Stumbled across this 2001 essay by someone named Christopher Hansen, in which he puts forward the argument that JFK was planning to pull the US out of Vietnam by 1965, but needed to talk tough to get through the re-election campaign first for fear another Joe MacCarthy would attack him for being a communist appeaser.

http://home.c2i.net/chrhansen/jfk/kennedy.html

I'm not trying to argue that old idea, but reading this again did make me think about the actions Bush took after striking Afghanistan, of taking us into Iraq and into one of the largest disasters in American history. It's no a par with Vietnam, and maybe bigger because the implications of lighting the gasoline can in the heart of our energy supply may have much larger consequences in the long run.

Seeing Vietnam in hindsight makes me wonder now how things might have been radically different if this administration had done a couple of things with a more rational view.

If we had focused on making sure the Taliban stayed crushed, on establishing a sense of authentic safety for the population and on building the Afghan infrastructure like roads, schools and power supplies, without triggering the Afghans' notorious prickliness about foreign invaders...

If we had, simultaneously, used the goodwill we still had in the region then to reach out to the Syrians with the goal of getting Asad and Israel to back down from confrontation, particularly in Lebanon, and to negotiate agreements to begin to get those two states to start on the road to cooperation. (Instead of throwing them into the arms of the Iranians.)

And if, also at the same time, the US had maintained an even hand in making Palestinian/Israeli peace negotiations a core goal of American foreign policy...

Imagine the lost opportunities. Imagine a landscape now where Syria and Israel were talking instead of fighting proxy wars in Lebanon; where Iran was not on the ascendancy, and where the Israelis and Palestinians were now, if not best buddies, at least being forced to talk instead of being locked in this endless death grip.

Perhaps none of this would have worked out all that well. Lots of people in that part of the world, as well as here, certainly don't want to see conflict stop... there's too much money to be made, and too much absolutist thinking to make one too optimistic.

But we could not have been worse off than we are now? Our history would have been much different if Kennedy's alleged plans to withdraw from Vietnam, win or lose, had not been short-circuited by his assassination.

Maybe there's a lesson to be learned from both examples.