Doug Bandow
Security, Americas
“Great countries do not fight endless wars,” intoned President Donald Trump in his State of the Union address, and he is right. Certainly, nations that do fight them don’t stay great, which should serve as a powerful warning for American policymakers.
Alas, the Washington blob, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite that has kept the United States at war for years, appears to have learned nothing. Indeed, members of Congress didn’t greet the president’s pronouncement with much enthusiasm. Legislators had voted against his plan to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan. Members also had opposed his stated interest in doing the same from South Korea. These are the same congressmen who can’t be bothered to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to approve America’s wars, yet they fear the president might end one.
Indeed, some Washington policymakers reject any accountability. Five years ago Samantha Power, one of the high tribunes of humanitarian military intervention, reflected on what most Americans recognize to be years of disastrous war-making: “I think there is too much of, ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’ . . . one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.”
But they must be drawn. And the lessons from America’s recent decades of intervention and war have not been pretty. For instance, Ronald Reagan took the United States into Lebanon’s bitter civil war, backing the “national” government, which controlled little more than the capital of Beirut. Americans became combatants and died for nothing.
Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had no interest in America’s domestic institutions. They launched their terrorist operations in response to U.S. intervention and war-making in the Middle East. Bush administration Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued that one benefit of the Iraq war was the removal of U.S. “occupation” forces from Saudi Arabia, one of bin Laden’s grievances.
American troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for more than seventeen years, making it the longest war in U.S. history. Washington almost immediately achieved its objectives of striking Al Qaeda and ousting the Taliban; since then the war’s apparent goal has been to impose a centralized liberal democracy in Kabul, an effort neither worth war nor achievable at reasonable cost. Today Americans are dying to kick the final withdrawal to the next president.
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