Be Like Ike

This is super-great. It's about Ike, and his response to warfare as President (he knows a little about wars, it turns out...): Trying to hold a country the size of Iraq in the middle of a civil war with 160,000 troops would have seemed to him absurd. If you need to use force, you should have enough of it to do the job quickly and completely. Then get the troops home and leave the rest to the politicians and diplomats. That was the American way of war, as Ike and Grant saw it. Ike was shrewd enough to avoid getting entangled in France's war in Indochina. "No one," he said, "could be more opposed to ever getting the United States involved in a hot war in that region than I am." As for the Middle East, Ike offered prescient words: the United States had no business transforming itself into "an occupying power in a seething Arab world," and if it ever did so, "I am sure we would regret it." We shouldn't be an occupying power in a seething Arab world? Who is this guy, some peace advocate? He's probably never even thought about war, death, or the destruction that those un-American evil-doers could wreak! Damn him, and his liberal, cut-and-run politics too, right? The most poignant part of the article that I saw was this: He came home and ended the Korean War in about six months with an armistice that is still in effect today. In short, he understood that if you can't win a war, the faster you get out of it the better. He answered criticism from the right wing of his own party by remarking simply, "The war is over, and I hope my son is going to come home soon." "I hope my son is going to come home soon." Ike's son was actually engaged in the fighting, not sitting at home, waxing poetic about the situation. He was put in real danger, putting his life where his mouth was, instead of simply pontificating flowery rhetoric. Fortunately for the current administration, this time it's only other people that need to worry about their children dying.