We see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office. . .
The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball’s dissenting role. . .
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27rich.html?ref=opinion___________________________________________
We've got a REAL Vice President!