Obama hit a particular nerve with me - and I’m sure a lot of people, especially military folks - when he said in his acceptance speech, “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.”
You see, this is EXACTLY where I began to lose faith in the Bush administration’s ability to win this war. As you might recall, a military Predator had Taliban leader Mullah Omar in its sights while driving in a caravan on a deserted Afghan road on the very first night of the war. But lawyers back in Tampa, Florida, refused to give permission to fire. Mullah Omar got away to fight another day.
Since then, dozens of soldiers and Marines have been persecuted…er, prosecuted for shooting the enemy and doing their jobs. And in the case of Lt. Col. Allen West (ret.), simply for scaring the enemy.
If Obama picks up on this issue of how lawyers who have never seen battle and overly-restrictive “rules of engagement” are not only keeping our troops from doing what needs to be done, but endangering their own lives as well, he just might stumble onto something he could make great hay with.
Posted on August 30th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: National
This is just another variation of an old liberal tactic to show that they support military action and that they’re tough guys too.
The underlying premise of focusing on killing bin Laden and his boys is that we took our eye off the ball by invading Iraq, the world would be a much better place if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein wasn’t the bad dude that GWB made him out to be, and that Barry and Joe will fix all these problems once they take over.
If you believe all these things, that’s fine. But does anyone really believe that OBL is scared of the prospect of Barry pouring gasoline down his cave and setting it on fire?
I think Obama can make hay with this for one reason: George W. Bush decided to be a nation builder rather than the President of the United States. Instead of hammering the Taliban and Osama, then getting out. And instead of invading Iraq, verifying no WMD, grabbing Saddam, then handing the country back to those who truly hated Iran, he decided to make Iraq into his own private ant farm.
Here’s what he didn’t get: Ants in an ant farm may seem to think that you’re a God for owning the ant farm, but they have their own internal order and while you can affect it, or kill them at will, you can never really change their M.O.
And that has given Barry and all the other Democrats an entree to take over all three branches of government, if you consider that they’ll control the Supreme Court nominations of up to 3 justices. And that will bring disaster upon our country. And it’s the fault of our president and those who acted as if he could do no wrong.
Smart people realize they will have difficulty taking all parameters into account when they act. GWB acts, then figures those parameters will sort themselves out. That is to say, the dumber you are, the less you should do. He should have done very little.
“Instead of hammering the Taliban and Osama, then getting out. And instead of invading Iraq, verifying no WMD, grabbing Saddam, then handing the country back to those who truly hated Iran…..”
How would things be better today if we had followed this course of action?
Are you saying that after we hammered the Taliban and Osama, then got out, that their forces wouldn’t have regenerated in Afghanistan after we were gone?
Wouldn’t grabbing Saddam then handing the country back to those who truly hated Iran be the same as handing it back to the Baath Party minus Saddam? Wouldn’t this be about like taking out Hitler, then turning Germany back over to the remnants of the Nazi Party?
Nope. We would have done exactly what needed to be done in both cases. In one, killed Osama or punished the Taliban to a great degree for enabling him, or both. They would have regenerated? Well, we’ve spent how many billion and they’re regenerating anyway and they always would have.
Turning the country over to the Baathists? Yeah, the mortal enemies of Iran. Minus Saddam and after having made sure there were no WMDs. Think the Saddam replacements would have threatened anyone but Iran for a long time? Doubt it.
And with the trillions that we’ve probably spent in the intervening years, or are about to, we’d have had a real chance not to have to inflate our economy into crisis mode.
As it is now, we and the Chinese, Japanese and Saudis are in a dollar death grip. First to let go kills the others, then themselves.
The alternative would be to either do what we’re doing now, or nothing. Nothing would have worked to some degree, but when people threaten or attack you, it’s usually best to strike back in a way that makes them think twice next time. And what we’re doing now is temporizing, while we destroy out economy and our military at the same time. Not smart.
Oh, and Saddam wasn’t Hitler. Hitler was Hitler and that’s about it. In fact, there was an attempt to take Hitler out, probably a lot more attempts we don’t know about, too. The thinking was that Hitler was the driving force behind the hostilities, so take him out and his replacements would be much more amenable to ending the war. It may actually have worked.
Removing the personality from a cult of personality isn’t a bad idea. And when that person’s chief weapons have been fear and paranoia, it may actually be a relief to the population when he’s removed.
No major disagreement with you regarding the above. However, I just think that it was pretty naive of anyone to think that we would follow the course of “…hammering the Taliban and Osama, then getting out…..invading Iraq, verifying no WMD, grabbing Saddam, then handing the country back to those who truly hated Iran…..”
After 9-11, one of the major points of reference (whether you agree with it or not) among our foreign policy establishment was that the Taliban was able to take over Afghanistan and al qaeda was able to establish a strong presence there because of the vacuum left after the USSR departed the country, a vacuum that the US failed to fill. If this was the consensus of our foreign policy establishment, it’s pretty much a given that we weren’t going to just go into Afghanistan, do our business, then leave again.
In the book “Cobra II,” the authors outline Saddam’s three national security threats. First was Iran, second was internal rebellion, a distant third was the US. The myth of WMD was targeted primarily at Iran, but it was the US that reacted and actually ended up doing Iran a favor. However, even if Saddam had WMD, he didn’t have the delivery systems to hit the US with them, so they posed no threat to our national security, so why was the WMD threat made into such a casus belli to begin with?
This president seemed pretty intent on regime change, democratizing the world, or whatever else you want to call it, going back to the period after 9-11. There was little doubt in my mind in March 2003 that we would end up with an army of occupation in Iraq for the forseeable future once we invaded.
The foreign policy irony of his presidency is that GWBush initially campaigned as an opponent of the Clinton doctrine of nation building, peacekeeping, etc., then ended up doing it to a greater degree than Clinton, Halfbright and company ever dreamed of.
I think we agree. Certainly about Iraq. I always thought it was ironic that Saddam did his saber rattling to try to fake out Iran, and what he got was the U.S. using that very bluff to justify what the administration had wanted to do all along. In the Arab world, the truth is a commodity and is looked at as being owed to no one. It would have been naive for any in the West to actually believe Saddam. This also points up a huge difference between Hitler and Saddam. Hitler told everyone what he was going to do. And nobody believed him. Then he did it. Saddam bluffed, had no intention or ability to do what he claimed, and got hammered for it.
I didn’t believe the Bush administration would do the things I urged. So it probably wasn’t naivete. It’s more that I was HOPING that’s what they’d do, even though I’d read papers written by the welfare-warfare conservatives who were advising GWB and had urged what has happened in the meantime.
As for Afghanistan, I think filling the vacuum left by the Soviets hadn’t been a realistic possibility since we dropped the ball when the Soviets left. That window was closed a long time ago. So, I think the best we could have done was to zap bin Laden, hammer the Taliban where possible, and leave with the promise we’d be back with a lot more firepower if they ever enabled again. Would that have worked? I don’t know. But the only other option would have been mercenaries and letters of marque and reprisal. I’d have been willing to support that, but it seems nobody else would.
It must be a huge ego boost to believeone can accomplish nation building And someone with an ego like GWB, coupled with a lack of thoughtfulness, is the perfect set up for those who were advising him on the present course all the way back to before 9/11.
The next president inherits a real mess. No doubt about that.