Bob Wright's article comparing Vietnam and Afghanistan

[Wonderment]

Happy to see Bob pointing out the hypocrisy of Republican claims about government spending:

...the cost of the Afghanistan war already exceeds the cost of the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. At $100 billion a year (seven times the gross domestic product of Afghanistan) this war is feeding a deficit that will eventually take its toll in real, human terms. I encourage Tea Partiers and other fiscal conservatives to ponder the tension between deficit hawkism and military hawkism.

The larger point of Bob's article, however, is that the Bush-Obama Afghanistan War is arguably worse than the Johnson-Nixon Vietnam War because the former debacle makes us more vulnerable to future attack while the latter did not.

Both wars are examples of mission creep and have become bottomless pits of misery, death and waste. The truly horrifying feature of the post-08 escalation is that Obama was warned repeatedly not to become LBJ and not to get sucked into nation-building. He pondered and consulted, studied and strategized, hemmed and hawed, issued disclaimers and stipulations; and he still fell headlong into the ditch.