William Pfaff has a good piece on Obama entering the Thirty Years' War we are starting in Afghanistan/Pakistan. A friend's interpretation:
I think Obama nurses the fantasy that (1) in this way he placates the formidable Petraeus and (2) he may capture Osama bin Laden. But (1) suggests a significant failure of nerve, and (2) plays the propaganda game, nothing more. Such a war will make enemies of thousands in Pakistan; and, as the London bombings showed, the Pakistani radicals are mobile, energetic, and hardly dependent on Bin Laden.
Obama in such a venture gambles American credibility and indirectly puts the U.S. in jeopardy from a whole new side–in the process destroying countless foreign lives. This fantastic wager tells you something about his "coolness," about the range of his sympathies and about his real and growing devotion to the household gods of the establishment: Summers, the Clintons, Gen. Petraeus.
Obama in such a venture gambles American credibility and indirectly puts the U.S. in jeopardy from a whole new side–in the process destroying countless foreign lives. This fantastic wager tells you something about his "coolness," about the range of his sympathies and about his real and growing devotion to the household gods of the establishment: Summers, the Clintons, Gen. Petraeus.
