If you look up the word "clueless" in the dictionary, you should find this recent passage by DNC Chairman Howard Dean:
"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening.
... I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops.
... The White House wants us to have a permanent commitment to Iraq. This is an Iraqi problem. President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing, but that could have been done in a very different way. But now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave. 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, and it's their country."
Rush Limbaugh provided this transcript:
STAN KELLY (WOIA): Governor Dean, the key to I guess eventually getting the US forces out of Iraq is going to have the Iraqis do a better job defending themselves and taking a greater goal. Are we on the right track to achieve that goal?
HOWARD DEAN: Let's not forget. This is ultimately what America had to do in Vietnam [sic]. Ultimately they said we're going to turn this over to the Vietnamese and of course the South Vietnamese couldn't manage to take care of their own country. I wish the president had paid more attention to the history of Iraq before we'd gotten in there. The idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong and I've seen this before in my life, and it cost us 25,000 [sic--58,000] brave American soldiers in Vietnam, and I don't want to go down that road again. Get out of there and take the targets off our troops' back[s].
There is so much wrong with this, on so many levels, that it is hard to know where to begin. But the important thing to take away from this is the simple fact that Howard Dean is pandering to hard-left anti-military, anti-American, anti-war Democrats. He is, quite frankly, attempting to turn the party toward a relatively small number of kooks in order to appease them and save their votes. These burned out 60's leftovers aren't mature or educated enough to understand anything beyond "Vietnam," and if Dean is attempting to articulate official Democrat party policy when he outlines such a defeatist and revisionist military "strategy," then he has just lost the next election for their party.
The tired canards about "protecting our troops" and "restoring their morale" are just a bunch of nonsense, a smokescreen to soften the anti-war message so that it doesn't alienate the majority of Americans. As recent polling shows, these constant attacks on the administration and constant predictions of military defeat by Democrats have already alienated voters and have resulted in a demonstrably negative effect on troop morale. But damaging President Bush politically has long been a far greater priority for Democrats than defeating Al Qaeda or tangibly supporting our troops.
Again, thank you Howard Dean for making this fact crystal clear.
______________________________________________________
RELATED: Criticism of the US Military is not a taboo or forbidden subject; we have the right to ask questions when we think that things could have been done better. Blogger Wunderkraut points out that many people were angry after the US invasion of Tarawa in Nov. 1943 that resulted in over 3,000 US casualties (mostly Marines) because official reports sited poor intelligence and poor planning of the invasion. But no one called for the impeachment of President Roosevelt, or the resignation of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, or the court marshall of Navy admirals, or for America to surrender to Japan and sign a peace treaty. In fact, the New York Times closed its editorial with a sobering reminder that the US would likely suffer similar casualties as we continually occupied Japanese strongholds, and that "we should steel ourselves now to pay that price."
Comments