On the Contrary

Since these wars are sort of, kind of, winding down,  let’s just review.  First why do we decide to fight wars in such armpits of the world?  I mean at least Reagan invaded Granada where you could get a Mai Tai and lay on the beach.  Remember the story of the enterprising young captain that coordinated off shore artillery by using a local pay phone with a connection through the Pentagon?  Think you would have found a pay phone in these countries (that worked)?  Okay al Qaeda, and the Taliban that gave them refuge, were in Afghanistan, but after we bombed them from the stone age back to, well, the stone age, all the rest was one giant waste of time, blood, and money.

What you hear on Iraq, which we entered on false pretenses of WMD and conflated them with the 9/11 bombers, is that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.  Ask yourself if it is better without the almost 5000 Americans and probably closer to 400,000 Iraqis who died.  As Tom Friedman tries to argue badly, we established a beachhead for democracy in the Middle East.  Well as predicted, the real war in Iraq was a sectarian war with al Qaeda playing all sides of the conflict to inflict damage on the U.S., and it is degenerating into that again as we leave.  The real question is, can we really win someone else’s civil war?  One of our great ambassadors to Japan, Edwin O.Reischauer, opined on our entry into the Vietnamese civil war (north-south) that you can only make a difference if you help the guys who would have won anyway (I read this in a book as I was winging my way to that war).

As far as Afghanistan, as I noted in the first paragraph, after we decimated the Taliban and then let bin Laden get away, it was their country to rebuild.  Staying there just set up the dynamic for the civil war that is now taking place there.  Al Qaeda is non existent and we are refereeing a civil war between the Taliban and the propped up government.  And once again we have picked the side that can’t win unless we stay there forever.  Meanwhile the freedom loving government we support released a woman from prison who was raped and jailed because she told about it, but only if she will marry her rapist.  I personally was involved in bidding billions of dollars of construction that will probably go to ruin and should have been spent here.  Libya comes to mind as a more realistic response in that world where if we show up in person, we are the problem.  The point that Reischauer was making  that so applies here is that you can only delay the eventual working out of their problems, but you can’t really change the outcome for them.  They have to that for themselves.

So what does that say to the men and women of our country who fought there and to those who lost their lives there?  Well from an old guy who flew combat in Vietnam, it was a nice adventure and a hell of an adrenalin rush, but in the scheme of things, was a waste of time and human life.  That doesn’t mean the experience was meaningless, but it means that the sacrifice was not worth the price.  I think veterans will be, and should be, proud of their service.  They will remember the incredible teamwork, focus on mission, and the amazing responsibility and dedication they displayed to serve their country.  But they may also begin to wonder why our nation spent so much blood and treasure on such a foolish enterprise.

More importantly, they will begin to wonder what it means to spend all that money and time fighting for mud hut people who enslave their women and then they can’t find a job when they get home in their own country.  They may wonder why we all stood up and saluted their fighting the war for us while we refused to sacrifice ourselves, and are forgotten when they got home.  They may wonder why that same focus on mission and serving their country can not be translated into a mission or jobs at home.  They may wonder what happened to all that feeling of being part of something really important when the best they can do at home is work at McDonald’s or the car wash.  And most important of all, they may start to wonder why they served their country who so misled them and now is consigning them to the trash bin.  They may lose their faith in their government and believing in sacrificing for it.  They may start to demand change.  And when they get to that point, look out.  We trained these boys and girls how to solve problems with violence and they were damned good at it.