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In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."
Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
I don't fault the senior military. Cancel that, I DO fault them. They resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, "a sewer of deceit."
The current crew is in better odor. And one may be tempted to make excuses for them, noting for example that if admirals/generals are the hammer, small wonder that to them everything looks like a nail. No, that does not excuse them.
The ones standing in back of Obama on Friday have smarts enough to have said, NO; IT'S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President. That should not be too much to expect.
Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan -- probably over the next decade or longer. But not their blood.
Sound Military Advice
General officers seldom rise to the occasion. Exceptions are so few that they immediately spring to mind: French war hero Gen. Philippe LeClerc, for example, was sent to Indochina right after World War II with orders to report back on how many troops it would take to recapture Indochina. His report: "It would require 500,000 men; and even with 500,000 France could not win."
Equally relevant to Obama's fateful decision, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told another young President in April 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined."
When JFK's top military advisers, critical of the President's reluctance to go against that advice, virtually called him a traitor -- for pursuing a negotiated solution to the fighting in Laos, for example -- Kennedy would tell them to convince Gen. MacArthur first, and then come back to him. (Alas, there seems to be no comparable Gen. MacArthur today.)
Kennedy recognized Vietnam as a potential quagmire, and was determined not to get sucked in -- despite the misguided, ideologically-salted advice given him by Ivy League patricians like McGeorge Bundy.
Kennedy's military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor said later that MacArthur's statement made a "hell of an impression on the President."
MacArthur made another comment about the situation that President Kennedy had inherited in Indochina. This one struck the young President so much that he dictated it into a memorandum of conversation: Kennedy quoted MacArthur as saying to him, "The chickens are coming home to roost from the Eisenhower years, and you live in the chicken coop."
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost after eight years of Cheney and Bush, but there is no sign that President Obama is listening to anyone capable of fresh thinking on Afghanistan. Obama has apparently decided to stay in the chicken coop. And that can be called, well, chicken.
Can't say I actually KNEW Jack Kennedy, but it was he who got so many of us down here to Washington to explore what we might do for our country.
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