Perpetual war
Back in September, when President Obama announced his military mission against the terrorists who call themselves the Islamic State, I
wrote that military missions don't creep anymore, they accelerate toward disaster:
So, the plan is to bomb the terrorists, which almost certainly will only make things worse, to rely on local forces who are reportedly making a deal with the terrorists not to fight each other so they can all focus on fighting the Syrian government, and to keep in the back pocket the possibility of using ground troops. Just in case they become necessary. In the far off future somewhere. Just in case this plan of bombing, making things worse, and relying on local forces who have an entirely different agenda somehow doesn't work out.
And it gets even worse, because the history of sending arms to local forces has not been a pretty one. Many of the nearly quarter million small arms sent to Afghanistan are missing and unaccounted for. The terrorists in Syria and Iraq already have been winning battles by using captured American weapons, and now there will be even more American weapons for them to capture, from forces supposedly friendly to the U.S. but who are not themselves intent on fighting the same enemy the administration wants them to fight. Even the CIA thinks the idea of arming Syrian rebels is doomed to fail. More people will needlessly die, billions of more dollars will be wasted, and the bad guys inevitably will end up with more American-made weapons. And the neocons will demand an escalation. And the traditional media will back them. And the American generals already are contemplating American troops on the ground, if this impossible plan with impossible goals somehow proves unsuccessful.
When has a U.S. military incursion in the region ever proved successful? The Bush war in Iraq led directly to the current crisis. Thirteen years after it started, and despite two escalations from the Obama administration, the Bush war in Afghanistan remains a persistent failure. The effort in Syria was failed from the start, and with more money and more arms will only get worse. President Obama continues to choose his words very carefully, when discounting the possibility of using ground troops, but he still hasn't explained how a bombing campaign while relying on local forces to fight on the ground somehow will succeed where previous such efforts have failed. It will get worse. As will the politics. Blowback is coming. In the Middle East and in the United States.
Of course, I hoped I would be proven wrong. And of course, the military contractors immediately began
cashing in. Now we have
this:
A mere six months after military operations began against the Islamic State, the White House today formally requested that Congress authorize military operations against the Islamic State. The full text of the resolution proposed by the Obama administration is right here.
Some Democrats criticized the proposal as too broad and too vague. They are right. Several critics I spoke to note that, in its current form, at least, it would not only do little to limit Obama right now, but could also leave the next president with enormous war-making latitude — whether he or she is a Democrat or a Republican.
More over the fold.
From a process standpoint, this is actually a respectable move. The president isn't trying something surreptitious and underhanded, and he isn't trying to circumvent or deceive Congress. He's asking for authorization, and he's asking that it be deliberately vague, and therefore open-ended. Except for that ostensible timetable. And speaking of timetables, and speaking of Afghanistan, on the same day that this new request for a war authorization was reported, we also learned this:
The Obama administration is considering slowing its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan for the second time, according to U.S. officials, a sign of the significant security challenges that remain despite an end to the U.S. and NATO combat mission there.
Under the still-evolving plans, Army Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, could be given greater latitude to determine the pace of the drawdown in 2015 as foreign forces scramble to ensure Afghan troops are capable of battling Taliban insurgents on their own, the officials said.
Because as we continue to learn about new plans for new or expanded or extended military missions, it's obvious that the nation's leaders aren't learning anything. First came the 2009
Obama Afghanistan surge of 17,000 troops. Later that year, 14,000
more combat troops were sent to replace non-combat troops. Before the year was out, and despite earlier
denials, yet
another Obama Afghanistan surge added another 30,000 American troops to the war, although this with an ostensible withdrawal date of 2011 that already was
transparently not what some thought it was. Because
none of these surges worked. The war just kept
dragging on. And even the military declared the surges a
failure. And as the 2011 withdrawal date became a 2014 withdrawal date, even that was
not what it seemed. And now the 2015 drawdown is proving not what it seemed, apparently because there needs to be assurances that Afghan troops will be capable of doing what they have never proved capable of doing, no matter how many American troops have been sent to Afghanistan, no matter how much money has been sent to Afghanistan, and no matter how many of these timetables have proved to have no time limits whatsoever. But now we're going to play the same game in Syria and Iraq and anywhere else the terrorists known as ISIL/ISIS may be claimed to be found.
As I wrote last June, we cannot win an already lost war. And however good and noble his intentions may have been, President Obama inherited lost wars, and there was nothing he could have done to save them. But no matter how many American troops he sends to these already lost wars, no matter how much money he sends, and no matter how many timetables are established only to prove not to have been time limits at all, President Obama and his team still don't seem to have figured out that however good and noble their intentions, they inherited lost wars, and there was nothing they could have done, and there is nothing they can do, to save them. Which brings us back to the new request for a new authorization to use military force.
The process is respectable, but the policy is not. The three-year timetable puts the nebulous end game in the lap of the next president, in the lead-up to a mid-term election. Which means it will be highly politicized. And we know how well the politics of war plays in an election year. Even worse is the lack of specificity in the request. There is no stated goal. There is no metric for what would need to be accomplished for the troops to leave. The closest things to specificity is this:
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized, subject to the limitations in subsection (c), to use the Armed Forces of the United States as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate against ISIL or associated persons or forces as defined in section 5.
Section 5 says this:
In this joint resolution, the term "associated persons or forces" means individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside ISIL or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.
Which could mean just about anyone anywhere, as the president determines. And given how these terrorist groups morph and evolve, ISIL/ISIS itself having birthed
under the noses of American guards at an American-run prison in Iraq out of previous amorphous opposition groups, there never will be a lack of potential "closely-related successor" entities. And the ostensible limitations in subsection (c) are similarly no limitations at all.
The authority granted in subsection (a) does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations.
But how about an endless series of ostensibly distinct temporary ground operations? And what is an offensive operation, when the series of opening clauses in the request is replete with rationalizations such as:
Whereas the United States is working with regional and global allies and partners to degrade and defeat ISIL, to cut off its funding, to stop the flow of foreign fighters to its ranks, and to support local communities as they reject ISIL
And:
Whereas the United States has taken military action against ISIL in accordance with its inherent right of individual and collective self-defense
Given that the entire operation is being defined as defensive in nature, pretty much anything can be defined as helping to degrade and defeat in accordance with that definition. The goal is to degrade and defeat ISIL, but what does that even mean? Can ISIL be defeated without its being rooted out of its
Sunni Triangle Iraq
stronghold? And even if there were a clear definition of ISIL being defeated, are not successor entities inevitable? Does anyone actually believe there ever will be a dearth of armed Sunni opponents of Iraq's Shia- or Kurd-dominated governments, or armed theocratic opponents of the Syrian government that just a year and a half ago the United States was
considering attacking? How
many more
times must
Fallujah be
devastated and at what
civilian cost?
The Bush Iraq war led to the creation of ISIL. The Bush Afghanistan war still hasn't ended, and no end is in sight. And now the Obama administration is asking Congress to authorize yet another amorphous war, with no clear enemy, no clear borders, no clear metric of success, and a timetable that is as realistic as are all war timetables. The United States is very good at getting into wars. It's not so good at ending them or getting out of them. The only costs are money, environmental degradation, human lives, and our national soul. President Obama is doing the right thing by going to Congress, to request authorization. Congress must do the right thing and tell him no.