Posted on 10/29/2004 6:02:27 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Maybe John Kerry aspires to be the next Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Both presidents tried to run the Vietnam War from behind a desk in the Oval Office, picking and choosing from target lists, frequently with the political repercussions in mind. And that level of meddling is widely cited as one reason we lost the war, by undermining the ability of commanders to carry out a winning strategy on the ground.
It became unofficial doctrine after Vietnam that presidents should set broad war goals, while leaving the tactical details to professional soldiers.
Kerry, however, by incessantly second-guessing President Bush on everything from how the battle of Tora Bora was fought in Afghanistan to why U.S. forces allegedly failed to secure a cache of high explosives in Iraq, seems not to have absorbed that lesson.
That's ironic, given Kerry's past as a noted critic of how Johnson and Nixon conducted the Vietnam War
As commander in chief, the president sits atop the command structure of the U.S. armed forces. Yet no president can - or should - take that responsibility so literally that he's out in the field of fire, calling in artillery rounds, directing the assault on Tora Bora or ensuring security in Baghdad's "green zone." Not only is that impossible, but it's undesirable, if we want our wars waged effectively.
Yet this is the unprecedented standard to which Kerry holds Bush when he rails against this administration's alleged failure to bag Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, or its alleged failure to secure high explosives that may or may not have been stored at a military factory, at a time when the primary mission was storming Baghdad.
There is much to question in how this administration has conducted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Was adequate planning done for insurgency scenarios? Did we put enough boots on the ground to maintain order in a country the size of California? These are legitimate subjects for debate.
But Kerry breaks new ground in demagoguery when he begins to suggest that the president allowed bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora, that he somehow could have averted this week's massacre of Iraqi National Guard recruits, or should have secured the high explosives that reportedly went missing. That's like blaming LBJ for what did or didn't happen aboard Kerry's Swift boat back in 1968.
Wars have always been messy and uneven affairs, as Kerry well knows, marked by as many blunders as bold strokes. And trying to second-guess a commander in chief each time something goes wrong in war isn't something Americans have embraced. If they had, Abraham Lincoln would have been out of office after Bull Run; Franklin Roosevelt would have been ousted when the North African campaign got off to a rocky start; and Harry Truman would have been pilloried during the disastrous opening months of the Korean War.
Americans understand that victory can never be achieved cleanly and neatly, without setbacks and mistakes. They know a sensible president sets broad strategy, while leaving the tactics and execution of the war to the people at the Pentagon. And they've stood by presidents through military setbacks because they realize war is never a strictly one-sided affair, and because only dissent, demoralization and defeat can come from too much Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Kerry is breaking with that tradition for shamelessly self-serving and partisan reasons. But by doing so, he's setting himself up for similar second guessing and nitpicking should he inherit the weighty responsibility of bringing the Iraq mission to a tolerable conclusion. The senator's insistence that the commander in chief also should serve as a general, a colonel, a captain and a sergeant recalls some of the worst characteristics of former Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
Oh, if Kerry is elected, we all know what he'll do.
Just like he blamed the SS agent for him falling while skiing, he'll blame everything in Iraq or any other failure in any of his endeavors on Bush or the Republican Congress.
He has no core convictions that line up with a strong America.
Yeah, that's it. Blame LBJ for JF'nK exploding rice into his own butt.
Never mind, they are both demonrats. JF'nK wouldn't do it and the MSM wouldn't cover it.
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