No more Coles and no more snow jobs

Seventeen American sailors were killed last week. Did these young men
and women die because their seniors failed to do their duty?

That’s the question Congress should ask President Bill Clinton,
Defense Secretary Bill Cohen and the uniformed brass from Joint Chiefs
Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton to Navy Chief Adm. Vern Clark to the skipper
of the destroyer USS Cole.

Last month, U.S. intelligence warned that an attack on an American
warship in that dangerous region was in the wind. Simultaneously,
superterrorist Osama bin Laden and some like-minded rats ranted on Arab
TV about making Americans bleed.

So why did the brass send sailors into the Port of Aden like grunts
onto Hamburger Hill, when only days before our State Department had
closed its embassies in that area because of terrorist threats?

If State was worried about the risk to embassy personnel in Aden —
long known as a terrorist snake pit where only two days before thousands
of Yemenis took to the streets calling for a holy war — why didn’t the
brass show the same concern for our sailors? And why didn’t the Cole
refuel at sea or at least in the outer harbor of Aden, where the ship
could’ve been protected by gun crews capable of blowing a suicide craft
out of the water before it got danger-close?

Almost before the smoke drifted away from the Cole, the White House
launched into its too familiar after-the-terrorist-attack damage
control. First Clinton addressed the nation using the identical words he
uttered in 1996 when 19 U.S. airmen were killed by terrorists in Saudi
Arabia — “a despicable and cowardly act” — followed by the now
well-worn threat that we’re going to get ’em and extract an eye for an
eye.

Then he ordered his spinners to flood the media with the party line.
The following, culled from a dozen similar snow jobs, says it all:

• Gen. Wesley Clark of Serbian War shame — now retired and
  working for the same Arkansas gang that contributed so generously to
  Clinton’s taking over the White House in 1992 — told TV journalist
  Geraldo Rivera that the U.S. military must take risks; that big guys
  don’t hide from trouble; and that because we’re a superpower, we had to
  enter this terrorist hangout to “show the flag.”

• Navy Chief Adm. Vern Clark followed the Wesley Clark act by
  stating, when asked why the destroyer wasn’t refueled at sea, that there
  weren’t enough oilers to go around.

America is engaged in an undeclared but very real war against
terrorism, but as with the Vietnam War, our senior military types are
thinking and acting conventionally. In Vietnam, the brass refought World
War II while their opponent fought — and won — a nonconventional war.

Showing the flag may have worked when Teddy Roosevelt dispatched the
Great White Fleet. But it doesn’t make a lick of sense when a high-tech
warship capable of mass destruction can be taken out by two martyrs in a
small craft who pulled off a kamikaze attack with a tactic as old as the
Trojan Horse.

Adm. Clark, along with most of the Navy’s top brass, has long
been silent regarding the state of naval readiness. Candidates George W.
Bush and Dick Cheney rightly say readiness stinks, while their opponents
Al Gore and Joe Lieberman say it’s just peachy keen — and the Navy
brass continue to duck and weave just as the Pentagon did in 1993 when
18 soldiers were killed in Somalia because there were no tanks to
protect our troops.

Have Adm. Clark and his fellow gold-stripers shirked their duty by
allowing our fleet to be downsized in the past seven years from 435
ships to 311 without telling the president and the candidates that the
Navy doesn’t have the ships to do the job?

Had they stood tall, an oiler would have been available. Had they
fulfilled their sworn duty to their country and their sailors, the USS
Cole would have stayed with its battle group — instead of being
dispatched by itself to pick up the slack in the Gulf because there
aren’t enough warships to accomplish all assigned missions.

Come January, let’s hope our new president rebuilds our broken
military not only materially, but morally, by putting in top leaders
with the guts to hold to their sworn duty.