No more Vietnams!

Of course there are some parallels that bear paying attention to in Iraq. Like Vietnam we refuse to actually hold to account those who are supplying the "insurgents"/"vietcong....had we attacked the North with a vengence we might have ended the war much earlier in similar fashion to Korea.

A link to some very original thinking on the war. Snodgrass on War[.]

And now we find ourselves afraid to admit that until we subdue Iran the war in Iraq will continue. ^[1]

Absolutely! "No more Vietnams!"

That ancient battle cry of the left ought to instruct us today that clarity about the identity of our enemies and meting out horrendous punishment to them are the first order of business of any serious and formidable nation.

We're not sure that the U.S. qualifies as either when smiling matrons fawn over a rank amateur like Barack Obama and the likes of Hillary. Recall that it was she who was caught with her hand in a bribery scheme the cookie jar back when "she" was "trading" cattle futures.^[2]

Sen. Chris Dodd, also a presidential pretender contender is apparently making a national service corps a major plank in his platform. We lie awake at night over the absence of service opportunities for our youngsters.

The world worries, or at least some of the world worries about Ahmadinejad getting his finger on the nuclear trigger. Perhaps the world should worry about any of the aforementioned troika doing likewise. That, friends, is a truly scary thought.

To the extent that George Bush can't bring himself to speak the truth about Islam -- kind of like a Jim Carey movie in reverse -- and can't even bang a teaspoon on a no. 10 can by way of an alarm about Iran's decades-long sponsorship of terror and recent proclivity for dismembering American GIs, it appears this casting the evil eye on one's enemies deal is a lot harder than we make it out to be.

Perhaps if we got real about who our friends are in the Balkans^[3] we could accede to the Russians' wishes for Kosovo with all kinds of logic on our side, dump the cost of protecting the Kosovo Serbs from the Muslims protecting the Kosovo Muslims from the Serbs, and perhaps interest the Russians in operations against our mutual Muslim enemies in Chechnya and Iran.

If there's naivete in these proposals, how much more naïve are they than the foreign policy that doesn't name names, fights straw men, and does everything but secure the borders of the United States?

Notes
^[1] PierreLegrand commenting on "Watch and Wait:". By Wretchard, The Belmont Club, 7/4/07 (emphasis added).
^[2] Embarassing details here:

On October 11, 1978, the future First Lady, a neophyte investor with an annual income of $25,000, opened a commodity-futures account with a deposit of $1,000. Her first trade was the short sale of ten live-cattle contracts at a price of 57.55 cents a pound: a commitment to deliver in December of that year 400,000 pounds of cattle with a market value of $230,200. One day later, she bought the contracts back at a price of 56.10 cents, just 0.15 cent above the low of the day, pocketing $5,300 for a return of 530 per cent.

Mrs. Clinton continued to be a net winner at the game. By the time she closed her trading account ten months later, she had racked up $99,541 in profits, a spectacular 10,000 per cent return on her initial investment of $1,000. Either Mrs. Clinton was a better trader than the legendary George Soros, whose best-ever annual return in thirty years of trading was 122 per cent, or she was led by an invisible hand.

"Herd instincts: Hillary's investment profits - ethics of Hillary Clinton's cattle futures investments." By Caroline Baum and Victor Niederhoffer, National Review, 2/20/95, reproduced at Find Articles (emphasis added).
^[3] For a quick way to get up to speed on a region that has a bewildering history and unnecessarily consumed billions of American dollars see, "Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker." By Julia Gorin, The American Thinker, 7/4/07.