Obama's Vietnam

Hey, hey, BHO, how many years until we go?

By Justin Raimondo

"A "team of rivals" is how the Obama administration is being portrayed by the head-over-heels media, which started out by likening the new president to Lincoln and may end up comparing him – favorably – to God. A more appropriate phrase would be "team of retreads": Hillary at State, Gates still at Defense, and all the usual suspects lording it over their regional fiefdoms......

The third major factor tending toward militarism is that wartime atmospherics fit Obama's domestic program to a tee. Already we are hearing the rhetoric of war applied to the economic front, in the hopes that the same sense of obligatory "unity" will be imposed on potential critics and soften, if not silence, naysayers. As the "war on recession" enlists an army of cheerleaders and would-be block captains, the scapegoat of a foreign enemy is a welcome diversion from deteriorating conditions on the home front.

If Holbrooke is right and we are headed for a major war that will make Iraq pale in comparison, then he may be wrong about how long it'll last. Because the war he envisions will amount to a final spasm of unrestrained violence, a wholly destructive – and futile – assertion of our rapidly failing imperial pretensions. Longer than Vietnam? I give it five years, at the most, at the end of which we'll be licking our wounds and frantically signaling an "exit strategy.""