Obama must face down the ghost of VietnamAs the President ponders sending more troops to Afghanistan, he is haunted by the conflict that scarred the US psycheBen Macintyre 24 CommentsRecommend? (4) An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up.Comparisons between these two conflicts are easy to make, but hard to avoid: a grinding, unpredictable battle in difficult terrain, a weak and corrupted foreign government kept afloat by American guns and money; a versatile enemy, adept at ambush warfare, with sanctuary in a neighbouring country.American public opinion on Afghanistan is shifting in a way reminiscent of the tide of feeling that brought the Vietnam War to its humiliating close. The death toll is ramping up, with 55 US servicemen killed this month — the war is suddenly being brought home to America, in bodybags.The first senior official has resigned in protest over a war that may be unwinnable. “I fail to see the value in the continued US casualties or expenditures . . . in what is, truly, a civil war,” declared Matthew Hoh, the decorated former Marine who resigned from the US Foreign Service this week. He might have been speaking in 1969.BACKGROUNDUS hero quits Kabul job over ‘unwinnable war’ Vietnam historians give Bush reason to stay in Iraq Death of 16 US troops turns up heat on Obama The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma of Vietnam is seared on the national memory like no other event in US history.The debate is suffused with the language of the Vietnam War: “hawks”, “doves” and fear of the “quagmire”. Mr Obama is of the post-Vietnam generation, yet he, too, is haunted by it. Last month he declared: “You never step into the same river twice, and so, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But the danger of overreach and not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues that I think about all the time.”Those words perfectly capture the anxiety that is fraying nerves in the White House, a determination to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam, but an inability to see the conflict though any other prism. After the Gulf War, the first President Bush declared triumphantly, and quite wrongly, that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all”.The hawks are quick to point out that the Vietnam analogy is routinely trotted out whenever America goes to war. Over the past 25 years it has been invoked in response to US military action in Lebanon, El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Iraq (twice).In terms of scale, Afghanistan is still a far cry from Vietnam, which involved more than half a million US troops and claimed 58,000 American lives. Fewer than 1,000 American troops…

 America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began. By Ambrose Evans-PritchardComments 165 | Comment on this articleHistory repeating itself? President Obama has been accused by some economists of making the same mistakes policymakers in the US made in the Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, pictured Photo: AP The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters. Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism. The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens. Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas. This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America's democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process. This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next. US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we're back where we were before – in a nightmare." David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew…

 Imposed solution can end Palestinian conflictThe old ways of negotiating between Israel and Palestine have failed. We need a multilateral approach using international law Omar Rahman guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 May 2010 Article history Israel has an extremely close relationship with the central mediator involved in brokering a peace deal, the US, making a solution unlikely. Photograph: Gpo/Getty It is a sign of how far the peace process has retrogressed that the Israelis and Palestinians have now entered into proximity talks, more than 16 years after having started direct negotiations.To make matters worse, nobody – including the actual participants – gives the latest round of talks the slightest chance of success. In fact, many fear that failure will only bolster critics of the peace process by further displaying the ineffectiveness of its methods.So why are they entering negotiations to begin with?The answer is that the international community, led by the Americans, has been unable to extricate itself from the failed paradigm of bilateral negotiations.Over the years, this strategy has been adopted as a given without alternative, disregarding the basic imbalance of power between the two parties.Politically, economically and militarily, Israel is by far the stronger party, not to mention its extremely close relationship with the central mediator involved in brokering a peace deal, the United States. Furthermore, unlike Israel's past negotiations with Egypt and Jordan, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one of an occupier and the occupied, with the latter commanding very little actual leverage.Negotiations under these conditions are bound to fail. Israel will never want to give up enough because it does not need to, and for political and historical reasons the Palestinians cannot afford to accept the pittance they are being offered.What is needed today is a new method of solving this conflict that is capable of breaking the current deadlock while taking better account of the actual politics at play.Alternatives have already manifested on the ground, such as Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's plan to establish the institutions of a Palestinian state by August 2011. Although this "third way" (distinct from armed struggle and bilateral negotiations) has received a ringing endorsement from the international community, it is not an end in itself and must be complemented with an overall settlement to the conflict.Barack Obama has already floated the ideas of holding an international conference or providing an American-imposed plan on the final-settlement issues (borders, Jerusalem, refugees etc) if the proximity talks fail to produce any results.Regardless, the desire for a new approach is palpable as parties beyond the United States are pushing to take a more active role.Given the political realities of today, the conflict needs a multilateral approach, which would be beneficial in several ways. First of all, not only…

 NYC Bomb Suspect's Conn. Home Was in ForeclosureBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK (AP) -- Court records show that the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing defaulted on a $200,000 mortgage on his Connecticut home and that the property is in foreclosure. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that Chase Home Finance LLC sued Faisal Shahzad (FY'-sul shah-ZAHD') in September to foreclose on the home in Shelton. Authorities say they arrested Shahzad at New York's Kennedy Airport on Monday night on a plane about to leave for Dubai. The foreclosure records show Shahzad took out the mortgage on the property in 2004, and he co-owned the home with a woman named Huma Mian. The foreclosure case is pending in Milford Superior Court. A message was left Tuesday with an attorney for Chase's law firm. The records show Shahzad and Mian didn't have lawyers for the case.  

  Olbermann and O'Reilly, Again       " For viewers, the constant attacks have been a grand spectator sport, but their bruising nature has at times been painful to watch. Olbermann started the assault on "Bill-O" five years ago as a way of boosting his fortunes against "The O'Reilly Factor," which roughly triples his ratings; O'Reilly refuses to mention the "Countdown" host by name, instead training his ammo on MSNBC, NBC and Immelt."