Nader on O’Reilly Factor
I caught Ralph Nader on the O’Reilly Factor. It wasn’t a bad show, and Nader had many good points – especially about the corporate sponsorship of the “coronation” of Kerry. However, since I wrote about feasibility yesterday, something that he said reminded me of the topic.
O’Reilly asked what Nader would do differently in the terror fight. Nader said that we were taking the wrong approach but O’Reilly wouldn’t buy it. “Are you telling me that you think Osama would be afraid of you?” Bill said.
Nader then made the error of going into specifics. He said that we should use the right of imminent preemption to go into a country with special forces and grab the terrorists. Bill let him off the hook, mercifully, at that point – but in my mind the damage was done.
I’ve checked the Net for a transcript of Nader’s exact phrase, but I can’t find one. The essence of his statement was that instead of invading Afghanistan, we should have left the Taliban in power and gone after Osama with special forces.
Was this a feasible option in Oct 2001? No – for numerous reasons. Special Forces don’t have the same leeway or enjoy the same freedom of movement as a SWAT team.
First off they have to get to the country – not an easy task in landlocked Afghanistan surrounded by regimes that were not all that friendly to the USA. Next, any type of SF operation of that scale would have necessitated a tremendous back up force of run-of-the-mill forces. If we didn’t provide those, the SF mission would have little chance of succeeding. However if we did add those, the result would have been a war with the Taliban – just without the numbers we would have needed to insure their defeat.
In the end, we did the only thing that was feasible: we sent in a large force, took out the government, replaced it with a friendly one, and maintain a large support force that supports the Special Forces as they go about their task of hunting down Bin Laden and Friends.
Nader is not a tactician. Worse, he’s not even a strategist. By his logic, I could beat his ass at Risk or Axis & Allies and it wouldn’t even be any fun. I can’t imagine him as actually leading this country. Or wait, yes I can….
