LBJ famously got into the Vietnam war not intending to win it but intending to find a 'political' solution. As a result he was a half hearted warrior even to the point of reviewing specific bombing targets himself. The result? By 1969 when Richard Nixon got the keys, a war to protect people, millions of whom would ultimately be murdered or exiled by our enemies had morphed into an 'evil' project and lacked the broad based support necessary to achieve the political solution LBJ claimed to want. The North knew it simply had to wait us out.
Fast forward to today where our current President is behaving in the same, irrational manner with the same predictable results. One of my friends accuses Sara Palin of being 'incurious' because she doesn't read the right books. Well Mr. Obama may be well read but he doesn't seem to learn anything from them. Failing to learn from history's example: How incurious. Charles Krauthammer has more here:
From the beginning, the call to arms was highly uncertain. On Dec. 1, 2009, commander-in-chief Barack Obama orders 30,000 more Americans into battle in Afghanistan. But in the very next sentence, he announces that an American withdrawal will begin after 18 months.
Astonishing. A surge of troops — overall, Obama has tripled our Afghan force — with a declaration not of war, but of ambivalence. Nine months later, Marine Corps Commandant James Conway admitted that this decision was “probably giving our enemy sustenance.” This wasn’t conjecture, he insisted, but the stuff of intercepted Taliban communications testifying to their relief that they simply had to wait out the Americans.
What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war while announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn’t have his heart in it. One who doesn’t really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as trying but is preparing the ground — meaning, the political cover — for failure.
No comments:
Post a Comment