Yes, it would be funny if it weren’t so grim. After all, when it comes to squandering money and resources in strange and distant places (or even here at home), you can count on the practitioners of American-style war to be wildly over the top.
Why Don’t Iraqis and Afghans Embrace Democracy?
There are other reasons besides the bad example we set why states we occupy fail to jump through the U.S. democracy hoop.
Beating Swords Into Ploughshares
In last month’s blitzkrieg tour of Central and Southeast Asia, two of the four stops Secretary Clinton made share the unfortunate bond of enduring an invasion by U.S. air and ground forces. In the space of a few days, Clinton visited both Vietnam and Afghanistan, thus physically linking what had once been, and then what has now become the United States’ longest war. One of the more insidious links that tie these conflicts together was highlighted in a few of the news stories about Clinton’s trip. That link, in a word, is agribusiness.
Serial Denialists and the State of Permanent War
The refusal to face up to reality that the United States cannot succeed in Afghanistan, despite all evidence to the contrary, suggests that the political elite is desperately clinging to the American system of global military hegemony.
Whose Hands? Whose Blood? Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq
Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
Attempts by Petraeus to Turn Soldiers Into Boy Scouts Disingenuous at Best
Soldiers’ recent backlash against restraint in Afghanistan is the most recent example of the clash between the demands of counterinsurgency and conventional military culture.
Dismembering Afghanistan
Wars are rarely lost in a single encounter; Defeat is almost always more complex than that. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have lost the war in Afghanistan, but not just because they failed in the battle for Marjah or decided that discretion was the better part of valor in Kandahar. They lost the war because they should never have invaded in the first place; because they never had a goal that was achievable; because their blood and capital are finite.
The Opposite Game: All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
The WikiLeaks Documents Are NOT the Pentagon Papers 2.0
Even though we’re flooded with new information about Afghanistan — leaks, Rolling Stone features, et al — without the military draft, we have no hard incentive to enhance our knowledge.
Conceding Failure of Pentagon Papers Critical to WikiLeaks’ Success Ending War
It’s up to us to ensure that, in the wake of WikiLeaks, the war doesn’t last four more years like Vietnam did after the release of the Pentagon.