Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: On terrorism and economy

Obama's Vietnam?

In a haunting reminder of Vietnam's body counts, the U.S. Army has begun publicizing every Taliban fighter killed, according to the Wall Street Journal. Another reminder of Vietnam comes from a New York Times report that Army investigators have determined that civilians at Granai, Afghanistan, were attacked in violation of the rules of engagement regarding "putting high-density village dwellings at risk."

I've been working on a book about Lyndon Johnson, and have had to face the fact that the case against the Vietnam War that seems so compelling in retrospect did not seem nearly so obvious in the war's early years. Of the thirty or so civilian or military advisers that Johnson consulted in the July 1965 decision to commit enough American troops to take over the ground war, only two dissented: Undersecretary of State George Ball and Senator Mike Mansfield. Even supposed doves like Bill Moyers and Dick Goodwin remained silent. As late as the summer of 1966, Neil Sheehan, who later wrote perhaps the most damning indictment of the war, A Bright Shining Lie, wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine saying that, though no longer a hawk, he was against surrendering.

Similarly, today there is a very persuasive case for staying the course in Afghanistan. Indeed, Peter Bergen makes it in this issue. But it seems to me there is enough reason to doubt success to wonder if it is worth the American and Afghan lives that will be lost in its pursuit. I find it very hard to accept the cruelty of sending soldiers to Afghanistan after they have endured three or four tours in Iraq.

Even if we eradicate al-Qaeda, won't other terrorist groups arise? I think that our best hope for the withering of the terrorist impulse rests not with war, but with the diplomatic approach that Obama so eloquently expressed in Cairo. To be sure, there will always be just plain bad guys and dangerous lunatics from which society must protect itself. But effective security measures, not war, are the way to do that.

What's experience got to do with it?

Why is the only senator to have served as a superintendent of schools not on the Senate Education Committee? Michael Bennet, the new senator from Colorado, was in fact such an outstanding superintendent that he was the subject of an article by our former editor Katherine Boo in the New Yorker. Yet Harry Reid decided not to place him on the Education Committee. Reid is said to be saving the seat for Al Franken.

The good news about the bad news about the news

I have often lamented the gulf between the affluent classes and the down-and-out that has developed in this country in the last half century, and the resulting lack of empathy for the less fortunate. I would contrast it to my childhood, where my middle-class parents still identified with their poor relatives on the farm. I could recall that as late as the 1950s, when I was a lawyer for the Charleston Gazette, the newsroom still regarded itself as blue collar, a far cry from today's newsrooms, dominated by people whose backgrounds rarely involved economic hardship.

Now, as a serendipitous consequence of our current unemployment, the empathy situation may be improving. Barbara Ehrenreich, whose wonderful Nickel and Dimed proved she never lost her capacity to care, said this in a commencement speech to the graduating journalism students at the University of California at Berkeley: "You have abundant skills and talent--it's just not clear that anyone wants to pay you for them. Well, you are not alone. How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? They've got skills; they've got experience; they just don't have jobs. So let me be the first to say to you: Welcome to the American working class."

Streeter to greeter

And it's not just journalists who are waking up. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about Carlos Araya, a Wall Streeter who lost his $200,000 job in the meltdown of the finance industry, and is now earning $25,000 as a restaurant host. He tells the Journal's Mary Pilon: "I used to see unemployed people and think that they were lazy, that it was all on them. Now it's happened to me."

Deal me out

"Senators Blast Automakers Over Dealer Closings," was the Washington Post's headline for a story about a dune hearing of the Commerce Committee. I found that my heart did not automatically break at the plight of the dealers. Too many of them have made me suffer through hours of pressure in one of those small rooms in which dealers love to imprison the customer--until he agrees to a deal that is much more of a deal for the dealer than for him. In these sessions, numbers are...