Word: visitations
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...study the situation and recommend a course of action. Ball's chief qualification was that he, more than any other high-level U.S. official, had been right about Vietnam--from early on, he had warned it would be a quagmire. Ball accepted Carter's offer but refused to visit Iran. In the 1960s he had watched one colleague after another set off on fact-finding missions to Vietnam, and each returned convinced that America could win the war. "I had learned from our Vietnam experience," he explained, "how dangerous it can be when travel is substituted for thought...
Barack Obama should keep Ball in mind as he mulls John McCain's suggestion of a joint visit to Iraq. Ball understood something important: that when you take a guided tour, your tour guide decides what you see. In Iraq today, as in Vietnam back then, the tour guides are America's officers and diplomats on the ground. And in Iraq, as in Vietnam, they have an incentive to show good news--which isn't always the same as the truth...
...Pakistan are more central to the war on terrorism and that our resources in those countries would bring a higher rate of return. Given that fundamental difference, a joint trip to Iraq--and only Iraq--concedes McCain's key assumption. Perhaps Obama should counter by proposing that they visit southern Afghanistan, where America's war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda has been crippled for years by the diversion of troops and attention to Iraq...
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...center stage, with Democrats badgering John McCain for erroneously saying the number of U.S. troops has been reduced to pre-surge levels and accusing the Senator of focusing on the conflict to avoid talking about the sagging economy. Republicans, meanwhile, have been taunting Barack Obama for failing to visit Iraq to observe conditions on the ground firsthand since 2006. With an eye on November, Obama is redoubling his efforts to talk to struggling working-class voters with feel-your-pain intensity and increased specificity about how he would help them as President. His man-of-the-people persona has improved...