Neocons Agitating for More Victory-Free Wars, Again

What a shock.

If Donald Trump doesn’t take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2021, one principal but little-noted reason for this may be that he crossed one of the most powerful and least accountable forces in the nation: the military-industrial complex. As Trump said last September, "the top people in the Pentagon...want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we're getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing." Now, however, that Joe Biden has been anointed "President-elect" by the establishment media, the propaganda is already starting to get us back into one of those endless wars, in Syria.

We learned just recently that we never really left Syria in the first place. As Victoria Taft noted at PJ Media Friday, President Trump’s former special envoy for Syria, Never-Trumper Jim Jeffrey, has boasted that he circumvented Trump's orders to withdraw American troops from Syria by lying to the president. Jeffrey explained: "We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there," and "the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is 'a lot more than' the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019."

What the Masters of War have in mind, however, is a far greater commitment of American troops than even Jeffrey's shell game allows for. After all, how else are they going to keep happy "all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes"?

More at the link.

At the Federalist, a call for the final act of Trump's first term to be pulling the US out of all of its endless quagmires.

In a recent memo advocating a swift U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller gave shape to the fundamental political stand of the Trump administration--realism and restraint.

"We are not a people of perpetual war -- it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought. All wars must end," the memo read. This comes after a rapid purge in the last couple of weeks, in which President Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark Esper and replaced him with Miller in what was termed by the leftist media as a takeover of the Pentagon by the National Counterterrorism Center.

Trump also appointed Col. Douglas Macgregor to be a senior adviser at the Pentagon. Macgregor is a fierce opponent of endless wars, and previously nominated to be the ambassador to Germany, but was not yet confirmed.

This has the potential to conclude America's longest and perhaps most pointless of military engagements. While the idea was to decimate al-Qaeda and punish the Taliban, that was over by 2005. By the time of the surge in 2007, the overall war had morphed into a nation-building process with a sunk cost fallacy.

...

In a New York Times interview, Ruger was quoted saying, "The president has had difficulty finding personnel who would faithfully execute on his preferences," adding that now is the last chance for Trump to cement his legacy and stand for what he believed during his campaigning: ending fruitless wars.

That article notes that progressive Democrats -- who once claimed Bush was Hitler and "lying us into war" -- are now claiming that Trump's determination to end foreign quagmires is "one last favor to Putin."

My, how things change.

My own opinions on this have shifted. I was pro-war. I still am pro-war on some level.

But I am pro wars that end in victory.

For whatever reasons, the US doesn't seem in the business of fighting wars that end in victory anymore. We're now in the business of fighting wars that end in defeat or at best in stalemate, and fighting those literally forever.

We are now entering the second generation of occupation and nation-building in Afghanistan. The second generation.

We're actually well into the second generation, rather than merely starting the second generation, if you define a generation as fifteen years, as we do sometimes.

Anyone under 21 years old has literally never known a day when the US was not in Afganistan.

Our failure to "win" per any plausible definition is not a license for continuing to stay in Afghanistan -- it is, rather, a call to realistically redefine what is possible in Afghanstian.

Nation-building this savage shithole into a western pluralistic liberal democracy is not possible -- period. And to waste another American life or limb in pursuit of pipedream fantasia is a vicious sin.

We are killing our boys for nothing.

I favored war in Iraq because I did not want to see, as one critic called it, another 20 years of Clinton-style "maintenance bombing," in which we just occasionally send cruise missiles and B-52s to let Iraq know: Stop or we will bomb you worse.

I didn't want that policy to continue. I wanted to have Peace Once and For All.

But there is no such thing as Peace Once and For All. That is a childish fantasy. As Patton told fourth graders just after World War II: "You are the soldiers and nurses in the next war. And there will be another war. There always has been."

So the choice is not between conflict and Peace Once and For All. The latter doesn't exist. There will always be conflict.

The choice is between conflict at a relatively low cost ("maintenance bombing") and conflict with a high cost (a full generation of pointless bloody nation building for primitive savages).

War is an evil. It can be a necessary evil, and a justifiable evil, when that evil leads to the longer-term betterment of the world and for our own national interest.

But where there is no long-term betterment, and no national interest being advanced, than that necessary evil is unnecessary, and war is simply evil.

We are killing our own men for no fucking reason -- apart from sparing some old men who have constantly made poor decisions from having to show the courage of admitting their errors.

Our foreign policy "Wise Men" are not wise.

They are merely creatures of habit, sad, cowardly men who find comfort in the status quo.

And the status quo consists of Americans dying for no reason at all.

Especially not the Virtue Signaling Neocons like Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney -- men whose records are impeccably clean of any prior military service.

But oh! Give them a chance to tell them how Virtuous it is for other (better) men to die in war! Give them a chance to show how Good and Nobel they are to waste the lives of other (better) men while never risking so much as a hangnail in defense of their supposed Moral Imperatives.

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah thinks that the U.S. needs to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, stating that even after 20 years of a military presence there, “conditions for withdrawal have not been met.”

"The decision to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and potentially elsewhere should not be based on a U.S. political calendar," Romney said in a statement. "The Administration has yet to explain why reducing troops in Afghanistan--where conditions for withdrawal have not been met--is a wise decision for our national security interests in the region."

Twenty years. Twenty fucking years.

An entire generation spent fighting a war for, what? To achieve victory?

No they gave up on that in 2008. We're now fighting, it seems, to achieve "conditions for withdrawal."

Say wasn't that what we were allegedly fighting for in Vietnam from 1968 to 1974?

You know, Vietnam is still a painful memory for Americans.

But how long were we there? From 1963 to 1974 -- just eleven years.

But we've been in Afghanistan for twenty -- and Mitt Romney, a man who has never spent a minute in uniform, a man who has taught his children and grandchildren to avoid military service as he did, says we have to spend another ten or twenty years in Afghanistan.

To achieve "conditions for withdrawal."

We do not fight wars to achieve "conditions for withdrawal," you cowardly monster, and we do not fight wars to show your Virtue and Moral Courage in sending other (better) men to their deaths.

The conditions for withdrawal are achieved: Those conditions are "fighting for twenty years with no plausible victory condition in mind."

How about these craven chickenhawks and ludicrous strutting Moral Peacocks write about The Conservative Case for Peace for one fucking time in their cowardly, no-military-service lives?

19 As a Moron noted, there are men dying in Afghanistan that weren't born when the war started. Posted by: G'rump928(C)

posted by Ace at 05:08 PM

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