Media's Seal of Approval for Best and Brightest

Near the end of a year riddled with claims that he lacked enough experience to be commander in chief, the president-elect focused on an urgent need to assemble his foreign-policy team. For the young and charismatic senator, the time had come to choose wisely.

It was December 1960. "The old was going out and the new was coming in, and the new seemed exciting, promising," journalist David Halberstam was to write more than a decade later in his book "The Best and the Brightest," chronicling the policy disasters of the Vietnam War.

In the last weeks before he became president, John F. Kennedy trusted the guidance of old hands.

Two former top officials at President Harry Truman's State and Defense departments, Robert A. Lovett and Dean Acheson, urged JFK to choose a fellow named Dean Rusk for Secretary of State.

As for the civilian head of the Pentagon, the recommendation from Lovett — himself a former Defense secretary under Truman — was emphatic when he visited the president-elect at his Georgetown home on a cold day in early winter. "They discussed men of intelligence, men of hardware, men of the financial community, men of driving ambition," Halberstam wrote. "The best of them, said Lovett, was this young man at Ford, Robert McNamara, the best of the new group. ... Lovett had worked with McNamara in government during the war, and he had been terrific: disciplined, with a great analytical ability, a great hunger for facts."

All eras are unique moments in history. (Certainly, in 1960 it would have been very hard to imagine a race for a major-party presidential nomination coming down to a choice between a woman and an African-American.) But some parallels are worth pondering. The man set to become president on Jan. 20, 2009, seems eager to draw from the well of the most recent Democratic administration or from like-minded currents of the mainstream foreign-policy establishment.

The media coverage of those appointments — including the selection of Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State — has been overwhelmingly favorable.

On the subject of a war effort that the president-elect says he wants to strengthen, the wisdom is conventional.

The way things are going, we can expect that none of Barack Obama's top appointees will dispute the standard rationales for upping U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan.

No less than in Vietnam several decades ago, the prospects for a military victory in Afghanistan are extremely slim. Much more likely is a protracted version of what CBS anchor Walter Cronkite famously called "a bloody stalemate" in February 1968. Far more important than whether the Afghanistan war can be won, however, is the question of whether it should be fought.

Right now, the basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place — most of all, a lack of wide-ranging media debate over options.

In an atmosphere reminiscent of 1965, when almost all of the esteemed public voices concurred with the decision by newly elected President Lyndon Johnson to send more troops to Vietnam, the tenet that the United States must send additional troops to Afghanistan is axiomatic in U.S. news media, on Capitol Hill and (as far as can be discerned) at the top of the incoming administration. But the problem with such a foreign-policy "no brainer" is that the thinking has already been put in a lockbox.

These days, a source of fresh thinking on Afghanistan may be the president of that country, Hamid Karzai, who on Nov. 16 offered safe passage to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar for peace talks. The Kabul government sounds interested in pursuing a negotiated settlement of Afghanistan's steadily worsening war. In contrast, the next U.S. president seems to be assembling a foreign-policy team with approaches to Afghanistan that have remained inside the box. Journalists should help to pry it open.

Norman Solomon is author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." The book has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

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