[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York.]

Writing in The Washington Post, Yale Law School Professor Bruce Ackerman attempts to chastise General Stanley McChrystal for standing behind his well known recommendations on the military strategy for the United States to follow in Afghanistan. What upsets the professor is McChrystal’s audacity to challenge the wisdom of the expert from Delaware, Vice-President Joe Biden- a man who has been consistently wrong on every foreign policy recommendation he has made for the past twenty years.

The man who voted against the First Gulf War under Bush 41 now favors less troops and the use of strategic bombing and drones—a tactic that would assure no return, harm innocent civilians, and guarantee America’s losing in Afghanistan. But the professor tells us “McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements,” since the NSC, not the General, determines our strategy. Keep in mind, as Max Boot has pointed out, that McChrystal was not acting contrary to his orders, or even disagreeing with Obama. Indeed, Obama’s March 27th edict was made clear when he announced a “comprehensive strategy” that would reverse the Taliban’s gains. As the president then argued, we cannot allow Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban, or “that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

General McChrystal was simply doing what he was told: informing President Obama what needs to be done to accomplish the ends he said were necessary to achieve. Why would the President not listen to the recommendation of the very man he put in charge who knows the territory and what needs to be done better than anyone else? Does Ackerman really believe that Joe Biden has one ounce of credibility for his recommendations? This is especially the case, as Boot notes, since McChrystal was only “offering his judgment about what it will take to implement the existing policy.”

Nevertheless, Ackerman and others are making a very flawed analogy—that pertaining to the Truman-MacArthur fight during the Korean War. “We have no need,” Ackerman writes, “for a repeat of the showdown between President Harry Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur over Korea. Truman faced down his general the last time around, but it was a bruising experience.” Once again, Ackerman suggests that if the General does not “show more-self restraint,” there could be another showdown over the issue of civilian control of the military.

Columnist Eugene Robinson agrees. He too thinks the General should “shut up and salute,” and not campaign publicly on behalf of what he thinks should be done. Again, Robinson makes the same mistake as Ackerman: he does not seem to realize that McChrystal was defending the strategy Obama originally favored, not one contrary to that of the Administration. He was not, as Robinson charges, engaging in politics.

And in the same paper, columnist Richard Cohen too raises the Truman-MacArthur analogy, while failing to comprehend what that dispute was all about. Cohen, unlike his fellow columnists, thinks the war in Afghanistan “is eminently more winnable than was Vietnam,” and he knows to win, that more troops and funding are needed. That takes presidential leadership, and he is afraid that is something Obama lacks. “Does he,” Cohen asks, “have the stomach and commitment for what is likely to continue to be an unpopular war?” Will he send some troops- but not enough to do the job?

Cohen, however, seems upset that General McChrystal has told “this young and untested president…what to do.” He writes: “this MacArthuresque star called for a Trumanesque response, but Obama offered nothing of the kind.” Is Cohen suggesting that President Obama fire McChrystal, which would be the only Trumanesque response? Obviously, the left-wing of the Democratic Party, which only used the argument that Iraq is the wrong war and Afghanistan is the right war as a tool with which to attack George W. Bush, would be more than pleased. But Cohen’s real complaint is different. It is that Barack Obama does not inspire “a lot of awe,” which he knows is what we need. A war of necessity, he writes, demands just that. So he wants the president to show some spine, and based on his “zigzagging so far,” he has doubts about whether he will come through as he hopes will be the case.

As for Truman and MacArthur, the various columnists seem to forget how different that dispute was. General Douglas MacArthur favored victory at all costs, which he defined as expansion of the war by crossing the Yalu River, bombing in Chinese territory, and ignoring the possibility that such steps would lead the Soviet Union to honor its defense pact with China and then formally enter the war as well—risking the possibility of a third world war fought with atomic weapons.

The Administration was fighting to reverse the Soviet backed North Korean invasion of South Korea, and to push the Communist forces back across the 38th parallel that separated the South from the North. The set goal was to preserve the integrity of the pro-Western South Korean government, and defeat the attempt of the North Koreans to create a unified Communist Korea. Instead, in December of 1950, MacArthur, as Alonzo Hamby writes in his biography of Truman, “the general demanded full freedom of action and unlimited resources for all-out retaliation against the Chinese.” That included a coastal blockade, bombing of industrial areas in China, and support of military action by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Formosa. The fight was over whether the U.S. should accept the boundaries between North and South set in June of 1950, or make a drive towards the Yalu and fight to destroy the Communist regime in the North.

On March 24th, countermanding Truman’s decision to move to a negotiated peace and accept the boundaries- having pushed the Chinese out of Seoul in South Korea- MacArthur issued his own declaration publicly calling for victory, and proclaiming that his forces could easily defeat the Chinese troops in battle. Truman had no choice, once the general issued his own directives for the war and challenged that of the Administration, but to remove him from office. That tough decision was not popular in the country, and it showed Truman’s strength of character that he was willing to do what was necessary, even though the nation exploded in rage against him.

The Republican far Right of the day called for the president’s impeachment, branded him as the Communist’s great friend, said he was unfit to be the nation’s leader, and even worse. MacArthur returned to America a conquering hero. He got a ticker tape parade in New York City where city residents lined the streets in the thousands, and later gave a speech to Congress, that exploded in applause for the disgraced former military leader.

So in reality, there was a major difference between Truman’s fight with MacArthur and Obama’s differences with McChrystal. Today’s general only stood by the strategy that Obama had previously announced on March 27th, and supported his analysis of what was needed to fulfill the goals the Obama Administration set forth. MacArthur violated the Constitutional requirement for civilian control of the military when he called for a different strategy than the president and sought public support to carry it out in opposition to the White House.

The spine Obama needs is not that of moving to dismiss McChrystal, but that of having the courage to implement the agreed upon strategy, and not to backtrack and act to win the favor of his party’s left-wing that now wants retreat. Let us hope, as Richard Cohen argues, that he is up to that task.

Update:

On the TNR website, the centrist Democrat William Galston has just posted a similar piece, making the same argument about the differences between MacArthur and McChrystal. He too says that Ackerman and Robinson are wrong. Galston argues that McChrystal’s intervention is a good thing, and makes it harder for Obama to fudge his eventual decision. Kudos to Galston for reminding liberals of the double standard they often have when it comes to letting Obama off the hook.

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about Iran's nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are:

1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of independently enriching uranium to at least the 5 percent or so needed for energy reactors and also to the 20 percent needed for its medical reactor.

2. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a fatwa in 2005 that no Islamic state may possess or use atomic weapons because they willy nilly kill masses of innocent civilians when used, which is contrary to the Islamic law of war (which forbids killing innocent non-combatants).

3. Iranian officials have repeatedly denied that they are working on a nuclear bomb or that they aspire to have one.

4. US intelligence agencies are convinced that Iran has done no weapons-related experiments since 2003, and that it currently has no nuclear weapons program.

5. Israel forcefully maintains that Iran's nuclear program is for weapons and has repeatedly threatened to bomb the Natanz enrichment facilities.

6. Iran recently announced a new nuclear enrichment facility near Qom.

Those who insist that Iran is trying to get a bomb have a difficult time explaining why Khamenei forbids it as un-Islamic and why the president and others all deny it. It is possible that they are lying, but their denials at least have to be noted and analyzed. The skeptics also have to explain away why the 16 US intelligence agencies say after exhaustive espionage and investigation that there is no weapons program now and that there hasn't been one for some time.

Those who agree with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that there is no evidence for Iran having a nuclear weapons program have to explain Iran's insistence on closing the fuel cycle and being able to enrich uranium itself.

The answer I propose, which explains all the anomalies elegantly and concisely, is that Iran is seeking nuclear latency. Latency is the possession of a nuclear energy program and of reactors, which would allow the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to national autonomy reared its ugly head. Nuclear latency is sometimes called the 'Japan option,' because given its sophisticated scientific establishment and enormous economy, Japan could clearly produce a nuclear weapon on short notice if its government decided to mount a crash program.

The reason for the construction of the Qom facility, in this reading, would be that the Natanz facility is too easily bombed or struck with missiles. Moreover, the Israelis and some Americans have repeatedly threatened to strike it. A nuclear enrichment program such as that at Natanz, which is subject to being wiped out by a military strike, cannot truly provide nuclear latency. The Qom facility was necessary in the regime's eyes if the latency strategy was to be preserved.

The regime has every reason to maintain latency and no reasons to go further and construct a nuclear device. The latter step would attract severe international sanctions.

I was on an email list where someone expressed suspicion of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's 2005 fatwa against the possession and use of nuclear weapons by an Islamic state.

One suggestion was that Khamenei is not a real Shiite jurisprudent and has eschewed having followers inside Iran. But, no, Khamenei is a mujtahid or independent jurist and has the standing to issue a fatwa or considered ruling on the law.. A mujtahid may always decline to accept muqallidun or followers, which Khamenei appears to have done for Iranian nationals, without that affecting his legitimate right to issue fatwas. The theory of ijtihad or independent jurisprudential reasoning holds that the law inheres in the reasoning processes of the jurisprudent; whether the jurisprudent has followers or not is irrelevant to the discovery of the law in a particular instance. Moreover, as rahbar or supreme leader,, Khamenei's pronouncements on such matters might even be seen as a hukm or standing command. Finally, since he sets policy on such matters, what difference, in any case, would it make what exact jurisprudential standing his fatwas enjoy?

The only real question is whether he is lying and insincere. That would be a dangerous ploy on his part, in a state premised on Islamic jurisprudence, as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out.

As for the general Islamic law of war, it forbids killing innocent non-combatants such as women, children and unarmed men; ipso facto it forbids deploying nuclear weapons. It was suggested that Iran has chemical weapons and that these would as much violate the stricture above as nuclear warheads. I do not agree that Iran has a chemical weapons program, but in any case chemical weapons have for the most part been battlefield weapons used against massed troops or in trenches. Having such a program does not imply intent to kill innocent civilians. Whereas making a bomb does imply such intent and is therefore considered by most Muslim jurisprudents incompatible with Islamic law.

Khamenei seems to me to have decided some time ago on a policy of nuclear latency, for two reasons. Nuclear reactors lend Iran a hope of energy independence. Iran produces 3.8 million barrels per day of petroleum and uses about 2 mn. b/d itself. It is likely that soon Iran will use up all of its daily petroleum production, leaving it without the petroleum income windfall upon which its government depends. At that point, Khamenei fears, Iran would be dragooned back into the neo-liberal, America-centric order that had dominated Iran under the shah. Second, nuclear latency would help fend off aggressive attempts at regime change by the Western powers or Israel.

Nuclear latency has all the advantages of actual possession of a bomb without any of the unpleasant consequences, of the sort North Korea is suffering.

Even if my thesis that Iran seeks nuclear latency were accepted, isn't there a chance that in the future the leaders of the Islamic Republic might seek a weapon?

Scott Sagan noted in one of his essays that one impetus to seek an actual bomb is regime and national pride in the country's modernity. But this motivation does not exist in the case of Iran, since the Islamic Republic is a critic of the alleged horrors of modernity and because it defines nuclear bombs as shameful, rather than something to boast about.

Moreover, latent nuclear states sometimes give up their latency and foreswear even a nuclear option. Brazil and Argentina mothballed their programs in the 1980s, either because they saw each other as insufficiently threatening or because their move to democratic rule lessed the power of the military-industrial complex in each country that had been plumping for nukes (Sagan thinks it is the latter).

The problem for the West is that nuclear latency is not illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And conveniently for Khamenei, nuclear latency is not incompatible with Islamic law. That is why the US and its close allies have to pretend that Iran is actually going for a bomb, despite the lack of good evidence for serious weaponization; they are using this pretense as a way to attempt to forestall a Japan option, which is what they really object to, since it is a geostrategic game changer for the region in and of itself. Unfortunately for them, the General Assembly is unconvinced, and China and Russia are reluctant.

[Susan Dunn, the author of the forthcoming “Roosevelt’s Gamble: How F.D.R. Fought to Change the Democratic Party,” is a professor at Williams College.]

Williamstown, Mass.

“PRESIDENT OBAMA is not only president of the country, but head of the Democratic Party,” said Doug Sosnik, the political director in the Clinton White House, commenting on President Obama’s aggressive move to quash the election hopes of New York’s deeply unpopular governor, David Paterson, and to pick favorites in gubernatorial and Senate primaries in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia and elsewhere. But history shows that a White House push to intervene in state races is fraught with danger.

In 1938, in the middle of his second term, Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself stuck. Two years earlier, every state in the union — except Maine and Vermont — had joined in a collective vote of confidence in Roosevelt and the New Deal. But that overwhelming mandate proved to be anything but shatterproof.

Even though Democrats held staggering majorities in both chambers of Congress, that huge Democratic majority was deceptive. Conservative Democrats — senators like Millard Tydings of Maryland, Walter George of Georgia and Ellison Smith of South Carolina — allied themselves with Republicans to obstruct and vote down key New Deal bills. Yet when Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1936, none of those Democrats had had the courage to criticize him. On the contrary, they gave lip service to the New Deal — and then, insisting that they were only voting their consciences, proceeded to knife it.

Concerned about his progressive agenda as well as about the next presidential election in 1940, Roosevelt decided to intervene in state primaries — tantamount to the November election in the one-party Democratic South — and support challengers to the conservative incumbents.

In a fireside chat in June 1938, he carefully explained that as president, he would not intervene in Democratic primaries. But, as the head of the Democratic Party, he said, it was his right and duty to support liberal candidates who stood by the New Deal. In addition, he believed that the nation should have two effective and responsible political parties, one liberal, the other conservative, each ideologically consistent and united. Newspapers branded his tactic a “purge” — and the inflammatory label stuck...

... In the end, the purge was one of the few glaring political missteps in Roosevelt’s long career, and afterward he had to struggle to make amends and repair relations with the men he had tried to oust. As it turned out, many of the Democratic conservatives — especially those from the South — whom Roosevelt had sought to banish were staunch internationalists who would soon become his loyal allies as he battled isolationists over America’s role in World War II.

Will President Obama and his White House team learn the lessons of the purge of 1938? Franklin Roosevelt’s political vision of party realignment was compelling; and yet the purge was hastily contrived and its execution amateurish...

[William R. Polk's most recent book, Understanding Iran, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in October. He is working on a new book on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, tentatively titled The Cockpit of Asia.]

Dear Mr. President,

Although we were separated by more than a decade, we lived a few steps apart in Hyde Park and were both professors at the University of Chicago. There I established the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Before going to Chicago, during the Kennedy administration I was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia. A Democrat, I was an early supporter of yours. So I hope you will accept the following analysis and proposals as being from a friend as well as a person with considerable experience on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In recent events I see an opportunity to accomplish American objectives while avoiding a course of action that could derail plans for your presidency, just as the Vietnam War ruined the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

According to press accounts, you are being told that America can win the war against the Taliban by employing overwhelming military power. Just like President Johnson's generals, yours keep asking for more troops. You are also being told that we can multiply our power with counterinsurgency tactics. Having made a detailed study (laid out in my book Violent Politics) of a dozen insurgencies, ranging from the American Revolution to Afghanistan, and fought by the British, French, Germans and Russians in America, Europe, Africa and Asia, I doubt that you are being well advised. When I was in government, we were told we could achieve victory in Vietnam by the same combination of force and counterinsurgency recommended by your advisers in Afghanistan. But as the editors of the Pentagon Papers concluded, the "attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counter-insurgency into operational reality.... [through] a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures.... [were] marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally."

What actually brought all the insurgencies, including the one in Vietnam, to a halt was the withdrawal of the foreigners. Some foreigners left in defeat, but others left in ways that achieved their most important objectives. I believe you have an opportunity to achieve America's important objectives in Afghanistan.

In Vietnam we never understood the Vietnamese and were defeated; so here I lay out the essential features of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir and then show how they set the context for a successful policy. I begin with Pakistan.

Pakistan has long been obsessed with Kashmir, frightened of India and favorably inclined toward its Pashtun ethnic minority. To help Pashtun "freedom fighters" in the 1979-89 war against the Soviet Union, we funneled billions of dollars into Pakistan. Opposition to the Soviet Union was our motivation, but Pakistan had a different motivation: to protect Islam. This necessarily involved it not only in Afghanistan but also in Kashmir. Since Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, is about as close to the Indian-held capital of Kashmir, Srinagar, and to the Khyber Pass, which leads into Afghanistan, as New York is to Hartford, both Afghanistan and Kashmir appear to the Pakistanis to be nearly domestic issues.

Kashmir is one of those legacies of the age of imperialism that still blight international relations. Today's problem was created in 1846, when the British sold Kashmir and its Muslim population to a Hindu who became its maharaja. Cruel and rapacious, he and his descendants were bitterly hated by Kashmiris. When the British were leaving South Asia in 1947, they assumed that because the people were mainly Muslim, Kashmir would be folded into what became Pakistan. But the maharaja opted for India. Despite a promise from Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister-designate of India, to Lord Louis Mountbatten, then viceroy of India, that a plebiscite would be held to ascertain the wishes of the Kashmiris, it has never been held. Ever since, the Indians have occupied Kashmir with half a million troops as a conquered enemy country. Under Indian rule, thousands of Kashmiris have been imprisoned, hundreds "disappeared" and almost everyone afflicted by lesser tyrannies. In shorthand terms, Kashmir is the Palestine of Central/South Asia. Pakistan and India have fought three wars and innumerable bloody engagements over Kashmir. The drain on the resources of both India and Pakistan has been immense. In part because of the destabilizing effects of this conflict, Pakistan has never developed a durable, coherent government. The only really solid Pakistani organization is the army. Civilian governments have been marked by massive corruption, ineptitude and fragility.

There are many reasons for Pakistan's problems, but one stands out: it is an amalgam of ethnic/cultural nations. The British ruled the Punjab and Sind directly, but sought merely to divide and weaken the Pashtuns. That was the purpose of the Durand Line, which they drew in 1893 along the mountainous frontier. The effect of the line is that today about 25 million Pashtuns live in Pakistan and roughly 14 million live in Afghanistan. The Pashtuns wanted to form an independent nation-state in 1947 but were prevented from doing so. Until its recent military campaign against the Taliban in Swat, the Pakistanis made little attempt to integrate the Pashtuns, but because of them Pakistan has always been deeply affected by Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has always baffled foreign invaders. After three attempts from 1842 to 1919 to rule it, the British gave up; at the end of a decade of costly war, the Russians did as well. Neither understood the complex social and political makeup of the country. Without doing so, we cannot hope to accomplish our objectives, so let me highlight the main points.

When I first went to Afghanistan, in 1962, to prepare a US National Policy Paper, I found a good analogy for the land and the society to be a rocky hill sliced by gullies and covered by 20,000 Ping-Pong balls. The balls represented the autonomous village-states. Politically and economically divided, they shared a common adherence to a blend of primitive Islam and even more primitive tribal custom (varying throughout the country but known in the south as Pashtunwali). During their occupation, the Russians crushed many Ping-Pong balls, but they could not defeat enough of them to win. At any given time, roughly 80 percent of the country remained outside Russian control; so the Russians won all the battles but lost the war. Afghanistan became the graveyard of the Soviet Union.

The brutal Soviet occupation shattered the Afghan social structure. Nearly one in ten Afghans was killed or died, and more than 5 million fled the country. Living wretchedly in refugee camps, mainly in Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of young Afghan men were "reshaped." Like the biblical Children of Israel after forty years in the wilderness, these Afghans emerged very different from their fathers. The new generation kept their stern code of belief, but they lost touch with the humanizing aspects of growing up in families. Living apart from mothers and sisters, many of the young men, mostly Pashtuns, were incorporated into male-only madrassas in which they were housed, fed, armed and radicalized. They emerged as the foot soldiers of the Taliban.

When they were in power, the Taliban enforced an ugly, repressive regime, but it was no worse than some other regimes in Asia and Africa. And, as we can observe, societies and regimes evolve. Look at what has happened in postwar Vietnam. No one in my time in government could have guessed that the Communist regime would evolve into a relatively open and indeed capitalistic society. In Afghanistan there are signs, still faint to be sure, that while the stern code remains intact, at least the Taliban leadership is beginning to modify its program. As I will point out, we can encourage this trend...

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, reaffirmed Monday that a date would soon be set for the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the planned nuclear enrichment facility near Qom about which the Iranian government informed the IAEA on Monday a week ago.

If Iran really does permit full, ongoing IAEA inspections of the facility, then it cannot be used for weapons production. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted Sunday that Iran cannot use the Natanz plant for bomb-making because it is being regularly inspected by the UN.

Scott Ritter, an experienced inspector himself, dispels the myths about the new Qom facility and urges against new economic sanctions on Iran as counter-productive. Greater transparency and more inspections should be the demand of the West, he says.

I made the same point on MSNBC on Monday with Nora O'Donnell: And no here's something you won't read in major American newspapers or see on American television.

The USG Open Source Center translated remarks to Iranian television of General Hoseyn Salami, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Air Force concerning Iran's Monday missile tests (Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN), Monday, September 28, 2009):

Gen. Salami said, "as long as our enemies act within a political domain, our behavior will be completely political. However, if they want to leave the domain of political action and enter the domain of military threat, then our action will be exactly and completely military.

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.]

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly called for expanding the war in Afghanistan. Be careful what you wish for.

The bells of Afghanistan echo the Vietnam War. Like then, we have a powerful military establishment linked to civilian foreign and defense intellectuals clamoring for an expansive military adventure to protect us from an onrushing enemy. The pressure on President Barack Obama to substantially increase troop levels in Afghanistan is enhanced by a high-powered, hardly subtle campaign.

Vietnam cost more than 50,000 Americans killed in action, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead or missing, untold numbers of maimed and wounded on both sides, and incalculable American treasure. Afghanistan promises to be as long and as expensive.

Tension and conflict between the military high command and the Obama administration over Afghanistan are obvious. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in August described the Afghanistan security situation as “serious” and “deteriorating.” Less than a month later, he told a Senate panel that “probably” more troops were needed. Mullen’s remarks prefaced the report of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the field commander in Afghanistan.

Predictably, McChrystal has called for 45,000 more troops. And equally predictable, his “confidential” report to his commander in chief was leaked to The Washington Post, using none other than Bob Woodward, the serial conduit for power holders (or grabbers?). Who leaked and why is a mindless Beltway parlor game; the simple answer will do: The leak clearly is designed to pressure President Obama.

McChrystal paints an impressive analysis of the war in Afghanistan and the shortcomings of our counterinsurgency responses. He suggests that failure is certain if he is denied additional troops. His report has been in circulation for nearly a month, yet the president has maintained that he will withhold a decision until he has charted a clear course. The White House take is that the United States must define its strategy before making any further commitment.

McChrystal and other military leaders, however, will apparently have none of that. The report’s conclusions are stated in urgent terms, citing the imminent danger of a Taliban triumph. Indeed, reports of the Taliban’s increasing successes mount, but that only draws into question whether an expanded military effort can do much to stem the tide against a Kabul government that is inept, corrupt and lacking of popular support. Meanwhile, the Taliban freely uses the soil of our ally Pakistan as a sanctuary and launching pad. Some ally.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, weighed in with support for McChrystal’s recommendations. The generals are post-Vietnam, anxious to prove they are more adept in counterinsurgency. They have also learned to operate more effectively in the domestic political arena. They are not Gen. William Westmoreland.

Important civilian voices have lent their support, apparently well informed of the military’s thinking. Condoleezza Rice again has warned that if we abandon Afghanistan, we invite further terrorist attacks, reminding one of the dire “mushroom cloud” warnings she made before the Iraq debacle.

More ominously, Sen. John McCain soldiers on. Following the leak of McChrystal’s report, he attacked a “disconnect” between the military and the White House, as if the president is constitutionally, perhaps divinely, mandated to follow wherever the military leads. Since McCain campaigned for the presidency in 2008 as being best qualified to serve as commander in chief, he should know that the constitutional phrase asserts civilian supremacy. When Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon confronted unsound or incorrect military advice, McCain was a POW in Vietnam, unmindful of civilian-military clashes over Vietnam. Today, with the hindsight of history, we can look back over those conflicts and see that the wiser course was all too apparent. Clearly McCain in his certitude does not.

We will not hear much dissent among the political elite from McChrystal’s recommendations, aside from the usual array of war critics. But what is at work here is that vague, almost incalculable force: public opinion. Polls now reflect diminishing public support for our involvement and a corresponding increase in opposition.

The Afghanistan war has been difficult and long. McChrystal knows it will be even longer and more difficult—but he promises light at the end of the tunnel. Old idea, new garb.

The president is in a bind of his own making. How ironic. His campaign attempts to show his toughness have come back to bite him. Where were progressive voices then? In their zeal to pile on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, they offered few criticisms of their own candidate, who eagerly promised to pursue a similar policy, only better. The futility of that approach should have been evident, but candidate Obama got a free ride.

Obama inherited an imperial America; he also inherited the need to maintain it with military force. In the meantime, whatever the wisdom or viability of McChrystal’s military solution, his mission seems predicated on maintaining a corrupt, ineffective regime in Kabul. Or is it? McChrystal has not said anything on the subject, but does he have contingency plans for supporting a coup in Afghanistan? We should remember the futility of coups we sponsored in South Vietnam that resulted only in still another incompetent general.

If Obama rejects McChrystal’s call for more troops, and carries on an inconclusive war interminably, he will have to shoulder the blame and carry the burden of “we told you so” barbs. The right, determined for the president’s policy initiatives to fail, enthusiastically urges a more expansive war. But that is not to suggest a moratorium on its criticism.

Obama has little wiggle room; he cannot continue the war he already has expanded without imperiling his presidency. Time is not his ally.

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.]

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly called for expanding the war in Afghanistan. Be careful what you wish for.

The bells of Afghanistan echo the Vietnam War. Like then, we have a powerful military establishment linked to civilian foreign and defense intellectuals clamoring for an expansive military adventure to protect us from an onrushing enemy. The pressure on President Barack Obama to substantially increase troop levels in Afghanistan is enhanced by a high-powered, hardly subtle campaign.

Vietnam cost more than 50,000 Americans killed in action, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead or missing, untold numbers of maimed and wounded on both sides, and incalculable American treasure. Afghanistan promises to be as long and as expensive.

Tension and conflict between the military high command and the Obama administration over Afghanistan are obvious. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in August described the Afghanistan security situation as “serious” and “deteriorating.” Less than a month later, he told a Senate panel that “probably” more troops were needed. Mullen’s remarks prefaced the report of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the field commander in Afghanistan.

Predictably, McChrystal has called for 45,000 more troops. And equally predictable, his “confidential” report to his commander in chief was leaked to The Washington Post, using none other than Bob Woodward, the serial conduit for power holders (or grabbers?). Who leaked and why is a mindless Beltway parlor game; the simple answer will do: The leak clearly is designed to pressure President Obama.

McChrystal paints an impressive analysis of the war in Afghanistan and the shortcomings of our counterinsurgency responses. He suggests that failure is certain if he is denied additional troops. His report has been in circulation for nearly a month, yet the president has maintained that he will withhold a decision until he has charted a clear course. The White House take is that the United States must define its strategy before making any further commitment.

McChrystal and other military leaders, however, will apparently have none of that. The report’s conclusions are stated in urgent terms, citing the imminent danger of a Taliban triumph. Indeed, reports of the Taliban’s increasing successes mount, but that only draws into question whether an expanded military effort can do much to stem the tide against a Kabul government that is inept, corrupt and lacking of popular support. Meanwhile, the Taliban freely uses the soil of our ally Pakistan as a sanctuary and launching pad. Some ally.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, weighed in with support for McChrystal’s recommendations. The generals are post-Vietnam, anxious to prove they are more adept in counterinsurgency. They have also learned to operate more effectively in the domestic political arena. They are not Gen. William Westmoreland.

Important civilian voices have lent their support, apparently well informed of the military’s thinking. Condoleezza Rice again has warned that if we abandon Afghanistan, we invite further terrorist attacks, reminding one of the dire “mushroom cloud” warnings she made before the Iraq debacle.

More ominously, Sen. John McCain soldiers on. Following the leak of McChrystal’s report, he attacked a “disconnect” between the military and the White House, as if the president is constitutionally, perhaps divinely, mandated to follow wherever the military leads. Since McCain campaigned for the presidency in 2008 as being best qualified to serve as commander in chief, he should know that the constitutional phrase asserts civilian supremacy. When Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon confronted unsound or incorrect military advice, McCain was a POW in Vietnam, unmindful of civilian-military clashes over Vietnam. Today, with the hindsight of history, we can look back over those conflicts and see that the wiser course was all too apparent. Clearly McCain in his certitude does not.

We will not hear much dissent among the political elite from McChrystal’s recommendations, aside from the usual array of war critics. But what is at work here is that vague, almost incalculable force: public opinion. Polls now reflect diminishing public support for our involvement and a corresponding increase in opposition.

The Afghanistan war has been difficult and long. McChrystal knows it will be even longer and more difficult—but he promises light at the end of the tunnel. Old idea, new garb.

The president is in a bind of his own making. How ironic. His campaign attempts to show his toughness have come back to bite him. Where were progressive voices then? In their zeal to pile on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, they offered few criticisms of their own candidate, who eagerly promised to pursue a similar policy, only better. The futility of that approach should have been evident, but candidate Obama got a free ride.

Obama inherited an imperial America; he also inherited the need to maintain it with military force. In the meantime, whatever the wisdom or viability of McChrystal’s military solution, his mission seems predicated on maintaining a corrupt, ineffective regime in Kabul. Or is it? McChrystal has not said anything on the subject, but does he have contingency plans for supporting a coup in Afghanistan? We should remember the futility of coups we sponsored in South Vietnam that resulted only in still another incompetent general.

If Obama rejects McChrystal’s call for more troops, and carries on an inconclusive war interminably, he will have to shoulder the blame and carry the burden of “we told you so” barbs. The right, determined for the president’s policy initiatives to fail, enthusiastically urges a more expansive war. But that is not to suggest a moratorium on its criticism.

Obama has little wiggle room; he cannot continue the war he already has expanded without imperiling his presidency. Time is not his ally.

[Haggai Ram teaches the history of the Middle East at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His most recent book is Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford University Press, 2009).]

Before, during and after the recent UN General Assembly meeting, the Israeli government, much like Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeat forever a meaningless task, once again stepped up its campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. The immediate objective is patently clear: to push the United Nations Security Council to expand sanctions against Iran and perhaps also to lay down the justification for a future Israeli preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The tactic used is not new either. It consists of a well known, well orchestrated endeavor to conjure up a radioactively reified picture of Iran as a Nazi Germany-like power obsessively bent on making good on its alleged pledge to have the Jewish state “wiped off the map.” Thus, on a recent trip to Russia Israeli President Shimon Peres described the prospects of an Iranian nuclear bomb in ominous terms as “a flying concentration camp”; and Netanyahu, while on a trip to Germany, warned Iran that Israel will not allow “those who wish to perpetrate mass deaths, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state, to go unchallenged.”

In assessing the Jewish state’s unrelenting recourse to drawing analogies between Iran and Nazi Germany, one should not dismiss the genuine feelings of vulnerability among Israelis stemming from the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. This explains, in part, why despite Israel’s overwhelming military superiority and its own nuclear arsenal, Israeli Jews today are deeply concerned about the likelihood of an impending “second” Holocaust. However misplaced and exaggerated, the reality of such feelings, their importance, must be recognized.

Persistently voicing venomous anti-Israel rhetoric and allegedly pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, the Iranian government, no doubt, has not been helpful in reducing these misplaced anxieties. To these we should add the reverberations of the electoral earthquake that has shaken the Islamic republic to its core since last June. Indeed, the fraudulent presidential elections and their aftermath have demonstrated to the Israelis the brutal force which that government is prepared to unleash — even against its own people — in order to ensure its survival.

Yet one should also not ignore the dubious dividends that the Israeli government now expects to reap from producing such tenuous analogies. It is no secret that the Obama administration has been exploring ways to bringing about the resumption of the long-stalled Middle East talks. To that end, it has mounted pressure on Israel to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian land. By playing up the purported genocidal threat issuing from Iran, the Netanyahu government thus hopes to avoid making any concessions that are likely to bring about a meaningful breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. "The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not," as an Israeli official recently told The Guardian.

In my recent book, Iranophobia (2009), I have demonstrated how the Jewish state has time and again (ab)used the specter of the “Iranian threat” in order to cover up, and divert attention away from, both domestic oversights and the continuing apartheid regime in the Palestinian territories. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s incumbent Foreign Minister, is a case in point. When asked in the wake of the devastation that the Israeli military had sown in Gaza last year, “What you think is the first most strategic threat to Israel,” Lieberman responded: “Iran, Iran, Iran… As long as there’s no solution to the Iranian problem we will deal with neither the settlements nor the settlers… Only after we will have taken care of … Iran it will become possible to talk about… the problem in Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights.”

These fanciful expressions concerning the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran are misleading for two reasons: First, because when compared to the extraordinary misery and depredation which the Iranian government has exacted on its own people, the actual threat which it poses to the Jewish state pales into insignificance; and second, because such expressions have thus far enabled the Jewish state to exacerbate, rather than help to alleviate, the Palestinian problem. It is this yet-to-be resolved problem — and not Iran — that presents the Jewish state with the most serious challenge to its survival.

CHINA HAS a long, rich tradition—or, rather, multiple overlapping traditions—of dissent. For centuries prior to the 1949 Revolution, which culminated in the founding of the People’s Republic of China, aggrieved villagers and urbanites employed an array of tactics, ranging from rioting over tax rates to going to the capital with petitions detailing the failings of local officials. This varied repertoire continually evolved, and whenever new complaints arose or novel technologies of communication became available, innovations were made and familiar forms were updated. Since the revolution, this has continued to be true: movements of dissent have linked themselves to both the past and utilized new expressions of protest.

Two famous pre-1949 and post-1949 examples are the great student-led struggles that swept through the country during the May 4 Movement of 1919 and the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989. They were both agitations that began with marches by educated youths but reached their peaks with much bigger demonstrations in which non-student participants far outnumbered those with ties to campuses.

In the May 4 Movement, the student activists were angry about oppression and corruption at home as well as about impingements on Chinese sovereignty from abroad. They stepped into a long-established role of dissent by citing historical precedents that stretched back as far as the Song Dynasty (960-1279), but they also circulated their manifestos via a new medium: the telegraph.

Similarly, the students of 1989, again angered by corruption, framed their protests as an effort to save the nation and nodded to the past, including calling their struggle the “New May 4 Movement.” But they also employed various tactics that had not been used in 1919. Perhaps the most important one was the group hunger strike, a dramatic action that put young bodies on the line and that had no parallels with the original May 4 movement...