America’s Red Lines - Foreign Policy Blunders by Conrad Black

Interesting perspectives from this Canadian . . .

America’s Red Lines - Foreign Policy Blunders by Conrad Black

In Vietnam

In the terrible debacle in Vietnam, force levels in a combat zone were raised to 550,000 draftees, with the Americans regularly taking 200 to 400 dead per week, on dubious legislative authority. The war was ambivalently pursued and militarily mismanaged. In the aftermath, all ability to enforce the peace agreement was cut off, dooming the entire effort and condemning millions of Indochinese to a gruesome fate.

In Desert Storm

In the first Gulf War, following the naked aggression of Saddam Hussein in invading and occupying Kuwait, a mighty alliance was assembled, 957,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen were transported to the approaches to Iraq and armed to the teeth. The war cleared Iraq out of Kuwait, and the record for the disparity of casualty levels between two fighting forces — previously set at the nearby Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great — was surpassed. (Alexander allegedly took 1,300 casualties in killing 50,000 Persians and capturing 300,000, a considerable feat with swords, spears, and arrows; while the Gulf War Allies suffered a thousand casualties while killing, wounding, and capturing about 350,000 Iraqis.) But Saddam was allowed to continue as Iraqi dictator. He violated almost all the terms of the ceasefire, Iraq’s Kurds were violently subdued despite the imposition of a no-fly zone, and Saddam strutted about the Arab world as a virtual David against the great American-headed Goliath.

In Bosnia

In the Bosnian conflict, after the Europeans got over the hubristic illusion that it was “the hour of Europe,” Republican Senate leader Robert Dole denounced the European arms embargo, correctly, as a plan to enable the Serbs to massacre their designated opponents, and pushed the U.S. into the conflict with his lift-and-strike legislation. President Bill Clinton and his advisers then developed the dubious concept of the war worth killing for, but not worth dying for: Allied aircraft flew at 30,000 feet to avoid any possibility of ground-to-air fire from the Serbs while bombing that country into backwardness, and the commander-in-chief publicly wept when one American airman’s plane crashed and he was captured alive by the Serbs. On this arithmetic basis, many of the world’s greatest statesmen, including Lincoln, Churchill and Roosevelt, would have drowned in their own tears. (To make the Clintons a matched pair in histrionics, Hillary Clinton fantasized that she had been under heavy sniper fire at Sarajevo airport while being presented with posies by curtsying schoolgirls — and later attributed this complete fabrication to jet lag).

In Fighting Terrorists in the 1990s

As terrorist outrages against the United States occurred in the late 1990s (the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998; and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, in 2000), the Clinton administration responded with half-measures: cruise missile attacks that rearranged the rubble around an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and took the roof off an aspirin factory in Sudan. Such feeble gestures later prompted George W. Bush to say: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.”) This under-response led directly to the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi and Afghan actions that followed.

In Iraq

In the 2003 Iraq War, Saddam was ousted just as quickly as the Gulf War has been won in 1991, and with a fifth of the forces. He was captured and executed, but in the greatest military blunder in modern U.S. history (except the failure to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War), the American authorities laid off the 400,000 members of the Iraqi army and police forces but allowed them to retain their weapons and munitions, as if they were going to set up target and quail-shooting clubs around Iraq and not rent themselves out (as they did) as private armies and factional death squads. George W. Bush’s dream of democracy in the Middle East has wilted; the Maliki government in Baghdad is unstable, ungrateful and undemocratic (though an improvement on Saddam).

In Afghanistan

President Obama decisively raised the American commitment to Afghanistan, where Western forces had been floundering after George W. Bush decamped to Iraq for no reason that has ever been adequately explained. But the West has almost nothing to show for this effort either, and the United States has been reduced to truckling to the Taliban whom it deposed, and paying Dane geld to America’s gallant Pakistani ally, which passes on some of the American assistance it receives to the very same Taliban forces that are busily engaged in killing American and NATO servicemen.

In Syria

Barack Obama has positioned cruise missile-equipped vessels off the coast of Syria that could deliver conventional warheads precisely on Syrian targets. Yet as he has done this, he has engaged in vigorous public discussion about the dangers that would await the United States in Syria. Last week, for instance, he told CNN that he was wary of “being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region.”  It is an unusual (and, among the leaders of Great Powers, probably unprecedented) gambit, to muster a nation’s war-making potential while publicly musing on the inadvisability of engaging in war-like acts. It is the ultimate spectacle of the narcissist: All the world must watch while I pull the petals off this daisy.

Should the USA Attack Syria?

Opponents of an attack on Syria say that American munitions can’t target Bashar Assad’s poison gas stocks without releasing them; and that any punitive attack that weakens Assad would facilitate the triumph of his Jihadist enemies. This analysis suggests that nothing should be done except “punishing” Assad for his use of chemical weapons … without actually hurting him in any militarily significant way. That’s the sort of Bill Clinton tokenism that led directly to 9/11.  It is paralysis by analysis: the antics of people who don’t want to decide, who feel something must be done but don’t want to do anything.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/08/31/conrad-black-have-americas-red-lines-all-been-erased/