So the assumptions of the last 60 years are over — and not just because of the cost. If America’s responsible for 43 percent of global military expenditure, why doesn’t it feel like that? Why does the United States get so little bang for the buck? It is two-thirds of a century since this country won a war (and please don’t bother writing in to say what about Grenada? or Panama?). In the days after 9/11, many Bush-administration officials assured us that this time it would be different, and even liberals believed them. A decade later, Washington can’t wait to get the hell out of the Hindu Kush, and the day after they do it will be as if they never set foot on that benighted sod. Illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer have tied down the hyperpower for twice as long as it took America to win the Second World War. Something is wrong with this picture.
Ron Paul says he would pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan “as quickly as the ships could get there.” Afghanistan is a landlocked country, but hey, that’s just the kind of boring foreign trivia we won’t need to bother with once we’re safely holed up in Fortress America. To those who dissent from this easy and affordable solution to America’s woes, the Paul campaign likes to point out that it receives more money from America’s men in uniform than anybody else. According to the Federal Election Commission, in the second quarter of 2011, Ron Paul got more donations from service personnel than all other Republican candidates combined plus President Obama. Not unreasonably, serving soldiers are weary of unwon wars — of going to war with everything except war aims and strategic clarity. I would hazard that the recent video of U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses is a coarser comment on the same psychosis, and the folly of fighting a determined and murderous enemy by distributing to your officers bulk orders of that charlatan’s bestseller Three Cups of Tea. There is a logical progression from three cups of sweet tea to those acts of micturition that the Pentagon would do well to ponder.
With characteristic timidity, Mitt Romney says that as commander-in-chief his Afghan strategy would be determined by the “commanders in the field.” More tea and sympathy! But a lazy deference to the inviolability of the present arrangements for another two-thirds of a century of unwon wars will not suffice. I am in favor of a leaner, meaner military — emphasis on both adjectives. A broke America will perforce wind up with the first. But, if we want the second, the foreign-policy Right will have to make a better case than it has this primary season. |