A new book explores how a week-long war–one barely covered in college history courses–explained the subsequent sixty years of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
A new book explores how a week-long war–one barely covered in college history courses–explained the subsequent sixty years of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
America 1st oughta do it.
What a surprise! Who woulda thunk it? Arabs lying and being duplicitous. A shocker, I tell you! And that dumb shit fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Ike was a fool. Don’t even get be started on all his screw-ups in WWII. I know the ETO very well, having studied it since I was a young teenager.
This article and book gets it wrong.
Here are just a smattering of his fvck-ups:
He kept that idiotic and cowardly fool Monty in command over and over as he fvcked up mission after mission (i.e.Caen, Market Garden, to name just two), allowed Bradley to hamstring Patton again and again and approve Operation Keelhaul which allowed Stalin to murder hundreds of thousand of good soldiers and civvies.
He screwed Patton to the wall post-war for Gerorgie just trying to keep the German citizens of his area from starving or freezing.
And BY FAR here is the biggest fvck-up:
He decided to kowtow to that butcher Stalin and invade France instead of going up from and ALREADY subdued Italy and cut Stalin off at the pass. That move would have kept him from subjugating half of Europe for over 50 years.
And that’s just scratching this surface.
Ike was a pencil-pusher, a bureaucrat and an adulterer who NEVER saw one minute of combat his entire life.
I sincerely hope he’s burning in hell as we speak. He should be. He has the blood of millions on his hands.COTA 61
That is an interesting opinion.. Might just explain why the Neo-Cons & Iran don’t want Trump & Putin to join forces against ISIS & terrorism. One of the very first targets will be IRAN….Putin dropping Iran would put them in a world of pain… GO Trump!
Some Neo-cons: SEN John McCain, Lindsey Graham. Fox: Krauthammer, Brett Hume
What is missing in this piece is the part that Canada took. Thanks to Pearson declining to take sides the UN adopted the Canadian envoy’s vision of a peacekeeper role in the theft by Nasser of the Canal. And the rest as they say is history, as we are the “peacekeeper’s” chained to the UN’s organ grinder.
we are stupid. is there anything more that needs to be said?
and hindsight is 20 20. of course it is. historical bullshit is even more accurate.
Fuel Filter
Are you suggesting the book has it wrong? I haven’t read the book but the article seems to suggest that Ike got conned. He drank the Kool-Aid so to speak. Is this not correct?
I get your comment re ETO but you seem to suggest the article and book got it wrong. No?
“He kept that idiotic and cowardly fool Monty in command over and over as he fvcked up mission after mission (i.e.Caen, Market Garden, to name just two)”
Ike was only the General selected by America… Monty was England’s choice to lead Commonwealth Troops. He put the Canadians/New Zealand/ Indian/ Pakistan Troops in the front line hot spots, keeping England’s best in reserve..Don’t blame America for the British Class System of Royal Command, Canadians had a right to fight under British Command.
In the real world mistakes are a normal function of leadership. The ability to identify & correct for those mistakes defines a measure of greatness…
Ike knew his limitations….
America is not done kissing Islams ass by a long shot. The rich oil tics have groomed Americas Families of Influence for generations now and are generous patrons and family friends they are reluctant to lose. I imagine it was pretty easy to fool a group totally ignorant to the ways of Islam.It still goes on.
“He put the Canadians/New Zealand/ Indian/ Pakistan Troops in the front line hot spots, keeping England’s best in reserve..”
Be hard to convince the Royal Marines who fought and died in Normandy alongside the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade of that.
Not just the Royal Marines nor forward/behind line operations. By that point in the war regular enlisted British forces had taken a hammering and very few were not by then either battle weary or hardened.
It wasn’t Pearson who called the peacekeeper thing despite what the Libs have been telling us
for over 1/2 a century. It was John Foster Dulles who TOLD Pearson to go that route to bail the US out of a sticky situation. ref. Try Conrad Black’s Flight Of The Eagle for one example.
I’ll have to look into that but if it’s accurate it just means that the Liberals have been lying to us since…..well before….well dammit they’ve always been lying to us. Thanks for the heads up.
Exactly.
Pearson got a Nobel prize for an idea that he had nothing to do with. A piece of Canadian fiction.
George Blackburn wrote a remarkable account of WW11 in a trilogy. He exposed the Hon Vincent Massey as a coward who trembled in the presence of Mussolini. The Canadian troops who were engaged in the Italian campaign hated Massey. They knew what he was.
Back home Massey was spun as a great diplomat and was later appointed Governor General. Another piece of Canadian fiction.
“…Don’t even get be started on all his screw-ups in WWII …”
Turns out you are a self-starter, as well as seemingly self-taught. You had a head-start on General Eisenhower, he didn’t start studying the ETO until he was a bit older. And to be fair to him, he must have been a bit busy trying to actually fight the war at the same time, and he didn’t know how it had turned out.
Ike was known as a skilled poker player and diplomat in high places starting as a junior Army officer.
Monty wasn’t brought in by Churchill to handle the desert war because he was a tactical genius, he was
sent to stitch things back together after a bunch of high ranking uncooperative squabbling “feudal lords”
who had been botching things up every time they were given the opportunity got ejected. It was unfair that
both the good and bad were dumped but it it gave “Churchill’s man” Monty a fresh clean go at putting “the
fear of the Lord” in those who were kept on and he did that with great success.
My point exactly. The claim that Montgomery “saved” British troops by keeping them in reserve at the expense of Canadians is utter crap.
Interesting article.
“The honest broker worldview,” Doran writes, “instilled in Western officials a perverse desire to shun friends and embrace enemies.”
Did you notice there is no mention of Pearson’s Nobel winning peace plan? The US had already set the stage by stabbing the French and British in the back. If the US hadn’t backed Nasser and forced the British to stand down there would have been no Pearson peace plan.
Sorry, I’m just trying to determine what you think is wrong with the article and the book. I’m not trying to defend Eisenhower, but your complaints about him are entirely related to decisions he made, right or wrong, during the Second World War. Please specify.
It’s certainly true that Eisenhower’s overreaction to the joint Israel-U.K.-France operation was driven in some significant measure by his pique at being excluded by his allies, who conducted their preparations in secret, with Israel playing the instigator with precursory military action (she claimed a casus belli in respect of fighting between her forces and those of Egypt in the lands to the east of the Canal, if memory serves) and with Britain and France essentially using that as a pretext to intervene militarily to protect the Canal zone from both sides. I think I’d be annoyed with my allies, too, if they pulled such a stunt by deliberately excluding me.
It’s also true, I think, that the American reaction to the debacle at Suez led to a great deal of anti-Americanism in Britain, which undoubtedly contributed to that country turning toward Europe, an uncomfortable arrangement since its inception that is just now being unwound.
The broader point, I thought, about Totten’s article was about the failure of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, including the senior officers of state, to have any inkling about what was going on at the time — a failure that has been perpetuated over over subsequent decades. That was absolutely true of the previous administration, which minimized the importance of Israel and got its clock cleaned by the players in the region.
Following Totten’s critique that America punishes its friends and rewards its enemies, I take encouragement from Trump’s focus on Israel and his outreach to Britain on a U.S.-U.K. FTA. Maybe some sanity will prevail after all.
How did MacArthur describe Ike? ‘Best clerk I ever had’! His ongoing support of Montgomery was political. When the shit hit the fan during the Bulge campaign who did Ike go to but Patton. Who had planning in place to deal with a German counterattack? Patton did, Montgomery did not.
How little times change. Canada sacrificed thousands under British command in WW I. Canada answered again in WW II. Again in Croatia. Not to be outdone Harper did the same thing in Libya. Reading the history prior to WW I was enough to make me want Canada out of NATO.
General Eisenhower’s job as Supreme Commander was political, and that is a normal part of generalship at the higher levels. General Marshall selected him for it because he was good for that, and Marshall wasn’t wrong.