Two, three, many 'grand bargains'?

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - As the United States waded ever deeper into the Indochinese quagmire in the early 1960s, Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara called for "two, three, many Vietnams" to bog down the superpower in unwinnable Third World conflicts which 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 - 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 on January 20.