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JOHN BECKETT

It's time to challenge wars' assumptions
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11/24/08 -- "And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop might be Tehran And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates. Ain't no time to wonder why. Whoopee! We're all gonna die."

My apologies to Country Joe McDonald for updating his lyrics slightly, but his Vietnam-era classic Fixing to Die Rag came to mind today while reading a New York Times package of seven op-ed columns on the challenges the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will pose for the Barack Obama administration. I didn't expect to find any outside-the-box thinking from authors like Donald Rumsfeld and Anthony Cordesman. But from seven opinions in such a prestigious paper, I didn't expect to find the near-unanimity these articles offered, either. There was very little op in these op-eds.

Conspicuous by its absence was any anti-war voice. Less than a month after American voters thoroughly repudiated George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin and their imperialistic, God's war cohorts, and despite polls showing that Americans are sick and tired of these wars, not one of the Times' seven writers questioned the legitimacy of either war.

So, allow me to raise the strategic question that goes unanswered because it never gets asked: Why are we waging these wars?

The Iraq war was discredited long ago, but based on improved security, an Iraqi government that proved to be a tougher negotiator than our brass expected, and Obama's campaign promises to withdraw from that conflict, it is now possible that we will have removed most of our armed forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Afghanistan is another matter. During his campaign, Obama pledged to increase troops there, a shrewd political tactic that allowed him to be both dove and hawk. But to borrow a point McCain unsuccessfully tried to use against Obama in one of the presidential debates, there is a difference between tactics and strategy. And it's time to ask, what strategy will be served by the tactic of sending more Americans to die in Afghanistan?

In other words, what do we hope to gain by continuing an Afghan war that increasingly is seen, even in military circles, as one we can't win?

Is it because our blood-lust for Bin Laden is so great that it won't be satisfied until we have sacrificed thousands of lives, of practically all nationalities, to kill or capture this one man? I can't believe we're naive enough to think that getting Bin Laden will end Muslim radicalism, which was around long before he was and is likely to stay around until three things happen: Middle Eastern countries become more democratic, Israelis treat Palesitnians like people, and the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam learn to coexist. In comparison to these issues, whether the United States ever "gets" Osama Bin Laden is practically meaningless.

Or maybe we stay under Colin Powell's doctrine of being responsible for what you break, which only sounds like it makes sense. Countries aren't bowls you drop at Pottery Barn, and war is the collapsed failure of responsibility. Diplomacy, at which Powell failed miserably, is the only sensible method for international relations and the only sensible solution in Afghanistan. As we have in Iraq, we now must negotiate with Afghanistan on when to withdraw our -- and NATO's -- forces.

Tactically, that will be much harder in Afghanistan because it is so big, so sparsely populated, so tribal, and so lacking in leadership and numbers on the pro-government side -- these latter two showing how poorly our military has done, for six years, at winning hearts and minds. After years of bombing wedding parties and causing a carnage of "collateral damage," increasing troops in Aghanistan is likely to increase only deaths on all sides.

In response to 9/11, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, which was more than a little like using a baseball bat to swat a fly. That invasion went so easily, if not successfully in the Bin Laden sense, that Bush couldn't stop there. And now, here we are, mired in two wars.

For what?

Don't kid yourself. We're in Iraq for oil, although however much we ultimately get from it will pale compared to the price we will have paid in lives, dollars, and our world image. We're in Afghanistan for pipeline routes to Caspian Sea oil that both we (meaning the U.S. and NATO) and Russia covet. Obtaining more oil is, and always has been, the main goal of these wars.

They've also been about "spreading democracy," a slogan-strategy about as applicable in the real world as Powell's Pottery Barn dictum, as if we are the 21st century's Johnny Appleseeds of freedom. The problem with this strategy is that democracy is not transplantable. Being the will of the people, it has to spring from the people. No matter how hard we try, no matter how pure our motives, we are not the people of Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor can we force them to become democratic, an inherent contradiction in terms that one suspects has yet to occur to George W. Bush.

What I found most upsetting about the seven pieces in the Times was the assumption among most of the authors that we can, and should, re-make the world in our image. Guess what? We can't. Nor should we presume to have such a right. We have a Department of Defense, and that's what it should be. Over the years -- and not just the last eight years -- we have allowed it to become strategically, economically, and morally offensive. That must stop, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan.