Monday, March 29, 2004

This is vintage Clinton….

He approached Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said, according to the book, "It would scare the (expletive) out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters in to the middle of their camp. It would get us an enormous deterrence and show those guys we're not afraid."

The Pentagon feared a debacle similar to April 1980 when President Carter dispatched helicopters to Iran in hopes of rescuing 52 American hostages. The result was the incineration of two helicopters and the deaths of eight servicemen.

The authors suspect that Pentagon's reservations about the Clinton plan ran deeper. The Pentagon, they point out, had an uneasy relationship with Clinton virtually from Day 1, when the White House began pushing to end discrimination against homosexuals by the military.

They quoted a senior political appointee at the Pentagon as saying that Defense was "particularly unwilling to go out on a limb for Clinton."

Also, the authors say, Thomas Pickering, No. 3 at the State Department under Clinton, worried that someone at Defense would put out the story that the Clinton plan would "hazard the lives of young Americans in a wild goose chase. The Pentagon has a great capacity to let things leak to keep from doing them."

Clinton's "black ninja" plan never got off the ground.



See the entire article here
This fits into my theory of Clinton as an adolescent that never grew up. Too cowardly to serve in the military, unable to stay loyal to his shrewish wife and playing with the military like toy soldiers in a sandbox. Odd that a man who was dismissive of the military as President and outright hostile to them before he took office never engendered the loyalty from the troops.

Fight terrorists with ninjas. Brilliant! Maybe we can sic King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on Osama bin Laden!

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