What Washington Refuses To Admit
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/11/12/what-washington-refuses-to-admit/
Nov 12 2014 @ 8:24pm
Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two
long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We
lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of
the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war
and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were
complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the
only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent
US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni
insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The
Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in
all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as
well. The president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war
– effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human
rights.
These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so
many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or
bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a
consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes
again. To protect its own self-regard, Washington’s elite is prepared to send
young Americans to fight in a war they cannot win and indeed have already lost.
You see the blinding myopia elsewhere: Washington’s refusal to release the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture merely proves that it cannot
face the fact that some of the elite are war criminals tout simple, and that
these horrific war crimes have changed America’s role in the world.
What infuriated me about the decision to re-start the
Iraq War last August – by a president explicitly elected not to do any such
thing – was its arrogance, its smugness, and its contempt for what this
country, and especially its armed forces, went through for so many long years
of quagmire and failure. Obama and his aides revealed that their commitment to
realism and not to intervene in Syria could be up-ended on a dime – and a war
initiated without any debate in Congress, let alone a war authorization. They
actually believed they had the right to re-start the Iraq War – glibly tell us
it’s no big deal – tell us about it afterwards, and then ramp up the numbers of
combat forces on the ground to early Vietnam levels . . .
. . . the leadership in both parties cannot help
themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don’t
like happening in the world. If they can actually decide to intervene in a
civil war to suppress an insurgency they couldn’t fully defeat even with
100,000 troops in the country, without any direct threat to national security,
they can do anything. Worse, our political culture asks no more of them. The
Congress doesn’t want to take a stand, the public just wants beheadings-induced
panic satiated by a pliant president (who is then blamed anyway), and the
voices that need to be heard – the voices of those who fought and lost so much
in Iraq – are largely absent.
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