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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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GREAT POWER STATUS ON THE LINE Last year, during the 2004 presidential election campaign, an acquaintance and I argued by e-mail over presidential politics, the war, military strategy, etc. Although my worthy opponent generally disagreed with the Democratic platform, he said he could not vote Republican because President Bush had gotten us into “the wrong war at the wrong time”. The whole “Iraq thing”, he said, was just “W” finishing a job his father had left undone. He played back all the Michael Moore talking points, including the bizarre view that Islamist terrorists hate us for our policies and actions, and that we had brought on their attacks by offending them. Our correspondence was considerable. My opponent criticized how the war was being waged – lifting arguments for catching Osama Bin Laden (instead of defeating Iraq) from books like Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, by Michael Sheuer. I cited history to argue the impracticality of catching one person – Hitler, for instance – and defended the strategy of crushing our enemies, one at a time, to bring the whole Axis of Evil down eventually. I reminded him of the difficulty and cost of defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, and showed how the nation trusted its political and military leaders to fight the war successfully, despite the many reversals and outright defeats that preceded final victory. Repeating comments made in this space on previous occasions, I said I doubted we had the collective will to defeat such enemies today. I also suggested that he couldn’t be serious about voting for Mr. Kerry, who stood far to the left on most issues and was wishy-washy about the war. Ultimately, I ruffled his feathers by saying that the real “hubris” lay with armchair strategists who thought they knew better than the president – and all his military and intelligence advisors – how to fight and defeat terrorism. Something like my opponent’s borrowed screed of last year has been going on, during August, down in Crawford, Texas – but with more publicity and (it seems to me) far less wit than we brought to our debate. A woman named Cindy Sheehan – whose son was tragically killed during our military operations in Iraq – has conducted a highly emotional campaign against the war on worldwide terror. Her anti-war “sit-in” – hard by the Bush ranch – was gleefully covered by White House reporters and assorted camp followers during the dog-days of August, while Mr. Bush vacationed. In the Texas heat, anything controversial was like manna from heaven for reporters. A grieving mother talking trash about Mr. Bush and “his war” could not have been better. The big media, of course, are avowedly “neutral” about the war, if not actually opposed to our presence in Iraq. Saddam, they say, wasn’t so bad. Things are really far worse now than during his regime. The horror of 9-11 is long forgotten (did it really happen?) and, anyway, we need to “move on”. Terrorism is, as John Kerry put it, just a “nuisance”, like crime, to be handled by police – not a worldwide menace that must be decisively defeated, militarily. Truth be told, the media would not mind a bit if we left Iraq with our tail between our legs – or if we lost the war on Islamist terror entirely – if it meant destruction of (the hated) George W. Bush and the Republican Party. From where I stand, it appears that the far left wing of the Democratic Party, academic elites, Big Media, liberal Protestant denominations, and numerous liberal-advocacy groups would find military defeat an acceptable price for rendering the Party of Bush impotent for the foreseeable future. My mother-in-law always said she hated FDR, but she was small-time next to these guys. They really hate George W. I saw Mrs. Sheehan on TV a few weeks ago. She wanted the USA “out of Iraq right now”. We need to bring our troops home immediately, she said, before any more young men die, as her son did. When the interviewer asked for her response to Iraqis who want American troops to stay until terrorist forces in Iraq are defeated, she basically said they didn’t know what was in their best interests. (But she did.) “We have hurt their country enough,” she said. Mrs. Sheehan’s outrageous demand – completely blind to the serious ramifications that would flow from immediate withdrawal of our troops – is appalling. Withdrawal, or even a timetable for withdrawal, would cost the nation a complete loss of credibility for the future. From that point, what president would be believed if he proposed any military action? Every hostile foreign power or terrorist element would regard the USA as a paper tiger that can be dissed at will. This potentially disastrous result is not mere speculation. It is historically based. Many of our current difficulties with terrorism can be traced directly to the failures of earlier administrations and Congresses to keep commitments and respond in forceful ways to external provocations and threats. Vietnam, of course, is Exhibit A. Most historians agree that the Viet Cong were no longer an effective fighting force after the so-called Tet Offensive of 1968. Although our media billed Tet as a great “victory” for the Communists, it actually was a serious defeat. Thereafter, North Vietnamese Regulars took over the war. By 1972 they, too, were exhausted and ready to sign the peace accords. The armistice gave them an opportunity to rest, rearm, and await “developments”. Those developments were the withdrawal of nearly all American forces, despite warnings from military experts that South Vietnamese forces were too weak to withstand a concentrated attack. But we no longer had the political will to continue. When North Vietnamese forces swept south in April 1975, we stood by and watched. We did nothing. The communists won – not by defeating us in the field, but by outlasting us until our political will to fight was gone. Legions of present-day reporters and millions of students – even many college faculty – were not even born when the catastrophe of Vietnam happened. Many of them do not realize how it affects our foreign policy down to this very day, and might affect it far into the future. Another cave-in on a foreign military commitment might be terminal for us – meaning that it would signal the end of America as a serious player in world affairs. Again, there is historical precedent. Defeated in World War II, France’s status as a world power ended in 1954 when Vietnamese communists surrounded and defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Today, every hostile nation and every terrorist has studied and learned the lessons of Vietnam. Without a doubt, they believe they can defeat America simply by “Vietnaming” us – i.e., by exposing us to prolonged conflict, continued casualties, and a steady anti-war drumbeat. They don’t have to win, militarily. They need only to make it appear that they can’t be defeated. They are certain we shall weaken, grow weary of sacrifice, and finally quit. Mr. Bush’s government is trying not only to defeat international terror but to undo the damage we did to ourselves in Vietnam. People like Cindy Sheehan – grieved though she may be by her loss – are not helping us. Neither are eager-for-blood young reporters who were wearing diapers when America’s will to wage war collapsed. They don’t realize how tenuous our situation is. If we crawl away from Iraq, we’re finished as a great power. We’ll be Spain with a larger economy.
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