George Packer, who is always worth listening to, approves of McChrystal's report on Afghanistan. A taste:
In my piece I wrote about the fears within the Administration that escalation in Afghanistan could do to Obama what the same thing in Vietnam did to Johnson (just substitute health care and energy legislation for the Great Society). That’s the Vietnam analogy people in the Administration keep coming back to. I’ve long thought that Obama was more like J.F.K.: rational, coldly objective in the heat of events, unlikely to allow his advisers and his ego to destroy his Presidency by getting the country deeper into a war he never felt fully committed to.
Obama has Kennedy’s confidence in his own judgment, which Johnson tragically lacked. Gordon Goldstein’s very good book “Lessons in Disaster,” about McGeorge Bundynational security adviser to both J.F.K. and L.B.J.pretty much proves that Kennedy, if he’d lived, would not have committed ground troops to Vietnam at the start of his second term. After the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy stopped trusting his military advisers, and went on to overrule them during the Cuban missile crisis and, again and again, on Vietnam. Perhaps this is Obama’s J.F.K. moment. We’ll know in a few weeks. And if so, perhaps he would be right.
His caveat:
[T]he alternatives were already rejected by Obama’s strategy review, and since then no one has made a persuasive case why they would work any better.