During the mid-60’s, just as
the Viet Nam War was escalating to its fullest extent, I was attending graduate
school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. As a hot bed of liberalism, this turned out
to be one of the first places the anti-war movement gained traction.
Americans, in general, were
growing tired of a conflict where the casualties were rising and where victory
seemed further away than ever. College
students, in particular, were disenchanted.
As a result, they began to clamor for an end to our military
involvement.
One of the ways this was
expressed was by organizing “teach-ins.”
These were intended to demonstrate that the war was both brutal and
unwinnable. The idea was to educate
ordinary citizens why they too should join the effort to bring the troops home.
As a contemporary of the
demonstrators, I understood that a primary concern of many of the agitators was
that they not get drafted. In the
interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I shared this sentiment. This, indeed, is why I signed up for the
National Guard.
In any event, while I too
hated the idea of getting killed, I was willing to go if called. Many of my peers were not. As a result, they concocted a theory of how
the U.S. could extricate itself from this mess.
The concept was simple: declare victory and come home.
Ultimately this is
essentially what we did. Under the
tutelage of Henry Kissinger, we negotiated a peace we had every reason to
believe would be violated. Then we
picked up and got out. We, thanks to subsequent
congressional decisions, did not even keep our word to supply the South
Vietnamese with the weapons needed to defend themselves.
The upshot was that tens and
perhaps hundreds of thousands of our allies died. And yet we were safe. Moreover, the blood bath took place far from
our shores and hence was out of sight.
This shameful episode
continues to be celebrated by the liberals who won their political spurs by
preaching duplicity. Now one of their
disciples is at it again. Barack Obama
has decided that the strategy wherein we betrayed our former friends can be
recycled. We too can declare victory and
come home from the War on Terror.
Oh, excuse me—this is not a
war, but a series of policing actions.
There are merely small pockets of criminals scattered around the world
the periodically require our attention.
Mobilizing to meet this threat is accordingly unnecessary. We can even afford to pull back on killing
them with drones.
The trouble with this
attitude is that the parallel between Viet Nam and today does not hold. When we left southeast Asia the violence
continued, but it took place over there.
The Viet Cong had no intention of following us home and murdering us in
our beds.
The Islamist terrorists are
different. They do wish to slaughter us
where we live. Thus unilaterally
declaring the war against them as over will in no way protect us from their
wrath. It would be a case of “the sound
of one hand clapping” actually being that of bombs set off in our midst.
Centuries ago the Chinese learned that the
best defense against an implacable foe was a good offense. Merely hiding behind the Great Wall and
waiting for the Mongols to attack was an invitation for them to do exactly
that. Only a forward strategy that kept
their enemies off-balance forestalled subsequent invasions.
The military situation is no
different today. When thousands, and
perhaps hundreds of thousands, of religious militants believe they have a
sacred duty to kill us, it makes no sense to give them a free pass. Hoping that if we are nice to them, they will
be nice to us, is fatuous.
Barack Obama must remember that the first obligation of
the president of the United States is to defend us from our enemies, not to
placate his political cronies.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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