With a firm grip on his dual mantra of making everything about political impact and never letting a crisis go to waste, President Obama has appointed a Democrat heavy-duty political operative named Ron Klain to be “Ebola Czar.”
Never mind that Klain has no medical or disease expertise. Now we get to watch news reports of a few thousand of our troops diverted from their military duties, plus trainloads of American dollars, pour into West Africa to build medical infrastructure while the Ebola Czar labors to make Obama look good.
Notice how Ebola reporting has distracted you from the semi-war on ISIS in the Middle East?
If you have read my past columns and know that I revere the service and sacrifice of our troops, you might wonder how I square that with my disgust for the White House and my mistrust of the Pentagon, that huge five-sided building where strange things happen in the heads of generals and admirals when they reach such lofty ranks that the thin air at that altitude seems to dilute the remains of their common sense while ambition steals their honor.
I expect a train wreck to develop in the ISIS fight since in today’s media-driven world there is only one way for America to fight a war successfully, and that is quickly, with overwhelming force, defeating the enemy before the media morphs into reporting with sympathies for the underdog. We should stay out of discretionary and long-term conflicts, like Iraq and Afghanistan. We should keep American powder dry, quietly reserving military fury for a dangerous enemy that crosses the line of threatening our country, or civilization in general, then we should squash them like a bug without warning, without apologies for collateral damage that couldn’t be avoided. Let our enemies fear us as strong, crazy and unpredictable.
We should also keep our military focused on combat readiness, not trying to nation-build 7th-century stinkholes like Afghanistan into America’s image, not building medical facilities in Africa where they apparently have been unable to build their own, not squeezing out combat-experienced generals and admirals the way Obama has done because they are politically incompatible, not imposing social experiments on the military like welcoming gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, not caving to agitators to put women in combat infantry units. Our military should be combat-ready.
Obama’s first real test of Commander-In-Chief strength and honor came when American military commanders requested a troop surge in Afghanistan. Obama proved he wouldn’t know honor if it bit him on the ankle as he dithered – publicly for Pete’s sake – for weeks before splitting the baby trying to please both hawks and doves by approving a lower number of troops than requested, then threw his own fighting force under the bus by advertising to doves and the enemy a schedule for American troop withdrawal. But everything is about politics to Obama, who never spoke the word and likely never considered “victory.”
When pulling out of Iraq, since politics is everything to Obama, he cared only about ending the war and failed to press hard for residual forces. The ISIS result had been predicted by President George W. Bush if we didn’t keep an adequate residual force, 20,000 troops according to commanders, and even though the Iraqis refused to waive liability for our troops, withholding aid to Iraq would have been very persuasive in the negotiations if only Obama had been serious about more than politics.
Now we have a clearly evil and strengthening ISIS enemy on a rampage of rape, murder and religious genocide, threatening America and world civilization, an enemy demanding annihilation with no room to vacillate on whether to fight. Having spent the remains of his presidential prestige on his fake red line in Syria, Obama dithered publicly again before finally approving the half-measure of air strikes here and there to slow down ISIS, but he threw his own fighting force under the bus again by promising a war-weary American public, and the enemy, that he won’t commit ground troops to the fight.
If you wonder what kind of military commander tells the enemy what he won’t or can’t do in the fight against them, the answer is one who never earned his big-boy pants or one who focuses on politics instead of national security. Take your pick.
Meanwhile, a cowardly Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, is promoting his tell-all book in which he says he warned the President about the importance of residual forces in Iraq and the potential for terrorist developments like ISIS, giving himself a big public pat on the back for being right. Panetta probably doesn’t realize he is cowardly because he obviously didn’t press the matter very hard, didn’t make his concerns public and didn’t reveal his sentiments when the issue was hotly debated in 2011. He chose political loyalty to the President rather than loyalty to his country, a cowardly convenience.
And so we now have a half-ass war in process, with a Commander-In-Chief that doesn’t know diddly about effective use of military force, and not mature enough to turn loose military commanders to defeat ISIS. If you wonder what could possibly go wrong, turn your view back 50 years to Vietnam, where our country should have learned these same lessons long ago.
While the anti-war crowd was telling you in the 1960s our troops in Vietnam were evil, they were selling you a pack of lies even while the truth about that war was quite bad enough. Let me illustrate with a quick story.
My Sandy Springs friend David Wallace was a Navy lieutenant (junior grade) OIC (Officer-In-Charge) of an armed SWIFT boat in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. He remembers wishing for a special place in Hell for President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara on one disturbing night patrol.
David sat on the fantail of his boat while the engine shrieked at max RPM, the boat racing as fast as she would go on the Bassac River toward Binh Thuy, the nearest U.S. medical facility. He was holding a little Vietnamese girl in his lap, keeping her brain in her head with a towel where Viet Cong had lopped off a five inch section of the rear of her skull with a machete. The Viet Cong had entered this girl’s village just before the SWIFT boat arrived, hacking villagers to death as retribution for them accepting food and other gifts from David’s American crew on their periodic visit.
While David held her, he prayed desperately for her to live and screamed at his crew to go faster. They threw heavy junk overboard and pumped off excess fuel to make the boat lighter. He was furious at the half-ass war policies from Washington that were multiplying the number of Americans and Vietnamese getting killed in a war we could have won if only the political restraints were removed.
By order of our President, our military could not cross the borders to Cambodia and Laos, so that is where our enemy built their training camps and rest depots as well as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to bring from North Vietnam all their supplies and weapons to kill South Vietnamese and Americans.
Our combat troops were required to radio to higher authority for permission to fire on the enemy unless they shot first. Our fighter/bomber jets could not fly within 35 miles of the capital city of Hanoi, or the Haiphong Harbor where Russian ships brought daily shipments of war materiel to fight against us. When SAM (Surface-To-Air) missile sites were under construction our pilots were not allowed to hit them for fear of killing a Russian advisor. They had to wait until the site was operational and firing missiles at them before they could strike back. And so on.
Fighting a war, like when the U.S. took Iraq in 2003, involves putting out the enemy’s eyes by taking out their radar, destroying their air force on the ground, cutting off their command and control communication, taking away their electricity and water, and then for ground enemy units executing the four Fs – find them, fix them, fight them and finish them. In Vietnam, we were fighting a half-ass war because of political concerns about the war spreading, so the military was not turned loose to fight the war effectively with overwhelming force.
A civilian weekly meeting at the White House, without military representation, selected targets half a world away. The President himself selected some targets, stupid targets like an intersection, a truck park, a bridge, a building, while real targets like enemy Mig bases, electrical plants, dams, the Haiphong harbor, rail infrastructure, key facilities in Hanoi were off limits since hitting them would be “too provocative.”
Our Navy pilots risked their lives with carrier take-offs and landings, dodging flack and SAMs and Mig fighters every day while they were prohibited from hitting targets that would genuinely hurt the enemy. Secretary of Defense McNamara believed in “gradualism,” withholding overwhelming force while searching for that incremental threshold of pain that would force the enemy to capitulate. He forbid the rough bombing campaign that would have forced the enemy to quit their assault on South Vietnam.
Because of the stupidity of President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara, way too many of my brothers died needlessly. Through it all, American troops fought with honor and courage just like their fathers in WWII and never lost a major battle. Without stupid ROE (rules of engagement) they could have won and ended the war. That’s what David was thinking as his boat rapidly approached the Binh Thuy dock.
A Vietnamese doctor met him as David stepped on the dock holding the little girl. The doctor explained that they could do nothing for the child since the medical facility was for American troops. David handed the girl to one of his crew, pulled his .45 and forced the barrel into the doctor’s mouth, whereupon some medical staff suddenly arrived to rush the child off to trauma treatment. David said he and his crew always wished they knew if the little girl lived because it was important to them.
During that crazy war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met with President Johnson to tell him we were not going to win in Vietnam war with all the ROE constraints holding back our military. Johnson screamed obscenities and threw them out of the Oval Office.
They did not persist to persuade the President. They did not go public. They did not resign in protest. They followed orders, protecting their stars and their pension while the meat-grinder continued to eat American young men. Throughout the war, not one general officer resigned to protest the abysmally stupid political war policies.
And now we have an updated, more modern version to prove that stupid lives on at the highest level.
I know our troops are doing their duty well in whatever capacity they serve in the ISIS conflict, and I know the pilots and crews are talking quietly right now about the breathtaking stupidity in the strategy of this war.
I can only hope the Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of staff might give this inexperienced President the perspective of strong opposition when he needs it on matters of military conflict and national security.
Meanwhile, I fear an ISIS train wreck might be just around the bend, and the juxtaposition of the honor and courage of our troops serving today compared to the empty shirts leading them at the top makes me want to plant my lunch between my shoes.
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen.]
