There have been any number of movies portraying the American military as inept, bloodthirsty, bent on killing, incompetent, blundering, blithering idiots.
And frequently those adjectives are completely applicable to the civilian overlords of our military forces. To wit, from Bloomberg.com:
Twenty years ago, in a debate over the war in Bosnia, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a challenge to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Albright wanted the U.S. to confront an aggressive Serbia; Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant. Albright grew frustrated: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked. Powell later said that he thought Albright was going to give him an aneurysm.
An issue of the civilian federal government simply declaring that there will be faeries and unicorns issuing from the US military.
But the response from a US Army General, Martin Dempsey, who may actually possess an intact and full set of testicles? Read on:
Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.
As in: we did this before. As in: you Blithering Idiots may want to re-think doing this again.
BZ
P.S.
How to do it? Perhaps people could actually read Popular Mechanics.
Finally: NOT interfering in Syria is not inherent “Isolationism.” I portray it as simple common sense.
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense K.T. McFarland said:
“The cardinal rule in Washington is that if you have two enemies fighting each other, do not try to step in and stop them.”
