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A series of interlocking ”grand bargains” backed by the relevant regional players as well as major global powers — aimed at pacifying Afghanistan; integrating Iran into a new regional security structure; promoting reconciliation in Iraq; and launching a credible process to negotiate a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world — must offer a very tempting, if extremely challenging, prospect to any new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Restoring stability to the Greater Middle East and reducing its on-the-ground troop presence would not only greatly reduce the 15 billion dollars a month Washington spends on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the stress on the U.S. military, and the unprecedented hostility toward among the world’s more than one billion Muslims.
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WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (IPS) – As the United States waded ever deeper into the Indochinese quagmire in the early 1960s, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara called for ”two, three, many Vietnams” to bog down the superpower in unwinnable Third World conflicts that would drain its treasury and overstretch its military.
While today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not quite as costly — at least as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) — as then, Guevara’s vision, echoed nearly 40 years later by Osama bin Laden, of an increasingly stressed hyperpower which now confronts its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression must weigh heavily on whichever candidate moves into the White House Jan. 20.
Indeed, even as both Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama talk about the urgency of sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan to cope with the growing Taliban threat — potentially magnified manifold by the ongoing insurgency across the border in the tribal territories of nuclear-armed Pakistan — the transition set to begin next Tuesday next Tuesday will offer the president-elect a critical window to contemplate possible exit strategies not only in southwest Asia, but westward to the Mediterranean, as well.