Howling at the Moon and the Lost American Dream

We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent. – “We Are The 99 Percent” (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com)

Although I have never been entirely comfortable with street protests and Guerilla Theater, preferring instead the traditional tools of democracy, debate and persuasion to achieve a better world, I understand the need for them. On occasion, public demonstrations have changed the course of history. When in 1963 the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth organized a group of black students and clergymen in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest segregation, the ensuing photographs displaying the vicious attacks and fire hoses of Bull Connor shocked the nation’s conscience. More importantly, it awakened Americans to the injustices of racism and moved public opinion, eventually resulting in equal rights for all Americans. A few years later, when hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to oppose the Vietnam War, a sitting president chose not to run for reelection and influential members of Congress began questioning U.S. involvement in an immoral war. More recently, protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo helped propel an Arab Spring that has toppled corrupt dictators in Egypt and Libya.

Viewed from the broad perspective of history, the Occupy Wall Street movement may prove ineffectual and less momentous. Its message is unclear and its solutions virtually non-existent. But I do believe the protesters are tapping into something real. A sense of frustration with the lost American dream, perhaps, or a feeling that the system is rigged against the middle class, that it is no longer enough to finish school and work hard to get ahead in America, and that the rules have changed. The economy has become a high-stakes casino where the lucky 1% (or even 5%) wins all the prizes, while the rest fight for the scraps. There is something not right with America right now. The reasons are most certainly complex and not entirely understood, but the notion that our political and business leaders have for too long ignored the plight and suffering of the average citizen resonates strongly.

As far as I can discern, the protestors that make up the Occupy Wall Street movement have no definable political demands, and the vague, open-ended character of their message is a bit frustrating. But the catchphrase We are the 99 percent has a plain-speaking directness that gives voice to the widening disparity between the richest Americans and everyone else, a level of inequality not seen since the Great Depression. Consider just some of these facts:

• The 400 wealthiest Americans today have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans (The New York Times).

• The top 1 percent of income earners has more accumulated wealth than the bottom 90 percent (The New York Times).

• To join the ranks of the top 1 percent requires a minimum annual income of $516,633 and an average net wealth of $14 million. By comparison, 50% of U.S. workers earned less than $26,364 in 2010 (The Washington Post; Social Security Administration).

• The average salary in the financial sector in New York City is $361,330, nearly six times what the average worker makes in all other private sector jobs in New York (The New York Times; New York State Comptroller).

• 25 of the 100 highest paid CEOs in the United States took home more pay than their companies paid in federal corporate income taxes (Institute of Policy Studies).

• The average CEO at publicly-traded corporations makes 350 times that of the average worker. Only thirty years ago, this disparity was 50-to-1. (Institute for Policy Studies).

• Adjusting for inflation, the average hourly earnings of American workers have not increased in 50 years (Institute for Policy Studies; Bureau of Labor Statistics).

• The United States ranks 93rd in the world in income inequality (Central Intelligence Agency, 2010).

It is hard not to question the morality of an economic system that so greatly rewards a small few while requiring all others to struggle in a survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog world. “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” As the Rev. Jim Wallis noted in Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street (Howard Books 2010), “The rules of the game seem to have worked for those who set the rules, but not for those who played by them.” America’s economic system, built on a foundation of profit-motive and self-interest, an economic model based historically on a pre-industrial, agrarian society, when too-big-to-fail financial institutions and multi-national conglomerates did not control the reins of power and wealth, has reached a point where the American dream is no longer accessible to the vast majority of participants. For the past thirty years, ever since the Reagan Revolution, Wallis states:

We were promised that as the rich got richer, the rest of the country would prosper as well. If we handed our finances and ultimately our lives over to those who knew the market the best, it would benefit us all. If we took the virtues of the market and made them the virtues of our lives, we, too, would experience boundless prosperity. Fulfillment would come if we could just trust the market enough to work for us…

“Left to themselves, economic forces do not work out for the best except perhaps for the powerful.” So wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in Economics and the Public Purpose (Houghton Mifflin 1973), the last installment of his classic trilogy that started with The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin 1958) and The New Industrial State (Houghton Mifflin 1967). A Harvard economist and public intellectual who served in the Office of Price Administration during World War II and as United States Ambassador to India in the Kennedy administration, Galbraith wrote eloquently and plainly about the practical effects of economic theory, explaining the workings of free market capitalism in the real world of global conglomerates, oligopolies, and a powerful financial sector. According to Galbraith, how economic systems perform and for whom are very much dependent upon a society’s distribution of power and wealth. A capitalist economy is in constant tension with our democratic ideals, for “the man who spends $70,000 in the course of a year speaks to the market with ten times as much authority on what is produced as does the man who disposes of but $7000.” Although power rests with the individual, “in the exercise of that power, some individuals are more equal than others.”

This is evident in the faces and stories of the many people who have joined the protestors in 150 cities throughout the country. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton professor of international affairs, told The New York Times, “Go to the Web site ‘We Are the 99 percent’ and you will see . . . page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out mortgages to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses . . . worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up . . . on the precipice of financial and social ruin.” It seems that the economic system we have relied upon for so long to provide stability and opportunity to all who are willing to play by the rules and work hard, has left behind all but a select few.

In 2010, corporate profits as a percentage of the economy exceeded $1.4 trillion, an all-time high, while wages as a percentage of the economy have dropped to an all-time low (source: St. Louis Federal Reserve). And yet, many companies continue to downsize, cutting costs (and people) to further increase profits. Meanwhile, unemployment hovers officially at above 9% and the real jobless rate (including those who have stopped looking for work and part-time employees in need of full-time work) stagnates at 17% of the workforce. Median family income has fallen 6.7 percent over the past two years, while executive compensation has reached near-historic levels.

Of course, ask a highly-paid corporate executive why companies reduce jobs even as profits soar and you will likely receive a carefully articulated, economically rational explanation. It is precisely why we cannot rely upon the private sector alone to solve the nation’s economic ills. And it is why an economic system in which the sole legal obligation of individual firms is to maximize profits, and which rewards short-term gain at the expense of long-term stability, is a flawed and unsustainable system.

When the richest 1 percent rake in money as if perpetual winners at a gambling table, while the wages and jobs available to working class Americans are cut; when a college education goes from something that almost any middle class family could afford 25 years ago to being a huge debt burden on the young; when the richest 5% of the country controls almost all of the nation’s wealth; and when both major political parties cater to corporate interests and the needs of their wealthy donors, it is understandable that people have taken to the streets.

But income inequality is only part of the story. Occupy Wall Street, as disorganized and ineffectual as it may be, has hit a vital nerve, because average citizens do not believe anyone speaks for them. They cannot afford K Street lobbyists or $25,000 plate fundraisers. They know that when extremely well compensated executives and investment bankers run their businesses into the ground, the politicians will come to their aid, while the average citizen who loses a job, or a home, or has his retirement fund decimated, is told to make do.

There was a time when Americans had an unshakable faith that their government stood ready to help in times of need. Under the New Deal, and later during the Great Society, the nation established the concept of economic security as a collective responsibility. Putting people to work and building and repairing the nation’s infrastructure became a governmental, community imperative. Enduring programs like Medicare and Social Security, which today serves 54 million Americans, has helped tens of millions of Americans avoid poverty. At a time when corporate pensions and job security have become quaint notions of a distant past, I am astounded that government programs which aid our most vulnerable citizens, which provide a fair shake for the middle class, and which put people to work, are under constant attack.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has hit a nerve because it encompasses the majority of Americans who feel left behind, ordinary people struggling with hard times and looking for answers. It is a movement of people who yearn to be heard, whose voices are calling out for a political and economic system that truly provides economic opportunity and fairness for all. They are the 99% who wish for a country where the government wisely spends tax revenue and works to create jobs; a country that takes care of working families; an economic system that values people and encourages corporations to invest in the American workforce, even at the expense of a small portion of profit. It is a movement that wishes to retain the American Dream that has all but vanished from our grasp.

First and Foremost a Preacher: The Anti-War Imperative of Martin Luther King Jr.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. – Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City and delivered the single most powerful indictment of the Vietnam War by a leading voice of moral dissent in American society. Before a large gathering of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, surrounded by such heavyweights as Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and Yale University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, King explained why it was time to break his silence on the war. Though he had become closely allied with President Lyndon Johnson, he acknowledged that “when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war.” Over the course of the next 45 minutes, he articulated his opposition to war in principle and to American involvement in Vietnam in particular, condemning in the strongest terms the policies of a Democratic president who had, just a few years earlier, helped King secure passage of the most significant civil rights and voting rights laws in American history.

King chose Riverside Church to demonstrate that the anti-war cause he embraced was not a subversive movement, but resulted from a life-long commitment to Christian principles. He had “come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” He anticipated, correctly as it turned out, that his statements would be criticized by many of his own supporters, including members of the black community who believed that King’s foray into the anti-war movement would dilute his efforts to secure civil, economic, and human rights for all Americans. He was “greatly saddened” by such criticism, however, “for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.”

For King, there was nothing inconsistent in speaking out on behalf of the poor and opposing an unjust war. The build-up in Vietnam was diverting resources away from anti-poverty efforts at home and, because of draft exemptions that disproportionately benefited affluent whites, the poor increasingly were called to “fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. . . .

King was first and foremost a preacher whose faith and calling exceeded national allegiances and compelled him to act within the meaning of his commitment “to the ministry of Jesus Christ.”

To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men – for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?

King also had an abiding faith in American democracy and the principles upon which our nation was founded. Four years earlier, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., he spoke to the hopes and dreams of all American citizens that the nation would one day rise up and embrace the ideals of justice and equality for all. “I have a dream,” he said. In 1964, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, King understood that beyond the race problem in America was the problem of violence and “the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.” By 1967, however, his movement for non-violent social change was under attack from some of the very people he was trying to help, from the growing militancy of urban blacks and the rise of the black power movement, to the competing visions of more radical and less conciliatory forces. Yet as a follower of Jesus and as a student of Ghandi, King never wavered in his commitment to non-violence, in his belief that love was more powerful than hate, that to break down the walls of oppression and injustice required an appeal to the hearts and souls of his fellow human beings.

From the pulpit at Riverside Church, King ached for the soul of America and believed it “incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.” In a manner exceptional for an American social critic and prophet of his day, King’s voice of conscience crossed national boundaries. He reviewed the history of colonial repression in Vietnam and saw how western powers repeatedly sided with the forces of despotism and oppression in squelching the revolutionary forces of independence. Although in 1945 the Vietnamese people proclaimed independence from French and Japanese occupation, U.S. policy makers believed the people of Vietnam were not ready for independence, and for nine years “vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.”

As a result, the peasants of Vietnam were denied a chance at real and meaningful land reform, something they genuinely needed, and instead were ruled by one of history’s most vicious modern dictators, Premier Diem. By the time King stood in the podium at Riverside Church, superior American air power and napalm had destroyed an ancient culture, its farms and forests; U.S. forces had killed over a million people, including tens of thousands of children. If King was to take his calling as a Christian pastor seriously, if he was to remain committed to his moral and ethical beliefs, he could not remain silent as the United States subjected a country the size of Italy to more than three times the tonnage of bombs dropped in all of World War II.

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. . . . We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

As a pastor and as an American, King also was deeply concerned with what the war was doing to the American soldiers who had to fight it, for “what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.”

It was time, King said, for the madness to cease. In demanding an end to the war, he spoke in language consistent with his pastoral calling and which implicitly embraced the Christian concept of care for the “least of these” as expressed in Matthew 25:

I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. . . . I speak as one who loves America.

King encouraged churches and synagogues to protest the war and to take creative actions in opposition to it. He then looked beyond Vietnam and addressed the wrongs of war itself.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

King called for a unilateral cease-fire, an end to the bombing, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Although in seven years, U.S. policy makers would accept the wisdom of King’s words, in April 1967, King was very much in the minority. President Johnson never forgave King for breaking ranks. A large segment of the civil rights movement deplored King’s violation of an unspoken contract. The mainstream press also turned on King. The New York Times called King’s sermon at Riverside Church “wasteful and self-defeating.” Life magazine said it was “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post suggested that King’s followers “would never again accord him the same confidence” and said he had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.”

King answered his critics during a television interview on July 28, 1967. When asked about the supposed contradiction between his efforts for civil rights and his statements against the war, King replied, “Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And wherever I see injustice, I’m going to take a stand against it whether it’s in Mississippi or in Vietnam.”

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after his remarks at Riverside Church. We will never know how American history might have changed if the nation had followed King’s advice in 1967. Had America listened to King, thousands of young American boys would have come home and lived to work and love and raise families of their own; the people and environment of Vietnam would have been spared some of the worst destruction in the annals of warfare; and America would not have ended its involvement in Vietnam on the wrong side of history.

As I look back 43 years later, it is apparent that the moral courage of a Martin Luther King Jr. is exceedingly rare. His was a lonely courage. He spoke out against the war at a time when the majority of Americans remained in support of U.S. policy. He branched off when the civil rights movement was divided, when supporters of non-violence were dwindling, and when the easy thing to do would have been to remain silent. He publicly broke from a president who had risked his political support in the South to help the causes for which King had fought his entire adult life, and he rejected conformity to an anti-Communist dogma that had dominated American politics for a generation. He exercised a most difficult form of courage, risking everything for a cause greater than himself.

I recognize that Martin Luther King Jr. was not a saint.  He was not perfect. Like all of us, he was a mortal human being with human flaws. No one understood this better than King. But today more than ever we need people with King’s exceptional courage and prophetic insight, his moral voice and passion for justice, his vision of peace and universal love. As a people, we are less complete in his absence.

Growing Doubts On Afghanistan

During a national nightly news broadcast in February 1968, Walter Cronkite questioned the legitimacy of America’s continued involvement in the Vietnam War. It was a defining moment. Following the broadcast, President Johnson famously told an aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” He was right. American support for the war substantially declined and, soon thereafter, Johnson announced that he was not running for re-election.

On September 1, 2009, conservative columnist George Will published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post entitled, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.” Although Will may not rank with Cronkite as “most trusted man in America,” his dissension from the ranks of pro-war sentiment is nevertheless significant and potentially influential. Will is a model of civil discourse, a thoughtful, intelligent, and well-respected commentator who appeals to reason at a time when the news media is filled with shouting pundits and a lack of critical thinking.

Will correctly notes that the United States has been entangled in Afghanistan for eight years – longer than its combined involvements in the two world wars of the Twentieth Century. He contends that our stated policy of “clear, hold, and build” – that is, clear various regions of Taliban control, hold U.S./Afghan control of those areas, and build effective local, district and provincial governments – is doomed to failure; “nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try.” According to the Brookings Institution, only Somalia ranks lower than Afghanistan as a weaker nation state. Will contends that Afghanistan has never had an effective, central government and, citing recent commentary in The Economist, states that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is “so ‘inept, corrupt and predatory’ that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, ‘who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai’s lot.’” We presently have 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan (bringing the coalition total to 110,000), and President Obama is considering adding thousands more; yet most experts believe that the counterinsurgency effort needed to protect the population would require “hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.”

Although most Republicans, including the editorialists of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, continue to support increased military jingoism, Will is not alone on the right in espousing a more cautious approach. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, for one, also advocates withdrawal of U.S. troops: “Bogging down large armies in historically complex, dangerous areas ends in disaster.” Hagel contends that the United States must recognize that every great threat to our country also threatens our global partners, including former adversaries China, Russia, India, and Turkey. “We need a clearly defined strategy that accounts for the interconnectedness and the shared interests of all nations.” Hagel suggests that we should not “view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only ‘winning’ or ‘losing.’ . . . There are too many cultural, ethnic and religious dynamics at play in these regions for any one nation to control.”

Like many Democrats, I have until recently believed that Afghanistan was the “good war” in our fight against global terrorism. Afghanistan is where the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, were planned and executed. The Taliban forces who supported Osama Bin-laden and provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda were legitimate targets of U.S. military might. I continue to believe that we were right to invade Afghanistan in October 2001, and that we were wrong to invade Iraq, a war which was entered under false pretenses and which diverted our military and security resources in a country that had not attacked us and that posed no direct threat to us. I agreed with President Obama when he asserted during the campaign that U.S. resources should be increased in Afghanistan and decreased in Iraq.

So it is with some reluctance that I express doubts about the President’s strategy and acknowledge the legitimacy of questions raised by George Will, Chuck Hagel, and an increasing number of more liberal commentators. As Bob Herbert wrote in Saturday’s New York Times, “We’re fighting on behalf of an incompetent and hopelessly corrupt government in Afghanistan. If our ultimate goal, as the administration tells us, is a government that can effectively run the country, protect its own population and defeat the Taliban, our troops will be fighting and dying in Afghanistan for many, many years to come.”

Although Vietnam analogies can be tiresome, and while liberals too easily equate all American military incursions with Vietnam, some comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam are indeed apt.

• Like President Johnson during the Vietnam War, President Obama appears eager to demonstrate his toughness by vowing to do what it takes to “win” in Afghanistan – even though what is meant by winning is far from clear. When Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, was asked last month to define “success” in Afghanistan, he replied, “We’ll know it when we see it.”

• As was the case with South Vietnam, Afghanistan is a deeply divided, semi-failed state with an incompetent, corrupt government that is considered illegitimate by a large portion of its population.

• As with Vietnam, in Afghanistan the United States is embroiled in a nation for which we have very little understanding of its culture, history, and language.

• Similar to Vietnam, Afghanistan has an inhospitable geography, with mountainous terrain, snowy winters, and numerous caves and escape routes that provide off-limit sanctuaries across 9,000 miles of borders. It is ideal for indigenous resistance to foreign invaders, providing the Taliban in certain areas with a distinct advantage.

• As with Vietnam’s resistance of French colonialism prior to the arrival of U.S. forces, Afghanistan successfully resisted military incursions by the British and the former Soviet Union.

• As with LBJ and Vietnam in the 1960’s, the conflict in Afghanistan threatens to derail President Obama’s efforts to reshape America at home. A military escalation in Afghanistan can only serve to divert much needed resources away from the President’s attempts to reform a troubled health care industry, revive a broken economy, prevent global warming, and restore America’s standing in the world.

None of this should be taken as criticism of the brave and courageous U.S. military forces that are stationed in Afghanistan. The ability and skill of our armed forces is unmatched. But many years after U.S. forces had completely withdrawn from Vietnam, Col. Harry Summers, a military historian, said to a counterpart in the North Vietnamese Army, “You never defeated us in the field.” The NVA officer replied, “That may be true. It is also irrelevant.” The Viet Cong knew that one day U.S. forces would leave and, until that day arrived, they would outlast us. At the peak of the Vietnamese conflict, LBJ confided in Senator Richard Russell that he knew we could not win the war in Vietnam, but he felt compelled to stay the course so as to avoid being the first American president to lose a war. Johnson’s pride and political calculations cost the lives of tens of thousands of some of America’s finest young men. These should be warnings to President Obama. While the number of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan will likely never approach Vietnam War levels, President Obama is risking a commitment to a war that has no end in sight and no apparent upside.

While the goal of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, is to establish a reasonably noncorrupt Afghan state that will partner with America in keeping Afghanistan free of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, it is clear that he is talking about nation building in one of the poorest, most tribalized, countries in the world. As Thomas Friedman contends in today’s New York Times:

It would be one thing if the people we were fighting with and for represented everything the Taliban did not: decency, respect for women’s rights and education, respect for the rule of law and democratic values and rejection of drug-dealing. But they do not. Too many in this Kabul government are just a different kind of bad. This has become a war between light black — Karzai & Co. — and dark black — Taliban Inc. And light black is simply not good enough to ask Americans to pay for with blood or treasure.

Obama has framed Afghanistan as a war of necessity and not of choice. No one disputes that there are people and organizations committed to harming America and that strong measures are needed to protect us from these threats. But how and when we use force is a decision that must not be made in the mere hope that, maybe, it will succeed.

If we still have not learned that it is virtually impossible to defeat an enemy we do not understand in a terrain we cannot control, then President Obama is destined to repeat the failed lessons of history. There is much more to this debate, and the issues are complex and not easily boxed into the Vietnam analogy. But I cannot help but believe that a coordinated policy of containment and deterrence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, coupled with strategic development, military training, and economic aid to the Afghan government, will be more successful in keeping us safe and in preventing a resurgence of Taliban influence in the Pashtun regions of Pakistan, than will a military strategy of "winning" at all costs. As Senator Hagel said, “Relying on the use of force as a centerpiece of our global strategy, as we have in recent years, is economically, strategically and politically unsustainable and will result in unnecessary tragedy – especially for the men and women, and their families, who serve our country.”