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Jewish World Review March 25, 2011 / 19 Adar II, 5771 On-the-job training for the president By Wesley Pruden
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
There's nothing like someone saying "boo!" in the night to scatter a coalition of the unhappy, the unmanageable and the unwilling. Nobody has to be afraid of the Americans now. This is the change Barack Obama promised and delivered.
Muammar Gadaffi is sitting pretty, or at least sitting not-so-bad, only a week after the beginning and end of whatever it is that the French and the British cooked up and dragged in the reluctant Americans to do the dishes. Gadaffi is the sleeping dwarf, to paraphrase Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor (if you believe history as written by Hollywood), and filled him with a terrible rage for revenge. The allies, such as they are, are bumping, grinding and stumbling over each other to get out of his way. At the end of the week they were trying to come up with a committee to turn everything over to.
The French insist that those bombs their bombers are dropping on Libya don't really constitute "an act of war," though you couldn't prove it by anybody on the ground. President Obama vows there won't be a single American boot on the ground in Libya, but you can't tell that to the Marines, specifically the 2,200 men of the 26thMarine Expeditionary Force aboard the USS Kearsage lying off Tripoli.
Some of those 4,400 boots (assuming no peg-leg Marines) have already been on the ground, to rescue a downed American pilot. None of the rescuers arrived in either Nikes or Adidas, only boots. The White House says the operation will be over in a matter of "days, not weeks." French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe says it will be a matter of "days or weeks but not months." Other American officials suggested that nobody knows.
There's more than confusion enough for everybody. When an interviewer from the Spanish-language network Univision asked President Obama what his exit strategy, if any, might be, the commander in chief replied with eloquent argle-bargle: "The exit strategy will be executed this week in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment." Shape the environment? Everyone with a can of paint is frantically going green, but who would have guessed that making war is the proper work of the Environmental Protection Agency?
But why not? Our War No. 3 strikes a portent of wars to come. We're soon to be assigning gays to the military, women to combat, all under an admiral chief who has never heard a shot fired in anger. Harry S. Truman was mocked without mercy when he followed the lead of the mighty warriors at the United Nations to call the Korean War "a police action." Now the preferred word for war among politically correct Pentagon bureaucrats is "a kinetic action." Euphemisms like this may be the sugar that makes the medicine go down, but bullets still tear through flesh and bombs still burst like rockets showering a red glare. "To those who celebrate war (or at least find it grimly necessary)," observes Timothy Noah in Slate, the Web magazine, "'kinetic' fails to evoke the manly virtues of strength, fierceness and bravery. Imagine Rudyard Kipling writing the lines, 'For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, and 'chuck 'im out, the brute!' / But it's Savior of 'is country' when the U.K. goes kinetic.'"
The president returned from his vacation, or whatever it was south of the border, full of beans and hope and said he had "absolutely no doubt" the responsibility and control of the kinetic action in Libya would be shifted to other members of the coalition within days. "When this transition takes place," he said, "it is not going to be our planes that are maintaining the no-fly zone. It is not going to be our ships that are necessarily enforcing the arms embargo. That's precisely what the other nations are going to do."
Nobody expects this commander in chief to channel Stonewall Jackson or George S. Patton, but carefully parsed sentiments like those will never inspire fighting men to challenge tyranny with their sacrifice of blood. Nevertheless, that's as close as Barack Obama dares get to firing up the troops. We can understand his reluctance to involve the nation in Libya; Gallup finds that only 47 percent of his countrymen support kinetic action in Libya, the lowest support of a war ever (excluding our own Civil War, and Gallup wasn't around then). But no president can be forgiven for taking the nation to war with only half his heart in the effort. Mr. Obama's only excuse is that a woman dragged him into it. Blaming Hillary Clinton, who led the charge onto the shores of Tripoli, isn't much of a battle cry, either.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
© 2007 Wesley Pruden |
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