Wars, Endless Wars

Bob Herbert offers a wise and deeply cautionary account of the peril implicit in continuing US military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the grim lessons of Vietnam and the fate of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

It is not only billions of dollars that are at stake. It is the US's and the world's recovery from a terrible economic crisis. It is the fate of Barack Obama's program for restoration of an American democracy committed to the well-being and equal opportunity for all of its citizens. It is the awful daily accumulating costs of an insane war. (Item: "some 300,000 [American service members] are currently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, and 320,000 have most likely experienced a traumatic brain injury.")

As a companion to Bob Herbert's piece below, here is a striking assessment of the prospects for the realization of President Obama's plans by Andrew Bacevich, who teaches international relations at Boston University and is author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism:

He wrote:

A promise to end the war in Iraq formed the cornerstone of Barack Obama's run for the White House. Yet his announced "withdrawal" plan ends nothing. It serves chiefly to reorder the Pentagon's operational priorities. Meanwhile, the "Long War" -- conceived in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and now in its eighth year with no end in sight -- continues.

For President Bush, Iraq was priority No. 1. He expected victory to yield a rich strategic and political payoff. He neither gained victory nor reaped any payoff. Meanwhile, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Long War's other fronts, languished as afterthoughts. Obama's plan to reduce the U.S. military presence in Iraq to a residual force of 35,000 to 50,000 troops now transforms the Persian Gulf into a secondary theater. In effect, the president is orienting the Pentagon's attention back to Central Asia, the front where the war began in 2001. Yet in doing so, he implicitly recommits the United States to what has become an open-ended military endeavor.

Lost in the shuffling of troops is any clear understanding of that endeavor's strategic rationale. Iraq alone has cost the United States a trillion dollars or more. The putative success of the "surge" notwithstanding, we have achieved exceedingly modest and tenuous gains. To imagine that simply trying harder in Afghanistan and Pakistan will produce a happier outcome is surely a fantasy.

Bush hoped to transform the Middle East. Obama's instincts point in a different direction. To preserve the American way of life, he appears intent on changing it, a project with vast economic, social and even cultural implications.

The Long War is incompatible with that project. Protracted war or domestic reform: We may be able to afford one. We cannot afford both. So Obama must choose. If, instead of choosing, he tries to finesse the Long War -- and shifting the weight of U.S. military efforts from Iraq to Afghanistan amounts to little more than temporizing -- his reform agenda is likely to be stillborn.

Op-Ed Columnist
Wars, Endless Wars
By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 3, 2009

The nation as we’ve known it is fading before our very eyes, but we’re still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we are still unable to define.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/opinion/03herbert.html