Mission Impossible

I had referenced this article earlier here, but reading it again it deserves to be reposted in its entirety as often as possible. Just doing our part.

Russ

Via Human Events

By Col. Oliver North (Ret.)

The commander in chief’s December 1 lecture at the U.S. Military Academy has to go down in history as one of the strangest presentations ever offered by a war-time president. The robotically-delivered address is defended by administration officials as the culmination of a carefully thought-out “strategy review,” in which Obama proffered the “rationale” for deploying additional troops and explained “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Unfortunately, it failed to do any of this.

Though he was standing before West Point’s Corps of Cadets, the president’s remarks were devoid of strategic vision, lacking any definition of victory and empty of the rhetoric elected leaders employ to rally democratic people to a cause requiring the sacrifice of blood and treasure. The speech did, however, provide another Obama “first.” Giving the enemy a timetable for withdrawing American troops while simultaneously committing additional combat forces to a war zone is unprecedented. No commander in chief has ever done such a thing before -- because it makes no sense from either a political or military perspective.

To his credit, Obama said, “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.” These additional troops, trainers and mobility assets are desperately needed. But he offered no rationale for how he arrived at a number that is 25 percent less than what his hand-picked commander, General Stanley McChrystal requested. Then he devoted five additional passages to defending his statement that, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”


Since Tuesday, Obama has stopped talking about the war in Afghanistan and moved on to “Creating Jobs” -- a topic he raised four times in his West Point speech. He left Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Admiral Mike Mullins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a host nameless “administration spokesmen” to explain the extraordinary announcement that we will “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

The contortions required to support this statement were particularly evident in Congressional testimony this week -- particularly for Mr. Gates. When the Defense Secretary appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said to Mr. Gates: “You said in April 2007, with regard to Iraq, ‘I’ve been pretty clear that I think the enactment of specific deadlines would be a bad mistake.’”

Pence summed up the good sense of most Americans by noting, “I’m someone who believes it never makes sense to tell the enemy when you’re going to quit fighting in a war. Mr. Secretary, I wonder…what’s changed in your view here? What am I missing?”

The defense secretary’s response offers a glimpse into the deceptive double-think so prevalent in the Obama administration: “First of all, I have adamantly opposed deadlines; I opposed them in Iraq and I opposed deadlines in Afghanistan.” Gates continued, “But what the President has announced is the beginning of a process, not the end of a process; and it is clear that this will be a gradual process and -- as he said last night -- based on conditions on the ground. So there is no deadline for the withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan.”

The following day, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Gates said that “July 2011 is the beginning of a process, an inflection point if you will, of when Afghan forces will assume greater responsibility.”

Thus, a publicly announced “troop withdrawal timeline” and a “timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility,” won’t tell the Taliban and al Qaeda how long they have to go to ground or hide out. According to the O-Team, July 2011 is just “the beginning of a process,” an “inflection point.” If that’s what they really believe, they aren’t just trying to mislead us -- they are deceiving themselves.   

Finally, Obama’s self-centric West Point remarks -- he referred to himself no less than 57 times -- also prove that he and his speechwriters don’t know history either. He claimed that Afghanistan would not become “another Vietnam,” because “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Whoever wrote these words is simply wrong.

The Republic of Vietnam wasn’t lost to a “popular insurgency.” By April 1969, the Viet Cong had been eliminated as a military threat. The frail, flawed democratic government in Saigon collapsed in April 1975 -- three years after the last American combat troops were withdrawn -- because in December 1974 the country was invaded and subsequently conquered by a hostile neighbor -- North Vietnam -- only after the U.S. Congress rebuffed President Gerald Ford’s request for $522 million in emergency aid.

A head of state who distorts the lessons of history is a peril. A leader who tries to deceive himself and his people is dangerous. We can only pray that this commander in chief isn’t committing a hundred thousand young Americans to a mission impossible in the shadows of the Hindu Kush.

Foreign Policy: Obligations and Ideals

By Russ Cote

Let me start this essay by stating unequivocally that I believe that Ron Paul is by far the most consistent member of Congress in the last fifty years and maybe longer. Let me state my unequivocal agreement with Rep. Paul’s approach to economics, being myself a firm supporter of the Austrian School-(check out Mises.org from the link to ‘The Right Friends’). Finally, let me be on record agreeing with Rep. Paul’s belief that the United States is far too entangled with far too many other nations through various forms of financial aid and other more clandestine types of assistance.

All that said, my issue with Rep. Paul is his belief, shared by the Austrians that I’ve read, that the United States has no business defending itself at an armed level in places beyond our borders. Reading his book, “A Foreign Policy of Freedom”, I gleaned that his ‘threat’ threshold is extraordinarily high. The bombs must be literally en route to our shores before a defensive maneuver is morally justified and constitutionally permitted. I invite our Paulian readers who take issue with that characterization to make their case.

One example is the Vietnam War. I disagree with Rep. Paul’s conclusion that the War was unjustified and illegal. A subject that is obviously beyond the scope of this article, I’ll just say that I do not agree with Rep. Paul’s reading of our nation’s history concerning the criteria for what makes an armed conflict “illegal”. Suffice to say our history is replete with justifiable, justified and congressionally undeclared armed conflict. The Vietnam War, in particular, was an effort to stop the onslaught of Soviet expansion in Southeast Asia; a threat Ronald Reagan called “the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars”. Considering the death toll racked up prior to 1960 by Communism in general and the Soviets in particular, it would have been morally derelict on our part not to intervene. The problem with Vietnam, as I see it, is that we didn’t win when we could have.

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that a goal of the United States was, in part, to strive for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”. In fact this is the headline to Rep. Paul’s book. I sincerely believe this as much as Rep. Paul. However, continue reading his address and we see that Jefferson also said that “the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad” was as much a governing principle. I posit that ‘in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad’ is as much a recognition that the United States will fight threats to our safety abroad as they arise, as the former clause is a recognition that the United States should not entangle itself in the affairs of others that have no direct or indirect affect on the safety and security of the American people.

Perhaps our disagreement is more one regarding the limits of the “general government in its whole constitutional vigor” in the context of its power to engage in foreign conflicts-its obligations vs. ideals. For brevity’s sake, my own view is that our history-including Jefferson’s own actions respecting the Barbary pirates, as strong a denunciation of any theory of appeasement as one can find -tends to counsel that armed conflict is not as severely circumscribed as Rep. Paul believes. I am not debating that, from an economic vantage, war is extraordinarily costly. My quarrel with Rep. Paul and pure libertarianism is that man’s nature makes conflict inevitable; this is especially true in a world where not everyone shares the United States’ commitment to “peace, commerce and honest friendship”. Because of this simple historical fact and because of the United States’ unique place in the world, our leaders should not hesitate to militarily engage the forces of tyranny wherever the occur, counseled first by the central government’s constitutional and primary obligation to ensure our “peace at home and safety abroad” and second by the ideal of not entangling ourselves where it is truly not necessary.

Rep. Paul is a patriot; of this I have no doubt. I welcome this debate on foreign policy with adherents to his Libertarian School of thought because, at essence, I believe both sides honestly aspire to preserve those indispensable conditions for Liberty that offer the only real chance for our pursuit of happiness.