There's a blogger named Captain Ed, who writes Captain's Quarters, and he also is known to be a writer at Blogs for Bush. The Commissar has spoken highly of him before, and he is apparently rather popular.

Anyways, he writes an anti-Kerry post over at Blogs for Bush, and it goes something like this: John Kerry has mouthed off, saying something about President Bush running "the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of our country."

Captain Ed responds thusly: "Apparently this hyperbole will be the foreign-policy slogan up through the convention, and perhaps beyond. Let's test this by looking at highlights of the past 40 or so years, which I assume would satisfy Kerry's "modern" qualifier."

He then goes on to break down a few of the foreign policy occurrences over the last forty-odd years, apparently demonstrating that the Bush Administration is the first one in nearly half a century that's shown any spine.

I disagree. Time for a good old fisking.

1961 - President John F. Kennedy implements a leftover plan from the Eisenhower adminstration of supporting a native insurgency in Cuba, but at the last minute and without warning the insurgents, Kennedy withdraws American Air Force support for the attack on the Bay of Pigs. The resultant disaster destroys any basis for improving US-Cuba relations and pushes Fidel Castro to seek protection from the Soviet Union. The USSR begins installing ballistic missiles in Cuba, leading to the worst crisis of the Cold War and almost touching off a nuclear war between the US and Soviets. The solution requires the dismantling of US missile bases in the Near East and may have contributed to the building of the Berlin Wall.

It is my understanding that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy negotiated the removal of PGM-19 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles from their bases in Turkey, by meeting with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. It's worth noting that the Jupiter IRBM was launched from fixed sites. If they're fixed, they can't maneuver. If you can't maneuver, then a missile or a bomber stands a half-decent chance of getting through and putting a several-kiloton-yield device on your launching apparatus, and then it's game over.

Now, I've been a Nixon man since I heard of the guy, and I take a back seat to no one in loathing the Kennedy family. If I could find an opportunity to kick John Kennedy, I would. The Bay of Pigs is an excellent example, and he deserves scorn for losing his nerve. [It is apparently an item of academic debate whether Kennedy's aggressive actions later on were an attempt to prove that he wasn't soft on Communism.] Thus, I'm no JFK fanboy and I scoff at "Camelot". But Captain Ed misses the mark badly here.

The Jupiter missiles had become redundant in terms of the American strategic nuclear deterrent. As fixed missiles, they were the most vulnerable of the triad¹ and weren't an entirely survivable weapons system. Enter the United States Navy.

By 1962, the United States Navy was capable of deploying its Polaris FBM-toting submarines in the George Washington and Ethan Allen classes to the Mediterranean to serve the same role as the Jupiter IRBMs. Soviet anti-submarine warfare in the Mediterranean was probably for naught at the time, so these Polaris boats were effectively invulnerable. Kennedy agreed to trade vulnerable fixed missiles for "Polaris—from out of the
deep to target. Perfect." Kindly explain to me how this is a failure, especially when we kept the trade quiet.²

1962-3 - The Kennedy administration tries several fruitless and laughable methods of assassinating Fidel Castro. They manage to stage a coup in South Vietnam, getting a government that is more inclined to fight the Communists than the preceding Diem government, which was more inclined to negotiation with Ho Chi Minh.

The misadventures of the Kennedys in trying to off Castro are probably too numerous to list. However, it's worth noting that Captain Ed misses the mark on the question of Vietnam. The 1963 coup that claimed the life of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of the Republic of Vietnam, didn't quite turn out like he thinks. Instead of the (admittedly somewhat bumbling) Diem government, we got twelve years of infighting, bickering, and posturing for position that probably didn't help the war effort. Maybe Ed got his terms confused, but the impression I got in a class on the war in college---taught by a veteran---was that the Diem assassination didn't help.

Ed's got some other oddities buried in this piece, and they're in the Extended Entry.

1968 - The Johnson administration, up to its eyeballs fighting a proxy war in South Vietnam to stop the spread of Soviet Communism, fails to respond to the Soviets spreading directly into Czechoslovakia to put down the "Prague Spring" uprising for democracy.

Ed, did you not read the first part of your own sentence? Get out a map, Cap'n. Y'see anything between American forces in West Berlin and Czechoslovakia? No? Try the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. A wee little fortress called the German Democratic Republic---East Germany to Cold Warriors---lay between us and the geographically short route to the Czechs. Never mind that Alexander Dubcek wasn't so much about abandoning Communism but rather putting a Czech-mark on it. The Prague Spring was about "socialism with a human face", not about the departure of Czechoslovakia from the Communist world.

No less an authority than Vaclav Havel described events as a clash between two groups of Communists.

Newsflash: As Ed stated before, we had one group of forces tied down in Vietnam. We had another tied down in Korea. Anything aviation-related that wasn't tasked to the nuclear warfighting mission was pretty much getting taken to Southeast Asia. Ditto the Army, and I'd hate to be a CVBG commander having to maneuver in the Adriatic around Badgers, Bears, and Blinders. I'd like to know where he would have gotten the military muscle to do something about the Prague Spring.

Even if he did scrounge up the military might to get into Czechoslovakia, there's the wee problem of Soviet forces already being there and being a lot closer to resupply than we would be. Back to the maps: East Germany on the Czech northwestern border, Yugoslavia and Austria to the south, and Poland in the north and east. The only approach from the West German border would be more or less from the south, through the Bohemian forests of Bavaria. Even then, you'd have to fight your way all the way north, because Prague itself is more north than south, closer to East Germany than it is the Bavarian lines.

Someone remind me how we're going to crash through either three Warsaw Pact countries or Austria---a neutral country in this time frame---and whack the Red Army without igniting World War III. I darned near hear Wesley Clark in Captain Ed's complaint.

What else could be done? Lodge a diplomatic protest? Yeah, sure. Right when we're trying to keep the Soviets from dropping by Vietnam for an assistance to fraternal socialist allies party. I doubt that Captain Ed would have endorsed a stiff protest, too. With a hot war distracting us in a far away theater, domestic unrest from Communist sympathizers and blacks who threaten a long hot summer, Landslide Lyndon needs to be hollering "Knock it off" at the Soviets. In a word, no. Dwight Eisenhower saw no room to intervene when the Hungarians and Poles rose up in the mid-1950s, and I doubt that Captain Ed would call Ike 'inept'.

I left out criticisms of the Carter Administration, because they're largely on-target. The mullahs of Iran have been earning interest on a beat-down since 1979, when they in essence declared war on the United States by invading our embassy there. I don't know why Carter didn't just walk to Congress, announce that he had exercised Presidential authority and was asking for a declaration of war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevermind that he probably wouldn't have gotten that declaration, and from some of the rumblings I've heard about the state of the armed forces post-Vietnam, we could have had some problems laying the smack-down on the Iranians, who would have been enjoying the fruits of our military prowess. Remember: Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was an avid customer of the American arms industry, and had operational F-14A Tomcats at that point, along with Phoenix missiles. We also would have been very easily painted as being the Shah's stooges, and any resulting war would probably have cost us the hostages and lots of casualties. Given the weak knees in Congress, I'm not sure that we would have seen it through.

Besides, better to save the Iranian beating for when it will do the best---like soon.

1979 - 2000 - America either retreats in the face of successive attacks by Islamofascist terrorists or attempts to negotiate with them, instead of attacking them outright. Incidents include the Teheran embassy hostages, the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, a string of hostage-taking in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, simultaneous attacks on two American embassies in Africa, and a suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, all with the same American response: police work.

Four words, Captain Ed: Operation EL DORADO CANYON. In April of 1986, we paid a leading exporter of state-sponsored terrorism a laser-guided visit with a bomb. Colonel Khadafi, the Libyan head of state, was deliberately targeted for assassination. Although the colonel survived the evening and morning of 14-15 April, there was a drop-off in Libyan-sponsored attacks.

I'd like to know how Captain Ed would have resolved the Lebanon question. Other than what we did, I can see maybe two other routes: Cut and run, abandoning Lebanon and letting the Islamists win. The second alternative is to do what I heard attributed to the Soviets in a Tom Clancy novel: Take hostages of our own and threaten death to the family of the hostage takers. That's an awfully attractive view and I'd endorse it, but I don't know if it's the right thing to do. Given my preference for Nixon, I would have suggested doing something along the lines of what we did, a back-channel to exert pressure on the sponsors of the terrorists and reach our ends of recovering our people.

I won't defend the Clinton Administration---I believe that the seeds of American slumber were sown on his watch---but to sit back and say that we've been bungling for forty years while only George W. Bush has had any clue in foreign policy is ridiculous.

It's easy for a blogger to sit back and demand someone's head, but it isn't always the easiest thing in the world to get it. By the way, Ed: We were busy fighting a little something called the Cold War. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush didn't have the luxury of George W. Bush, who gets to focus on the Islamists. Those administrations had to worry about the Soviet Union, and I'd say that they were right to do so. George W. Bush has it easy---the worst the Islamists could do is bag a city or two. Regrettable, but that's pretty much the limit. A full-bore confrontation with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, on the other hand, could have ended nations and regions if not threatened Western civilization pretty directly. Islamists as they are now constituted don't have that capability.

Quite frankly, when asked to deal with either the Soviets or the Islamists, I would have chosen to focus my attentions on the well-organized political empire that had ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and tremendous armies. Unshaven losers whose best weapons are the "not-so-smart-bomb" pale in comparison.

I understand that it's important to many in the conservative blogosphere to credit George W. Bush as the shining star of foreign and domestic policy, the Man Who Would Lead Us to Glory and So Forth. That's fine. Bloggers who wish to deify the sitting President are more than welcome to do so. At the same time, I think Captain Ed has run aground. I do not concur in his judgment and I find his claims to be unsustainable, especially when their point is to bust John Kerry's chops. The Merovingian of Massachusetts can be defeated by other means, and I doubt we need to throw dirt on prior administrations---which would breach a Rumsfeld Rule---in order to do so. There are a lot of good unsung men and women on both sides of the Iron Curtain who probably did their best to make sure that five thousand years of human civilization didn't end in a five thousand kiloton flash, and Ed's dismissal of American policy as 'inept' strikes me as immature. Ed, we're still here. No cities died. All in all, the Forty Years War ended pretty cheaply, and we won. Exactly what's inept about that?

To borrow a line from Top Gun, a movie made during Captain Ed's era of retreat, "Your blogging is writing checks the truth can't cash!"

¹ "The strategic triad", a term used to describe American nuclear forces. The three legs of the triad are/were land-based missiles, manned bombers, and fleet ballistic missile submarines.

² A chronology of the Jupiter missile posted here indicates that the Jupiters were thought of as obsolescent and vulnerable at this point.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 08:38 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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