 4 or 5 children and one has started having children of her own early too. Big evolutionary success. Biological evolution is not a beneficent process.
Evolution is not just about maximizing offspring. It concerns adaptation and improving the quality of life itself. Looking at evolution from this perspective I don’t think Palin’s family is any indication of evolutionary success; perhaps, the opposite.
And there are always those pesky recessives to consider.
Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy
“In the first two weeks after the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the last eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
“Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s ‘Sixty Minutes’ last Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.”
…
“The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, ‘OK, subject, predicate, subject, predicate–we get it, stop showing off.'”
I love that!
My kids and I have discussed this very thing almost every time we see Obama on the teevee….how very nice it is to have a president who speaks in clear, coherent sentences.
It is an odd feeling to be proud that we have an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-spoken president after all these years, isn’t it?
Re Vietnam, JFK would have done well to study the Japanese experience in Indochina. They had their hands full with the Communist guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh who was a godsend to American pilots who wee shot down over this part of the world.
If I am not mistaken, FDR favored the forces of Uncle Ho as the key force in Vietnam once the Japanese were defeated.
I agree Ball was magnificent and Obama would do well to find and hire someone like him. Oh yes, and listen to him, very carefully.
Don, NSAM 263 versus NSAM 273.
A month before he was murdered his National Security Action Memorandum 263 called for withdrawal of troops at a thousand a month, which would have taken all troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1964.
Within four days after JFK’s death LBJ’s NSAM 273, while claiming to follow JFK’s lead, actually laid the groundwork for troop escalation. Peter Dale Scott does an examination of this in his book DEEP POLITICS.
JFK would have done better to have another event planner for his Dallas trip.
Now we are in Afghanistan, originally to “get Osama”, and now to bring democracy. A load of crap, says I. It’s to get that pipeline from the Stan Lands down to the Indian Ocean for the benefit of Big Oil.
To tell the truth, I can not figure out Obama. Jeremiah Wright, in spite of his abrasiveness and lack of tact, certainly knew history and Obama listened to him for 20 years, yet appears not to know any of it, or he senses how little the average American knows of history and does not talk about it. Is it to avoid confrontation?
He is for the war in Afghanistan and does not seen to apply whatever knowledge he has to Afghanistan. Doesn’t he know how many Russian military colonels and generals advised the U. S. against conducting a war in Afghanistan? They were in Afghanistan for 9 or 10 years with 85,000 to 105,000 soldiers and lost. Is he ready to lose in Afghanistan?
It seems the ideal war to model the war in Afghanistan after is the war in Panama where we killed only 3,000 innocents to capture one guy, Noriega. Except Osama may no longer be alive.
As far as Vietnam is concerned, the French left, and we went in. Didn’t the U. S. learn anything from the French experience? Or did the U. S. think the Vietnamese were weakened from the French experience and ripe for exploitation?
“…He is for the war in Afghanistan and does not seen to apply whatever knowledge he has to Afghanistan. Doesn’t he know how many Russian military colonels and generals advised the U. S. against conducting a war in Afghanistan? They were in Afghanistan for 9 or 10 years with 85,000 to 105,000 soldiers and lost. Is he ready to lose in Afghanistan?..”
Your own statement would imply that we’ve already lost the effort in Afghanistan, whether or not Obama intends and acts to escalate American involvment there. Re Afghanistan, the real issue on “losing” is whether the US intends to exercise hard control in the country. The Russians had actually been able to steer Afghan policy for many years before they invaded, but that wasn’t good enough for the Moscow crowd. If we ever actually put some real resources into the country to try to reestablish a civil society there, we might just be able to secure at least an acceptable outcome.
Several major differences also exist between Afghanistan and Vietnam. In Afghanistan, less than a majority of the country are opposed to US involvement in their affairs. In fact, it is quite possible that a minority actually resist US efforts. In Vietnam, 90% of the population really didn’t care who controlled the country and the remaining 10% was split 2-to-1 against the US being there. We never could get much traction in Vietnam to establish a functioning government because of that division and we never recognized it until after we left Vietnam. Hell, half the official South Vietnamese “government” appears to have been double agents working for the Viet Cong and then North Vietnamese. It’s not a good way to try to win.
Now can you figure him out?
How he does this is significant, given the fact that a lot of the Taliban resurgence has been built on American tactical errors (bombing weddings for example) and rising civilian casualties.
The key figures not mentioned are the military rulers in the provinces. A map of the provinces and of the terrain will tell you why this is so. They mostly want Kabul to leave them alone so they can run their provinces as they see fit. You will have to look at the personalities and rule of these people one by one to understand whether Obama and NATO can turn things around.
In a recent interview with Barbara Walters the following was said:
While the folks at Politico think he is losing the fight, I believe there is a more important message here. Obama does NOT intend to give up his “lifeline” to a much larger network of friends and informal advisors (let alone the internet) no mater what the lawyers say. Perhaps it won’t be the Blackberry, but he will have some mechanism for getting to and making use of information that comes from beyond the bubble. To me this is a great sign and a clear indication that he will continue to use some of the information gathering tools that has led him to such great success thus far.
A lot of Obama’s appointments to date look like transitionary figures. I can’t see many of them still being in place in 4 years time. They will have to take the flack for the very difficult decisions that will have to be taken in the meantime. They have been chosen for their ability to take the heat off Obama himself – they are not his people, but Republicans, Clintonistas, moderates, Washington insiders and their failures will have less impact on Obama personally, because they are players in their own right.
Meanwhile Obama and his team will form a kitchen cabinet within the White House where the real strategising will be done. After 4 years they will gradually come to prominence and the real OBama footprint will become clear. The Overton windo will have moved. The centrist solutions will have been tried. And where they have failed a more radical policy position will take shape.
This is all about maximising political capital and putting your defensive structures into place. Obama will play offense too, but only on carefully selected battlegrounds, and at a time and place of his choosing.