Two Vietnam Books For Afghanistan Debate

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have both noted the two Vietnam books that are all the rage in Washington these days as the Afghanistan debate heats up:

The two books -- "Lessons in Disaster," on Mr. Obama's nightstand, and "A Better War" on the shelves of military gurus -- have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama's presidency.

On Tuesday, in a White House meeting that went well over its allotted hour, Mr. Obama discussed the war with 31 members of Congress. Republican leaders, and some Democrats, pressed him to quickly accept the judgment of his commanders and send as many as 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But some Democrats asked if the war was winnable.

In Washington, books are flying off shelves. None of the major bookstores near the White House have the recently released paperback edition of "Lessons in Disaster" in stock, and one major shop in the Georgetown area, Barnes & Noble, said all its remaining copies were being held for buyers.

The impact of all the book-reading on the Afghanistan decision isn't clear. The administration's review of its Afghan strategy is expected to last until the end of this month, and views are likely to evolve. "A Better War" shaped the debate over the 2007 troop surge in Iraq: Military commanders and top Pentagon civilians pushed the book ardently on surge skeptics, winning important converts.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), long an advocate of the narrative detailed in "A Better War," warned that while Vietnam may appear to have some parallels to Afghanistan, the better comparison is Iraq, where many of the same commanders now managing the Afghan war learned the value of surging more troops into a battle zone. "Vietnam fell to a conventional invasion of the North Vietnamese military," Mr. McCain said. "The closest parallel to Afghanistan today is Iraq, the strategies that succeeded and the generals that succeeded."

"Lessons in Disaster" entered West Wing circulation after Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, one of the top foreign-policy voices in the White House, gave it to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel after reading it himself.