Kondor3
Cafeteria Centrist
Golly-gosh-gee-willickers, Mister Wizard, but I just found out about the SouthEast Asia Treaty Organization ten seconds ago when I saw your extremely helpful post...
Yep. That was the Official Party Line, alright, although your average Vietnamese had never so much as seen a voting booth by the time of the request for assistance.
Indeed. Just like there is a compelling interest to keep Militant Islam from spreading; yet another hate-filled totalitarian approach to human social organization.
Indeed.
Ike knew what he was doing.
LBJ did not.
Smart guy, Ike, when it came to military strategy and tactics and organization and logistics and the politics incumbent upon all of that in the context of a multinational allied venture.
Trouble is, you have to go back that far to find a Democratic President with (1) Balls and (2) a crisis of sufficient proportions so as to warrant full-scale warfare.
Franklin Roosevelt? Now there was a Democratic President with Balls. He tried to keep us out of it, and then tried to delay our entry for as long as possible until we were ready, and meanwhile kept feeding inventory to our allies to keep the eventual possibility of a multinational multi-front assault alive for future use.
Harry Truman? He, too, was a Democratic President with Balls; handling Korea as best he could while being hobbled by new developments on the nuclear front and by this new thing called the UN that stood in his way for so long. Just as well, probably, given that America was still war-weary at the time, but he did a damned-fine job, under the circumstances.
JFK? Now there was a card-player; although the Cuban Missile Crisis was mostly a Navy show, and JFK was an old Navy Man. Still, he also did a damned-fine job of hanging onto Berlin when The Wall went up, and other, lesser Air and Land challenges.
LBJ? A masterful politician in some respects, but a cowboy, and one who had to rely heavily upon his advisors to talk him through the basics in Vietnam with other challenges, and who eventually screwed the pooch, politically, and damned-near militarily. LBJ's administration was the beginning of the Slide of the Democratic Party in terms of wartime leadership.
Jimmah Abdul Carter? Don't make me laugh. The scenes from the Iranian desert and the world laughing at us for 444 days says it all.
Bill Clinton? The failed Somalia intervention (Blackhawk Down)? Lobbing some cruise-missles at Muslims (Afghanistan) or a few bombs on Saddam's radar-sites? But he DID get us into a high-altitude bombing campaign on BEHALF of the Muslims in Bosnia, didn't he?
Barack Obama? He INHERITED his wars; he didn't start them. He closed the one (Iraq) down in rather ignominious fashion and let the Enemy know when we'd be pulling out of the other one, to the detriment of our efforts there, but he (1) ranted and railed against both wars, then (2) sustained the one for years rather than shutting it down.
So, yeah, we have to back 40 years or more to find a Democratic President with the Balls to start one on any kind of appreciable scale AND where the stars aligned to that one was appropriate, but that's also largely a matter of what was happening in the world during their watches, and, of course, a couple of our more recent Democratic Presidents have demonstrated all the Military Acumen of a Cocker Spaniel.
No... I paraphrase and stand by my original remarks... both parties are culpable.
Both Repugs AND Dummies have manged to get us into the shit, and usually in a bullshit fashion, repeatedly, within living memory.
BOTH parties have blood on their hands... a great deal of it... literally and figuratively... there are no innocents in this context.
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