HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Mar. 30, 2006 I don't know what Wesley Clark is advocating now, as I haven't seen him pontificating on Fox News lately. I do know that he tended to a very unmilitarily correct view that getting there "fustest with the mostest" was somehow a bad idea and that we ought to dither more. General Odom has apparently assumed General Clark's job as opponent-in-chief to the standard viewpoint. He has said "What's wrong with cutting and running?" I guess he never studied military history and the results of the cut-and-run approach. Those of us old enough to have fought in Vietnam--or at least old enough to have been watching television then--recall the last helicopter lifting off from the embassy roof in Saigon. It was, in fact, a climactic scene in the musical play, "Miss Saigon." This imagery is mentioned prominently in Amir Taheri's piece on opinionjournal.com from 3/29/2006. Mr. Taheri notes that the mental image of "the last helicopter out" plays prominently in the mind of one of the chief Islamic terrorists. There is a lesson here, not for the terrorists, but for American politicians and for the American citizens. The terrorists have learned a lesson of Vietnam, which is to work on destroying the will of the American people back home, not defeating the American soldiers. Despite American military mistakes and political micromanaging by the Johnson administration, the North Vietnamese knew they could never defeat America on the battlefield. The American military has proved undefeatable in the Middle East, also, having done in Afghanistan what the Soviets and others could not do. I have also made the point that, had the Democrats gotten on board rather than relentlessly opposing every Bush admin initiative, we might well have concluded the Iraqi conflict and have been well on the way toward defeating Muslim extremist terrorism in general. Mr. Taheri makes the same point in his excellent piece. In particular, he says that Syria's Assad was about to take the Gadhafi approach of acquiescing to Bush's will but decided, based on the belief that Bush was the only president likely to ever be steadfast, to just wait Bush out--wait until Bush is out of office and then the next president would load up the helicopters and desert the Middle East as Nixon, Carter, and Ford abandoned South Vietnam. What is clear from this is that, were both political parties and all Americans firmly on the anti-terrorism bandwagon, there would not likely be this belief that the terrorists could just bide their time till Bush was gone. Syria would likely have already rolled over. Iran might be taking a less hard pro-nuke line. The support of Syria and Iran for the Iraqi opposition would be much less or non-existent. We would be much farther ahead in the war on terror but for the despicable implacable kneejerk opposition of the Dems. Much of the failure and the dragging out of the war in Iraq is due to the opposition of the Dems to Bush policies, and this opposition's encouragement of the enemy. How could it be otherwise? If the Republicans had implacably opposed all Roosevelt's policies in WW2, we might still be fighting the Japanese and Germans. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154 ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
