"In the ninth year of the war we are starting from scratch."

By GottaLaff

I'm not feeling the optimism:

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is in Germany seeking additional international troops to assist in Afghanistan, reports Deutche Welle, but his spin isn't very encouraging.

Said Holbrooke: "The whole thing was uncoordinated and did not get us very far. The upshot is that in the ninth year of the war we are starting from scratch."

I feel an "oy" coming on.

Holbrooke: Afghanistan is no Vietnam

By GottaLaff

Labels, labels, labels:

Just days after President Obama announced his comprehensive plan for the next phase of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, a senior diplomat in the new administration sought to put to rest any comparison between Afghanistan and Vietnam wars.

“I served in Vietnam for three and a half years and I’m aware of certain structural similarities,” Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King Sunday.

“But there’s a fundamental difference — the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese never posed any direct threat to the United States and its homeland. The people we are fighting in Afghanistan and the people they are sheltering in Western Pakistan, pose a direct threat. Those are the men of 9-11, the people who killed Benazir Bhutto and you can be sure that as we sit here today, they are planning further attacks on the United States and our allies.”

"Obama's War". "Obama's Viet Nam". The rebranding continues... Why not wait longer than, ohIdunno, two months into Obama's presidency to see the results of his policies, hmmm?

VIDEO-- President Obama speaks at State Dep't: "America's moral example" will guide policy

By GottaLaff

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Here is the video of President Obama's speech at the State Department. That would be the very same one that got the "rousing ovation" that brought the crowd to its feet.

He's not so much a breath of fresh air as a hurricane. Hurricane Barack.

Richard Holbrooke Under Consideration for South Asia Envoy

By GottaLaff

We had a feeling he'd end up somewhere:

President -elect Barack Obama is seriously considering appointing former ambassador Richard Holbrooke as his special envoy for south Asia, a move that would put one of America's most prominent diplomatic troubleshooters in charge of trying to resolve the thorny and interrelated problems surrounding India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to several sources familiar with the transition.

The appointment would represent early recognition by Obama that the region poses perhaps the biggest foreign policy challenge for his incoming administration. [...]

The move would also represent another example of Obama's willingness to look beyond his circle of supporters to fill key posts. [...]

Holbrooke's hopes for a top job in the new Democratic administration initially seemed unlikely to be realized, particularly because his aggressive diplomacy and bureaucratic maneuvering had alienated some of Obama's closest advisers over the years. But his star seemed to rise again after Obama settled on Clinton to be secretary of state and gave her leeway to assemble her own team at the department.

Holbrooke is perhaps best known as the broker of the Dayton accords, which ended the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, but he has long experience across the globe, having served as assistant secretary of state in charge of East Asia policy (during the Carter administration) and in charge of Europe policy (during the Clinton administration.) In recent years, he has written extensively about the war and political problems in Afghanistan, which would be a key focus of the new job.