War against ISIL smacks of 'Nam

Local columnist

link Rube Render

When President Obama tells the American public that ISIL is on the defensive and will be destroyed, ISIL isn’t getting the word. It has recently captured the town of al-Baghadai in Anbar Province, Iraq.

The al-Asad Air Base is just a few miles from al-Baghadai and happens to be a place where some 300 American Marines are training and advising Iraqi forces. I can’t possibly be the only person alive today who sees the similarities between what is going on now and what happened in Vietnam.

U.S. Marine advisors began operations in South Vietnam during 1962. By the end of 1965, 41,000 Marines were in country. The public is always assured that advisors will not be involved in combat operations, but will only be used to train indigenous troops. By the way, U.S. troops may be involved in defensive actions. Sooner or later we will begin to take casualties.

I see the same kind of trickling in troops, several hundred here and several hundred there until the number of boots on the ground will get to be too large to ignore. I hear the same kind of rhetoric coming from the State Department and other experts who say, “We can’t win this militarily,” or “We can’t kill our way out of this.” I recognize the same need to blame poverty, or lack of opportunity or lack of education as the root causes of the conflict.

We spent billions of dollars fighting the war on poverty in this country and we still have poverty. Even with the expenditure of a trillion dollars in stimulus funding we only managed to create or save a small fraction of the jobs needed to rekindle our economy. If we can’t do it here, where we have all the resources and talent, how can we get it done in the Middle East where none of these things exist?

The final blow came when I heard that we needed to win the hearts and minds of the terrorists.

Until the day I retired from active duty, there was a sign that hung in every unit I was assigned to that said, “In the battle for the hearts and minds of the enemy, once we have them by the … , their hearts and minds will follow.”

The White House, and its equally proficient State Department, would do well to recall this hard learned truth and have some of those signs reprinted.

Rube Render is the Curry County Republican chairman. Contact him at:

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