Gordon Brown Channels Richard Nixon

In a speech only Richard Nixon could love, Gordon Brown outlined Britain’s (and apparently the U.S.’s) new policy toward the war in Afghanistan. The PM conjures the term “Afghanisation”. The policy's relation to Richard Nixon? For those of us old enough to remember, Nixon tried the same thing with a regime that the U.S. had installed (President Thieu), by questionable election, and the result was Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization, which was the replacement of foreign with native troops which we had trained, and the result? The collapse of the Thieu regime a scant 18 months after the last Americans were pulled out. Does the PM, and by extension Mr. Obama, seriously believe that this is a viable policy? I very much doubt it. Like Nixon, we find ourselves in a war that we have lost politically, and we will not pay the cost required in terms of lives to make good on the promises the U.S. had made.

It is nice to know that the change we voted for can be summed up on the words of an old Who song:

“Here is the new boss, same as the old boss”

When will we learn?