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Happy New Year! A Failure of American Competency There’s a reason why political power was taken from the Republicans and given to the Democrat Party. Voters in the political center had concluded that the Iraq invasion has been a failure. They may be wrong, but the Middle East has a long history of befuddling the best efforts to reform it. At the heart of the election was the conclusion that, given America’s famed managerial and military skills, what had occurred in Iraq was a failure of competency at the highest levels of government. The blame cannot be placed on our soldiers, airmen, and Marines. It was not a failure of the valor of our fighting forces.
Following 9/11, having rapidly rid Afghanistan of the Taliban by employing the forces of local warlords, combined with U.S. air power, the White House became fixated on ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein without the necessary planning for the aftermath of that goal. Books such as "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks and "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward reveal a lack of competency at the highest levels of government that is appalling.
Those that did participate, Spain and England, felt the pain of terror, the former pulling out swiftly, the latter planning to reduce its participation. The Netherlands and Denmark got a taste of Muslim outrage and France is locked into a civil war with its Muslim population. Germany, ever reluctant to commit forces anywhere, has provided only symbolic participation. The failure was made even more manifest in the wake of Hurricane Katrina when nothing could hide the astonishing incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with state and local authorities to respond effectively. The citizens of New Orleans who played their own role in the disaster recently re-elected William Jefferson, a Congressman under investigation for bribery. Their failure to maintain and improve the levees played a significant role in the disaster. It did not go unnoticed that FEMA had been one of many federal agencies folded into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. The Immigration and Naturalization agency, too, had been added to the DHS organizational chart. Neither before nor since 9-11, have they received sufficient funding to stop America’s potential enemies at the borders. Plans to strengthen our borders remain in limbo. At issue is competency in a government Americans have been taught to believe was ready to take care of every problem and every need they had. Since the days of Barry Goldwater, conservatives have striven to advance their fundamental belief in a smaller federal government, more reliance on the role of the States, and fiscal responsibility. After George W. Bush took the reins of government, the very opposite of the success initiated during the Reagan years of the 1980’s and the subsequent 1994 transfer of power to a Republican Congress, occurred. Conservatives looked on in dismay and slowly began to raise their voices in protest. Centrist voters heard them and Bush is now a very lame duck President.
Billions of U.S. dollars have been expended on the Iraq war and its aftermath. We are closing in on more than 3,000 casualties, in addition to thousands of wounded and maimed service men and women. Unheeded in the initial and subsequent calculations was the ancient and endemic corruption that has existed for centuries throughout the Middle East. It has proven as powerful as bombs and bullets. A retreat from Iraq, however, will further embolden the forces of radical Islam that have been on the march since the late 1970s. They want to control the whole of the Middle East and then the world beyond. This would be their goal whether the U.S. had invaded Iraq or not. Congress must decide whether America needs a larger military and on that decision hinges much of the future at home and abroad. It is an obligation that America must assume because few other nations can or will. The military we have is a superb fighting machine, but as Gen. John Abizaid recently told an audience at Harvard, "This is not an Army that was built to sustain a long war." If the neocons knew that, they ignored it.
Our population of 300 million people has 60 million between the ages of 18 and 35, more than enough to expand the current force if Congress would authorize the expansion to 70 brigades from our current 52. Constantly drawing down on Guard and Reserve units is a bad idea. War is always a serious enterprise. Americans need to take it more seriously. A Wish List of Things America Must Do We need a Congress that will impose real limits on spending and get out of the way so that the great engines of our national economy can function without endless regulation and litigation. America needs to take the steps necessary to access and extract the vast oil and natural gas reserves that exist off of our east and west coasts and in places like Alaska’s ANWR. We need to build more coal-fired (we have centuries-worth of available coal reserves) and nuclear plants to meet our expanding need for more electricity. We desperately need more refining capacity and the famed electrical "grid" needs major upgrading. We need to rid ourselves of the pusillanimous "political correctness" that does not permit us to identify and root out the enemies in our midst. We need to shut our southern border for at least a decade until we can either assimilate the millions of illegal aliens among us or require their return to home nations. English must be our national language and competency a requirement of citizenship. Proof of citizenship should be required for everything from an auto license, voting, and the use of our schools and medical facilities. Another amnesty is the last thing we need. It undermines our immigration laws and invites a flood of more illegal aliens. We need to vastly increase our counterintelligence capabilities to root out the cells of Muslim radicals waiting for the call to wreak havoc on our infrastructure and our fellow Americans. We need to put an end to any discussion or activities aimed at creating a North American Union. We need to withdraw our membership from the United Nations so that utterly corrupt institution can be left to implode in order to create an international union of democratic nations. Mostly, however, America has to regain a sense of our greatest virtue, our competence and ability to take on big challenges and succeed. Earlier generations were able and willing to do it. Why can’t we? Would you like to be able to post my weekly commentaries on your website or blog? Just write to me at acaruba@aol.com. You can purchase our new book, "Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy", from this website or online book outlets. Thank You!
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It’s a remake of John F. Kennedy’s "best and the brightest" advisors who never understood the enemy they took on in Vietnam and repeated by Bush’s neocons who probably had even less insight to those in the Middle East. They blithely expected other nations to unite in "a war on terror." Like the 1930s, however, appeasement was and is the order of the day.