Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), a Republican, was the 34th President of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. Prior to his presidency, Eisenhower was a lifelong military man, commanding the D-Day invasion while serving as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II.
General Eisenhower was never in combat on the battlefront. The majority of his military career (23 of 38 years) was at the rank of major or lieutenant colonel, mid-level field ranks. He spent a great deal of his military career in staff positions as a planner or trainer and not as a commander of combat army units. He was an aide to the legendary general Douglas MacArthur who was very difficult to deal with.
General Eisenhower's skill at dealing with difficult personalities persuaded President Roosevelt to promote him to become the commanding general of the largest amphibious military invasion in history on the beaches of Normandy. This was a landing force of nine allied countries that required the overall commander to have great interpersonal skills and planning and coordination abilities.
The Eisenhower Doctrine, as the proposal soon came to be known, established the Middle East as a Cold War (1945-91) battlefield.
Background of the Eisenhower Doctrine
The United States believed that the situation in the Middle East degenerated badly during 1956, and Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser (1918-70) was deemed largely responsible. America used Nasser’s anti-Western nationalism and his increasingly close relations with the Soviet Union as justification for withdrawing U.S. support for the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile River in July 1956. Less than a month later, Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal. This action prompted, in late October, a coordinated attack by French, British and Israeli military forces on Egypt. Suddenly, it appeared that the Middle East might be the site of World War III.
The Eisenhower Doctrine received its first call to action in the summer of 1958, when civil strife in Lebanon led that nation’s president to request American assistance. Nearly 15,000 U.S. troops were sent to help quell the disturbances. With the Eisenhower Doctrine and the first action taken in its name, the United States demonstrated its interest in Middle East developments.
Did You Know
In September 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate public schools.
Eisenhower Quotes
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
References:
 |
Today we are once again engaged in a gigantic battle with people that we’ve dubbed insurgents or resistance fighters, who seem to be so filled with rancor and rage that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones to destroy the hated Americans. Are we making an effort to understand and empathize with our new enemy; to communicate with those who want to destroy us? Sadly, the first lesson of war offered by an octogenarian who’s been there and seen the folly of fighting an enemy you cannot comprehend, let alone, understand, is still being ignored at a horrendous cost.
Our strategy today, just as it was some 40-plus years ago, is to kill the insurgents even if we must destroy the villages—including schools, mosques, homes, and businesses in the process. After all, we can always rebuild what we’ve torn down. Yet the hatred remains, and force gives birth to counter force. The killing and destruction go on, and the people who witness the total annihilation of their land are future insurgents in the making.
We’re told by those who represent us that the insurgents and the average Iraqi and Middle Easterner hate us because we stand for freedom and democracy. It’s my contention that we have it backwards. We’re hated because we fail to stand for freedom and democracy. In fact, what we do stand for is whatever is best for American financial interests. Under the Shah of Iran, freedom and democracy didn’t exist, yet we supported that regime. The Saudi royal family certainly doesn’t stand for freedom and democracy, yet we have no quarrel with them. The Emir of Kuwait is not about freedom and democracy, and he has our dying loyalty.
The average person on the streets of Iraq isn’t fooled by our occupation of their country. They hate us throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world because we care most about how to make money in foreign lands. They know it and we should know it. But we’re told that it’s our freedom and democracy that engenders this animosity toward us. Residents of Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and other countries throughout the Middle East hate us vehemently because they believe that Americans simply can’t figure out how all that American oil got under their sand. They believe that we’re acting in our own self-interest and that we justify destroying their villages and killing insurgents by convincing ourselves that it’s in the name of freedom and democracy.
If all of this is blatantly untrue, and we have no monetary motives in our continual clean-up campaigns that are leaving corpses and severely wounded people by the hundreds of thousands, then let’s make an effort to communicate with those whom we’re now aimlessly killing. I ask each and every person who conducts this war under the guise of Christian principles to answer this question: How much time have you spent praying for your enemy today? Read Jesus in Matthew 5:43-44: You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Throughout our history, there has been a long list of those we’ve been conditioned to hate. The British, French, Spanish, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Communists, Northern Koreans, Vietnamese, Iranians, Taliban, and both northerners and southerners in our own country are some of the people we’ve been encouraged at various times to call enemies and to hate. The list is long, and as time passes, those we were assigned to hate we later were told should be removed from our hate list. The enemy is obviously hatred itself, and the glassy eyes and the tears rolling down the face of a former wartime Secretary of Defense say it all to me. Have empathy for your assigned enemy.
With empathy you know in your heart that it’s not a sign of weakness to attempt to understand that the people we call terrorists have placed the same label on us, and that the use of force will create a counter force, a never-ending saga of killing and hate. Ending war involves cultivating empathy in our policies and the love of God in our hearts.
As the Native Americans reminded us: No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves.
Wayne Walter Dyer (May 10, 1940 - August 29,2015)... an asset to humanity, you will be missed. ~ taskeinc
We're facing some very difficult times that will only get worse if we fall for the false notion pontificated by President Obama, "We will destroy ISIS" ... then what? There will be another trained group of paid, U.S.-trained mercenaries to take the place of ISIS, just as ISIS took the place of the Taliban. The same stratagem with a new Casus belli for the gullible American public.
There is no way we can rely on our government to bring about peace. World peace is attainable if we can get at least 40 percent of the 7 billion people on this planet to get their heads out of the sand. It's critical to the survival of the human species to force our collective will on the 300 or so plutocrats who vie for power, financial domination, and oil. These monsters have no regard for the colossal loss of lives and devastation they create.
Mankind must put an end to war, before war puts an end to mankind.
~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy
