Flash Points USA - America at War - Robert Dallek
Flash Points USA - America at War - Robert Dallek
Flash Points USA - America at War - Robert Dallek (raw interview with Robert Dallek speaking about various Presidents) 07.09.57 Robert Dallek says "Things have changed dramatically in the sense that the Civil War was an all out war, World Wars One and Two were all out conflicts, but since then we've fought a series of limited wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the second Gulf War. We have nuclear weapons, we could pull all our troops out of Iraq and decimate the whole place by dropping a couple atomic bombs on them....Lyndon Johnson was counseled to us a tactical nuclear weapon, and he refused because he thought this would touch off World War Three and wisely refused. We have all this power, but it's an illusion, you can't really use it, and however much you can defeat an army in a face to face conflict as we did with the Iraqi Army in Iraq, what do you do when you face an insurgency? What are you going to do when you have to struggle with a kind of urban conflict, are you going to put a million man army into Iraq, to police every city, control every nook and cranny of the place? We're not going to do that, and the public isn't ready to support it. Are we going to expend how many more billions of dollars to occupy and take the place over, we don't want to be seen as a colonial occupying power. 07.11.22 Dallek continues "As it is our reputation in the Middle East has been so badly blighted by being there with 135,000 troops, so we need an exit strategy. And the exit strategy at the moment is well, get the UN involved, get NATO involved, internationalize this, get the Arab states to put troops in, but they're not coming forward so quickly to do it and so Mr. Bush has gotten us into a terrible predicament, which he doesn't have the answers to, he hopes he may have some answers to them, but if he doesn't come up with something in the next five or six months, it's probably going to mean the loss of the Presidency for him." 07.12.04 Robert Dallek says that wars have gotten "more muddled, more difficult to control, and you can't fight an all out war anymore, because you can't use nuclear weapons, and who are you going to fight? Now, we're locked in this struggle against terrorism, and how do you fight this war against terrorism? This is a diffuse movement, there are some maybe in France, maybe in Italy, maybe in the United States, and Africa, the Middle East....how do you do this? It's a tremendous dilemma which is probably going to haunt us for the next maybe thirty, forty, and even fifty years."