I was watching a forum on C-SPAN about presidential campaign politics. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former New York governor Mario Cuomo each spoke at Cooper Union, followed by a question and answer session led by Tim Russert of Meet the Press.
I learned I've been giving Newt Gingrich WAY too much credit.
Don't get me wrong. I was never very impressed with Gingrich for his shenanigans while he was Speaker of the House. I remember when he shut the government down, which of course caused us in the military no end of difficulty, just so he could play political power games with a Democratic president.
Ironic, that last. When the Democrats in charge of Congress put strings on appropriations to require minimum standards for military training, down-time, safety equipment, and oh yeah, a strategy for ending a war that's killed over 3200 Americans, the Republicans whine about executive prerogatives and not supporting the troops. I don't remember them having a problem when a Republican House refused to pass any budget at all. And yes, there were Americans in harm's way back then too. But I digress...
Nope, never did much care for playing games with the military, just to score political points. And I lost even more respect for Gingrich when I found out he had been schleppin' around on his wife the whole time he was going after Bill Clinton for essentially the same thing.
But I always gave Gingrich credit for being an intelligent man, and assumed he had some depth of knowledge in military history.
Not any more.
During the Q&A at the Cooper Union session, Gingrich made me realize that he has no concept of even the most basic of strategic principles. Unfortunately, I can't find a transcript of what he said, and the C-SPAN video doesn't seem to work. But from what I remember, Gingrich said he didn't accept the argument that the military is too over-stretched to deal with Iran because the admiral in command of CENTCOM has two aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf to prove the Navy can do the job.
Excuse me, Mr. Speaker, but have you ever heard of any sailors consolidating an objective and occupying a piece of ground?
No one asked him that question, of course (and yes, I know a carrier group has marines on board, but not enough for this mission and it's not what he meant anyway). But Gingrich must have heard it in his own head, because he said, quickly and without prompting (as quoted by his own website), “I don’t want to invade Iran, I didn’t want to occupy Iraq. I want to use military force decisively, immediately … and as indirectly as possible.”
And there you have it. Just bomb Iran with no plan to back it up with any ground force. Can't these people learn anything? What does it take to make them understand that you cannot bomb people into submission? It didn't work in Iraq. It didn't work for Israel in Lebanon. Even in Kosovo, widely understood as the first successful air war, Milosevic didn't surrender until ground forces were threatened, and our military commander, General Clark, was smart enough to plan for enough NATO forces to occupy the region after he did. It's probably worth noting that his CinC and the NATO Secretary General were smart enough to give them to him. Once upon a time, I would have taken those smarts for granted, but they seem to be missing in our current administration.
Every second lieutenant knows that it takes boots on the ground to hold ground. People aren't intimidated by superior technology and overwhelming firepower. They just hunker down and wait it out. And they get mad.
Does anyone imagine for a minute that any amount of bombing would cause Americans to accept whatever some foreign power wanted to dish out to us?
There's also the possibility that Gingrich knows exactly what the limitations of air power are, but is trying to "talk tough" about Iran in an attempt to pander to the Republican base, perhaps in anticipation of a presidential run. But whatever the case, he showed me he's just another Republican chickenhawk, who would play war without having the slightest concept of what military force can and cannot accomplish, or who is willing to subordinate military reality to ideology and political expediency.
