I was lamenting Bush’s reasoning for war long before the Axis of Evil speech. I complained at the end of September ‘01, when engagement of Afghanistan was still just talk. Instead of spending money we didn’t have on full-scale, inefficient obsolete war, we could have been using our very capable intelligence and espionage agencies to send covert attachments into the heart of Al-Qaeda, and not just the cells in Afghanistan.
I’m not an Muslim radical apologist. Bad guys exist. Yes, it’s good to go get the bad guys. In some cases, it’s even good to slaughter them indiscriminately. Pigeonhole-me-not; I am no pacifist.
But it would be nice if someone in charge would admit that it’s just plain stupid to pit a whole nation against you–due to your flailing stupidity–simply because you couldn’t address the threat to the United States at an appropriate response level. Big doesn’t always win a war. It especially doesn’t win a war where previously neutral people are now AGAINST you because you blew up their village looking for terrorist cells that were never there.
Recall 230 years ago when the British Empire fought Colonial Seperatists with well-disciplined regiments, only to have their asses handed to them by underequipped, undertrained farmers. There was a reason for that defeat, folks.
Best used, the United States Armed Forces is a fast, silent, punishing rain of hell that is exercised when no other option is viable. Invasion is a good excuse, but it’s not the only one. Just the best.
9/11 was not an invasion. It was 19 uncompromising radicals who flew four planes into three buildings. For these 19 radicals, we killed a thousand times their number in innocent civilians while seeking out the others in their group.
Would we have traded a Sears Tower full of lives to catch a McVeigh, or slaughtered the whole of a rural mid-western town to capture a Kaczynski? How would we respond to another nation doing the same in the name of justice?
If an oversized RC-car rigged with a chain gun killed your brother, how exactly would you feel about that? What about a faceless metal shell sailing through the air dropping ordnance on your children like rain? Who would you hate? Who else could you hate but the whole of the nation that authorized such an action?
I’m not really a hawk or a dove, but if you’d like me to play hawk, lets play this way: in terms of efficiency–terms of cold, hard cash and resource expenditure. In regard to Desert Storm in 1990-1 (A war that lasted over a fall and winter), a once-sane Dick Cheney stated:
“I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home. … While everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right…we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
As recently as 1991–even Mr. Cheney (who would later become one of the nation’s greatest hypocrites,) knew what military efficiency was about. Lately, though, our men and women in the service have been subject to the wandering whims of politicians–left and right–who can’t quite elucidate why they continue to send troops overseas or what those troops are supposed to be accomplishing. (Mr. Obama’s speech tonight is apparently going to explain his request for 30,000 more troops in Asia.)
As President, even the most celebrated speakers have well-meaning paragraphs prepared by post grad staffers in which they extoll the American way of life and tell us, “Extending freedom to the native peoples of [country x] is the most important issue we have to face today.” The explanation, more often than not, fails to go any deeper.
The stated goals are even less clear–draw imaginary lines and say we’ll be done fighting “once the security of the state has been achieved,” or “once the people are able to govern themselves”.
It seems to me that the people of Afghanistan HAVE been governing themselves. It’s simply not a brand of government you particularly appreciate. In fact, we apparently “destroyed” the Taliban in 2001 only to find them up and running again less than a decade later. If anything, I think that proves the people of Afghanistan are INCREDIBLY capable of self-governance. After all, even “destruction” by the greatest military on earth couldn’t keep the Taliban’s system of government from re-sprouting like crab grass–while we were still on the soil.
What’s so odd about praising for our way of life as a justification for fighting a war overseas is this: at the same time our politicians pay lip service to the freedoms in this country, they strip away those SAME freedoms bit by bit with more and more nanny legislation.
These freedoms are apparently important enough to send men and women to defend them overseas for citizens of other nations, yet somehow AREN’T important enough to give our own native citizens responsibility over their own actions, their own property, their own health, and their own lives.
It’s a frightening prospect to fight a war in a distant foreign nation under those pretenses, and one reason is above all others: The same pretenses can be used to start a dozen new wars we can’t afford.
