The Baraq War

From ‘A Problem from Hell’: 

“You don’t want to be Lyndon Johnson, sacrificing your potential for doing good on the domestic front by a destructive, never-ending foreign involvement. It’s the Democrats’ disease to take the same compassion that motivates their domestic policies and let it lure them into heroic but ill-considered foreign wars.” 

– Former political advisor Dick Morris to then-U.S. President Bill Clinton. Morris was advising Clinton against military intervention in Bosnia (the former Yugoslavia) to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide.

From The Guardian:

"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." 

"If he is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan, all right, because everyone who's tried over a thousand years of history has failed?"

– Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele referring to U.S President Barack Obama

From the Washington Post:

Of course, Steele was right from the start. His truth was the larger one, which is that enough time has elapsed so that the war in Afghanistan can be seen as Barack Obama's. It began, as we all know, under the illustrious George W. Bush, who then got distracted by all those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and veered off toward Baghdad. But these are mere details, pesky facts with which we need not concern ourselves. The truth is that Obama found this war on his doorstep, took it in, nursed and even escalated it, and swaddled it in his own clothes: more troops, and still more on the way.

One can appreciate how Steele got his "facts" wrong. It is how possession of the Vietnam War moved from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon even though they both lacked absolute belief in the cause -- whatever exactly that once was. Nixon, in fact, even had a secret plan to end the conflict and was furiously de-escalating, rapidly Vietnamizationing and frantically trying to disentangle himself and the nation from the war. Still, when demonstrators gathered outside the White House, it was not to praise his peace efforts but to denounce him as a warmonger. The rule in all these cases seems pretty apparent: Either end the war or own it.

From A Problem from Hell:

In 1984 President Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, had demanded that armed intervention

1)      Be used only to protect the vital interests of the United States or its allies;

2)      Be carried out wholeheartedly, with the clear intention of winning;

3)      Be in pursuit of clearly defined political and military objectives;

4)      Be accompanied by widespread public and congressional support;

5)      And be waged only as a last resort.

[Colin] Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, […] resurrected this cautious military doctrine and amended it to require a “decisive” force and a clear “exit strategy.” Iraq had eventually threatened U.S. oil supplies, whereas Yugoslavia’s turmoil threatened no obvious U.S. national interests. The war was “tragic,” but the stakes seemed wholly humanitarian. It met very few of the administration’s criteria for intervention.

From 'Violent Politics':

Wars of opinion, [General Antoine Henri] Jomini wrote, come about when one state seeks to propagate its own doctrines or to crush the dogma of another state. He would have placed the current American neoconservative plan forcibly to impose “democracy” on other nations as a war of opinion. It would have horrified him. Such wars, he said, “enlist the worst passions, and become vindictive, cruel and terrible.” They are fearful, he continued, “since the invading force not only is met by the armies of the enemy, but is exposed to the attacks of an exasperated people… History… appears to clearly demonstrate the danger of attacking an intensely-excited nation.” Thus, attack and reprisal without restraint are inevitable.

Perhaps as bad but certainly more problematic are what he call national wars, since the invader has only his army whereas “his adversaries have an army and a people wholly or almost wholly in arms [so that] even the non-combatants have an interest in his ruin and accelerate it by every means in their power.”

From The Guardian:

But even if Steele is a hack, it is worth contemplating whether he may have a point: what started as a specific act of retribution against a terrorist attack on US soil has become an attempt to turn Afghanistan into an at least minimally normal country. By accepting the counterinsurgency plan offered by General Stanley McChrystal (a brave solider whose public relations skills unfortunately rival Steele's), Obama has actually chosen to make Afghan nation-building his war.

 Worth Reading:

• Michael Steele may be right about the war in Afghanistan
• Afghanistan: Barack Obama's war and Michael Steele's truth
• America: hooked on war and getting poorer
• Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq by William R. Polk
• A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power