DEMOCRATS AND THE GHOSTS OF WARTIMES PAST

To complement their limited appreciation of economic principles, the Democrats also don't seem to know--or understand--history. A Corner reader appropriately notes that Webb was apparently unaware that he was suggesting we deal with the situation in Iraq by threatening the use of nuclear weapons:

Subject: Hey, Webb implies we should use nukes to win in Iraq

Sir,

Believe it or not, that's what he implied
Here's what Jim Webb said in the Democrat's response to the State of the Union Address:

As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. "When comes the end?" asked the general who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War II. And as soon as he became president, he brought the Korean War to an end.

These presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world. Tonight we are calling on this president to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way.

Just how did Dwight Eisenhower bring the Korean War to an end? Col. Tom Snodgrass, writing at American Thinker, explains:

This disparity of total vs. limited war objectives first became apparent as the Korean War dragged on and President Truman's administration could find no way to conclude the conflict. When President Eisenhower assumed the presidency from Truman in 1953, he quickly recognized the logical solution to the strategic conundrum was shifting U.S. war-fighting from limited to total war means, and he thereby ended the Korean War by communicating to the communists his intention of escalating with nuclear weapons if the communists persisted in their total war objectives. Civilian limited war advocates should have seen the glaring fallacy of their theory at this point, but they didn't. For his part, Eisenhower did not believe that limited war could remain limited.
As a warrior who knew war first-hand, President Eisenhower opted for a historically-based defense doctrine of "Massive Retaliation," which promised an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the event of aggression. Throughout the better part of the 1950's, Eisenhower's national security strategy insured that there was no military superpower confrontation. Because Eisenhower had doubts that a "limited war" would remain such, his over-all national security policy, called the "New Look," was based on the unstoppable nuclear striking power of Strategic Air Command. During this period of relative peace, Democrat political opponents and social-science civilian theorists were in constant chorus that the New Look Massive Retaliation was simply too risky for the country and the world.

(My bold) If we are to take Webb at his word, and we assume he actually knows how Eisenhower ended the war, then it appears we should use the nuclear option to end the war in Iraq. A previous Democrat president used the nuclear option to end World War 2. Nice to know the Democrats have a simple solution to the war. A lot of Americans, frustrated at the PC way this war has been fought, would agree.

The fact is that if we stop the PC BS and let our military forces use, you know...force ...against the insurgents, terrorists, and dead-enders who are the ones indiscriminately blowing up people in Iraq; instead of insisting that soldiers be like the type of emasculated overly-sensitive metrosexual yahoos that dominate the ranks of the left, we might actually succeed in quelling the tide of violence.

Only in the fevered brains of someone like a John Kerry, trapped in vietnamized amber and resurrecting the ghost of himself by repeating the same bogus and insulting analogy he made then (probably because he can't think of a new or original one), could possibly imagine that a war is fought without mistakes, casualties, deaths, or even bad language directed against the enemy.

One wonders what delusion Webb was under when he used the resurrected Dwight Eisenhower during the Dems response to the SOTU? Eisenhower was a real soldier in the days before political correctness was decreed mandatory and I imagine that he was not one to beat around the bush in his language (unlike Ace, who is wearing his PC tinfoil helmet and suggests tongue-in-cheek to the troops, "Stop using words that hurt and start using words that heal.")

Remember that before he was President, Eisenhower was a general in a war in which up to 56 million people died (counting both military and civilian). A war, in fact, that might have gone on for many extra years if the difficult decision to use nuclear weapons had not been made by a Democrat President of the United States.

I'm sure the irony of this was lost on Webb and his fellow Democrat defeatists as they argued to boldly accept defeat in Iraq, while calling on the ghosts of wartimes past.