{"id":48778,"date":"2024-08-03T06:18:55","date_gmt":"2024-08-03T14:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=48778"},"modified":"2024-08-03T06:18:55","modified_gmt":"2024-08-03T14:18:55","slug":"wars-that-never-should-have-been-fought-cannot-be-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/03\/wars-that-never-should-have-been-fought-cannot-be-won\/","title":{"rendered":"Wars That Never Should Have Been Fought Cannot Be Won"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

I wrote my first article for TomDispatch in 2007<\/a>, two years after I\u2019d retired from the military. That article was highly critical of the U.S. military and its disastrous war in Iraq. I wrote that we, the citizens of America, had to save the military from itself and its worst excesses. Sadly, we the people have been demobilized; we have no say about \u201cour\u201d military and its wars.<\/p>\n

In fact, while the Iraq and Afghan Wars are now officially over, both lost at enormous cost, we the people are still issuing blank checks to a Pentagon that is wildly if not fatally deluded and delusional.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Much like a black hole, the Pentagon keeps sucking in everything around it, especially taxpayer dollars<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Back in 2018, Tom Engelhardt, the creator, editor, and prime mover of TomDispatch, asked me to write a new introduction to my article from 2007. Here\u2019s that intro as I wrote it back then:<\/p>\n

Retiring from the U.S. military liberated my tongue, but I quickly learned few people were interested in what I had to say. In 2007, I was outraged by the way the Bush administration hid behind the richly bemedaled chest of General David Petraeus, using his testimony before a spineless Congress to evade responsibility for the catastrophic war in Iraq. I wrote an op-ed about how \u2018my\u2019 military was deluding itself not only into believing that it was the \u2018greatest\u2019 but that it could somehow find a formula to win an unwinnable war. I sent it to the usual suspects, newspapers like the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0and\u00a0Boston Globe, with no response. A friend then mentioned a website I\u2019d never heard of,\u00a0TomDispatch.com, and I found a man there who would listen: today\u2019s equivalent of I.F. Stone, Tom Engelhardt. What started as a one-off article led to 55 more \u2018Tomgrams\u2019<\/a><\/strong> over the last decade.<\/em><\/p>\n

In that very first post, I asked, \u2018How can you win someone else\u2019s civil war?\u2019 It\u2019s a question the U.S. military still avoids asking, let alone answering. Indeed, a state of what I then called \u2018ongoing self-delusion\u2019 about war persists in that military and American society as a whole. More than a decade later, its commanders continue to\u00a0mislead<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0themselves and the rest of us by speaking about \u2018new\u2019 approaches that promise \u2018progress\u2019 in places like Afghanistan.<\/em><\/p>\n

Who will teach the Pentagon that wars that never should have been fought cannot be won? Who will remind the American people that perpetual war abroad is the most insidious enemy to liberty and freedom at home? Members of the military, active duty and retired, need to\u00a0speak up<\/a><\/strong>. Our oath to the Constitution was never about saluting smartly and following blindly, but about allegiance to the noble ideals expressed in that document. William J. Astore, May 2018<\/em><\/p>\n

Since 2018, I\u2019ve written another fifty or so articles for TomDispatch, nearly all of them focusing on U.S. military folly and fallacies. It hasn\u2019t mattered. Both parties, Republicans and Democrats, profess their unconditional love of \u201cour\u201d troops, even as they\u2019ve shoved and shoveled trillions of dollars to the military-industrial-congressional complex, the all-powerful MICIMATT* that increasingly infects our lives and infests our society and culture.<\/p>\n

This November provides us another opportunity to go to the polls and allegedly vote for what we want. Most people want peace. The Republicans and Democrats offer us more war. Might I suggest that we vote for a person or party that actually seeks peace?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s highly unlikely we\u2019re going to vote ourselves out of the mess we\u2019re in. Look at the mainstream candidates! But at least we shouldn\u2019t vote for yet more insanity.<\/p>\n

*MICIMATT: military industrial congressional intelligence media academe think tank complex. To that you can now add Hollywood and the world of sports as well. Hercules had a much easier time vanquishing the hydra. It only had seven heads.<\/p>\n

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. I wrote my first article for TomDispatch in 2007, two years after I\u2019d retired from the military. That article was highly critical of the U.S. military and its disastrous war in Iraq. I wrote that we, the citizens of America, had to save the military from itself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-48778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Perpetual War Abroad Is the Most Insidious Enemy to Liberty and Freedom at Home"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48778"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48787,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48778\/revisions\/48787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48778"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=48778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}