I realize that reading about Lieberman is about as appetizing as sharing a remote log cabin with Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell, but he said something yesterday during Petraeus's confirmation hearing that struck me. Lieberman suggested that Petraeus's appointment was a momentous event in the history of blah blah blah. And then he compared it to Matthew Ridgway's appointment to take over the crumbling situation in Korea in 1951.
Ooops.
I can see sort of where he was going. In this instance, Rumsfeld sort of fills the shoes of MacArthur, unless he's taking a dig at Casey, in which case "Why does Joe Lieberman hate our troops?" But let's assume that he's indicting Rumsfeld's remote and faulty leadership by comparing it to MacArthur's remote and faulty leadership in Korea.
Let's go further and say that MacArthur's mistake was to incite Chinese intervention by threatening a country with which we were not at war. This lead to the needless death of tens of thousands of Americans and one of the worst military disasters this country has ever seen.
So, to recap: Rumsfeld and his plan - that Lieberman supported for years - was a disaster on par with MacArthur in 1950-1. So it becomes necessary to insert a brilliant capable field commander (who used to be a paratrooper) in to stabilize the situation.
But Ridgway's challenge was to stabilize the 8th Army that was falling apart. He was everywhere those first few months. Visiting forward company HQs within rifle range of the front lines. Forcing unit commanders to get out of their trucks and run patrols. Reinstilling morale that was badly shaken by Chosin and other disasters.
Does any of this sound like the problem in Iraq? Does anyone think that the American military is the problem? Or is it the impossible political goals that are necessary to solve this problem?
And look what Ridgway made his strategy: stalemate. Force a stalemate and negotiate an extraction. Oh, and we're still there 56 years later and it's possibly an even more perilous situation than Iraq in the long term.
So, Joe's invocation of Matthew Ridgway (one of America's finest field commanders and military thinkers) is intended to prepare us for 56 years of patrolling DMZs in Iraq?
But the reason why I'm such a big Matthew Ridgway fan goes beyond what he did in Korea. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower sent Ridgway to Vietnam to determine what America should do. Ridgway's famous report said that you cannot win a counterinsurgency warfare if your side has no popular support. Ridgway predicted that American could spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives and never achieve victory in Vietnam.
Eisenhower, to his great credit, listened. LBJ did not.
Is this what the Last Honest Man wanted us to think about?