By Edwin Cooney
Dear Speaker Newt,
I recently read with interest and amazement your insistence
that there were five strategic failures in what you called the president’s
“pretty good” speech of Wednesday, September 10th, 2014 outlining
his new and more aggressive policy toward ISIL.
Although your concerns regarding the status of Qatar and
Yemen, and the possible length and depth of our involvement have some
substance, your tone and justification of them smacks more of partisan politics
than patriotic concern. If I possessed
your historical knowledge and respectable celebrity status, I’d have sought a
personal meeting with the president before going public with my concerns. What’s even more amazing, given your considerable
knowledge of history, governmental experience, and intellect, is the way you
have contorted the history of our successful struggle with Communism to quarrel
with President Obama on a matter of considerable international importance.
Unlike Communism, which was preached but never practiced as
a worker’s paradise on earth, ISIL isn’t doctrinaire; it’s just plain
gangsterism. Even worse, you legitimize
this international thuggary by suggesting that if they are successful, they
will have the capacity to establish a government or “Islamic Caliphate.” You know too much history not to realize that
there’s a huge difference between fighting and governing.
Hence, your first complaint that the president has failed to
“define a global strategy to defeat doctrinaire radical Islam” is
misleading. There’s nothing doctrinaire or
even genuinely Islamic about ISIL. After
all, Muslims are among ISIL’s tragic victims.
Your second complaint that President Obama has failed to set
“a positive goal” or strategy for combating radical Islam indicates significantly
less faith on your part than you had a decade ago as to who we are and what we
stand for and its importance throughout the world community. As far as I’m aware, you never doubted the
righteousness of our cause when President Bush (2001-2009) insisted we had a
moral obligation to obliterate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in
2002 and 2003.
Your third complaint, that the president offered no plan to
compel “our so-called allies” (as you sarcastically labeled them) to adapt
sufficiently draconian measures to combat radical Islam within their borders
ignores an historic reality with which you’re more than aware. Speaker Newt,
you know better than a lot of Americans that our NATO allies fostered Communist
parties within their borders throughout the entire cold war. Hence, despite the NKVD and the KGB,
Communism could not and did not prevail.
That American and western European citizens would join ISIL is
exceedingly disturbing, but it won’t even come close to being fatal to our national
survival.
Your fourth complaint that the president failed to
adequately prepare us for a long hard struggle is clearly your most valid point. No president, not even Mr. Reagan during Iran
Contra, has leveled with the American people concerning the consequences of his
actions especially when it comes to foreign affairs. (Actually, Mr. Speaker, Jimmy Carter may be
an exception to that observation!)
Perhaps John McCain was right during the 2008 campaign when he suggested
that it would be more realistic to keep boots on the ground in Iraq as we have
in South Korea since 1953.
As for your fifth and final complaint, that President Obama
failed to ask Congress for adequate resources to win this kind of war, that is
the sort of suggestion you, as a history professor, might receive from a
student in History 101. After all, sir,
Congress has yet to even declare war on ISIL. Therefore, as has been the case so many times
since World War II, we are fighting on foreign soil absent a declaration of war
just as President Reagan did in Granada, briefly in Libya, and poorly in
Lebanon. As for Congress having a
“constitutional obligation,” there’s nothing in the constitution that forces
Congress to declare war. Congress may
have a prerogative, but it clearly has no obligation to do anything.
Your reaction to the president’s speech is clearly more
partisan than it is either constructive or instructive. You complain on the one hand that the
president and his team clearly haven’t thought through the war and then you
suggest that having begun this war, justifiable as it is, Congress ought to be
investigating the Commander-In-Chief and his administration during “war time,”
a time of national emergency under any definition.
Mr. Speaker, you’ve probably forgotten more history than most
of us have ever learned. You’ve held an
office second in line to the presidency and several professorships. You could, if you so chose, be a
knowledgeable and instructive educational force that people across the
political spectrum would be compelled to listen to and learn from. However, you appear to believe that your
political views outrank in importance your professional knowledge. I suppose I’m jealous, but had I been second
in line to the presidency as you were between January 1995 and December 1998
and possessed as do you substantial academic credentials, I would hope to use
them as a teacher rather than as a partisan preacher.
As you know, just after Great Britain went to war against
Germany, Winston Churchill in a speech from the BBC wondered out loud about the
likely actions of Russia. He said they
were a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But, he said, perhaps there is a key and that
key is Russian national interest.
Sadly, Mr. Speaker, to this observer that Churchilian
observation about Soviet Russia appears also to be an apt observation about you!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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