Vietnam - The Sequel

Austin Bay, a retired Army colonel, has an interesting column today suggesting that what the Obama Administration is doing right now in the Middle East is eerily similar to what Lyndon Johnson did starting in 1964 or so in Vietnam, e.g. a "gradualism" strategy. Bay says it didn't work then and it's not going to work now.

After pledging "no boots on the ground" after withdrawing from Iraq, the U.S. has been quietly slipping troops into Iraq, Syria, Yemen and who knows where else in the Middle East, to counter ISIS and Iranian proxies. He puts this figure at probably somewhere north of 5,000 at the moment. Why won't this strategy work, especially in view of the fact that most of these troops are special ops guys and both they and their weapons are far more lethal than was the case in 1964? The answer is Whack-a-Mole and Iran.

Whack-a-Mole applies because the ISIS jihadists are being recruited from all over the Muslim world and the more they fight, the more vicious and nasty they become. Instead of poking at them here and there, the best strategy is to cover the whole playing field at once with overwhelming force and kill them all. As Colin Powell said of the strategy in Desert Storm I, "We're going to corner them and then we're going to kill them." There was no messing around there, which was the proper lesson from Vietnam. Make the battlefield so lethal throughout the theater that stepping on to it means death and even these fanatics may blink. If they don't, well then we kill a lot of bad guys. 

Iran also applies because we are currently making nice with the mullahs despite the almost daily provocations from this bunch of nasty vermin. We cannot fight them on the one hand in Yemen, for example, and at the same time encourage Western Europe to trade with Iran, as John Kerry recently urged. It is immoral in the extreme to put American lives at risk in this situation and unreliable as far as the host country goes, as Americans are getting a deserved reputation (again) for cutting and running when the heat gets too high. Maybe bin Laden was right after all. Sad but true. 

Until we have a coherent strategy, let's keep our guys out of the snake pit. Over 58,000 young Americans were killed in Vietnam for nothing, as it turned out. I have no desire to repeat that colossal mistake again. 

www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/2016/05/11/vietnam-shadow-falls-obamas-iraq/84251066/