OK, here's the Captain Ed entry. I excerpted the Captain's comments in block quotation in order to set them off, and if he's got any problem with the representation of the original post and/or his remarks, I'll be glad to revise the presentation of content.

NB: Where Captain Ed uses the term 'Islamofascist', I use the term 'Islamist'. Insofar as I know, we're referring to the same group.

I may not have made clear my belief that absent 9/11, Bush probably would have never gone after the Islamofascists like he has since, or that he probably would have been only marginally tougher than Clinton. Politically, he would have lacked the mandate, and he would have been much more focused on building a broader political base for his legislative efforts.

I would tend to agree with this statement. I wouldn't expect a pre-11 September President Bush to have done much other than talk about being compassionate and cutting taxes, while offering lip service to defense and foreign policy. More hot air from Houston, if you will. The biggest impression I had was how I believed he had handled the EP-3E incident improperly, being too eager to be nice to the Red Chinese. ¹

Also, I'm not saying that I preferred the Thieu government that resulted from the Diem coup -- I'm saying it was a bad idea. I'm not sure I made myself clear in that instance. I think that the coup wound up embroiling us in that problem far more than was necessary, but once we set it in motion, we were left on the hook. A negotiated settlement could have allowed the partition to hold, and Diem may have gotten that. Maybe not. But Thieu and Giap certainly weren't interested in negotiation.

Fair enough; I had a feeling there was some sort of message getting lost in there. The 'problem' with Diem---don't get me wrong; I'm probably in the "sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem" category---was that he was in essence a Franco-Vietnamese Roman Catholic trying to hold together a Buddhist majority state. Sure he plays well with the foreign folks (like us) but he apparently couldn't get the whole country behind him.

As for negotiating with Ho Chi Minh, the only way that should have been done was through the use of a Ouija board. Any negotiation in which he was a party to would probably have failed invariably. Either the RVN or the DRV was going to have to win the war outright so long as he, and his disciples, were around. Unfortunately, the wrong side won that one. (By the way, John Kerry served in Vietnam. Brought to you by Kerry 2004. Gotta pay the bills.)

I think both the Diem and Thieu governments understood that the Communists had it in for them, but I'm wondering if the Thieu government (and its assorted participants like Nguyen Cao Ky or that 'Big Minh' character) understood that North Vietnamese victory meant more than just 'loss of power'. I don't quite get the sense that they---the Saigon leadership---were thinking about what the Communist victory would mean outside of the fact that they in Saigon would no longer be calling the shots. If these men had understood the stakes as they truly were, perhaps the infighting and coup-de-etat-of-the-week atmosphere might've lessened a bit and waited until the NVA had been dealt a bloody nose and the war was over.

Technically, Hungary occurred prior to the slice of time I laid out (since 1960), but yeah, I'd say sacrficing the Hungarians to keep the Soviets appeased was a mistake. In this case, as in Czechoslovakia, you still had one side willing to use military force and one side demonatrating it wasn't. I don't know if I'd characterize either as brilliant national-security moves, quite frankly.

I use Hungary and Poland as a way to show that when, the military equation favored us more, we didn't intervene. Toss into that a Republican President of near-unimpeachable military character (unless you're a John Birch man) and it effectively neutralizes, I think, any partisan value. In 1954-1956, we were not bogged down in a Southeast Asian sinkhole, and we were militarily superior to the Soviet Union. It's my impression that the Poles and the Hungarians were in a better position to have actually held out against the Soviets. Even so, both of those countries were effectively unreachable unless you landed troops from the Baltic Sea, drove through neutral Austria, or slugged your way east through East Germany.

There's the rub in all cases. N.S. Krushchev once referred to West Berlin as the 'testicles of the West' which he could squeeze with reckless abandon and we'd do what he wanted. I think some of the theories of the day included a slippery slope to war which began in Berlin. See The Sum of All Fears in paperback to recognize that. Keeping in mind that the Soviets would have regarded any intervention by the NATO powers in what could technically be described as Warsaw Pact business as an act of belligerence, I think we did the right thing in not getting involved.

But Country Pundit, you say, aren't you an anti-Communist? Yes, I am. But we couldn't have gone to the overt military aid of those folks in the 1950s and 1968 without provoking the Soviets. Our people were probably already worried about attracting Soviet attention in Southeast Asia, and I doubt the politicians of the time wanted to risk nuclear annihilation for the dubious cause of saving one Communist's butt from another.

The key thing I think you're overlooking here in your analysis is not so much that we weren't going to use force and the Sovs were, but look at the map. The Soviets could enter Czechoslovakia from friendly territory almost all around. We, on the other hand, would have to either cross enemy territory, violate a neutral, or take the risky step of coming in from the south of Czechoslovakia. How're we going to keep the troops supplied? How do we keep the Soviets from invoking some mutual self-defense clause in the Warsaw Pact and starting World War III?

An example: What would you have done if, during the French student riots of 1968, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany decided to side with the students and capture France for the Warsaw Pact? They'd have to go through West Germany in the process and it would provoke a general war in Europe that could lead to the big nuclear exchange. Sending CIA in to mess with the situation would be something I might endorse, but sending the 82nd Airborne is not particularly a good idea in my mind.

My closing question on the Czechoslovakian Issue is this: What would you have done had you been the President in 1968?

Operation El Dorado Canyon was an easy call to make, since its mission was against a fixed target. I think it was a great idea and paid off handsomely, in that it kept Gaddafi in a box for the next 18 years. Why didn't the Reagan administration try the same philosophy against Islamic Jihad and Hezb' Allah? Why not go after the Iranians then, who were obviously funding and hosting these groups, instead of selling them arms to release our hostages? That's ineptitude. I understand we were fighting the Cold War, but you could make the same exact argument about Carter. By the way, I disagree with you about his options in Teheran; I think Carter could easily have gotten a declaration of war from that Congress had he pursued one.

EL DORADO CANYON was a good idea, but it was a risky operation. We didn't get cooperation from the French---the more things change, the more they stay the same---we lost some people, and it required a large amount of concentration of forces. I'd say it was good for a one-time event, but I doubt that the Reagan Administration could have gotten away with it for long in Congress.

For a variety of reasons, Iran was not a viable military target. We had to try at least something to keep Khomeini and his people from cozying up to the Soviets, which would have been A Bad Thing Indeed. Also, I have some vague notion that Reagan's people, if not Reagan himself, were thinking about a rapprochement between the United States and the Islamic Republic, kind of on the order of Reagan goes to Tehran, if not in actual form. Richard Nixon, in a ghost-written letter to the New York Times, compared the Iranian initiative to his China opening; he noted that it was a bold strategy that (I think) he liked and had it succeeded, would have been hailed as comparable to his 1972 Beijing visit. If we had been able to get Iran back in our corner, it would have indeed placed another pistol at the head of the Soviets, instead of waving about madly.² The Soviets knew this, and I doubt they would have sat idly by while the Sixth Fleet turned the Islamic Republic into a smoking hole in the ground.

Also, the Iranians were willing to play ball with us in funding the contras in Nicaragua. Remember that the Reagan Administration was tightly focused on stopping the spread of Communism in Latin, Central, and South America; Iran was a means to that end. Congressional Democrats were howling against stopping Communists down there (who could be considered subordinates of the Soviets); I can only imagine Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy, and others in the Democratic majorities going ballistic over the notion that America was going to fight a much more nebulous enemy over the hostage thing.

And as for the hostages, I don't particularly recall---could be wrong---a large movement that said "KILL THOSE WHO TAKE HOSTAGES"; instead, I think more emphasis was placed by the electorate on getting them back home. There are, after all, objective limits to what can be done by a government in a Republic such as ours.

One could theoretically argue that our support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was our backdoor way of dealing with the Iranians. In any event, I would like to note my support in the present day for the two-track policy, one where we shake their hands and kick them in the butt at the same time. It's the duplicity and ends-oriented thinking that I like for our people to be practicing; heck with this noble ideals stuff.

In regards to a Carter-era full-scale war with Iran, I have to note that I think it would be a A Bad Idea, whether Congress gave the declaration or not. Any meaningful response would have taken a while to gin up, and the Iranians hadn't wasted the Shah's military base in that worthless Iraq-Iran war. Pahlavi was one of the defense industry's best customers, and I bet the Islamic Republic could have put up a good fight. In 1979-1980, we weren't the cutting-edge superpower we are now; we'd have been fighting on similar material terms, I think. After a few dozen casualties, Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor probably would have been on TV declaring Iranian victory and American humiliation. A double whammy of that so shortly after Vietnam could have been distinctly problematic when the larger issue of fighting the Soviets came up.

I'd also like to stress that in the 1980s, we were making use of Islamic fundamentalists to some extent, inasmuch as we were using them to discover Soviet mines and test their helicopters on in a rocky little dump named Afghanistan. It is unlikely that Islamic terrorism was considered to be a real threat on a major scale such as we saw in this century.

With regards to beating on Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, perhaps it was thought that we'd best leave them be. These groups didn't necessarily cooperate (I don't think) and some of them were Soviet backed. Had we pursued a policy of direct hunting and killing, I daresay that these various Shiite groups would have found a new brotherhood in Allah to justify a) cooperation and b) taking weapons from the unbelievers in order to fight the infidels, i.e. us. Think the Iraqi situation now, except all over the Middle East and parts of Europe, and with the Soviets and their subordinates in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany helping out.

All in all, I have to admit, you make a very good response to my post, although I still feel that I'm more correct than incorrect. And I finally got fisked by someone. Hmmm ... feels oddly good.

Well, I wish some others would weigh in on this because I think I'm holding a better hand than you are. That being said, I've enjoyed the exchange and I appreciate your remarks. I reckon we're doing what the blog bunch is supposed to do, so yippee skippee.

¹ What would I have done? Depending upon how important it was to the continued preservation of national technical means, I might have given the order to destroy it if possible. Be it Tomahawk by way of a Los Angeles or an F-117A/B-2A attack, that plane would have been bits and pieces. However, the fact that we didn't do it is circumstantial evidence suggesting that it either wasn't necessary or that it couldn't, for a variety of reasons---political or operational---be done. At the same time, the Red Chinese have to learn their lesson; their pilots like to feed on Navy aircraft.

At the same time, I would have liked to have seen someone issue an apology on the order of, "We're sorry that your guys are too incompetent to fly close formation with a lumbering ELINT aircraft" and go from there. The Red Chinese are going to be the real problem in the future, not these dirty Islamists. Enh, I digress.

² I have some notion that the Iranian policy (at one point) during the Khomeini-Rafsanjani years was to consider America the Great Satan (#1, baby!) and the Soviets the Lesser Satan, sort of a 'pox on the Zionist tools and the godless athiests of Russia!' notion. Of course this wasn't an ironclad policy but I think it would be accurate at least once or twice during the Khomeini period.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 11:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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