When Will They Ever Learn?

That famous line from Peter, Paul and Mary's 1960's anti-war anthem "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" should give us all something to think about as America approaches the eleventh anniversary of the Afghanistan War. 

The Afghanistan War became the longest war in American history on June 7, 2010 - longer than Vietnam, longer than Korea, longer than World War II.  Leon Panetta says we'll be ending it next year.  Not soon enough by a long shot.  It never should have been waged.  Terrorism is best controlled and prevented by police actions.  Of course, if you are asleep at the wheel and the the largest single-day attack on American soil occurs on your watch, you need to show that you're doing something - even if what you are doing is destructive, costly and ineffective.  But the neocons decided to declare a war on terror and Afghanistan was their easy first choice.  They then expanded this so-called war to invade Iraq, a country which had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11 and, of course, which had no weapons of mass destruction.  A permanent state of war (I mean, really, how can you ever defeat a noun) facilitates the destruction of civil liberties in a democracy.  Politically it creates an atmosphere that favors militarists, fear mongers, and neo cons.  Reason goes out the window as any opposition to war policies are branded "unpatriotic" or, in the more recent terminology of the right-wing echo machine, "You don't believe in American exceptionalism!"

These wars were totally unjustified.  Since many think that right and wrong has to do with power and winning (as in, "might makes right"), here's something to think about.  The end result of these disastrous wars is far from what was envisioned by the war planners and what was hoped for by the neocons.  In Iraq, power is now held by Shia political parties closely aligned with Iran.  In Afghanistan, the most likely outcome is some power sharing arrangement between Karzai and the Taliban.

The world, as Jonathan Schell says, is unconquerable (Note 1).  We will not be able to impose our will on others in the long-term by violent means .  We seem never to learn that war always causes more misery than we can contemplate.  We seem never to learn that, even if we put aside the moral considerations, war is ineffective and leads to unintended and unimaginable consequences. 

So to answer the nearly 50 year old question of Peter Paul and Mary...apparently not yet.

(1) The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. Jonathan Schell, 2003, Henry Holt and Co., New York).  From the jacket notes: "a visionary work that explores the limits of violence and charts an unexpectedly hopeful course toward a nonviolent future".

US Ends Iraq War

After nearly nine years, all American troops are finally leaving Iraq.  The United States formally ended the war today - eight years, seven months and 14 days after the so-called "mission accomplished" speech.  Nearly 4500 Americans lost their lives.  Thankfully there will be no more from this particular war.  Welcome home. 

The costs of this totally unnecessary neocon war have been enormous.  And, the increasingly irrelevant John McCain and increasingly misguided Cheney family to the contrary, the withdrawal is long past due.  In addition, the official number of wounded Americans is more than 33,000.  The toll on Iraqis was much greater - a minimum of 100,000 - 125,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invaded (Iraq Body Count website).  Some other estimates are much higher (e.g., Lancet/Johns Hopkins study on the "excessive" Iraqi deaths).  The total US price tag for the Iraq War will eventually reach 3 trillion dollars with the cost to other countries about the same order of magnitude (Stiglitz and Bilmes, Washington Post article).  For a good summary of Stiglitz and Bilmes analysis of the total cost of the war, see the 2008 article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian.

The Iraq War is the greatest US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.  It has immeasurably damaged the US reputation throughout the world.  It has damaged the world and national economy.  It was based on false intelligence and "sold" to a gullible and scared American public with deception, arrogance and lies.  Senator McCain, you have it completely wrong.  It was the neocons who misled the country into this unnecessary war of aggression and it is they, not the President who finally extracted us from Iraq, who will be judged most harshly by history.