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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Obama's Vietnam
By Bruce Walker
Vietnam has long been recognized as a failure caused by political meddling
in military operations, coupled with lying by Democrat presidents anxious to
protect their image and popularity. Although many Americans – count me in
that group – believed that the cause of freedom demanded that communist
aggression in Southeast Asia be stopped, implementing this policy demanded
presidential leadership. The man in the White House had to tell us why
spending treasure and blood to win a war was in our nation’s interest, and
he had to explain, at least in broad terms, how we were going to win.
Vietnam was a winnable war. The idea that American military power could not
stop a communist attack from the north and a guerrilla war from within
South Vietnam was absurd. As Goldwater accurately explained during his 1964
presidential campaign, our command of the air meant that if we let military
leaders decide the targeting in North Vietnam, we could “bomb them back to
the Stone Age.” (This phrase was twisted by leftists to imply that he
wanted to use nuclear weapons.)
Our four Iowa-class battleships – each with nine sixteen-inch guns, which
could hit targets in 90% of North Vietnam with perfect precision – if all
four were brought out of mothballs, had a combined rate of fire of one
sixteen-inch shell every two seconds. Every factory, every bridge, every
railway, every anti-aircraft battery, every North Vietnamese Army post,
every power generation plant – everything of any military, political, or
economic value – could have been utterly destroyed in a few months.
Our minelayers, our bombers, and our submarines had the capacity to
completely blockade Haiphong Harbor, where nearly all the munitions, weapons
, and supplies the North Vietnamese came through, with an airtight
quarantine. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, if hit at irregular intervals by
different types of attacks, could have been stopped cold. The very
preventable Holocaust that Cambodia and Vietnam endured happened because of
gutless American presidents and in spite of the courage and honor of our
fighting men.
Whatever the faults of George H. Bush, he fully grasped the reasons we
failed in Vietnam, and he scrupulously avoided those in Desert Storm, a war
against a much more powerful Iraq (we tend to forget that the battle-tested
Iraqi army had outfought, in a decade-long war, an Iranian army three times
as big.) We had a specific goal, and we used every weapon we had to achieve
that goal. Leftists at the time predicted that this would be “another
Vietnam,” but they were utterly and pathetically wrong.
Obama, now, is demonstrating that it is possible to repeat all the mistakes
of Vietnam. He is following what fifty years ago was called “escalation,”
or the incremental response with American military power to communist
aggression with the vague intention of raising the costs high enough so that
the rational actors who were leading enemy forces would decide that peace
was in their best interest. ISIS leaders, like communists and like similar
radical Islamists, are madmen obsessed with the destruction of those they
cannot conquer. These are the folks who successfully recruit suicide
bombers.
Obama also fails to tell us what victory will look like. Will we establish
and support a free Kurdistan? Is our goal to both defeat ISIS and the Assad
regime and create a functioning democracy in Syria? Are we trying to
prevent a general conflagration in West Asia? Obama doesn’t say, and,
scary as this sounds, his dull-witted advisers – truly embarrassingly dumb
folks – don’t know any more than he does what we are trying to do.
The “grand strategy” of Obama in the Middle East is an indecent flux of
poll numbers and sound bites. It is to react to crises that affect American
public opinion until the media and the voters are lulled into thinking that
he has done something. The purpose of American national security policy is
to make Barry look good.
The price for such selfishness is that innocent blood is spilt for ignoble
vanities. Today it is Kurdish blood, but because ISIS is the sort of
existential threat to Western values that in time will demand either its
defeat or our surrender, inevitably it will be the blood of our best and
bravest that will wash away the venality of Obama and his Vietnam. |
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