Archive: Opinions

I was stunned by President Obama's speech Wednesday night.  I wasn't stunned because he is committing the United States to help allies against terrorism.  Our country tends to do that.  What really struck me was that the speech sounded a lot like it was written by the younger President Bush's speech writers.  Only with grammar.

A major talking point was that we take the fight to terrorists.  That was a Bush thing, being proactive rather than reactive.  That's what we supposedly did in Iraq, smacking them down before they allegedly nuked us.  The whole thing fell apart pretty quickly.

Not putting our soldiers in harm's way on the ground... that sounds pretty familiar.  Maybe that was a Clinton thing, though it seems to me I remember President Bush the Elder saying something about that at the beginning of the Gulf War.  America leading a broad coalition... whatever you think about the Iraq war, President Bush the Younger was careful to come up with a broad coalition so it wouldn't seem like just his own war.  All presidents do these days.  They try to get allies, then if they can't they pretty much go to war anyway.

"Second, we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground," President Obama said Wednesday. "In June, I deployed several hundred American servicemembers to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi security forces."

To me that has disturbing parallels with our early involvement in Viet Nam.  Didn't we send non-combatant advisors there?  Until they became combative?  Before they became dead?

Cutting off funding to terrorist enemies, and providing humanitarian assistance to civilians?  Part of the typical pre-war formula.  Not that they are bad ideas.  But when all the pieces of the formula appear together, it doesn't look good.  And that bit about having the authority to bomb the heck out of ISIL and then saying that Congress and everyone should stand together in agreeing with him was something I've heard presidents say all my life.

"I have the authority to address the threat from ISIL, but I believe we are strongest as a nation when the President and Congress work together," he said. "So I welcome congressional support for this effort in order to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger."

In other words, "agree with me and do what I want or you are making our country weaker."  I don't blame the President for saying that, because all recent presidents have said something like it at one time or another.  It's just a thing presidents like to say.  It's different from stepping across the aisle and persuading people to agree, though.

President Obama said that he has brought 140,000 American troops home from Iraq, and plans to end America's Afghanistan combat mission this year.  Well, that makes sense because he ran for president on a strong platform of bringing our troops home to safety.  Good for him for doing what he promised.  You don't get that from many politicians.  But was that a sound military idea or a political one?

I didn't like that we went to Iraq.  I kept wondering if we were there because President Bush was mad at Saddam for trying to assassinate his father in 1993 during a trip to Kuwait to celebrate the success of the first Gulf War.  But once you get into a war... I think we learned in Viet Nam that if you are not -- to quote American Idol's Randy Jackson -- in it to win it, then it's not a super great idea to get in it at all.

That was a Colin Powell thing -- have a strategy to win, have a strategy to get out.  Don't draw it out ad nauseam.  I thought General Powell was pretty smart about that.  It was a shame that President Bush the Younger didn't listen to him, as we are finding out now.

So I was uncomfortable when President Obama took us out of Iraq, and, later this year plans to pull us out of Afghanistan.  Because it didn't appear to me that things were stable in either country.  And here we are, going back into Iraq because we didn't finish the job.  It didn't appear that we got out because we were done.  It looked like we got out because we were tired of being there and it was politically correct.

I don't think we've had a president with a comprehensive understanding of military strategy since Eisenhower.  Maybe Bush the Elder did, but I can't imagine he had the same breadth of understanding.  Then again I have no understanding of it.  But I'm not president.

Every time America goes out into the world we are hated for it.  Nobody is grateful.  Well, Kuwait was for a brief moment after the first President Bush saved them before they went back to hating us.  Seems to me we make more enemies than friends by helping other countries.  In weak moments I sympathize with the isolationists who don't want our country to get involved in world affairs at all.  The affairs in Hollywood should be enough to keep us interested.  But most of the time I understand that as a successful, powerful nation we have responsibilities to our fellow Earthlings.  The challenge is fullfilling them with some practical chance of getting the outcome we want, which means knowing what outcome we want and having a plan to get it.

Wednesday's speech was not one of President Obama's great moments.  Going back to Iraq to finish the job is a tacit admission that we left too soon.  And saying we're leaving Afghanistan in the same speech -- at a time when the government there recognizes the Taliban as a legitimate constituency, something I thought we were fighting against... well, it worried me.

Because if we didn't learn our lesson in Viet Nam, we certainly should have learned it in our current two wars.  War is messy.  Saying it won't be doesn't make it not be.  It doesn't end just because you want it to.  You can't be in a war a little.  If you're not willing to win it you shouldn't be there in the first place.

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