Obama needs a direct line to JFK

                                                        
                                       Message: Stay out of Iraq!

After becoming president in 1961, John F. Kennedy was faced with a problem that was left by the previous president. The CIA and the military had devised a plan to eliminate Fidel Castro from power in Cuba, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a reputable career as a general in World War II, declined to take part in it. 

Unfortunately, Kennedy, who believed that eliminating Castro was a good idea, listened to the military leaders and the CIA  who said that it was figuratively a "slam dunk." Once these expatriates reached shore, the Cuban people would rise up with them and overthrow Castro, they told the young president.

This led to a debacle known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. While that was a horrible experience on every level, it taught JFK a lesson that would help him in his greatest foreign policy victory a short time later in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Right now, Obama is listening to the wrong people about Iraq. While some people may not realize it today, Obama has some credible foreign-policy accomplishments to date that historians will regard positively after he leaves office. First, he captured Osama bin Laden, which the previous administration could not do for seven years after refocusing on Saddam Hussein. If you have a war against a group but cannot capture its leader, you are considered a failure. Second, he ended the war in Iraq in 2011, and by the time he leaves office, he will have ended the war in Afghanistan. In essence, he will have ended two of America's longest wars.

In addition, Obama's approach to Vladimar Putin's invasion of Ukraine earlier this year has paid some dividends as the economic sanctions are crippling Russia.

However, Obama appears to be listening to the Joint Chiefs for advice here. The president should forget about reading Doris Kearn Goodwin's "Team of Rival" as he did when he entered office and instead listen to American historian Robert Dallek has said about JFK's handling of the military. 

Dallek is the author of a well-received biography of Kennedy, "An unfinished life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963." He also penned an article that Obama should read rather quickly. This is entitled "JFK and the Military," and it appeared in "The Atlantic" last September as part of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's coup in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Dallek explains that the military constantly wanted to use nuclear weapons to solve every foreign policy crisis in the 1950s and 60s. The Atlantic summarized Dallek's article this way: "President Kennedy faced a foe more relentless than (Russian Premiser Nikita) Khrushchev just across the Potomac: the bellicose Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for the deployment of nuclear weapons and kept pressing to invade Cuba. (Dallek) reveals that Kennedy's success in fending them off may have been his most consequential victory."

In essence, military people love wars because that is what they have been trained to fight. JFK's victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis came because he assumed his role as civilian Commander-in-Chief and did not follow the recommendation of the military to use nuclear weapons or a ground war against Castro in Cuba. He recognized that doing so may engulf the world in a nuclear conflagration, something that did not bother his Joint Chiefs. 

Dallek explains how JFK handled this: "The October 1962 missile crisis widened the divide between Kennedy and the military brass. The chiefs favored a full-scale, five-day air campaign against the Soviet missile sites and Castro’s air force, with an option to invade the island afterward if they thought necessary. The chiefs, responding to (Defense Secretary Robert) McNamara’s question about whether that might lead to nuclear war, doubted the likelihood of a Soviet nuclear response to any U.S. action. And conducting a surgical strike against the missile sites and nothing more, they advised, would leave Castro free to send his air force to Florida’s coastal cities—an unacceptable risk."

Kennedy did not listen to them and instead decided upon a blockade of the Soviet ships that were heading to Cuba with nuclear missiles on them, risking a battle but relying upon what was called "brinksmanship." The technique of staring down Soviet premier Kruschev worked, and he was forced out of office at short time later. 

The Soviet ships turned around and headed back to the Soviet Union, eventually bringing down Kruschev without resorting to nuclear weapons -- or any other weapons.

Obama is feeling significant pressure from some of his military advisers to return to Iraq. Remember, these are the men who advised going into Pakistan with Navy Seals and capturing, eventually killing, Osama bin Laden. He owes the military for pulling that off without any loss of American lives. 

However, he has to forget about Iraq. It is a Civil War waged against a leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who is a Shiite. Al Maliki was installed -- supposedly democratically -- with the agreement of the Bush administration. He has failed to unite the Sunnis and the Kurds in his government, leading to this crisis. Obama should use diplomacy, which is what he is trying to use right now, to force al-Maliki to resign. That will help the problem immensely. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/world/middleeast/maliki-iraq.html?hp&assetType=nyt_now> 

However, the U.S. has lost more than 4,400 of our treasure in a war that should not have been fought. The United States did not have "a casus belli" in the Iraq War, an event or action that is used to justify war. Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor any nuclear weapons (mushroom clouds), and Hussein had no tie to bin Laden, who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks against the U.S. In short, G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice -- among others --  had no justification to attack Iraq.

Pope John Paul II rebuked Bush for that war when the president visited him at the Vatican in 2004. The Pontiff called it an unjust war based on the criteria that have been established by philosophers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and developed over centuries.

Iraq is still Bush's war. Bush was the one who signed off on the U.S. leaving the country in 2011. If Obama intervenes, even with targeted air strikes, ones that are recommended by the military, it will suddenly become his war and will not end well (remember LBJ: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). 

All of the revisionist neoconservatives are out banging the drums for a renewed war. Why does anyone even listen to them?

An Iraq War vet, Jim Wright, hammers them in this article, "Sure, let's go back to Iraq. Oh, yes, let us do that. I'll dig out my uniform and strap on my pistol and gird up my sword and ride into battle yet again. Just so long as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and every single one of those powdered, Botoxed talking heads at Fox News are in the vanguard. 

"That's right, you cowards, put on a uniform and lead the charge this time. The Koch brothers and Mitt Romney can pay for it … "

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Obama should listen to him. Stay out of Iraq!