My progressive friend out west got me to laughing … and thinking … with his not unexpected Veterans’ Day rant on Facebook about the dangers of the military industrial complex … quoting Dwight Eisenhower, who was right and wrong, but is cited by progressives whenever they want to blame the military and the defense budget for not funding all the entitlements programs they want.
He contends that pretty much all of conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in his adult life have not been “good wars.” I can accept that.
You know why I can accept that? For two reasons:
First, he is entitled to his opinion and that opinion can be as wrong as I think it is, but it is still his view and he can have it. That is why I was associated with the U.S. military for 26 years, so he could have his views.
Second, there ain’t no thing as a “good” war. Nope, there are only dirty ugly violent destructive deadly horrendous conflicts that if you are lucky you can end rather quickly with a minimum of the aforementioned consequences.
He told me I should have learned something when I was dual-hatting all those years I spent in the military, military reserve and as a Department of the Army civilian employee. Well, I would say to my friend, I did … over and over and over again.
What did I learn? Well a number of things.
First, Freedom is not free. It comes at a pretty high price. Not just in national treasure and blood, but work and effort and doing things because they have to be done, not because you want to do them or you like to do them.
Second, I learned that there truly are evil and nasty people out there in the world. And while I do believe that most people would just rather go along to get along and live and let live, there is a substantial minority that doesn’t see the world that way.
Some of those people, I do believe, honestly believe that they are just doing things to make things better for others (for whatever reason or cause). The rest, they are just evil. Sorry, but there are really bad people in the world and they really are there.
How do I know that? Well, unfortunately, I have seen their torture chambers (and ours are nothing like them). I have read enough reports and interviewed enough people who saw much worse than I did, to understand that there are some people who do things that just defy my imagination (and I bet my progressive friend’s too)
Now, I know the sacrifices that service men and women of each generation make. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt as the expression goes … because I too have made some of those sacrifices and incurred my own burdens from that service. Granted, like most of my life, I think I had it fairly easy … compared to the real Hades that many of my comrades, predecessors and successors went through.
I learned enough to validate the view I had in high school: War is a really dirty, ugly, nasty business and the best thing is to avoid it, or at least get it over as quickly as you can. Unfortunately, sometimes the path of violence is the only solution.
In those cases, to me anyway, a portion of the Weinberger/Powell doctrine applies: If you have to fight a war, then you don’t do halfway measures. You bring the biggest baddest force you can and you end the war quickly … anything else is a crime and a travesty. Unfortunately, in places like Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, the folks who planned the operation forgot that little maxim. That is why the aftereffects were so disappointing.
For example, I had no problem with kicking some Iraqi butt in 2003. The list of reasons for the Saddam Hussein regime to go was long and very verified. I thought we were about 12 years too late, but then I understood we didn’t have the same legal footing to stand on that we did in 2003. Not to refight the argument, but yes, there was ample legal footing for the invasion to proceed and with UN Sanction … and yes there were weapons of mass destruction found, and the capability and facilities to produce more, only not in the quantities anticipated. (Of course, when even the bad guys think they have them, it is hard not to believe them).
I had no problem with kicking some Taliban butt, for that matter.
Unfortunately, after World War II, the U.S. set a bad precedent. We tried to rebuild what we spent so much smashing … because that is what you do in wars – you smash things and you break them and you kill people.
Well, rather than just do the job, we Americans think the better idea is to stick around and help the smashed pick up the pieces. Unfortunately, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan (under the Cheney/Rumsfeld Doctrine) we went in a light as possible to do the job, but not heavy enough to emphasize that times had changed. We also really didn’t know what we were doing when it comes to rebuilding South Asian nations, so we really stepped on it.
So, have I learned anything from that experience? Yup. It is called don’t fight a war unless you really truly want to win it and then you fight it with everything you got and as violently as you can until the other side hollers “Uncle” and one of your guys is standing over the other guys with a bayonet on the end of his rifle and saying rather emphatically: It is over now, ya hear?
However, I didn’t learn that sitting behind our moats will protect us from anything and that the bad guys will be content with that.
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