Vietnam War: End Communism in Vietnam (Failed)
Grenada War: Protect students from Communism (Problem did not exist)
Persian Gulf War: Get Iraq out of Kuwait (Achieved)
War in Afghanistan: End terrorist strongholds (To be determined)
Iraq War: End Iraqi possession of WMDs (Problem did not exist)
Syrian War: Remove Assad? Stop Chemical Weapons? Defeat ISIS? (To be determined)
The Korean War cost the United States $50 billion as well as 33,000 U.S soldiers' lives, with another 110,000 troops wounded. The purpose was to prevent communism in the Korean Peninsula. While this was accomplished in the South, the North remains a huge failure. At .the October 16, 2015 White House Joint Press Conference with the President of South Korea, which we attended, we asked several top U/S reporters, "Do we know who won the Korean War?" Nobody could answer.
Putting an end to Communist rule over Vietnam was the goal of the Vietnam War. However, the North Vietnam communist government assumed control of the entire country. The U.S. lost 58,307 soldiers, with an additional 300,000 wounded. If one walks through the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi (known as The Hanoi War Museum), not only are there full-length pictures of captured American soldiers being paraded, but maps highlighting covert supply routes used by Vietnam, and a large chart listing a dozen supporting countries as their coalition. When the tour guide was asked why no one knew about the supply routes, the guide's response was, "You weren't supposed to know." The tour is a shocking experience for Americans who believe the United States military is invincible.
Justification for the Grenada War was to protect the lives of American students at St. George's School of Medicine. President Reagan stated, "There were then about 1,000 of our citizens on Grenada, 800 of them students. Concerned that they'd be harmed or held as hostages, I ordered a flotilla of ships." In reality, there was no reported increase of Granada's military activity.
While the Gulf War provided a decisive victory in getting Iraq out of Kuwait, the later Iraq War invasion would negate most good that came from winning earlier. In a TIME article by President George HW Bush, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam," he stated: "Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." His son, President GW Bush, did the exact opposite.
The goal of the War in Afghanistan was to end al Qaeda and other terrorist strongholds in Afghanistan. 26,000 Afghan Security forces were killed as well as over 3,000 Americans. At peak we had 100,000 American troops there in 2011. President Obama announced October 15 that 10,000 troops will remain as a security and counterterrorism training and maintenance force because the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS have grown, and we must help Afghanis to fight them.
Iraq's development of WMD's was the driving force behind the Iraq War. The idea was put into the media by George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. In a post 9/11 world, WMDs would scare any American citizen. Despite CIA report footnotes questioning the evidence, Administration Officials persisted in the myth. Later media including an MSNBC documentary contended the real reason for the wareffort was Iraqi oil, which the US also never obtained.
Many are suggesting that America go beyond air strikes in Syria to ground troops. In September 2013, President Obama was ready to expand the mission, but requested an authorization from Congress. Congress could not get support from the American people for another Middle East war with another unclear mission. Neither chamber reported a war authorization out of committee. In this case, the President used the Constitution, and the Constitution worked.
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