Scarborough: U.S. Can’t Keep Going to War ‘Half-Assed’

Saying he would not vote for President Barack Obama’s request for the authorization for use of military force, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said Thursday morning that America needed to go big or go home when it came to overseas military operations.

“The mistake that Americans have made time and time and time again is they have gone into war half-assed,” Scarborough said. “A little bit here, a little bit there, we’ll see what happens. They end up using American men and women as targets for enemies, for suicide bombers, for snipers to blow their brains out.”

“If you are going to war, go to war to win war. If you’re not going to go to war to win war, then keep our men and women home. This right now continues to seem, to me at least, to make more of a halfway approach.”

Scarborough compared the situation to Vietnam, in which American forces accreted over several years until they constituted a full military presence in an intractable conflict. The comparison raised the eyebrows of Vermont beatnik Howard Dean.

“What led us into Vietnam was the military claiming we could do all of these things and we couldn’t,” Dean said. “We had half a million troops in Vietnam, twice as many in Iraq. No comparison.”

Watch the clip below, via MSNBC, hurray:

[Image via screengrab]

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