Posted on 09/24/2002 8:16:01 AM PDT by ninenot
History has repeatedly shown that the military solution is the least-desirable way to resolve conflict. Smart leaders know that "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting" – as Sun Tzu wrote years ago – and exhaust all other options before they unleash the dogs of war.
Instead, our president seems single-mindedly obsessed with attacking Iraq. For months, the Bush war team has been talking up taking out Saddam and sneaking so many war toys into places like Qatar and Kuwait that it's a wonder our desert launching pads haven't already sunk from the weight of our pre-positioned gear and ammo.
So far, the emir of Kuwait has been picking up the tab for the American muscle deployed outside of his palace that lets him sleep at night without worrying about Iraqi tanks roaring through his front gate, as they did in 1990. But probably a key reason President Bush is so keen on pressing Congress to sanction his unrelenting march to battle is because thousands more armored vehicles and tens of thousands of warriors are already on the move. Since it will soon be impossible to hide the buildup or cost, Bush clearly needs congressional consensus before the boys, bombs and bullets become the lead story on prime-time television.
Now it looks as though Congress is about to give Bush the green light for his shootout with Saddam rather than standing tall and insisting that U.N. weapons inspectors get another go at defanging the monster.
Almost 40 years ago, Congress kowtowed to another president from Texas and approved the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – based on the repeated lies of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that Red patrol boats had attacked U.S. warships on a supposedly routine mission off North Vietnam, which the senior admiral in the Pacific had predicted months before would provoke exactly this type of response and result in an escalation of the Vietnam War. Only Sens. Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska stood tall and voted "nay." When Morse chillingly predicted we'd lose the war and LBJ would go down in flames, most members of Congress responded that they were patriotically backing the president in a time of crisis.
Before Congress blinks again, rubber-stamping one of the few wars in our country's history in which we've fired the first shot, the members should visit the Vietnam Memorial and read every name aloud on that black wall before blindly accepting their party machines' go-along-to-get-along directives. They should ask themselves: Do I want to be remembered as a William Fulbright – who pushed LBJ's bad resolution through the Senate, knowing all the while that he was repeating McNamara's spin – or as a Morse or Gruening?
They should also match what the ordinary folks who elected them are saying against the national polls' war chantey, "Let's Push With Bush Into Baghdad." Last week, I visited four states, and all of the hundreds of average Joes and Janes I spoke with were for U.N. inspectors returning and our tightening the choke leash on Iraq enough that nothing gets in or out without going through a U.S.-manned checkpoint.
A Vietnam combat Marine told me: "Certainly Saddam is a tyrant and a threat to his neighbors. But so are the leaders of Syria, Iran, North Korea and, for that matter, Pakistan. All of our comrades who died in Vietnam and those of us who vowed 'never again' will now again watch another generation march off to war without the approval of the American people."
"Who'll pay for it?" asks another citizen. "We all know it'll be our kids. They're the ones who will pay, as it has been since the Revolutionary War. Those who reap the rewards are of a different category."
Congressmen and congresswomen, which category are you? Will you vote for your own political future or the future of our country and its current generation of defenders? Will you challenge the rush to war along with Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who said last week that giving Bush the same broad, unchecked authority Congress gave LBJ is tantamount to allowing him to start a war and saying, "Don't bother me, I'll read about it in the newspapers"?
IIRC, he railed against our entry and the Clinton lies that got us there (as did I). He also predicted a quagmire (which it is not -- we're still there, but not for the reasons Hack predicted). He also described in detail the disaffection of the military for Clinton, and the lamentable state of readiness, equipment, and weapons stocks -- on which he was maybe 50% accurate.
GHWB most certainly had the perfect opportunity and means to engineer "regime change" both directly and indirectly. Directly would have been an overstepping of legal bounds, but Indirectly was entirely possible, preferable, and expedient.
One would have expected better of a former Head-Spook. He failed us and the world.
The subsequent establishment of bases in Saudi Arabia for the express purpose of containing Saddam, is one of the direct causes of the U.S. becoming the priority target of terrorists.
The restraint shown by the U.S. in not removing Saddam emboldened the terrorists and enabled and inspired Saddam to convert his aggression/revenge from overt to covert.
As with every big government program, the temporary solution leaves posterity with a more expensive problem in the future.
It's also interesting to note that "combat experience" is a vastly different realm of knowledge than the "big picture" of world politics.
Knowing how things work on the battlefield is hardly the same as understanding national interests or international diplomacy.
They all seem to be suffering from a "missing the forest for the trees" syndrome. Fighting a war puts you on the ground amid the trees. But the larger battles (the non-military ones, or the supra-military ones) are a different issue altogether.
I've seen too many of these "ground troops" fail to understand that by preparing full-bore for an actual military confrontation, the US is greatly increasing the odds of not having to actually have one.
If Saddam sees that we *will* get down and dirty and destroy his regime militarily if nothing else works, he's likely to take the route of self-preservation and, like Marcos and his shoe-loving wife, "retire" to a cushy location with his ill-gotten billions.
And alternately, if we get to the brink of war and Saddam still hasn't blinked, then we've just proven beyond all doubt that nothing else (inspectors, etc., blah blah blah) would have been enough for the job either. So we grit our teeth and do it the hard way.
Countless "inside" accounts of the first Gulf War have shown that Saddam didn't pull out of Kuwait because he believed that the US/UN was just saber-rattling and didn't actually have the guts to kick his ass out. So he stayed, and war *was* necessary.
Hackworth, et al, are unwittingly sending Saddam the very same signals, and are thus actually making war *more* necessary. They may have been brave or brilliant in battle on the ground, but they're idiots on the topic of the chess game of world affairs and statesmanship.
Sit down and shut up, Hack.
I can respect that feeling, but I can also see how it can easily lead to an overappreciation of the sacrifices of the men on the field, and an underappreciation of the necessity for those sacrifices.
In other words, they can become too concerned for soldiers' safety to remember that their job is to protect the safety of civilians or the country at large.
Yeah, war is an ugly thing. So is a country losing far more because it's too timid to go to war when necessary.
Some policemen come to think that the welfare of their fellow officers is more important than the welfare of the community they were hired to serve. So do some soldiers.
"The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms." - Karl von Clauswitz, On War, 1832.And Freeper "moneyrunner" made the same point I made in my other post, but in a single sentence: "A brave soldier is not necessarily a good strategist."
...and to prove my point, here's an incredibly idiotic statement from Hackworth:
Even though many experts say it isn't so, let's buy into Cheney's pitch and agree that Iraq has a few small nuclear warheads. The question then becomes: "Can he land them in New York City or Los Angeles?" The answer is: "No." Saddam just doesn't have the fleets of ICBMs that we and 43's new best friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, do. All he can muster at most are a few-dozen wheezing Scud missiles, onto which he could try to screw his alleged nuke warheads. On a good day, these throwbacks to the Vietnam era would have a range of 100 miles and be about as accurate as a blind man firing a shotgun at the sound of a bat in a forest.The utter, blinding stupidity of this just stuns me. Has Hackworth never heard of SHIPS, for god's sake? Arriving ships, and their cargos, are not inspected until they have already *arrived* in port. By then, it's too late. *boom*
If this is a sample of Hackworth's "strategic thinking", he's clearly unfit for the task.
No. Back then, war progressed and campaigns were fought at glacial speed and a 20 foot stone wall surrounding a city provided impregnable protection.
Hackworth might have been a good infantryman in his time but he is no strategist.
As I recall, during Desert Shield, he was predicting World War One style catastrophy in the coming Gulf War I.
I think I may still have one of his gloom and doom articles in an old Newsweek from that Gulf War period. I'll try to dig it up.
Far be it from me to lionize McCain. I'm no fan of his. I was just making the point that the argument that all the people with military (or combat) experience are against attacking Iraq and those with no experience are for it is untrue. It's also a specious argument. It's like saying that only cops have a valid opinion on the criminal justice system.
If Hackworth wrote such a column it would be accurate whether it was written in 1991 or this year, in it's limited context.
The military/diplomatic/financial efforts of Bush 1's administration were exemplary.
If the column were written before 1993 it would be easy to understand how a semi-civilian would miss the larger policy failure.
But for a President with a long history of intelligence experience, Arab relations, and an incredible opportunity, to fail to follow through on what should have been, to him, an obvious geopolitical necessity, is downright inexcusable.
In it's best light, Bush 1's actions in 1991 seem to be a common case of a commander winning a surprising and relatively bloodless victory and then refraining from risking turning it into a defeat, or at least a more costly achievement, of a larger goal.
A "stitch in time", so to speak. It now seems that GW is intent upon finishing the job left undone, in a rather expensive and ham-handed manner.
There's a big difference between the insanity of Viet Nam and self preservation.
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