"We have arrived at a critical moment. We must never forget that the decisive terrain in Europe is the human terrain. As you and our allied partners on the ground get into tough situations, we must employ all assets to ensure your safety, keeping in mind, again, the importance of avoiding civilian casualties."
General Eisenhower, of course did not make that statement. It was taken from recent statements of General Petraeus during a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Afghanistan. I merely replaced the word' Afghanistan' with 'Europe' and 'NATO' with 'allied', but I think you get the point.
Eisenhower may have indeed considered privately the very real inevitability of civilian casualties and regretted the ability to avoid them, but I doubt seriously he ever once considered it the “decisive terrain” of the war or made it part of his public statements to those who where being asked to lay down their own lives to free those very civilians from the tyranny of Nazi occupation. Eisenhower knew the success of the war did not hinge upon avoiding civilian casualties. He knew the success of the war hinged on killing the enemy and destroying his will and ability to fight. Apparently they don’t teach that at West Point anymore. Apparently General Petraeus has a different strategy. He is going to win the war by not killing civilians and then maybe the enemy will have a change of heart and just surrender en mass, or change their evil ways.
Times have changed since 1942. We have now another kind of General and another kind of war, if we can even call the mess in Afghanistan a war. We now have a General as concerned with civilian casualties as he is the safety of our own troops, at least publicly. We have a general now who operates from a different kind of schooling, a different military strategy, spawned in the murky primordial waters of doctorate theory, designed to respond to the nation building war doctrine of our current political morass, and to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Vietnam quagmire. He apparently concluded from that experience that the way to win an un-winable war is primarily to just avoid killing civilians. When faced with guerilla war tactics by an entrenched hostile indigenous enemy, you must win their hearts and minds by showing them how nice you are. I thought the lesson learned from Vietnam was to never have another Vietnam. But then, I didn’t attend West Point.
The man tapped by a publicly spurned President to replace the less politically savvy preceeding general in the field, General Petraeus has been hailed as a military genius for having proved his theory of counter insurgency in Iraq. His brilliant plan to win the hearts and minds of the civilians while turning his own troops into sitting ducks, has allegedly worked so well in Iraq that the level of violence has been reduced to a trickle of car bombings and I.E.D. explosions. The constant fear of mortar attacks on the US Embassy in Baghdad have almost disappeared.... well, except for the one that hit the embassy during President Biden’s recent 4th of July visit. We are told that it had nothing to do with his visit, however.
The level of violence has decreased so much in Iraq that we only have a few thousand troops still sitting around there waiting for that next mortar attack or I.E.D. But hey, the people just love us. They really do. We don’t have any kind of formal peace treaty with them yet, but they really do love us. I guess we’re keeping some troops there just in case they fall out of love with us, like the troops we still have deployed in South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Belgium, and the rest of the 150 countries around the World. That's why when Pelosi says she wants to bring the troops home, I really don't believe her.
So, General Petraeus is the guy now that is going to win this Vietnam sequel, this ill conceived undeclared war in Afghanistan. Congress is going to continue to fund it and Obama is going to just have to figure out a way to convince his political base of rabid anti-war Leftists that it is a good war. Perhaps amnesty for 30 million illegal aliens will do the trick. He's working on that.
RNC Chairman Steele is right. It’s Obama’s tar baby.
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