Ellsberg and Vietnamistan

(Parts Two and Three – H/T StartLoving1)

I read Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets years ago, and I admit unequivocally Ellsberg’s account and his own advocacy strongly affects my opposition to the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask, back then to today—at the time, your colleagues at the RAND Corporation, people you valued and trusted, wouldn’t even go near you, called you at traitor, a number of them. And end with today, which is, what you think should be done today.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I look at this film, and I watch the bombs falling, and all I can see in my mind are the bombs, the same bombs, falling over Afghanistan, or Vietnamistan, and Iraq right now. And we’re really facing, at this moment, a crisis of decision that’s just like the one that’s in the film, which I failed at the time, where the President is doing something that I feel will be a disaster, and I kept my mouth shut about it, the change from 70,000 men in the spring of ’65 to an open-ended commitment, starting with another 50,000, which I knew was on the way to hundreds of thousands. I didn’t tell about that, and nor did anyone else. There was a lot of dissent in the administration about that, but we were overruled. We saluted Clark Clifford, Vice President Humphrey. Again, we have a vice president who apparently is against the application, another parallel. James Jones, the military man, can see what I can see and anybody can see, who has memories of Vietnam: there is no success at the end of this tunnel. There is only a stalemate, which could persist indefinitely.