Dear Congressman Nugent

The same Congressman whose dweeb aide called me re: the USNA Golf shirts made in China, sent me his weekly update from Washington e-mail. He shouldn't have asked for a response, but he did.  I won't bore you with the bulk of it, which was simply beating up  POTUS for following up and honoring the Bush status of forces agreement to pull out of Iraq. what follows is my response.

Dear Congressman Nugent,

        At the end of your weekly sitrep/ Obama  bashing e-mail, you asked readers to drop you a line if they  agree or disagree.

     When I see anyone,  member of Congress or otherwise  analogize  the situation in the Middle East to any other world situation the US has ever faced, I cringe. You stated "...And in the end, the Obama Administration failed to secure an enduring security presence as previous administrations had done in Cuba, Italy, Germany, Japan and Korea. 

        One assumes by "Cuba" you are referring to the post Spanish American War era, where we initiated a war then, actually slacked off and allowed Spain to withdraw even though it was clear they could have been humiliated further. We then went in and set up a military government in a country which was powerless to actually resist our efforts and saw the USA as liberators.  Not like the Mid East!

        Or perhaps you are referring to our efforts in Europe post WWII, where the real question was  what, and how much would the Soviets do to oppose our reconstruction of two nations brought to their knees, and we were seen by both Germans and Italians as "the good guys?" Not like the Mid East!

        Or perhaps you meant Japan, bombed into the stone age, and brought to their knees where we still allowed them to retain their Emperor as long as he agreed that he was no longer a God, but the mouthpiece for US policy. Not Like the Mid-East!

        Or perhaps you mean South Korea, where we were seen as saviors and protectors against the North Koreans and Chinese. We had never been at war with South Korea, and your party initially resisted President Truman's actions there until the rabid anti-Communists of the Far Right saw the China connection and feared Chinese expansion after the Chinese Communist revolution. Not like the Mid East.

     You then said,  "After World War II, we kept bases and troops in Europe. Today, we still have roughly 29,000 troops on the Korean peninsula. Those places have remained peaceful through their rebuilding and up to the present day. So much so, that the United States is rightfully considering scaling back troop levels there."

        Of course we kept troops there, but not to fight a religiously motivated and driven  army of suicide bombing "martyrs" without a nation. And certainly not to counter any internal threat in any of those nations. We kept troops in Japan and Korea because of the specter of  newly "Red" China.   We keep them in Korea now because of the madman to the North.  In none of these cases, is the concern an internal, religiously driven enemy who fights guerilla style.

     If you were sincere instead of Obama bashing, why not use the example of  Viet Nam? Is that because we declared victory and withdrew, just as Bush did in Iraq?  Of course we really didn't gave a hoot what happened to the people of  Viet Nam, or we would have allowed the free elections called for by the  Geneva conference , Viet Nam would have been unified under Ho, and today, guess what? They'd probably still be a nominally communist nation (like China) and we'd still be trading with them as we are now. Of course there would be 2 million more Vietnamese alive and 58,000 plus more Americans alive.

        So what's my point? Simply put: There has never in our nation's  history been any other situation like the current Middle East mess, with the possible exception of the Philippine insurrection, where in a surprising parallel, the US toppled a government, and then refused to allow the "liberated" people to rule themselves. That one caused around 220,000 Filipino deaths, and can be laid at the feet of William McKinley.

        The combination of massive failure by the Bush administration to incorporate former senior Iraqi military and police into the rebuilding process (as originally recommended by the first Bush appointed administrator, but undermined by Rumsfeld and Cheney, who engineered his removal ) essentially guaranteed what exists today - a sectarian warfare in which both sides blame the other and the USA for their ills. Not President Obama's watch, not his fault, and even worse, no real world solution.

      There is no "wise old man" who knows what to do in such a situation, and frankly, there never will be as long as religious fanaticism  exists in the world, but to even attempt  a comparison with the situations you name above, demonstrates a  lack of understanding of geopolitics, history and  realpolitik (to borrow Dr. Kissinger's word) that is staggering, although not completely unexpected  in a member of Congress.  

        

              Michael Dorman  MMCM(SS) USN ret