The Longest War

The Liar in Chief addressed the nation on Monday night to talk about his new strategy in Afghanistan, which is the same as the old strategy, but with fewer details. Here are a couple of the things he said that I felt I had to respond to:

“When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry and no tolerance for hate.”

No, Mr. President, that is not true. Too many people who call themselves patriots are prejudiced, bigoted, and hateful. You, sir, are one of the greatest examples of this. When you said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, when you encouraged people not to trust their Muslim neighbors, when you call women fat or ugly, and call residents of our great American cities thugs and drug addicts, when you say that a war hero who endured torture on behalf of our nation is not heroic because he was captured, you show quite clearly that patriotism is not a cure for prejudice, bigotry, and hate. 

“Let us make a simple promise to the men and women we ask to fight in our name, that when they return home from battle, they will find a country that has renewed the sacred bonds of love and loyalty that unite us together as one.”

These words sounds so lofty and uplifting, Mr. President, but coming out of your mouth they smell like dog droppings and reveal you as a hypocrite. Sir, you make the promise first. You promise that you will be loyal to the American people above your loyalty to your business interests around the world, to your family who may have broken laws in order get help from the Russians to get you elected, and to your friends and supporters who may have done the same. We know from former FBI Director James Comey that when you use the word loyalty, you mean a willingness to overlook morality and ethics in order pay fealty to you, we know from your use of the word loyalty in referring to some of the people who helped you get elected who you later fired and called losers that loyalty only extends in one direction as far as you are concerned—towards you. As to love? We see no evidence that you understand the word. Here are some things you profess to love: war, Wikileaks, fighting banks (which I suppose means welshing on your debts, not making sure banks are regulated to protect us), women (ummm…Access Hollywood?), the old days, buying a building, Mexico (yes, really, you said that), China (yep, that too). 

“When I became president, I was given a bad and very complex hand. But I fully knew what I was getting into, big and intricate problems. But one way or another, these problems will be solved. I’m a problem solver. And in the end, we will win.”

We know you too well by now to swallow your lies and excuses or to believe your promises. When you ran for president you never tired of blaming everyone else for the problems that the U.S. faces around the world, but you continually told us that solving them would be easy. You claimed to have secret plans to destroy ISIS “very quickly, very fast.” Earlier in this same speech, you admit that your instinct was to pull out of Afghanistan, but you studied it, you said, “in great detail and from every conceivable angle.” And now you’ve decided, as you apparently did in relation to ISIS as well, to basically follow the same plan Obama and his generals laid out for you. Except you think being secretive about how many troops you might send and for how long you might keep them there is going to make a tremendous difference. Oh, yes, and you’re making another promise you can’t keep, that in the end “we will win.” You’d be better off, sir, to acknowledge what most world leaders understand: no one wins in war, and it’s likely to be very tough and in the end, there are no guarantee things will get better for the Afghan people no matter how much time and money we spend fighting there.

“We will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society. We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.”

I have a question. If we don’t care how other countries govern, why don’t we just leave Afghanistan and let the chips fall where they may? Why should we care who governs if we don’t care how? If the Taliban take over and decide to make women cover themselves from head to toe and chop heads off anyone who complains, so what? Why did you threaten Venezuela recently? Who cares if Maduro starves his people? Or the Cubans for that matter? Why do you care if they throw dissidents in jail? You don’t seem to care that Duterte is murdering his people in the Philippines. You praise him for solving the drug problem by shooting drug dealers without a trial. Oh, and Putin, Russia. What exactly are the criteria for being a friend of the United States of Trump? Is it merely promising not to directly attack our “homeland?” Or does it have something to do with whether we’re allowed to sell things in your country? Or perhaps whether or not you’re willing to open a Trump hotel or golf course? And what does this mean that you also said on Monday night: “As the prime minister of Afghanistan has promised, we are going to participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us.” Seriously, what does that mean? Is that like, we’re going to go into one of the poorest countries in the world and try to make money off them to pay us back for helping them? Is that money going to the U.S. government or to your cronies? I’ve got an idea, how about heroin? Let’s help them grow poppies, make heroin, and then sell it back to them! Ever heard of the Opium Wars? No, I’m not talking about gang fights in Chinatown.

“And we must achieve an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the enormous price that so many have paid.”

I’ve heard these words before from a man who was President when I was just turning draft age in 1969. “Peace with honor,” Nixon said. Then he proceeded to bomb the bejeezus out of North Vietnam in addition to Laos and Cambodia because they were offering safe harbor to the rebel fighters. In the end, some five years later, with tens of thousands more Americans dead or maimed and who knows how many southeast Asians, we left with our tails between our legs and Nixon resigned. Let’s get to the resignation part sooner this time. 

What have we Learned Since September 11, 2001

On the Monday following September 11, 2014, I visited what used to be called "Ground Zero", and now is called the 9-11 Memorial and Museum. In 2001, I was in New York during the Christmas break and made my way down to the smoking remains of the twin towers. I smelled the acrid air; I saw the fences around St. Paul's Chapel covered with photos, flowers, missing persons signs--the jutting remains of the iron skeleton like a massive tombstone. Like almost all Americans, I felt anger, sadness, and a sense of wonder and confusion about the vulnerability we had to acknowledge our way of life allowed. I also tussled with the question so many asked, "Why do they (so many in the Muslim world) hate us?" knowing that it was wrapped up in our support of Israel (a country that I support while not agreeing with all of its policies), our support of Arab dictators who kept our oil supply flowing, our way of life, so enticing and yet so evil in the eyes of all religious fundamentalists – not just Muslim.  How would we balance freedom and security?

I understood and supported our attack on Afghanistan, as did many of our allies who sent troops or other resources. After all, the Taliban government there was supporting and protecting our attacker, Al Qaida, which threatened many civilized nations. I did not realize, however, that our attack would mean we would spend more than a decade fighting there. By the time the Bush administration was gearing up to go to war in Iraq, I was highly suspicious of the motives and veracity of the Bush administration’s claims. I couldn't help but agree that Sadaam Hussein was a vicious tyrant, but should the United States be in the business of going to war, preemptively, to remove every dictator who might pose a threat to us?

Coming up out of the subway thirteen years later our troops are still in Afghanistan and the possibility exists that when these troops leave, the Taliban or a corrupt dictator will return to power there. And with President Obama announcing a new campaign against ISIS, a vicious extremist group now establishing a terrorist stronghold straddling Iraq and Syria, I was moved to ask myself what we have learned.

Most of us have learned that we shouldn’t invade every country with terrorists or leaders who may pose a threat. We might be able to invade and conquer, but then we end up having to support them: “You break it, you bought it,” General Colin Powell warned before we went into Iraq.  And our ability to win hearts and minds after destroying a country is limited. Our ability to help countries solve centuries old tribal and sectarian grievances is also limited.

President Obama tells us he’s learned that we can and must fight and destroy terrorist networks that threaten us wherever they are in the world. But we’ve learned that the job of distinguishing between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” is not so easy. Actually, it never has been. Ronald Reagan helped strengthen Al Qaida by supporting the Afghani “freedom fighters” who drove out the Soviet Union. We supported and armed Sadaam Hussein in his wars against Iran. The elected leader of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite, sowed the seeds of ISIS success there by marginalizing and discriminating against Iraq’s Sunnis.

Americans want their president to be tough and strong in response to threats. Everyone recognized ISIS was dangerous, but the beheading of two American journalists made them our enemies: mass murders, rapes, stonings, kidnappings, and various other war crimes against Syrians and Iraqis were not enough for most of us to want to take action. But fighting them in Syria is likely to help the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad. Some fear we will end up with “boots on the ground,” and some think we should send troops now.

Before 9/11/2001, I, and most Americans, did not know the words Sunni and Shiite. We did know that Iran was Shiite, that there was a Shiite majority in Iraq ruled by an elitist and often brutal Sunni majority led by Sadaam Hussein, that the Saudis protected, funded, and exported an extremist Islamic group called Wahhabis, who had spawned Osama Bin Laden. And not knowing all that, many of us believed the fantasies that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney spun that establishing democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan would be as simple as scheduling an election. And when the Arab Spring began, we allowed ourselves to believe that democracies were bound to flower when dictators were forced aside through mass demonstrations.

We have learned that the world is much more complicated and much less predictable than we wish it were. Too many of us yearn for the simplicity of the black and white world Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush painted. We don’t like the honesty in the shades of grey that Obama has acknowledged is what exists. But in the long run, and it appears that it will be a long run, acknowledging those shades of grey may save us red (blood) and green (treasure).

So what was it like to visit the 9-11 Museum and Memorial? The Memorial on the plaza above the museum is a peaceful shrine, the names of the dead engraved in marble bannisters surrounding waterfalls endlessly pouring into the deep holes of the footprints of the twin towers. The museum is a testimonial and a history, a reminder for those of us who lived through this time, a chance for those who didn’t to get a sense of what those who did saw and heard that day and in the days following. I won’t say you must go, for some it may prove too difficult to relive those times, but having visited, I am reminded that war is traumatic in a way that newspapers and TV can’t convey. We experienced an act of war on our soil in 2001 that killed almost 3,000 innocent Americans, setting us on a path to actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now Syria. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed or wounded at the hands of our military and at the hands of those fighting us or each other.  The fact that we try not to kill innocents does not seem to count for much. Beautiful memorials and expensive museums will probably not be built for them. But the memories of our role will not be easily forgotten.

a shortened version of this essay was published in the Charleston Gazette on Oct. 15, 2014: http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20141015/ARTICLE/141019604/1134