Columnist.
“The way to deter aggression … is to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of our own choosing.” On October 12, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles based Washington’s relationship with Moscow on our massive nuclear arsenal and the ability to nuke Russia until it glowed. That lasted until 1969 when the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity. For the next 22 years, until the USSR fell in 1991, the threat of mutual assured destruction dominated the relationship between the world’s two superpowers. Today’s world is arguably far more perilous.
Over the next two presidential debates, we can expect questions for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump about their respective plans for dealing with ISIS. But should Clinton or Trump even have a plan? Presidents don’t make military plans, generals and admirals do — or, their deputies for operations do. Presidents are responsible for establishing national security policy.
Many of those reading this article remember The Gong Show. It ran on NBC from June 1976 to July 1978 and briefly reprised in the 1980s. It featured amateur talent, much of it rendering absurd humor. Three judges awarded ridiculous prizes to the least deplorable performance. Ironically, The Gong Show was in some ways an unintended reflection of an era of uncertainty in America at the time.
There were 2,709,918 Americans who served in the Vietnam War. Of that number approximately 850,000 are alive. The youngest is 54. Because there were senior officers and non-commissioned officers in Vietnam who fought in World War II, the oldest are past the century mark. Forty-two years ago the last American serviceman, probably a U.S. Marine, died fighting the Khmer Rouge at Koh Tang Island on May 15, 1975. I served my tour in the relative comfort of Udorn Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand in 1970 and 1971. I turned 25 before going over. I am now 70. My first wife, who served with me, died of cancer at the age of 35. Some claimed the cancer was Agent Orange related. Who knows? Her war ended in 1981. Vietnam is in my rear view mirror.
The Armed Services Committee (ASC) recently approved a measure requiring American women aged 18 to 26 to register for the draft and sent it to the full House for consideration. If this measure becomes law it will do nothing to enhance gender equality in the Department of Defense that recently lifted a ban on women serving in combat.
“Si vis pacem, para bellum” (“If you want peace, prepare for war”)
In late August 1968, two months after an assassin killed presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy and shortly after Republicans nominated Richard Nixon for president, the Democrats gathered in Chicago to pick their candidate. The Democratic Party “establishment” supported Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was opposed by antiwar contenders Senator Eugene McCarthy and Senator George McGovern. The culminating point occurred on August 28 when delegates debated two rival Vietnam policy planks.
Recent revelations by the Pentagon’s inspector general indicates that U.S. Central Command, which bears responsibility for military operations in the Middle East, altered intelligence analyses to support the Obama administration’s contention that limited air strikes have “contained ISIS.” If so, that’s unfortunately nothing new. Politically skewed intelligence has a history.
My parents originally named me “Victory Japan” because my slightly premature birth resulted from mom and dad dancing in the streets of Saint Petersburg, Florida on the night of August 16, 1945 — the day after the United States won its last war. Seventy years is a lifetime by the Biblical standard of our allotted three score and 10 years. Go back to 1945 and subtract 70 and you are two years away from the end of Reconstruction.
The Vietnam War provides lessons in how to lose. The United States never planned to defeat its opponents, the indigenous southern Viet Cong guerrillas and their northern supporters the Peoples’ Army of Vietnam. Instead, from 1964 until 1969 — during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration — we sought to compel our enemies to stop their aggression against the Saigon regime and negotiate an end to the conflict. To avoid “a wider war” and fearing Chinese or Soviet intervention, President Johnson limited the bombing of North Vietnam to a series of tactical half-measures. He failed to stem Hanoi’s source of weapons by not bombing railways and highways near the Chinese border and not mining Haiphong Harbor. Administration policy also forbade pursuing enemy forces into sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos from which they attacked South Vietnam. The U.S. strategy of “containment” rendered a stalemate.
For months now, ISIS has sold oil on the international market through Turkey, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is furious with petroleum prices plunging along with Russia’s economy. Consider that context as we consider the following.
The Obama administration’s weak and failing Middle East policy — the struggle against ISIS and the ultimate fate of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria — revolves around a non-strategy of avoiding a major foreign-policy debacle in the 15 months remaining before a new president takes office. But it’s too late. Russia and Iran calling the shots in the Middle East is an American foreign-policy debacle.
