The campaign in afghanistan didn’t even define an enemy. I consider a war to at least include a clear definition of the enemy.
Vietnam was against a committed enemy who had a lot of popular support within the country. It was also Jungle warfare as opposed to open desert, which makes a huge difference as far as air support.
I still maintain that the invasion of Iraq owes more to an ocean of difference in technology than it does to any individual tactics. It’s much easier to subdue an enemy when you can carpet bomb them first, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
As it was, Franks did fuck some things up, he didn’t send enough initial ground support, and the ones he did send were mostly Reservists, not full-time soldiers. Everything that happened after the occupation of Baghdad was a fiasco, particuarly the looting of the Baghdad museum.
But that’s neither here nor there. Any reasonbally competent general was going to be successful. It would have taken a collossal incompetent to lose.
You are forgetting that military operations are political. The amount of military force necessary to carry out a plan is based not only upon the military capabilities of your opponents but also upon the strength of their opposition to your political goals. The Soviets were trying to conquer and hold Afganistan and were fighting not just the Taliban but all the other warlords as well. The US was just trying to kick out the Taliban and had the other warlords on its side. If the US were attempting what the Soviets had tried we would have been faced with far greater resistance.
In other words you are comparing apples to oranges.
Buncha guys called the Taliban, you might have heard of them. They were the ones running Afghanistan when we began blowing things up, they were the ones we were trying to kill along with this guy named Osama Bin Laden. You might have heard of him as well. Last I checked, our plan was to get those guys and not just any random shmucks wandering around Afghanistan.
As any combat veteran will tell you, the “enemy” is clearly defined as that guy shooting at you.
IIRC it’s the convention that officials who don’t want to stay for a second term leave well before the election campaign. That would account for the string of departures.
Of the three only Whitman’s departure might present a problem for the administration in that as a moderate, female Republican she is the kind of person that they need to attract swing voters.
December 22, 1994, Lloyd Bentsen resigned as Secretary of Treasury. December 31, 1994, Mike Espy resigned as Secretary of Agriculture. Not 3 people at essentially the same time, but 2 cabinet secretaries is pretty big.
From January 10 until January 23, 1997, the following all left their positions (some for other positions in the administration):
Robert Reich, Warren Christopher, Hazel O’Leary, Federico Pena, Mickey Cantor, William Perry. Granted, that group fits in with the change between first and second term, but it seems to illustrate the point that resignations tend to happen at times that are appropriate for change.
In the instance of the 3 in the Bush White House, I imagine they happened at the same general time because a major overseas conflict had ended, Bush had just finished with major economic policy, and the political landscape is in a calm before an election storm.
