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A critical review of Representative Ike Skelton’s Major Policy  | | Representative Ike Skelton |
Before I begin my critique of Ike Skelton’s address, I think I should inform the reader of a certain amount of animus I hold toward the speaker. After being informed of this, you may find my admitted hostility toward the guest of honor at Tuesdays assembly to be sufficient grounds for dismissing my account out of hand.
A little under a year ago, I and an number of residents of Ike’s Congressional District decided to contact our congressman to determine his position on the administration’s proposed preemptive nuclear strike on Iran. After doing a fairly extensive search of Representative Skelton’s statements and his website we decided to request a clarification of his position on the matter. Long story short, we ended up being completely stonewalled by our representative who refused to respond in any appropriate way to our concerns. We wasted a great deal of time, paper and pixels on our attempt to communicate with a completely unresponsive politician and I remain resentful to this day that he put us through such a fool’s mission. I must say that I was deeply disappointed by Representative Skelton’s speech. It was purported to be a major policy address even alluded to in terms of the Iron Curtain speech delivered by Winston Churchill at that same location 61 years ago. I was hard pressed to find anything of real substance, anything positive or anything new in it. I took copious notes as he spoke and I listened carefully for some definitive conclusion, some concrete statement that might indicate what he might call a “strategic vision” - to no avail. Much to my dismay, all he seemed to want to implement in any concrete way was a drastic increase in the size and cost of our standing military forces around the world. Trying to follow the speech to any other sort of lesson or conclusion was a little like waiting for a fly to light in order to swat it. He flitted tantalizingly from point to point seeming just on the verge of articulating something profound that one might get ones teeth into only to fly off to another point. Unfortunately no one is going to believe my conclusions as everyone present, including the press seemed to praise the speech as worthy of a Winston Churchill. Unfortunately this leaves me with the arduous task of dissecting the broad strokes of the speech in order to validate my criticisms. Warning: some of this may be offensive to some loyal Democrats and other sensitive readers. Ike spent a fair amount of time at the beginning of the speech lamenting the extent to which the future is ultimately unknowable. “Only madmen and oracles” can pretend to know the future. The rest of us are left to muddle through. He proposed the concept of “strategic vision” to guide us away from pitfalls toward a desirable future we would like. He noted that, in spite of our best lights, even the best of us can make horrific mistakes like Churchill a Gallipoli in the Dardanelles campaign. He applied these difficulties in the understanding of future outcomes to our situation in Iraq. “The horizon is clouded by the smoke arising from Iraq. It stings the eyes and it blots attempts to look beyond that conflict.” He seemed to be convinced that no one could have predicted the mess we have somehow stumbled into and he seemed to be equally convinced that the present confusion was the result of mistakes rather than any intentional policy. He also failed to grasp that this policy was not just a mistaken exploit by an administration who understandably could not foresee the consequences, but a conscious policy of imperial conquest conducted against all ignored, wise counsel that predicted chapter and verse the disaster that would befall us if we proceeded. To compare our bipartisan action in Iraq with Churchill’s miscalculation is beyond obscenity. Like most Democrats, Skelton does not understand that we are not involved in a project that needs tweaking and better management but an illegal and immoral enterprise, condemned by the whole civilized world that must be discontinued as quickly as is humanly possible. Ike’s fog of war excuse for a retreat from any statesman like position with regards to future policy is completely self-inflicted. During the question and answer session, a woman asked him if there are any comparisons to be made between Vietnam and Iraq. He basically said that the only similarity he grasped was that both wars went on too long. He said that most of the comparisons he had heard were fraudulent. I don’t intend to launch into the many obvious parallels between the two conflicts here. Ike not only admitted to not having learned anything from our misadventure in Iraq but he seemed not even to have learned the painful lesions from Vietnam. He is old enough to know better. It is hard to have respect for anyone this stupid. He then suggested that “after we put the Iraq War behind us” we should move on to other challenges. He didn’t specify how or when we will be able to put the Iraqi war behind us but made some suggestions for areas of the world that deserve our consideration. First on his list was Afghanistan “the forgotten war” which he seems to think we can win with a sufficiently increased amount of attention and military might, again failing to even acknowledge the Russian lesson. As laudable and initially feasible as the Afghan war seemed at the time, it now appears as if those scrappy little Afghans will defeat all our attempts in the same way they did the Russians. Ike doesn’t seem to understand that we lost Afghanistan a long time ago. All we have left in that poor land is a blemished record of atrocity, collateral damage, slaughter, deception and defeat. His second item on the list for our consideration was Islamic terrorism. I started to think that perhaps the fly was finally going to light – that he was on to something when he said that the battle against Islamic terrorism will not be won on the battle field. But that’s really about all he said before moving on to his next point. He should have given his whole speech about that one topic alone as it informs our whole approach to Iraq, Iran Afghanistan and the whole middle east, Pakistan, and Asia. But he left it there like a discarded footnote. Big disappointment. Then followed a whole laundry list of concerns around the world. He didn’t mention the fact that we cannot even begin to direct our attention to these other pressing dangerous challenges because of our preoccupation with Iraq. He also made no acknowledgment of how much the problems we face around the world are often the direct result of our own foreign policy and the activities of our corporations’ rape of the developing world. He said we should restore the international community’s confidence in the United States but had no suggestions as to how this might be accomplished. His emphasis with regards to our relationship to the world should be primarily one of the close monitoring of potential trouble spots rather than a proactive, positive foreign policy that might make some reparation for all the damage and ill will we have engendered and actually stop being the worlds bully. Ike talked a lot about “steps.” “Steps to insure the future over the long term” “Steps to assure the world’s confidence after Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” “Steps to maintain a positive presence in the world.” After elucidating these challenges he gave absolutely no indication that he had a clue as to what these steps might look like, what vision they might encapsulate or what strategy they might embody. Oh sorry, his idea of maintaining “a positive presence in the world” was to spend increased amounts to expand our navy as a world presence, which we have traditionally maintained. The honorable representative will have to forgive me if I read this in the context of our general military presence in the world today as “gunboat diplomacy.” If this is Ike’s idea of a positive presence I would hate to envision his idea of a negative. After a none too brief riff on how the words “challenge,” “opportunity,” “conflict,” “collision,” all mean the same thing. He went on to a reaffirmation of the old values that, while it was intended to inspire, just left me with a sense of sadness of what has been irretrievably lost in the American spirit. If the best that Ike can offer as a “strategic vision of imagination” is just another forth of July stump speech we had better look elsewhere. Again with yet another laundry list of clichés so obvious that everyone (even George Bush) can agree with them. And again no strategy, no steps to take to achieve these goals: Our fate is tied to the rest of the world. Great leaders lead not only in war but can inspire people and mobilize economies. We must be great. Not consigned to the dustbin of history (stop. stop. stop!) We must not govern because we are powerful but because we are good. (Actually I made that last one up myself – try a few yourself. There are no lack of platitudes in this politician’s bottomless bag of tricks) Nearly at the end of his address, he finally warmed to what I took to be the real thrust of his speech – massive increased military spending and an expansion of the Pentagon budget far beyond even its present stratospheric dimensions. Finally the fly had landed! Ike thinks that our military has been depleted beyond our ability to respond to crises that may arise in other parts of the world. Rather than disengaging from the Iraqi tar baby he would expand still further our forces. I don’t sense he cares much who will pay for this expansion or what it will do to our economy, already so vulnerable that a combination of a blunder in Iran and a well placed chop stick whack could make us a third world banana republic overnight. I could not imagine a neocon making a more persuasive argument for total spectrum military dominance. George W. Bush would be proud of this little hawk. I hate to say it, but dear old Ike, political animal that he is, thinks only of the one thing that has kept his career going lo these thirty years – pork. I hate to say it because even I have trouble grasping the absurdity of it. Ike is only looking out for pork for Missouri. Is it really possible that the whole thing boils down to this: his strategy is military contracts and his vision is jobs for his voters? Yes I think it might just be possible. PS.I finally did get my question about Iran answered. I couldn’t attract the mike-man’s attention, so when the last question was called, I stood up and shouted, “I have a question” when I received grudging, surprised recognition I asked, “For the past eleven months a group of your constituents has been trying in vain to determine if you are committed to taking The nuclear first strike option off the table in our negotiations with Iran. Do you favor a first strike nuclear attack on Iran?” “No” was his terse response with no explanation. I said “Thank you” and sat down. I figured I had made my point and any further attempt to follow up with “Why the hell then don’t you make this policy of yours known to the President, the Congress and the American people?” would probably be taken as quarrelsome. Bob Boldt is a Political Cartoonist, and an associate editor at MWC News
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