Obama’s New Syria Strategy is Nixon’s Vietnam Negotiation Tactics Redux (Meyer)

http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/strategy-negotiation-tactics.html

Obama’s New Syria Strategy is Nixon’s Vietnam Negotiation Tactics Redux (Meyer)
Posted on 06/23/2013 by Juan Cole

For better or worse, Obama came of age well after the Vietnam war. Had he lived through the daily body counts, he may have stood strong against arming the Syrian opposition.

The President’s new ‘strategy’ is to get enough arms to the ‘right people’ in Syria and to centralize arms delivery through General Idris. The goal is to rebuild the opposition’s strength after recent loss of ground to Assad forces. The theory is that once the ‘balance’ between Assad and opposition fighters has been restored, the opposition would be in a more advantageous situation for Geneva !! negotiations. The opposition is loathe to negotiate after its recent set-backs.

We’ve seen this before. Just as Nixon doubled down on a losing war in Vietnam, Obama seeks his own version of ‘peace through strength’.

Although Nixon and his war cabinet knew the Vietnam war would never be won and that political negotiations were the only end-game the US and South Vietnamese had, the President who promised to ‘bring the boys home’ continued and expanded the war several more years at the cost of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives.