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Whistling Past the Graveyard in the Hindu Kush
“The difference between genius and stupidity,” says an African proverb, “is that genius has limits.”
I’m a country boy with limited imagination, so I thought the 1975 pictures of Vietnamese on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon fighting over seats on the last helicopters out, clinging to the skids while being kicked, was an all-time low point for my country’s reputation in the world. Those people clinging to the skids until kicked off were Vietnamese who threw in with us and — with good reason — -feared victor’s justice.
Donald John Trump found a lower place to take us when he removed U.S. protection for the Syrian Kurds after they did the bloody fighting to rid Syria of ISIS. The Turks did not even wait until the last U.S. troops were gone before rounding up the civilian Kurds. In my book, World War ISIS, I suggested that President Obama intended to reverse the “slow bleed” strategy that has worked against us so many times by letting the Islamist guerrillas do the bleeding instead of American GIs.
That was my rebuttal to the claim that Obama had no strategy. I claimed it would work if U.S. voters were patient enough (in the face of Republican drum beats) to allow it to work. Bloody battles engaged through proxies was not our history but it…
