Echoes of Kennedy's Vietnam.

or, Mister We Could Use a Man Like Ronald Reagan Again...

So we're just committing 300 military advisers this go-round, eh? Unless, as President Obama ominously alludes to, something bad happens to our personnel...

It is in our national security interests not to see an all-out civil war inside of Iraq, not just for humanitarian reasons, but because that ultimately can be destabilizing throughout the region, and in addition to having strong allies there that we are committed to protecting, obviously, issues like energy and global energy markets continues to be important.

We also have an interest in making sure that we don’t have a safe haven that continues to grow for ISIL and other extremist jihadist groups who could use that as a base of operations for planning and targeting ourselves, our personnel overseas and eventually the homeland.

When our Marines were killed in Beirut, President Reagan wisely assessed that our troops were in more danger positioned there than "the mission" was worth;  he withdrew.  Beirut continued to bleed, chaos festered, but today?

Beirut is back, baby.  (and the Butcher/Bulldozer is dead, ding-dong.)
The people there did the dirty work themselves, no U.S. military presence needed.

When you read pundits today,
like former George Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who has composed a mid-summer wishlist to Santy Clause on behalf of Iraq, remember where you heard these threats hyped before -- pre-invasion.

It's the same old story:  if we don't route the potential terrorists here, there and everywhere, why the world will end!  If we don't stop VietNam from going communist, what will happen?  Turns out, all these many years down the road, the loss in VietNam did not threaten America here at home.

Nor did President Reagan's withdrawal of troops from Beirut show weakness, but smarts.  It is not America's place to fix the world, or more properly stated, to try and fix what we see as broken.  We've every right, in this country, to defend our borders and stop imminent threats from reaching our people.

But we can't continue to cheat by overreach, violating our own citizens' Constitutional rights here at home, and imposing our death values on civilians in other countries.  The reason military leaders don't support even targeted bombings at this time, is there is no way to protect civilian populations on the ground.  Killing innocents can cause more anger at U.S. than having foreign troops permanently situated where they have no reason to be.

Those comparing the troop levels left in Korea or Japan forget:  our country legitimately was warring with those countries, and vanquished them.  In Iraq... oops!  We helped overthrow, or we overthrew in all honesty, the leader of a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attack on America.  All the dead there weren't soldiers fighting against America, they were mostly people caught up in the wrong place at a deadly time.

We meant well, perhaps, but there's no excusing or looking away from what we actually accomplished.  The best thing we could do now, is keep out.  If the country's people want to partition themselves, let them.  Look at Gerson's magical wish list of what he believes is U.S. responsibility:

●Aid the emergence of a more inclusive and trusted Iraqi government, so that the entity we support is not a Shiite rump state.

●Get the Kurds, who are gaining in autonomy (and territory and resources), to avoid declaring themselves autonomous and to strengthen the central government.

●Engage the Sunni tribes with the goal of peeling off current ISIS allies of convenience.

●Urge the region’s Sunni states to support an Iraqi unity government in its fight against terrorist groups that are eventually a threat to those states as well.

●Inform the Iranians that the United States will be taking the lead in strengthening a more inclusive Iraqi government. Warn them against supporting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and a Shiite army as a proxy force, which would harden sectarian divisions. Persuade them they do not ultimately benefit from continual, regional civil war. And somehow convince them that their cooperation (through nonintervention) in Iraq is not a bargaining chip in nuclear negotiations.

●Pursue an effective military approach that restores our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities in Iraq (as Obama has apparently begun to do); conducts a vigorous counterterrorism campaign against ISIS; and eventually helps a unity government return to the offensive. Obama is right to be hesitant about military measures that appear to side with the Shiites in a sectarian conflict.

This range of responses is not, as they say, rocket science; it is much harder than that. Even if the administration took all these suggestions, and lots of better ones, it might not work.

Gerson, rightly, does not want to look too closely to see who broke Iraq. He might spot himself, and men much like him, whose words sold the world on a war of choice.

Ronald Reagan would know better.
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ADDED: Turns out, Gerson is well versed at writing words announcing plans and policies that will never be implemented.

Gerson joined the Bush campaign before 2000 as a speechwriter and went on to head the White House speechwriting team. "No one doubts that he did his job exceptionally well," wrote Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2007 article otherwise very critical of Gerson in National Review. According to Ponnuru, Bush's speechwriters had more prominence in the administration than their predecessors did under previous presidents because Bush's speeches did most of the work of defending the president's policies, since administration spokesmen and press conferences did not. On the other hand, he wrote, the speeches would announce new policies that were never implemented, making the speechwriting in some ways less influential than ever.

Gerson, an evangelical with a degree from Wheaton College in Illinois, is afraid of what might happen without a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq:

But we can’t give up on the possibility of a stable, whole Iraq, however distant it currently seems. The causal concession of “partition” is to concede a source of continual threat and potential disaster. A terrorist haven reaching from the outskirts of Aleppo to the outskirts of Baghdad, with the pretensions of a caliphate and the resources of a government, run (at least in part) by Baghdadi, would be a direct threat to London, Berlin, New York and Washington.

Fear not.
Look at Vietnam today, Beirut...
Turns out, other countries and other peoples sometimes indeed not only survive, but come out stronger and truly self-reliant.

WAIT, there's more:

Gerson proposed the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor during a September 5, 2002 meeting of the White House Iraq Group, in an effort to sell the American public on the nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff, "The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase — and the administration would soon make maximum use of it."

Gerson has said one of his favorite speeches was given at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, a few days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which included the following passage: "Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn."  Gerson coined "the armies of compassion. His noteworthy phrases for Bush are said to include "Axis of Evil," a phrase adapted from "axis of hatred," itself suggested by fellow speechwriter David Frum but deemed too mild.

LOL. No wonder he doesn't want to play the ... blame game (some call it accountability). Such a pretty way with words, with no connection to reality. Words can be killers too, you know... you ought to own up to what you write.

In an article by Matthew Scully (one of Gerson's co-speechwriters) published in The Atlantic (September 2007) Gerson is criticized for seeking the limelight, taking the credit for other people's work and for creating a false image of himself.

"It was always like this, working with Mike. No good deed went unreported, and many things that never happened were reported as fact. For all of our chief speechwriter’s finer qualities, the firm adherence to factual narrative is not a strong point."

Luckily, we've got more skeptical news reporters this go-around, checking out the facts and not just mongering the fears men like Gerson are paid to hype.