or maybe he thought Clinton was still President!

or maybe he thought Clinton was still President!

Or he thought all U.S. presidents were Bill Clinton.

We turned our tails and fled in Beirut. We turned our tails and fled in Somalia. We failed to finish the job in Iraq. We failed to have a significant response to the USS Cole and the first WTC attack. This pusillanimous behavior occured under Presidents of both parties. What was he supposed to think?

That he could get away with minor pinpricks abroad.

After watching Arafat gain frequent traveler status in the Lincoln bedroom, Osama probably thought nothing would follow, except possibly an invitation.

"...and the world reacted with utmost fury".

I defy the author to defend this statement.

ratbert,

He didn't say at whom 'the world' reacted.

oj,

Killing 300 Marines in Beirut was not a minor pinprick. The dragging of dead Marines through the streets of Mogadishu was not a minor pinprick. The murder of 37 aboard the USS Cole was not a minor pinprick.

I think Jim has it about right.

The attack on the WTC was not abroad. NYC may seem like a foreign country to you, but it is most emphatically part of America.

Bart:

Sure they were pinpricks--no one cares about military deaths abroad.

oj,

That's disgusting and nonsensical at the same time.

What did we do about them? It's why we have a volunteer military, so we don't have to care about casualties.

When someone says, "Where he went wrong...," is that an assumption that he could have gone right?

I don't care what people say, when the free stand and fight, they win. They will always win. Unfortunately, the free also seem to need strong leadership to remind them of that truth.

That's disgusting and nonsensical at the same time.

I completely agree.

And your assertion as to why our armed forces are all volunteer piles ignorance on top.

Jeff and Bart: of course it is disgusting and nonsensical, but OJ is describing very well the average person's thinking about the military.

I was talking with a wife of a Canadian soldier, and the joke was that the Canadian army had only enough money for one bullet for each soldier during "peacekeeping" missions. It was to be used on himself in case he got caught.

Maybe in Canada that's the way people think, but in countries that actually have a military with some tradition of excellence and a force projection capacity greater than that of a suburban Girl Scout troop, people do care about the soldiers. My goodness, even in France they worry about their military men.

What OJ is at best discussing is the opinion of some civilian authorities like, most famously, Madeleine Albright. It is an attitude that belongs back on the scrap heap with Field Marshall Haig and the feudal aristocracy, not in the modern citizen volunteer force.

Since Vietnam, when the political classes objected to sending their own kids, we've switched to a volunteer force so that we can sustain their deaths with no political consequences. It's worked.

Guys:

Like it or not, OJ has a valid point. Look how "mild" our response has been to 9/11. Would that we would have killed more than 100,000 Islamicists by now.

And who can doubt that the responses after all the preceding events were in line with the herd thinking of the day? Sure, lots of people wanted more than Bill Clinton's confused ramblings about justice, but evidently not enough.

The hissing directed towards Rumsfeld is more of the same.

However, the folly of appeasement has been exposed (again), and the chatterers are not running the show. They may hate the military, but they can't do so too openly, or they will suffer like Kerry, Max Cleland, Daschle, and the rest.

OJ,

That is a misstatement although you are close to the mark. The conscripted military has always been a problem in a free society. There are rare cases when the reasons for war are clear-cut, existential ones like WWII, or the Civil War. In most cases, the argument is more nuanced and there is significant room for good-faith disagreement, Gulf War II is an excellent example of this, and certainly any 'humanitarian' intervention is.

The volunteer military gives our nation greater flexibility to go into these ambiguous situations. It is difficult to grab people off the street and send them to some far off weird place for questionable purposes, it is quite another to say that if you sign up with us for X amount of time and a certain package of benefits we have the right to ship you into battle as we see fit. Every enlistee knows what he is getting himself into, what risks he runs, and has chosen to accept the risk in exchange for the remuneration he receives. In a conscript army, there is no such choice being made, and it cannot be said that the soldiers being put in harm's way consented in any possible manner to what was happening to them.

There are relatively few people from the political class in the military, but there are exceptions. However, the attitude that you describe is far less common than you suppose, and if it comes out certainly does disgust ordinary Americans.

Bart:

Yes, we often disgust ourselves when we discern the truth.

... we've switched to a volunteer force so that we can sustain their deaths with no political consequences.

is not related to

so we don't have to care about casualties.

even if the former is granted, which is far from certain.

We lost roughly 50,000 in Vietnam over about 10 years. Volunteer force or no, had we lost 7,500 servicemembers by now, there most assuredly would have been political consequences.

The former assertion is worthy of debate. The latter is just disgusting.

There are none.