America and War

You can deny it all you want and you can dispute my proposition here, but I am personally convinced that America is a nation enthralled with war.
by Charlie Leck

When Ronald Reagan sent troops into Grenada in 1983 I remember being embarrassed. Really! I was embarrassed.

“Well, perhaps,” I thought, “there is some explanation for this madman’s decision.”

“What the hell is he doing?”
The question was pretty universal in the states. Even Republicans were asking. Even very conservative Republicans were asking. To this day there has not been a meaningful and acceptable explanation for what Reagan did. I’ve written about it before on this blog site. I won’t go into again. I bring it up now to create the pattern I want to write about. America goes to war far too easily?

Earlier blogs touching on Granada….

The Real Ronald Reagan

War in a Time of Cholera

Obviously, there are exceptions. The First World War (“the Great War to end all wars”) and The Second World War are the two clear exceptions. Perhaps, too, so was the Civil War or, as friends in the South like to call it, “the war between the states” or “the war of northern aggression.” Some have convincing arguments that the Korean War (which President Truman persisted in calling a “police action”) was also necessary. Historically, I am not so convinced.

The little skirmish with Mexico (the Mexican-American War) that preceded the Civil War, however, was a complete farce and should have embarrassed all Americans of that time. For the record, it did not.

Of all America’s wars, the most useless, wasteful, tragic and unnecessary was the war in Iraq. Remember why we went? Remember? WMD! Remember the expression? Weapons of Mass Destruction. It turned out to be one of the great fictions in the history of presidential flim-flam. Today, members of that administration (such as Colin Powell) are embarrassed about what happened (but do not include the Vice President, Dick Cheney, among those with red faces). Mind you, the war in Iraq only cost us a couple trillion dollars (trillion!). I’d be embarrassed, too. Come to think of it, I am embarrassed.

My Tea Party friends would respond to this by saying: “You must never be embarrassed to be an American!” My reply to that is to argue that such thinking is exactly what gets us into trouble.

What motivates today’s rant?
You are probably wondering why I want to go off on embarrassing American wars today. It’s nice out! The baseball season is in full bloom. The Twins even won a couple of games lately. I ate a lovely lamb stew last night (with tasty parsnips and turnips substituted for the potatoes). My children are all well. So are my grandchildren. I had a good report from my doctor yesterday. There are the cutest baby wild turkeys meandering around behind their mother in the yard this morning. Why am I in such a foul (fowl) mood?

The Karzai Family
I’ll tell you why. I sat down in a Starbucks this morning with a wonderful latté in front of me and a tasty blueberry scone right at hand. I opened the day’s NY Times and read about the Karzai family (in Afghanistan) and how they have profited to the tune of millions and millions by our nation’s involvement in the Afghanistan War. (It’s a remarkable report by James Risen: Intrigue in Karsai Family Clouds Afghanistan’s Fate.)

“What?”

“Yes, I mean it!” The bastards have banked millions and millions and millions through utterly deceptive practices and they are not even red-faced about it all. A lot of what they’ve banked was intended to be aide money for the Afghan people or funds used to train their military.

Several of the Karzai folks have escaped to America. They live on comfortably in Maryland and Virginia.

Count it as one more worthless, stupid, irresponsible and unnecessary war! We went there to get Mr. Osama bin Laden. Instead we involved ourselves in a culture and political system that we don’t understand and that has problems to solve beyond our understanding and abilities. Count it as one more amazing American war without a mission.

There have been too many stupid, irresponsible and unnecessary wars in American history. You can trace the blame to leaders of both major political parties or to political parties that existed before the current political parties.

Is it the price that comes with being a super-power – a nation at the very core of global politics? It may. Yet, it’s been no fun and it has been too big a cost in human lives. Too many of our own lives have been disrupted and ruined. There’s been too much mourning, sorrow, pain and insanity caused by constant and horrible war.

Hasn’t civilization advanced far enough that we can find ways to settle problems without wars?

“We don’t want no war no more – no more – We don’t want no war no more!” [Wyclef Jeanelle Jean]

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Snagged or Snarled in an Unwinnable War

Afghanistan worries the dickens out of me!
by Charlie Leck

The United States just doesn’t learn very well from its mistakes. I believe we’ve gone and done it again.

We never should have gotten ourselves involved in Vietnam in the late 50s and then escalated matters in the 60s. It was clearly a guerilla war and those are unwinnable. After all, there’s no opponent with whom to actually negotiate. The fight is against a force on its own very familiar land. They can be citizens and villagers one instant and dangerous enemies the next.

We’ve had the same example shown us in Iraq. There will never really be an end, for the U.S., to the war in Iraq. We will one day just leave, even as we did in Vietnam, and then the local forces will just have to work things out and stabilize their nation, just as happened in Vietnam.

And now we are in Afghanistan fighting a guerilla war. The enemy fights from land he knows well. He disappears and becomes an innocent civilian. He reappears and becomes a dangerous weapon, fully prepared to sacrifice his life in the most violent ways.

How did it all happen? Why are we there?

Steve Coll, in his remarkable book, The Bin Ladens, has a credible explanation. We were suckered in by the master of the sucker punch, Osama Bin Laden himself.

In the year 2000 Osama sent some of his Al Qaeda suicide bombers up against the mighty American destroyer, USS Cole, as it was anchored in a Mideast Harbor. The two attackers blew themselves up and took seventeen sailors with them and left approximately thirty others injured. Only a few months after the event Osama Bin Laden was quoted as saying:

“We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that’s what we want... Then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.”

The terrorist did not get the response he wanted. He began plotting something more dramatic that would get the attention of the Americans and would lure them into his trap.

Osama Bin Laden wanted the Americans to come into Afghanistan, pursuing him, so badly that he began putting together an unimaginable plan to fly hijacked American passenger aircraft into a number of targets on U.S. soil. The initial plan called for planes to attack all over the U.S.. It was scaled back to make it both more realistic and to give it a higher possibility of success.

In October of 2001, Osama Bin Laden was interviewed by Taysir Allouni, a reporter for Al-Jazeera. Allouni asked about the killing of so many innocent civilians on 9-11.

“It is very strange for Americans and other educated people to talk about the killing of civilians,” Osama replied. “I mean, who said that our children and civilians are not innocents, and the shedding of their blood is permissible.”

The President of the United States readied a military plan. He would send our forces into Afghanistan to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. The trap was sprung. The mighty terrorist of terrorists had gotten his way. He promised to defeat the Americans even as he had overwhelmed the Soviets.

In October, only a month after the collapse of the Trade Towers, we almost bagged Osama in Tora Bora. He narrowly managed to escape. As the months and years advanced, Osama Bin Laden built his guerilla forces with his own wealth and additional funds supplied by nations in the Middle East that would enjoy seeing us defeated.

Now we are trapped in a murky war that has no mission and no end game. We’ve been deflected from our initial mission and our main purpose in going there – to get and kill Osama Bin Laden. Now we are involved in tribal politics about which we know so little, if anything. The enemy is indefinable and vague.

I fear that we have been trapped not only by Osama Bin Laden, but, as well, by history itself.