Vietnam

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Despite Pundits’ Best Efforts, Afghanistan Stubbornly Refuses to be Obama’s Vietnam

So, you see, Barack Obama is a Democratic president just like Jack Kennedy and LBJ and, right, there’s a war going on in Aghanistan which is in asia, just like Vietnam! So the parallels are just uncanny. Right? Wrong. It’s time, people. for a comprehensive ban on making facile comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Prospect’s Tom Streithorst is only the latest fellow to warn that Afghanistan “could destroy Obama’s presidency, as Vietnam did Johnson’s.” This seems extremely unlikely. Let’s trot through some of the reasons: 1. 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam. The current figure for Afghanistan? 796. There may be quite a number of troops involved but Afghanistan is, by

Monday

Martin Bright

Reporting protest

Anyone who has ever been on a protest march or felt the heady frission of student rebelliousness should check out Hugo Rifkind’s piece in the Times today. A really subtle piece of reporting, with no hint of the usual establishment sneer. What’s fascinating about his observations the history of student revolt is how similar the present wave of sit-ins is to the protests of the past. The latest generation of student revolutionaries use the Israeli action in Gaza as their starting point but their real gripe is with global capitalism. They know as little about the realities of life in Isreal’s occupied territories as their precursors in the 1968 “events”