Bring troops home from Afghanistan

Before plunging deeper into the Afghanistan quagmire, we should consider a lesson from our Vietnam debacle. After sacrificing 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese, to stop the “dominoes” from falling into the Communist camp, we lost the war, only to discover we were better off losing the war than winning it.

After Vietnam’s guerrilla forces drove American forces out of their country, the dominoes fell against each other: Communist China against Communist Russia, Communist Vietnam against China and Communist Cambodia. Blinded by our monolithic anticommunist ideology, Washington ignored the historical hostilities dividing the communist world. The bond uniting our enemies was not communism, but a common enemy—America; and when that bond shattered, their divisions surfaced with a vengeance.

How many more lives, American and Arab, will we sacrifice before learning that winning or losing in Afghanistan has little relevance to crushing al-Qaida when those terrorists can attack Americans from many other places in the globe? More effective, should President Obama act as an honest broker for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, removing a major source of anti-American hostility in the Middle East, he would land a far more powerful blow than sending more Americans into the bloody quicksands of Afghanistan.

Edward Cuddy

Kenmore