The Need to Stay Awake

You’ll hear a lot and see plenty of footage today about the 10^th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. I have no profundities to add. We did get rid of the not-so-nice guy that was running the country and helped establish a more-or-less stable democracy there -- some days more, others less.

Then we have to ask ourselves whether it was worth it. We may not like the answers we get, but the fact is, most of us slept through this war and are only waking up because the Afghan war is slowly ending. Thousands of American lives were lost. Most of the service members returning home have been damaged in some way.

While we may know someone, or know someone who knows someone, in a family that has been directly impacted by these conflicts, the blows were softened to the point where most of us felt almost no impact. No sacrifices were demanded of us. There was no rationing of rubber, paper or gasoline. We weren’t asked to buy bonds to pay for these wars. There was no draft, and many who served had to do it three or four times. Many weren’t young people – they were professionals, often from the ranks of public safety, who were doing the fighting.

During World War II, government did its best to keep us awake. It’s very cynical to say that in these modern conflicts, government almost prefers that we sleep, except maybe at holidays like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, or the opening ceremonies of the Super Bowl. As we wake up, it’s just like we’ve been in a hotel, and the management is shoving the bill under the door.

There will always be “good” wars and “bad” wars, necessary and unnecessary ones; they may even be fought with machines or devices instead of people. All the more reason we need to be awake – because there are always those who would prefer that we stay in bed.

But that bill will still be arriving in the morning.

Sorry Mess

Messrs. Romney and Santorum are off base when they fault the President for apologizing for the burning of the Qu’ran in Afghanistan.

Why must an apology automatically be considered an expression of weakness? Assuming that the burning was an accident, or even some kind of local policy decision (one version is that military authorities were concerned that copies of the Qu’ran were being used to spread messages), was it so wrong for the President to do what he did? In this case, the apology is as much “I feel your pain” as anything else. As children, did we – or our parents – never apologize for the grief we caused someone else – even when whatever we did to cause it seemed to be necessary?

Of course, there’s a much bigger issue here, and that’s religious hypersensitivity. It’s absolutely true that Muslims in Afghanistan are overreacting. There is no excuse for the the level of violence that has occurred, and as for apologies, we practically had to pry one out of the Afghan president with a crowbar. It calls into question what in God’s name (so to speak) we’re still doing in that country. We have two clear choices: stay there until the Taliban is wiped out – or leave.

But let me ask this: Is there a part of some of us that isn’t all that put out about the burning of the Qu’ran?

From my limited knowledge of the Bible, there’s little that upset Jesus (a Jew) more than religious intolerance. In one incident, he talked to a Samaritan woman at a well, and the woman was astonished, because the Jews “had no dealings” with the Samaritans, or weren’t supposed to. I’ve said often that religion has given God a bad name.

I’m just about convinced that this century isn’t going to end without Crusades II. Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten who won the first round.

Choose Your Words

In a recent post, a fellow blogger I know expressed concern about “defeatist” Democrats in Congress who favored a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. Personally, I don’t care for terminology like “victory” and “defeat” in the kinds of conflicts we find ourselves involved in today. Even “mission accomplished” has a bad sound now.

When it comes to Afghanistan, it seems to me there are two reasonable goals. The little one is whacking Osama bin Laden. I’ve heard all the arguments about how Al-Qaeda is a hydra-headed entity and that taking him out wouldn’t accomplish anything. I disagree. Such an act would have a tremendous symbolic impact around the world. Of course, it would have had a much greater impact if we’d done it in, say, 2002.

This can be done with relatively few operatives. When the Israelis want to track down international terrorists who have done bad things to them, they put teams together, send them into whatever countries their targets are living in, kidnap them or kill them, and apologize for it later (if they even bother).

The big goal in the region is keeping the terrorists away from the nukes in Pakistan, and the question is, how do you do that? Is it by nation-building in Afghanistan – or should we really be nation-building in Pakistan – or both?

So how many troops does it take to destroy the terrorist elements in those places and help stabilize the governments involved? I’m no military strategist, but based on what’s happened historically, the U.S. is not going to accomplish these ends with 10,000 or 20,000 more troops. This is a commitment that would seem to involve hundreds of thousands – a Vietnam-level commitment at least.

And as I’ve said before, if you really want to go to war, the whole country has to be involved – basically every American family – and that involves re-instituting the draft. It’s not fair to be sending the same people over for five our six tours. With a draft, if the President and Congress really wanted to fight a war, they’d have to bring the country with them.

I don’t envy the President having to make a decision about how to proceed. But instead of dealing with “victory” and “defeat” and all the emotional baggage packed into those terms, I hope he works with colder terms like “cost-benefit ratio.

In the end, “victory” means, to me at least, that we can answer yes to the question, “Are we safe now?”