The War We Can't Win

Andrew Bacevich in a posting speaks to the war in Afghanistan in terms that are straight forward and easy to understand. Bacevich points out the ongoing institution of war as adopted by President Obama after the fall of President Bush.

The misguided and mismanaged global war on terror reduced Bush’s presidency to ruin. The candidate whose run for high office derived its energy from an implicit promise to repudiate all that Bush had wrought now seems intent on salvaging something useful from that failed enterprise—even if that means putting his own presidency at risk. When it comes to Afghanistan, Obama may be singing in a different key, but to anyone with an ear for music—especially for military marches—the melody remains intact.

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires.

Six-plus years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than forty-three hundred American soldiers

Among the dead is Bacevich' son.

Given the embarrassing yet indisputable fact that this was an utterly needless war—no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set in motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad—to describe Iraq as a success, and as a model for application elsewhere, is nothing short of obscene. The great unacknowledged lesson of Iraq is the one that the writer Norman Mailer identified decades ago: “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.”

The continuing distortions of U.S. security run rampant. The administration continues to increase foreign commitments in the name of national security when Mexico is rife with drug wars and governmental corruption. Yet not one politician is suggesting we invade Mexico in the name of national security. Given his criticism of the Bush war during the campaign, Obama's current position remains inexplicable.

Will any of our politicians ever learn? War has never been a solution. Every war sows the seeds of the next conflict. Until and unless humankind learns those lessons we are doomed to ever more violent interactions in the names of "security" and "diplomacy."

Peace.