Another Vietnam

I seldom found myself agreeing with Ted Kennedy while he was alive. In fact, I don't think I ever agreed with him on anything. But there is one thing that he said that I am now finding I at least partially agree with. Back in 2004, in typical liberal fashion, after voting for the invasion of Iraq, he turned on President Bush and opposed it. On April 16, he said, "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam."

Actually, it didn't become Bush's Vietnam. After the war effort stalled due to lack of sufficient troops, and after the 2006 Republican shellacking in the midterm elections, Bush authorized a troop surge that effectively destroyed most all Al Qaeda resistance in Iraq and stabilized the country. In spite of the criticism he still receives, it turned into a great Bush success.

Then Obama got hold of it. He pulled our troops, which were helping keep the peace and training the Iraqi army, out before Iraq was ready, and shamelessly took credit for ending the war. But hardly had our troops returned home before Al Qaeda started moving back in, suicide bombings began shaking Baghdad again, and now ISIS controls a large part of the country.

In response Obama has called for limited air strikes against ISIS, and began redeploying troops as military advisors in Iraq. At first it was 375, then 400 more, eventually a deployment of over 1500, and today it was announced elements of the 82nd Airborne are being sent, bringing the total number of "boots on the ground," which Obama promised would never happen, to over 4,000. This is exactly how Lyndon Johnson ramped up the war in Southeast Asia, and then kept the American military from winning it by directing the war from the White House.

Ted Kennedy was right in one respect. Iraq is becoming another Vietnam. Only it's not George Bush's, it's Obama's.