By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, early, and I’ve got a cup of Chock Full o’ Nuts Premium Coffee (circa 1932); a small tub of Chobani Vanilla Yogurt; and a recent editorial by George Will.
Most know that George Will — a columnist who has been around since Pleistocene times — is a conservative who provides reliably thoughtful commentary.
Once, long ago, Will wrote a positive piece about (our own) Ernest “Fritz” Hollings who had thrown his hat into the presidential primaries in 1983. For a time Billy Keyserling ran Hollings’ campaign; and I still believe “Fritz” would have made a good President had he survived the primaries.
Last month Will wrote about Iran and why bombing that country was necessary. He says it was “a necessity for beginning to reestablish a precondition for a more peaceable world; the credibility of U.S. deterrence.”
A “precondition for a more peaceable world?”
“A nadir of post-1945 U.S. power — and its precondition, confidence — was the 1975 departure of the last helicopter from the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon. A second low point was reached when Barack Obama drew, in 2012, and then ignored a red line (concerning Syrian chemical weapons). A third was in 2021 when Joe Biden produced a chaotic exit from Afghanistan.”
“Unlike in Venezuela, mere decapitation — regime modification, is insufficient for Iran. The ayatollahs’ regime loathed not just modernity, which America exemplifies, but humanity, whose dignity is in imagining betterment through reason banishing superstition.”
As much as I admire Will, I take issue with his short history of our international blundering since World War II. I believe this history starts with Korea.
Our first post-World War II encounter was on the Korean Peninsula when we faced off against the Chinese. Nobody wanted this war — few even knew where Korea was located and, at first, it was fought by National Guard units who were outnumbered, almost “obliterated” at Pusan, and ended with a ceasefire — negotiated in part by Gen. Mark Clark.
But that unhappy ceasefire paved the way for the remarkable, modern-day rebirth of South Korea that manufactures automobiles, oil tankers and serves as an example of what free markets can do when given room to grow.
Let’s now consider Vietnam and a combat experience that cost 50,000 American lives including 10 classmates from my college. Despite the humiliating helicopter evacuation mentioned by Will, we were smart enough (20 years later) to make amends with these folks.
That rapprochement fostered a booming economy and a Vietnamese population who (now) loath the Chinese as much as we do.
The final verdicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not yet obvious; but we did commit troops in each of those fights. That flesh and blood commitment sent a message to the world saying we were horrified with the autocratic leadership in those places, but also worried about women’s rights, endemic poverty and the survival of Israel. And yes, of course, the desperate airport evacuation of Kabul was reminiscent of our helicopter evacuation from Saigon.
But now, today, this Administration’s diplomacy is more or less organized around the Tomahawk ship-to-shore missile; the F-35 all-purpose fighter-bomber; and special forces troops inserted to kill the leadership. This “diplomacy” avoids any long term commitment of troops; or follow-up effort to deliver humanitarian relief; or rebuilding what we have broken.
The most obvious example of this strategy would be Nigeria — a huge country with three competing tribes that are historically uneasy with each other — where we fired 12 Tomahawks into Sokoto Province in hopes of taking out a group of pro-Muslim bandits.
That’s it.
Our “solution” in Venezuela was to kidnap their President, and his wife, and do an oil deal with the surviving pro-Maduro autocracy.
Done.
It is not clear what the “final solution” in Iran will look like. Will says that the restoration of Iran will be ugly — there will be blood — but he says we can’t deliver “constitutional government in a box” with “boots on the ground” like Japan. Apparently Will doesn’t believe Colin Powell’s oft-quoted dictum — “If you break it you own it.”
In 1902, we sent our Asiatic Fleet into China by way of the Yangtze River Patrol to protect American citizens and our commercial interests in China. If you want details about this diplomacy pull up the 1966 movie, “The Sand Pebbles” starring Steve McQueen.
What is now happening is a return to the “Gunboat Diplomacy” we saw on the Orinoco River in Venezuela in 1898; the Yangtze River Patrol in China in 1902; and the attack on Veracruz in 1914.
“Back to the Future?”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.