The American Spectator

AMATEUR EFFORT
Re: George H. Wittman’s A War Too Rough:

Apologies to Rudyard Kipling:

Take up the White Man’s Burden, troops,
Wherever they should sendya
But here’s the final irony
Our President hails from Kenya

He proffers all the soft ideas
the fluffy Liberal line
But when it come to policy
It’s Bismarck’s Blood und Iron

But have a heart- what choice has he?
He’s finally in charge
And now it’s coming deadly clear
His errors will be writ large

So He must protect His image and
Construct the careful fence
Even if it’s made of policies
Obama preached against

What should we do for Afghans
Those immoral, charming scamps?
Why, American Citizenship classes
for refugee/jihadi camps

So long as Talibani votes
the Democrats ranks are filling
why not ( shades of ACORN)
ignore the odd honor killing?

So what if Liberty’s bright crown
has finally lost its luster?
With al - Qaeda votes for Al-Qongress
there will be no filibuster!
— Martin Owens
Sacramento, California

While an aggressive use of Special Forces can do a better job than a larger convention force sitting on the defensive, the fundamentals on the ground and the continuing need for us to be there for a generation or more will not change by this alone. An eighth century society is not going to vote its way into the 21st century after an election cycle or two.

Since Korea, our political establishment has been trying to redefine military victory in political terms. We lost nearly 100,000 in Korea and Vietnam combined under this concept and both countries are still in the hands of the enemy. One is nuclear arming and has the capacity to do a great deal of damage in the immediate area and eventually further out if left to its own devices. We walked over the Iraqi forces in 1990 in the world’s largest live fire training exercise and left the political structure in place that caused nothing but problems for the following 13 years by thumbing its nose at the agreements it signed to end that little war. Same for North Korea which has violated every agreement it signed. With a fraction of the forces we had in 1990 we took down Iraq and are still there because we still don’t understand the concept of defeating the enemy (as we did in WWII btw). In Afghanistan we’ve followed the original concept of limited war as we did in Vietnam with predictable results. Like Vietnam we drove the primary enemy forces out of the country and gave them safe havens in border countries and let them regroup, refit and control the initiative of when and where to attack. Like Vietnam, the enemy has controlled its losses and efforts, not through our efforts to control them. Like Vietnam, this goes on until one side gets tired of such low intensity effort. We have data points on who will pack up their marbles and go home first.

Like Korea, we rushed in without adequate forces and commitments to win a military victory. Like Korea when the going got rough we only got enough UN commitments to hold the original 38th Parallel. Like Korea and Vietnam victory was redefined as not losing a winnable conflict rather than defeating a military force outright with several times the capacity for war our enemies have at their disposal. Like all of our conflicts other than war, our political establishment desperately attempts to redefine war in purely political terms at the cost of tens of thousands of wasted lives. It has been written that only the dead know the end of war.

If we continue our amateur efforts at playing “war” since the 1950s we are going to eventually run up against someone that understands war and has the capacity to do something about that. George Will has famously recommended that we pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan and framed both efforts in terms of the deteriorating situation in the Balkans again. Being a supporter of neither effort, Will’s reasoning isn’t limited to his less than stellar understanding of the military reality if we do this without resolving what we went to Iraq and Afghanistan to resolve. On the other hand he does understand that the current administration will do anything it can to gut our military capacity to garner the savings from that to spend on its domestic programs while saying something quite different for public consumption. The public consumption part will ultimately just waste more lives for no purpose outside the political realm. George Will is wrong of course but he does understand the political reality that governs our post victory era concept of warfare. On that matter he is unfortunately right on the money.

The highest levels of our military profession are fond of saying we can’t be defeated militarily by our enemies. On a man for man basis that is true as far as it goes. The flip side is that our enemies don’t have to defeat our military to achieve their objectives. We are taking care of the rest of their plan for them.
— Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia

STEPPING BACK
Re: Ben Stein’s Plugging Away: