On Friday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “The Record,” former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.) stated that the Biden administration has been “micromanaging at the political level” when it comes to combating the Houthis and this micromanaging, pinprick strategy is like the strategy that “cost us in Vietnam under the Johnson and Kennedy administration[s].”
Host Tom Basile asked, “Whenever I hear [about] a strike from the Houthis, I keep on thinking of Gulliver being pestered by these Lilliputians. Why aren’t we taking these people out and why aren’t the Israelis doing it or why aren’t we doing it in conjunction with them as they continue to sort of flex their muscles, now hitting land-based targets in Israel?”
Clark answered, “I agree with the frustration. First of all, it’s a very tough piece of ground. The Egyptians actually fought there in the 1960s and never had much success in north Yemen. It’s mountainous, it’s tough, it’s bigger than it looks from a map. But the real problem is that we didn’t give our military the mission to do that. As far as I can tell, what we did to the military is say, go out there, and if they try to attack ships, you can protect the ships, and, if you come back to Washington, we might approve a strike or two against them on ground.”
Clark continued that we should have “done a mission-type order to the United States Navy Command, 5th Fleet out there and said, we want you to take down this threat. You tell us what it takes, what are the costs, what are the risks, come back to us, and then we’ll make the decision. Instead, we’re micromanaging at the political level. And as long as I’ve been associated with national security, this is the most persistent failure of any White House. It cost us in Vietnam under the Johnson and Kennedy administration[s]. A lot of Harvard intellectuals thought they knew exactly how to handle the North Vietnamese, do an airstrike here or do an airstrike there, show them — give them a pinprick, and hope they’ll get the message. They never got the message. And there [are] only two ways to handle this kind of a conflict: You either have escalation dominance, in which you persuade your adversary that he’s going to lose big if he doesn’t quit now, or you go in with overwhelming or decisive force and physically eliminate the threat.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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