Hagel, Nelson slouching toward Vietnam and defeat
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
If Iraq indeed becomes Vietnam, as some of our politicians seem bent on having it – American diplomats fleeing off rooftop helipads and our fighting men and women, victorious on the battlefield but undercut by politicians at home – Senators Chuck Hagel and Ben Nelson can say, “We helped.”
That assistance came Tuesday in the form of the two Nebraskans switching long-held positions against timelines for abandoning Iraq, giving, Bush-hating Senate Democrats their long-sought triumph.
The surprise 50-48 vote – pegged on Hagel and Nelson – tells Iraq’s terrorists and their mentors in Iran, that, absent a presidential veto, they need only hang on a little longer.
Bush most certainly will veto the action, but the damage around the world is done – “Don’t depend on America!”
Like Vietnam, where battleground victories were turned to media and political defeats back home, Congress is showing enemies the soft underbelly of American commitment.
Bush, of course, cannot let the timetable stand. Were he to do so, Congress strips the president of the United States of his constitutional role as commander-in-chief. In the form of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and assorted Chuck Hagels and Ben Nelsons, the legislative branch becomes master of war strategy, with no responsibility for anything.
Conservatives have come to expect this armchair generalship from Hagel. Many, however, believed that Nelson, although a Democrat, was made of sterner stuff.
How did these two get us to this point?
Hagel and Nelson voted for the Iraq War. They stood solid with President Bush and our military and supported the view that Saddam was a murderous dictator.
They presumably agreed, as did most of the rational Free World, that if Saddam didn’t have atomic weapons, he would press on until he did, and, once gotten, he would use them at the time and place of his choosing to attack or bluff, or export them to other rogue nations and radical Islamic groups.
Without George Bush’s resolve, the United States and our Allies would now be facing not two but three nuke-bent dictators, one in Iran, one in North Korea – and Saddam Hussein.
Among the three, Saddam’s record for making bones was far the most impressive, to date. Arriving after the fall of Baghdad, the Allies found more than 400,000 bodies in desert graves, political victims of Saddam. He had gassed thousands of Kurds during two decades and he presided over a war that killed more than 1 million Iranians and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the 1980s.
Would Saddam shrink from using ultimate weapons against America – “The Great Satan?” Not likely!
Chuck Hagel notwithstanding, Iraq is in no way Vietnam. It could end that way. But that would require America’s defeat and leaving Iraq to the Iranians and al Queda.
Losing in Iraq will mean much more to America and the world.
If we take our terrorists enemies at their words, they intend to come after us and destroy us, as a nation and a civilization.
It doesn’t have to happen. The echo for Iraq is not from Vietnam. It is from the pre-World War II days of the 1930s, telling us that when mad dictators promise to destroy us, we need to listen.
As a reminder to readers, we republish on this web site my editorial written before the November, 2004, elections: “Failed leaders and ‘peace movements’ cost 50 million lives in World War II.”
March, 2007
