The War Is Going Fine--All Over Again

I have lived long enough to experience as an adult commanding generals of U.S. foreign wars yammering about how, despite all evidence to the contrary, the war is going well and we will win it if the nation just pours more men and money and blood into the battle.

The first such commander was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a vainglorious strut in command of U.N. (read mainly U.S. and South Korean) forces during the Korean War that President Harry Truman, a Democrat, committed American forces to out of military and diplomatic necessity.

When those forces under MacArthur finally staved off the invasion by Communist North Koreans, the Chinese joined in, fell upon the Americans and other forces and damn near wiped them out until MacArthur’s generals held them to stalemate.

Alas, that wasn’t good enough for MacArthur, who wanted to take the war into China (a few nuclear bombs here and there to tonic the Chinese) and couldn’t shut up about it, despite Truman’s orders for MacArthur to sew his tongue to his lips. Truman fired him, creating a great political stew while the stalemate went on.

It took a better and smarter general, Dwight Eisenhower, once MacArthur’s aide, to get himself elected president on a Republican platform that promised to shut down the Korean War–it was achieving little and costing too much in money and blood.

Our generals running the Vietnam War assured all of us over and over and over that more troops, more planes, more killing and bombing and, of course, more casualties, would let us follow that cliche’–the light at the end of the tunnel–right out into the sunlight of victory.

President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, believed them, until the View Cong and North Vietnamese started whipping us fair and square and angry Americans took to the streets to protest and riot.

Johnson decided not to run for re-election and a petty Republican crook, Richard Nixon, whipped the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for the presidency because Humphrey couldn’t get his lips and tongue to say: I’m going to bring all our 500,000 troops home. Nixon said that, lied about it, and made the war go on until with Saigon in flames, our ambassador and other staff had to flee town by helicopter as North Vietnamese troops took over the streets.

Now we have Gen. David Petraeus, American commander in Iraq, and Ambassador David Crocker telling senators and the rest of us that George Bush’s war in Iraq is winnable if–guess what–we just continue to blow up dollars and American soldiers there. All the evidence is to the contrary, with Shiites of the government fighting Shiites of the streets, Sunnis blowing up and shooting us and Shiites when they can, the country’s civilians, including kids, daily dying violently from the war and suicide bombs.

As for Bush himself, he fiddles while Baghdad explodes. No American can leave the so-called Green Zone, our fortress under mortar siege there, to walk the streets of Baghdad one inch without getting shot or bombed.

Worse, Sen. John McCain finds that all jolly; and if he’s elected president, by God, he’ll keep us there fighting for another 100 years; no pansy he. In effect, he already pledges himself to be Bushette and a worse fool (something I never thought possible), because McCain should know better.

As for the Democrats, neither Sens. Hilary Clinton nor Barack Obama can bring themselves to say if I’m elected president I’m withdrawing our Army immediately–no, both maunder about phased withdrawals, supportive presences and other garble as they try to avoid the obvious: We’ve been whipped fair and square in a place we should not have come to in the first place and we’d better get our buns out of there before we ruin our Army and bankrupt our nation.

I expect someday, if I live long enough, to read that Iraqis have swarmed and overwhelmed the Green Zone, that Ambassador Crocker fled by helicopter and that General Petraeus has managed withdraw our forces into Kuwait, a maneuver so brilliant and so bloody that he soon will announce he’s running for president on the peace ticket.