America's Wars: How Serial War Became the American Way of Life

punditman says...The thing that got punditman to start his website and to later morph it into this blog was the impending and subsequent American invasion of Iraq. Think about it: Punditman predates blogs.

The start of the Iraq War is beginning to feel like a long time ago. I think. And yet Iraq is far from resolved or peaceful. Think about it: What has changed in your life since 2003? Most of you will point to many things. But the problem is that not much has changed in terms of American foreign policy. As this cogent article points out, each new president is now expected to never give up one war without taking on another. Welcome to the age of perpetual warfare. It behooves us all to ask, "What is to be done about it?" Have a peaceful weekend.

By David Bromwich | TomDispatch.com

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the “central question” for the defense of the United States was how the military should be “organized, equipped — and funded — in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon.” The phrase beyond the horizon ought to sound ominous. Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a palpable memory. After all, the menace of the Axis powers, whose state apparatus was fed by wars, had been stopped definitively by the concerted action of Soviet Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. The founding of the United Nations extended a larger hope for a general peace. Organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Union of Concerned Scientists reminded people in the West, as well as in the Communist bloc, of a truth that everyone knew already: the world had to advance beyond war. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called this brief interval "the Second Enlightenment" partly because of the unity of desire for a world at peace. And the name Second Enlightenment is far from absurd. The years after the worst of wars were marked by a sentiment of universal disgust with the very idea of war.

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Saigon Again?

By Philip Giraldi

www.antiwar.com

The problem with assessing President Barack Obama’s foreign policy after little more than 100 days is that it is nearly impossible to distinguish what has already become policy from approaches that might be termed more tentative. Does he really think that a continued American engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and on behalf of Israel serves the national interest? Maybe not. There are signs that a broad reassessment of U.S. policy is underway, though critics who have been rightly soured by eight years of George W. Bush’s blundering note that Obama appears to have embraced the interventionist formula that has proven so disastrous. Nation-building will not work in Afghanistan, and interference in neighboring Pakistan has produced a nuclear country that is self-destructing. Taking the two countries together, it is clear that Central Asia has become the poster child for U.S. foreign policy ineptitude.

The Bush administration’s tendency to try to sell an otherwise questionable foreign policy continues. President Obama’s pledge after last week’s meeting with the Pakistani and Afghan presidents that he is dedicated to defeating al-Qaeda was intended to push a button with the American audience. He knows perfectly well that al-Qaeda has become a minor player in the Central Asian drama and that the problem is much larger than the terrorist group that carried out 9/11. To be fair to Obama, it should be accepted that the Bush administration created the Afghanistan and Pakistan crisis that he has inherited. Obama has questioned existing policies even though he has increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by only half the number requested by the Pentagon. He has also increased the intensity of Predator drone strikes directed against Taliban and al-Qaeda inside Pakistan. He would be well advised to think yet again about what he is doing.

The increase in soldiers will not win the day, and would not even if it were double the number being committed, because the Afghan topography means the U.S. has to rely on air power, which leads to high civilian casualties and has turned the Afghan people against the NATO mission. More important, the narco-trafficking-fueled corruption in the Karzai government is so pervasive that Afghans have lost any hope that their lot will ever improve. Without that, the insurgency, which at least offers stability, will inevitably win, and the American GI will follow his British and Russian counterparts in the graveyard of empires. There is no reason to believe that allowing a government that includes the Taliban in Afghanistan threatens the United States. Quite the contrary, as the Taliban are not interested in exporting any revolution and are intensely inward-looking. They will also likely have learned the lesson of 2001 and will know that their support of any international terrorist movements will result in a devastating response from the United States. Obama could stay a while to save face, put a Band-Aid on the situation, and then get out while there is still an option to do so. The Afghans will sort out their own future just as they always have. If it is not a free-market, pluralistic, democratic future, then so be it.

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punditman says...

Punditman does not pretend that if NATO troops withdraw from the AfPak theatre, all will be peace and light. The question is, would the death, destruction and misery be any worse than that of an unwinnable foreign intervention? Or would things sort of muddle along at a lower level of conflict as the various forces jockey for power? Those who say you must support the troops by supporting their mission rarely offer a realistic assessment of the dire situation in Afghanistan and South Asia—let alone a "winning" scenario. They are content to follow whatever their government tells them until hell freezes over. Punditman thinks that they often secretly think this war is unwinnable but won't admit it. Or perhaps they believe in the magical military mystery tour?

Sometimes the only option is to choose the least worst choice. And that, it seems, is to stop messing with an already messy situation that the West is ill equipped to fix—much less truly understand—and come up with a plan for military withdrawal from South Asia. Unless of course the plan is for perpetual war as the domestic economy implodes. Other empires have known such folly. They now help form the ashheaps of history.