Whatever it was you wanted to say, it somehow, mysteriously has gone away. Don’t feel bad, many of my posts lately cannot go through until I copy those crazy numbers and letters because they think I am SPAM! And I try so hard to be nice!

P.S. I used to eat Spam in my college days––we used to fry it, put it on a roll with lettuce, tomatoes, a little mustard and if I remember, it was quite tasty. 

Do you recall this little ditty sung, to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," by American advisors  during the war?

We are winning, this we know

General Harkins tells us so.

In the delta, things are rough.

In the mountains, mighty tough.

But we’re winning, this we know.

General Harkins tells us so.

If you doubt this is true,

McNamara says so ,too. 

Here’s something Barbara Tuchman said in her book The Folly of War:

Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists  call the process of screening out discordant information “cognitive dissonance,” an academic disguise for “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Cognitive dissonance is the tenancy “to suppress, gloss over, water down, or `waffle’ issues which would produce conflict or `psychological pain’ within an organization.” It causes alternatives to be “deselected since even thinking about them entails conflicts.” In the relations of subordinate to superior within the government, its object is the development of policies that upset no one. It assists the ruler in wishful thinking, defined as “an unconscious alteration in the estimate of probabilities.” 

Kennedy: Aware of the negatives, bothered by them-made no adjustment-no one in Ex. Branch advocated withdrawal-partly in fear of encouragement to Communism, and damage to American prestige, damage to domestic reprisals. And for another reason, the most enduring in the history of folly: personal advantage, in this case a second term. His position was realistic, if not a profile in courage. Re-election was more than a year and a half away. To continue for that time to invest American resources and inevitably lives in a cause in which he no longer had much faith, rather than risk his own second term, was a decision in his own interest, not the country’s. Only an exceedingly rare ruler reverses that order. 

What Gary Wills actually said was that he has been told by people that he respects that Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one term president because of charges from various quarters that he would be weak, unpatriotic, betraying our dead, and so on and so forth. Wills then says that these are the very same arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. (anyone who has read the history of the Vietnam War or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War,  knows that this scenario plays out over and over. The generals called for more, the journalists tried to reveal the truth.) Wills adds that these are the arguments that made Bush pass on these two wars to his successor.

One of the strongest arguments for continued firing up of past wars is that none of these Presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, wanted to serve just one term. "But what justification is there for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds and thousands of young American men and women in the military?" Asks Wills, who has great hopes for the Obama presidency (Wills, by the way, is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern and has written countless books.) and would like him to have two terms to realize the exciting new things he aspires to do. But Wills would rather see him a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war. 

"It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained with shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?"