{"id":20230,"date":"2010-08-23T08:12:29","date_gmt":"2010-08-23T12:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=20230"},"modified":"2010-08-23T08:12:29","modified_gmt":"2010-08-23T12:12:29","slug":"the-might-have-beens-of-twenty-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=20230","title":{"rendered":"The “might have beens” of twenty years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fouad Ajami writes in the pages of the Wall Street Journal a recounting of the events after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and his threatened attack on Saudi Arabia two decades ago in a piece entitled “Guns of August, 1990<\/a>” which serves as a warning to those who dally in the theories of limited warfare.<\/p>\n

A whole history\u2014speculative, the domain of judgment and preference and hindsight\u2014could be written about the “might have beens” of American forces taking that open road to Baghdad the first time around.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

COB6 and I were on that “open road to Baghdad” through April and May of 1991 while we provided a shield for retreating Shi’ites and i’m sure all of us knew that our return was inevitable – well, as it turned out it was our kids who had to clean up after us. <\/p>\n

The lessons of that conflict have been lost on our policy makers. The hardest lesson, of course is that an enemy has to be beaten to death before victory can be declared. The same lesson we should have learned the first time in World War I – hell, as far back as the Napoleonic Wars.<\/p>\n

And now, we’ve forgotten that lesson again. In a rush to declare false victories, we’re making plans to pull out of Afghanistan next year, no matter what the situation there will be next summer. As violence increases in Iraq, we pat ourselves on the back for simply withdrawing “combat” forces. <\/p>\n

We left Afghanistan to their own devices in 1988 when the Soviets withdrew their forces and they became a terror kingdom. <\/p>\n

We left the South Vietnamese flapping in the wind despite Congress’ promises to the contrary and they suffered three decades of torture in re-education camps and floating in the China Sea in make-shift rafts. <\/p>\n

If we don’t continue our commitment to the region, we’ll find ourselves deploying our grandchildren. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fouad Ajami writes in the pages of the Wall Street Journal a recounting of the events … The “might have beens” of twenty years ago<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}