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I feel responsible

Last night I posted “The Corps was bored” as my comment on the president’s Afghanistan speech.

Now I hear that the hammer is coming down on cadets who were caught on film fading out during the soaring rhetoric. As someone who came so close to being a century man that I almost regret not achieving West Point’s highest award for non-conformity (that’s very tongue-in-cheek, for those who understandably have no idea what I’m talking about, and notwithstanding the fact that I view non-conformity as the new patriotism lately), I am sympathetic toward the cadets. If Obama did actually grant amnesty to the Corps, can we make it prospective instead of retroactive?

So to the extent my post “The Corps was bored” helped create a climate of cadet discipline, I am willing to fly to New York, squeeze into full dress over white, shine my brass, and take the hit.

In the event that my offer is not accepted, I want to humbly suggest one revision to the president’s speech; the addition of a paraphrase of General MacArthur, since I certainly heard nothing like it during the president’s Ike Hall speech:

“From the East I send you one single thought, one sole idea — written in red in every cave and on every dust-swept plain from Kabul to Tora Bora — There is no substitute for victory!”

There. I said it. My instinct is to win, good conservative arguments that it makes no sense to send precious soldiers into harms way with the knowledge that they are tasked to walk away in 18 months notwithstanding. Let us not give Bin Laden (or whoever took over for him) his “helicopter moment”. That’s more than a plea to keep an enemy from achieving satisfaction over his take on American resolve; it’s a plea to recognize that the enemy was exactly correct about how to beat the world’s greatest power with next to no resources but the will to do so.

And let’s not, dear Supe, punish the cadets who will be junior officers in half a year, for fading out while their CIC outlined his helicopter moment strategy to be completed in 18 months. If we can bring mass and overwhelming force and achieve decisive victory in the next year, great; I’m all for it, but if this surge is what it appears to be, and how it must have sounded to the cadets, Kabuki theater leading only to a Defeat Of Choice instead of a serious counter-insurgency operation with the full force of American might and the full faith of America’s leadership, then don’t let the dedicated students you have educated to spot strategic flaws be punished for not being electrified by what they heard the other night.

post by ArrMatey
USMA 1989
Root Hawg

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Posted by ArrMatey on December 2, 2009 9:34 pm

» Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Heroes, News, War On Terror, military, terrorism

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Comments

One Response to “I feel responsible”

  1. Cao on December 3rd, 2009 6:26 pm

    I think this whole thing is a sham…in order to build him a landslide victory in the next election. He dithers, he dithers, men die…they have a horrible impression of him…they hate him…their faces show it–then, suddenly, he pulls a big victory out of nowhere, everyone cheers.

    There is something very cold and calculating about all of this…particularly since it’s on the back of at least 400 dead soldiers.

    I couldn’t bear to watch that creep talking to the cadets at West Point…

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