Democrats Get Out the Word: We Do War Better

I saw how Henry Kissinger said that the Iraq War is unwinnable and yet he doesn't want us to pullout. Does this strike anyone as familiar? Like back around, say, 1973?

But then again, by that time, Nixon had slugged a three bagger, though for the other team. Vietnam was untenable, he had spread the conflict into Cambodia and thus helped set the stage for Pol Pot's emergence, and also lost Laos. The best Bush can do is a double (Afghanistan and Iraq) unless Iraq splits into three pieces (when he first heard about Sunni Muslims, he probably thought it had something to do with Woody Allen's wife).

Moreover, for all the nonsense about Democrats being weak on national security, when one looks at the facts the GOP doesn't come out so hot. Democrats won world wars one and two. We ended a genocidal war in the Balkans (over the strenuous objections of assholes like Bob Dole) and the liberals who won the Civil War are all now Democrats while those who lost it are all presently ensconced with the Republicans even if the parties were reversed at the time it ended. George H.W. "Scanner" Bush got us mired in Somalia and we basically went to war with Panama as a way to extradite Manuel Noriega (more irony: Boy George said that he "wasn't concerned with Osama Bin-Laden," who killed thousands of Americans on our own soil, but his daddy sure went after Noriega for a whole lot less, no?).

In addition, the Republicans only get an incomplete on the first Gulf War by leaving Saddam Hussein in power despite Scanner calling him another Hitler (which leads to the question of what would have happened if Scanner had been president during WWII and we got to Hitler's bunker first and not the Russians: "can't take out Hitler; would lead to a long costly occupation. Wouldn't be prudent"). My personal suspicion is that it allowed Hussein to lay infrastructure for a resistance in the aftermath of a new future attack (the labyrinth of underground tunnels, which the North Vietnamese would have thought luxurious by the standards of what they had to endure in their underground nests) and part of what we are seeing now is due to Scanner's inaction.

Eisenhower basically gave the North Koreans a mulligan because the American public was tiring of the war and then spent more than a billion dollars attempting to prop the French up in Vietnam despite the fact that the froggies have a recommended wine for a surrender in their military handbook. Eisenhower's mishandling of the diplomacy surrounding Vietnam then set in motion what became an American tragedy.

Nixon cut and run because he wanted to take the heat out of the American antiwar movement by getting out and therefore invalidating the need for a draft in an attempt to keep the GOP from eliciting an electoral bloodbath in the 1974 midterms (still didn't work).

Like Nixon and Kissinger did, Boy George and his cronies are trying to concoct some public relations bullshit, the 21st century answer to "peace with honor," which was actually peace at home and a Communist takeover in 1975.

Sorry, but Republicans just don't do war well. It's not that president Johnson was adept in handling Vietnam, but there was a hell of lot more at work diplomatically and geopolitically there than what Boy George had to deal with.

Oh, and MacArthur and Eisenhower being Republican generals? I'll acknowledge that. But the fact is that Roosevelt and Truman allowed them to run their wars (except for MacArthur's plan to nuke China) while Bush did not in a much less nettlesome geopolitcal environment. So Democrats, with the exception of Johnson, do war better. It can't be denied.