Before I turn to Che Guevara and Colonel and Congressman, Scott Perry, this news. Great Britain will help in bombing the terrorists but only in Iraq, not at their home base in Syria, as now authorized by vote of their Parliament. They worry that they would violate the “sovereignty” of Syria, whose government, while privately welcoming help against any and all rebel factions, has publicly denounced any foreign country’s airpower being deployed within their border. Ahem.
History lesson for the Brits and those Americans born after the Vietnam war or who listened to the biased media at that time instead of noting the facts.
Journey back with me for a moment to the Vietnam War and the 1970 “incursion” into Cambodia ordered by then President Richard Nixon, which provoked hysterical and sometimes violent demonstrations across America by the radical left.
When North Vietnamese troops had repeatedly crossed over into Cambodia, and then used it as a safe haven to attack and kill American troops up and down the length of Vietnam, Cambodia effectively eliminated any pretense of neutrality.
International Law is rather specific on this. You cannot claim to be neutral if your country’s territory is used to launch attacks on a belligerent or warring nation.
You must control your own borders. If you do not, the country which is being attacked from your country, can consider that an act of war by the supposedly neutral country at worst, or at best, they can counter attack and cross the border to destroy their tormentor.
Those deployed in that theater of operations were unanimous in cheering their Commander in Chief’s decision. The intelligence which was sent up the chain of command from Vietnam was finally being acted on and their tormentors who could repeatedly attack them from a safe haven, were finally being counter attacked.
We knew exactly what the North Vietnamese Communists were doing to us, and that their command and control headquarters was located just over the border in Cambodia.
We did not “invade a neutral country” as the left claimed when President Nixon ordered American troops to cross that border to search out and destroy the enemy.
We did not “expand the war” as the American left – which Hillary and Bill Clinton were bona fide leaders of and which Barack Obama traces his ideological ancestry to – all claimed.
Brits, wake up. Americans who think that way, wake up. Learn from history, harken to this reality check.
Syria is not neutral. Its neutrality has been compromised. Syria is unable or unwilling to stop anti-Iraq, anti-Israel, anti-America belligerents from crossing the border into Iraq to continue what they call their world war on the west, killing thousands and conquering a vast section of territory.
Conquered territory includes some of the richest oil fields in the middle east which they are now using to finance further expansion of the terrorist war on the west.
More important, the conflict in Syria and Iraq offers America the chance to take a stand instead of staying on the sidelines as supposedly “apostate” Muslims and Christians continue to be crucified, beheaded, tortured and murdered by ISIL thugs as their war on the west continues.
President Obama’s ordering a handful of bombing missions that will presumably continue for the next few months, is also reminiscent of the Vietnam War.
Read the fiction work, Flight of the Intruder about the Vietnam war era to get an idea of the frustration of pilots who were ordered to bomb targets that will simply be rebuilt later, while avoiding the real hard targets and sources of supply and avoiding the sort of bombing missions that would have ended the war with victory for the United States.
Read about the restrictive rules of engagement which prevented America from winning the war in Vietnam – rules restricting American soldiers on the ground as well as the air power that could have helped those soldiers win the war by crossing over into North Vietnam and to block resupply and punish the source of the aggression in the South.
Richard Nixon sent ground troops over the border into Cambodia, not just air power. He delivered a sharp blow to our enemy’s ability to continue killing Americans in Vietnam. Alas, it was not followed up on, and it was never done to North Vietnam, which continued to operate as a safe haven for launching attack after attack to kill American soldiers.
During the Vietnam war, the French, British and Germans continued to send merchant ships into Haiphong Harbor to trade with those killing American soldiers. Companies, countries and individuals got rich trading with America’s enemies during the Vietnam war and it is going on again today.
If you allow attacks on western interests in Iraq from Syria without a vigorous response, turn a blind eye to our supposed allies trading with our adversaries and refusing to help in this war, then you will get the same result that we ended up after many years of letting North Vietnam have a safe sanctuary to repeatedly attack and kill Americans.
That’s why Communist revolutionary Che Guevara said “One, two, many Vietnams.” Americans were bleeding week after week without ever – except that one Cambodia incursion – going after the source of the attacks – crossing the border into Cambodia and into North Vietnam.
Communism emerged stronger and America weaker because of the Vietnam war. That is exactly what cheered this icon of the American left so much and why Che wanted more Vietnams.
If Che were alive today he’d be cheering Barack Obama on. Good he would say: more ineffectual and half-hearted bombing that will help recruiting and piss more people off without really eliminating his anti-America friends.
Good, more dead Americans, with little or nothing to show for it, he would cheer. Good, Che would say – keep doing this week after week and month after month.
Yes, Che Guevara would cheer on President Obama, knowing that the continued bleeding of America will guarantee our people will tire of any resistance to the advance of ISIL and others around the world who despise freedom.
Sustained bombing of Cambodia and North Vietnam and the use of ground troops into enemy safe havens would have won the war in Vietnam.
Years later when wheelchair bound American Leon Klinghoffer was murdered and his body thrown over the side of the cruise ship Achille Lauro during that ship’s hijacking by the then most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, Abu Nidal, the jihadi terrorists were hunted down and captured by a combination of American ground and air forces (although the Italians took him into custody).
Following that operation, led by America’s first White House counter terrorism director, Lt. Col. Oliver North, President Reagan said, “you can run, but you cannot hide.”
In Vietnam, our enemies knew they could run, they could hide back in Cambodia and North Vietnam, and then attack and kill more Americans again and again without fear of reprisal.
The terrorists today also know, as did the Vietnam Communists of yesteryear, that they will see any effort to go after them, denounced by the American left, as energetically as they did during the Cambodian incursion of President Nixon nearly 50 years ago.
Sadly, some who are part of the Tea Party, distrustful of this President and fearful of any further entanglements on endless Vietnam-war style engagements that drain American blood and treasure, will join in protesting any vigorous military strategy designed to cripple our enemies and win a victory.
That dynamic virtually guarantees that today’s anti-war movement will be far more effective in helping protect the terrorist jihadis from American military power than was the American left of the 1960’s could do in the Vietnam war.
In both instances – Vietnam and today in Iraq and Syria – America is faced with a clear adversary and has the tools available to prevail and end any military confrontation.
We must echo Ronald Reagan by eliminating any safe sanctuary for those conducting this “war on the west.”
That includes the use of any and all weapons at our disposal, not only air power. We must speak out resolutely, clearly and repeatedly, that America has every right and indeed our government has an obligation to protect our citizens, our interests and protect our future.
Failure to act resolutely and decisively prolonged the Vietnam war and put more and more names on that wall in Washington, DC. The same thing can be expected to happen in Syria and Iraq that happened in South Vietnam, North Vietnam and Cambodia, if we employ the same weak willed tactics today that we used then.
Insanity is doing the same thing you did before to get a lousy result, and deluding yourself into thinking you will get a different result this time.
Sporadic bombing without a serious and aggressive ground game to go after our enemy wherever he attacks us from, failed in Vietnam and only produced thousands of American casualties and a conquered Communist southeast Asia. We are left with a memorial showing the price of that failed policy. Will Americans learn the lesson that Che Guevara knew so well?
The same result can be guaranteed to happen in Iraq and Syria if we follow the same tactics. Dead Americans for nothing, and our enemy will continue to achieve their stated goals – which includes killing large numbers of Americans and raising their evil black flag over our White House as they install a worldwide “caliphate.”
We abandoned Montagnard tribesmen who fought with U.S. Army Green Beret in Vietnam.
Today the North Vietnamese Communist invaders who conquered South Vietnam, continue to persecute and kill them in one of the unreported genocides that should embarrass us all as Americans. They answered our call to stand up and defend their own country, they fought and bled side by side with Green Beret, and now Montagnards continue to pay a terrible price today, along with all of their Vietnamese countrymen.
Today, virtually every failure we saw in Vietnam is being repeated. The left is repeating all of their arguments they employed so well back then – including the false claim that this is an internal civil war, that America should not intervene in another country’s internal affairs, that we cannot win, that this is not our business, that we cannot be the world’s policemen, that those so angry at us are just hungry, homeless and will calm down if we give them money to buy food and shelter.
There are plenty of people in Iraq and Syria who believe that America cannot be trusted when we give our word to help them, and our pledge to stand by them until they prevail.
They won’t be our “troops on the ground” to serve America’s purposes because they see by our actions that we are unreliable even without knowing about the courageous Montagnards who answered that same call and were then abandoned to a grisly fate.
Barack Obama is reading the polls and knows America is conflicted on this issue. Americans are mad about the beheadings, angry about ISIL and the idea of a terrorist state that can continue and expand its war on the west.
Americans don’t want to wait for more and more beheadings and the detonation of weapons of mass destruction on American soil that George Bush warned about.
But, Americans don’t want another Vietnam. Americans don’t want to vindicate Che Guevara’s call for “One, two, many Vietnams” today in Iraq and Syria. Nor do I.
Back then during the Vietnam War of the 1960’s, a small group of American conservatives, led by Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union, offered an alternative. They echoed what one generation earlier, General Douglas MacArthur said during the Korea war quagmire: why not victory.
Simply put, in war, MacArthur asserted, there can be no substitute for victory.
U.S. Congressman Scott Perry, a U.S. Army National Guard Colonel, voted against the funding of bombing and war in Iraq and Syria last week. He expressed his views cogently and clearly on Fox news, thereafter and at his website.
There is no plan to win, there is no strategy that makes sense, is Congressman Perry’s view. He has no confidence in this Commander in Chief. He does not wish to give a blank check to President Obama to expend more of America’s blood and treasure, without seeing a plan for victory first.
Congressman Scott Perry, who remains active in the U.S. Army National Guard (his Chief of Staff is also, as a Lt. Colonel) would surely have been in the group of YAF and ACU leaders in the 1960’s who also criticized President Lyndon Johnson’s immoral and weak prosecution of the Vietnam war.
The 1960’s YAFers even had a committee back then, called Students for Victory in Vietnam. They didn’t get their way in the 1960’s, those YAF and ACU leaders, but they build a conservative movement that helped capture the U.S. Senate, the House and the Presidency under Ronald Reagan. They concentrated on good policy and they kept their eye on the long run. History vindicated them.
Where’s a Victory against Jihadi Committee we need today? I nominate Scott Perry to be its chairman. I have seen nobody explain better, what veterans and those who wear the uniform today, and all of us concerned about the defense of our homeland are so worried about.
If Scott Perry’s views do not prevail and America ignores the lessons from the Vietnam War, then Che Guevara will smile as Barack Obama gives us “one, two, many Vietnams” and a lot of American treasure and blood will be spent for nothing, increasing despair and hopelessness for Americans, as the Jihad continues and reaches into our country.
For me and for Scott Perry, we prefer Victory and will hold out for it as the only sensible alternative to the policy of Barack Obama or the continued advance of the Jihad. And we most certainly don’t want to give Che Guevara, dead 47 years this October 9, any reason to smile from the depths of hell where he surely is.
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