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Four-star General Vo Nguyen Giap led Vietnam's armies from their inception, in the 1940s, up to the moment of their triumphant entrance into Saigon in 1975.
Possessing one of the finest military minds of this century, his strategy for vanquishing superior opponents was not to simply outmaneuver them in the field but to undermine their resolve by inflicting demoralizing political defeats with his bold tactics.
This was evidenced as early as 1944, when Giap sent his minuscule force against French outpost in Indochina. The moment he chose to attack was Christmas Eve. More devastatingly, in 1944 at a place called Dien Bien Phu, Giap lured the overconfident French into a turning point battle and won a stunning victory with brilliant deployments. Always he showed a great talent for approaching his enemy's strengths as if they were exploitable weaknesses.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1968 the General launched a major surprize offensive against American and South Vietnamese forces on the eve of the lunar New Year celebrations. Province capitals throughout the country were seized, garrisons simultaneously attacked and, perhaps most shockingly, in Saigon the U.S. Embassy was invaded. The cost in North Vietnamese casualties was tremendous but the gambit produced a pivotal media disaster for the White House and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Giap's strategy toppled the American commander in chief. It turned the tide of the war and sealed the General's fame as the dominant military genius of the 20th Century's second half.
John Colvin, Giap Volcano Under Snow
Our boys... went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war.... [O]ur boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled....
I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim....
I say to [the American people] that they have put themselves at the mercy of a disloyal government, and this is most evident in Clinton's administration....
We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says....
Osama bin Laden, May 1998
"The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden].
At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."
bill clinton
"The Bush Administration is so entralled by the idea of preemption and American military might. This is the consequence of the policy that regards legitimacy as largely a product of force and victory as primarily a triump of arms...
We truly should go to war as the last resort."
John Kerry
I think this administration has the right strategic vision and has taken many of the steps needed to get that long-term strategy rolling. Where I give them the failing grade is in explaining that vision to the American public and the world. Key example: this White House enshrines preemptive war in the latest National Security Strategy and that scares the hell out of a lot of Americans, not to mention our allies. Why? This administration fails to distinguish sufficiently under what conditions that strategy makes reasonable sense. My point is this: when you are explicit about the world being divided into globalization's Core and Gap, you can distinguish between the different security rule sets at work in each. Nothing has changed about strategic deterrence or the concept of mutual-assured destruction (or MAD) within the Core, so fears about preemptive wars triggering World War III are misplaced. When this administration talks about preemption, they're talking strictly about the Gap - not the Core. The strategic stability that defines the Core is not altered one whit by this new strategy, because preemption is all about striking first against actors or states you believe - quite reasonably - are undeterrable in the normal sense.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
The Pentagon's New Map
NB: Dr. Barnett is a lifelong DEMOCRAT
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eneral Vo Nguyen Giap's Tet-Offensive gambit is the terrorist's favorite how-to. It is the definitive primer on asymmetric warfare, the use of unconventional tactics to counter the overwhelming conventional military superiority of an adversary.
Not surprisingly, the terrorist's favorite how-to is also John Kerry's.
As is the terrorist's favorite target....
The Kerry cabal's Tet-Offensive gambit today is nothing more than a reprise of its cheap Vietnam parlor trick of decades past, which systematically and seditiously seized America's defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Tet-Offensive gambit is John Kerry's and the Left's last hope of overcoming both a president who has the competence and clarity and courage to confront terrorism and their own lethally dangerous record of unwavering deficiency and failure to do so.
A CONSPIRACY OF USEFUL IDIOTS
Kerry's Tet-Offensive gambit is a conspiracy of what Lenin called "useful idiots." It is a Leftist band of blind apologists for the islamofascist-terrorist enemies of America. But I suspect even Lenin would be surprised by the pro-islamofascist-terrorist radical chic-ness of it all.
These useful idiots, a self-anointed "intelligentsia"--now there's an oxymoron for you-- are the familiar motley collection of constituencies from the media, academe, Hollywood and, of course, the trusty left wing of our own federal government.
As you must have noticed by now, "incompetent" is their buzzword; it is uttered with dripping contempt and is separated by no more than one word from "George Bush," which is spit, not spoken.
The Kennedy-Kerry-Pelosi-Gore-clinton (either--"one for the price of two," I say)-Sulzberger-Soros-Moore construct is its grotesque manifestation. Some would call it a clever contrivance, engineered to render, by contrast, its virtually mute beneficiary, John Kerry, marginally sane, and if not attractive, certainly acceptably plain.
Kerry is virtually mute for reasons that extend beyond his (presumptive) candidacy, per se. A self-confessed war criminal, he lacks the moral authority to demagogue Iraqi-prisoner "abuse" or the Nick Berg decapitation by al Qaeda.
Regarding the latter, because "liberal " is itself sufficient cause to produce this muting effect, we have the bizarre result of Kerry agents oozing, as Zell MIller put it, "more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with underwear on his head than over the video of a young American with no head at all."
But with all the posturing and pointing on the Left, Kerry had to say something; so after a week of virtual muteness, he mumbled--bombastically, of course (It, therefore, didn't sound like a mumble, but it was a mumble; trust me.)--the old standby, some nonsense about process, staying clear of the substance of war crimes, faux or real.
Anyway, this grotesque Kennedy-Kerry-Pelosi-Gore-clinton (either--"one for the price of two," I say)-Sulzberger-Soros-Moore construct, having successfully transmogrified nominal "George Bush" into vile invective, is now busy pumping out anti-Bush venom via its Viacom/Simon & Schuster/60-minutes vertical operation, a coordinated if overblown Hollywood script hatched solely for the purpose of undermining and defeating America and, with her, our courageous and effective wartime president.
POSTMODERN POSE, STAGE LEFT
Bill clinton was the first postmodern president. When he encountered problems, he simply defined them away.
Thus:
Al Qaeda, in its incipient stage and stoppable in '93, was allowed--no, was empowered--to grow and metastasize under bill clinton's postmodern cover.
Terrorism grew and metastasized under bill clinton because bill clinton had a capacity to construct and compartmentalize alternative "truths," alternative selves, alternative moralities; bill clinton was the political manifestation of an "intelligentsia" and its "enlightened" worldview that reject all absolutes.
The net result of clinton's convenient postmodern pose was his opportunistic, Kerry-esque flip-flopping (positively spun as "triangulation" by clinton's political guru, Dick Morris )... or, alternatively, his complete and utter paralysis. The paralysis--and indeed, the postmodern pose itself, was partly a result of his well-documented cognitive inability to analyze, synthesize and prioritize; clinton cowardice and clinton corruption and clinton self-aggrandizement were also essential first causes.
KERRY'S POSTMODERN INCAPACITY
If this postmodern poppycock sounds familiar, that's because it is. John Kerry and the American Left today exhibit -- and are crippled by -- the very same political and cognitive postmodern incapacity and dysfunction.
Listen to the Left. Listen to Kerry and Gore and Pelosi and Kennedy and clinton and Soros and Moore and their complicit friends in the media. (How DARE The New York Times bury on page 16 the photos of the seven terrorists believed to be in the U.S., plotting an even more horrific 9/11? How DARE they?) You will hear the same alternative "truths," the same alternative selves, the same alternative moralities.
- They still refuse to accept the War on Terror as war, not crime.
- They still refuse to accept the War on Terror as a global, irreducible war, not a collection of discrete civil conflicts.
- They still refuse to understand that the war in Iraq is not an "optional" war apart from the War on Terror, but is, in fact, the War on Terror's lynchpin.
- They refuse to understand (or refuse to admit) that "support for the troops" cannot be independent of support for the war effort and support for the commander in chief.
They refuse to accept the fact that their jihad against America is killing our troops, aiding and abetting the terrorists and imperiling all Americans.
THE LEFT'S 24-HOUR-NEWS CYCLE ATTENTION SPAN
The Left's calculations are clintonian; that is to say, they are tactical, opportunistic, egocentric, small in both scope and depth. They are limited by a 24-hour-news-cycle attention span and a 2-year election cycle. The net result is vulgar play-by-play "commentary" when it should be objective, long-range analysis.
Bill clinton, and John Kerry and his Leftist goons -- (a self-confessed war criminal, as I have noted earlier, needs goons.) -- fail to understand that:
- a terrorist war requires only one consenting player
- the War on Terror is global and irreducible, the Left's postmodern posture notwithstanding.
- defining bin Laden's acts of war as "crimes'' is a dangerous, anachronistic, postmodern conceit (It doesn't depend on what the meaning of the word "war" is) and amounts to surrender
- preemptive action, and even more so, preventative action, serve a necessary, critically protective, as well as offensive function in any war on terror.
The sorry endpoint of the massive, 8-year clinton blunder was, of course, 9/11 and the exponential growth of al Qaeda.
John Kerry and the Left will, by definition, reprise the failed, lethally dangerous clinton policy of denial and surrender.
I, therefore, urge anyone planning to vote for John Kerry to rethink, to reconsider. Your children's lives, if not civilization, itself, just may depend on it.
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I'm a single-issue voter, as I guess must have become apparent.
I'm not a Republican. I'm not a conservative. I'm not a very great admirer of the president in many ways, but I think that my condition is... that this is an administration that wakes up every morning wondering how to make life hard for the forces of Jihad and how to make as hard as possible an unapologetic defense of civilization against this kind of barbarism... and though the Bush administration has been rife with disappointment on this and incompetent, I nonetheless feel that they have some sense of that spirit.
I don't get that... I don't get that feeling from anyone who even sought the Democratic nomination.
I would [therefore] have to vote for the reelection of President Bush.
Christopher Hitchens
Washington Journal, 6.01.04
C-SPAN
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