Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are turning me into a LOT more of a Dove than I ever was.
Still this video was really interesting:
I do like the bit about America always fighting the last war. Also I do hate me some John McCain and Barack Obama. Maybe someday we’ll be free of both of them.
I agree about the hawkish thing. Time was I was all for kicking ass at the drop of a hat.
Now I recognize something I wouldn’t have in my callow youth.
We don’t fight to win anymore. Not since Korea. Winning means taking every inch of ground held by the enemy wherever he may be, holding it and then imposing your victory conditions upon your vanquished foe.
We don’t do that. We have no intention of ever doing it again, and that means we will never win another war. We may win battle after battle. We may present weapons and élan so terrifying that the enemy flees from our very sight. But they know that all they have to do is flee across a line drawn on a map and we will stop chasing them and eventually we will become bored and go home; whereupon they will simply pick up where they left off.
It’s especially sad considering the trivial level of casualties we’re taking in the present conflict. It’s comparable to the deaths from traffic accidents in Germany during the cold war.
All you have to do to defeat America is do more damage than the autobahn.
Also we don’t even have an idea of what “Victory” looks like. In Iraq we removed the dictator, installed a modern elected government….and then stuck around getting killed for ages…
In Afghanistan, I have no idea what we want to accomplish there.
Same with Syria.
It’s pretty hard to “win” when the criteria don’t exist.
I’ve suggested that if we’re going to play “world cop” that we should flat out say that our payment is to own what we take when the war is done.
It’s not Iraq. It’s the new US Territory of Mesopotamia. Natives don’t like it? Send in Bu Indian Affairs (renamed to Bureau of Indigenous People Affairs) to explain “reservations” to them and generally behave like it’s 1870 again.
With those terms we could probably scale our military back to a gigantic navy and almost no ground forces like we traditionally had.
Nuke, then say “Nah, you can keep it!”
I’d be a lot more hawkish if ‘war’ was “Kill their fighters, break their shit, leave”. But it never is.