Robert Scheer is against the good war. For all I know, he always was. Regardless, his view will soon be the view of many who--as they did regarding Iraq--supported Afghanistan once but eventually turned on it, urging our retreat and defeat.
I won't comment on his Vietnam analogy--I've addressed it often enough--but I would like to highlight this nonsense:
The Vietnamese communists were not an extension of an inevitably hostile, unified international communist enemy, as evidenced by the fact that communist Vietnam and communist China are both our close trading partners today. Nor should the Taliban be considered simply an extension of a Mideast-based al Qaeda movement, whose operatives the United States recruited in the first place to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
Good grief. That's a lot of idiocy in one paragraph.
One, why does the enemy have to be part of a unified enemy to be our enemy capable of causing us harm? Were Germany and Japan really that unified in World War II? It wasn't true then and it isn't true now.
Two, was it then wrong to support the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in World War II?
And three, is Scheer saying that the status of Germany, Japan, and Italy as our allies today is evidence that fighting them in World War II was needless or a mistake? Or wrong?
The man reported on the Vietnam War and he has no clue about Vietnam. Which puts him right in their with his colleagues at the time and today, I suppose.
