Is Obama Creating Another Cartoon?

Many a true word is spoken in jest

"Paul Conrad, mostly a liberal Democrat, was not partial to political parties as he also wentPresident Johnson says to V.P. Humphrey about Vietnam bombings, “We’re gonna’ make history, Hubert!” after the Democrats too. In the 1960s, he lampooned Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson and became quite critical of Johnson. Conrad believed Johnson’s policies during the Vietnam War were despicable, drawing one 1964 cartoon showing Congress supplying the president with a “blank check” to wage war on Vietnam. “I really detested Lyndon Johnson,” Conrad said.  “For the Vietnam thing, that’s the one you could really get your teeth into. That was wrong, man, from the word go.”

Another of Conrad’s LBJ cartoons from 1968, shown above right, came at the time Johnson was bombing North Vietnam. It has Slim Pickens riding the A-Bomb!Johnson with vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, riding a bomb similar to a scene from the 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, in which the actor Slim Pickens rides a bomb in similar fashion. The caption reads: “We’re gonna’ make history, Hubert!”

I do remember the Presidential war of Washington, DC politics well in 1968. I was a twenty-two year old college student who had friends demonstrating there while the Chicago 7 were doing their incendiary, fiery violence at the National Democratic Convention Center that hot summer. The Vietnam Era instantly all went away five years later as the Vietnam War, like a supernova exploded and imploded into a black hole, it just disappeared.

As that era ended in a whimper, I remember Paul Conrad, a very liberal, left-wing editorial cartoonist in the Los Angeles Times newspaper, who did a political cartoon in the 1973 Vietnam Treaty peace accords edition. It pictured a military graveyard with a sea of white crosses awash over all the rolling hills. Two crosses in the foreground had helmets atop and below them a ticker tape is feverishly typing this: "Paris Peace Talks: Henry Kissinger now says that we should have never been in that war!". Then below that, the one helmet says to the other, "And now he tells us!" That said it all for me on how real war is, it's 100% political without regard to any combat participants and will always be that way--the Vietnam war killed more than 58,000 U.S. servicemen and disabled thousands by its end.

As of June, 2014 politicos like office holders, candidates, newsmen, pundits and hacks are now urging for a dramatic reduction in U.S. military combat troops since the total meltdown of Obama foreign policies of inactions leave no real options open. "My suggestion based upon the first rule of foreign policy is that if your enemies are killing each other, don’t step in to stop them. These radical insurgents, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Levant (ISIS), have blended into the Sunni, Shia and Kurd populations. The latest Iraq war is between Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite government and pro-Al Qaeda Sunni rebels. It boils down to Iran vs. Al Qaeda, radical Shiites versus radical Sunnis. 

ISIS the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) insurgent shooting people dead.

"What we’ve seen in Syria, and now in Iraq, is the early phase of a 30-year civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, which will go from region to region, country to country, tribe to tribe. Fighters will become increasingly radical and brutal, and they will be fueled by Arab oil money. For them, it is a fight about religion, power, geography and resources... And it could well be a fight to the finish!

America has a choice:

• We can be caught in the middle of this generational war, propping up this side or that, sometimes switching sides. Or:

• We can figure out what our underlying strategic interests in the region are and find a way to achieve them that doesn’t involve U.S. forces or military assistance."

First, enough already!  Let all sides stop bickering and arguing but instead just agree it’s everybody’s fault about Iraq: Bush shouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Obama shouldn’t have gotten out. There is plenty of blame to go around for past mistakes, but we are where we are and the question now is, what do we do?

"An important but often forgotten test for American foreign policy decisions is what is in our country’s national interest. It’s not about what is best for Iraq or Afghanistan or anyone else. The question is what’s best for America. We have three sustaining vital strategic interests in the Middle East: oil, terrorists and Israel. We want their oil, we don’t want their terrorists and we want Israel to survive in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood."

"If the president fails to do so, he cannot hide behind the excuse that Iraq was Bush’s war, and losing it was Bush’s failure. If he fails to take the steps available to him to develop American energy resources, to protect Americans from terrorist attacks and to offer full support to our ally Israel, it will be on his watch, and on his head."