Ed Morrissey over at HotAir has a great write-up on the new Wall Street Journal story about how President Obama plans to exert a great deal of “personal control” over Middle Eastern air strikes, so I won’t try to reprise his arguments. To briefly recap, here’s what the WSJ reported last night about Obama’s new strategy:
The U.S. military campaign against Islamist militants in Syria is being designed to allow President Barack Obama to exert a high degree of personal control, going so far as to require that the military obtain presidential signoff for strikes in Syrian territory, officials said.
Here’s where it gets spooky. Compare that paragraph to the following quote from the book “American Generalship: Character Is Everything: The Art of Command.” In it, the author recounts a passage from Gen. William Westmoreland’s memoirs about how political interference from a know-it-all president severely hampered the American campaign in Vietnam. The parallels are terrifying:
A controversial new war with no definition of victory, no clear exit strategy, and a naive president who thinks targets should be picked from the Oval Office? What could possibly go wrong?
