Ramblings

It seems the older I get, the less enamored I am of war. I spent nearly 40 years in the military and served in Korea and Vietnam. I understand why we invaded Afghanistan, but somewhere we lost sight of our mission. It happened when we decided to invade Iraq. I can understand the first Gulf War, but am still trying to understand why we thought it was our job to remove Saddam Hussein. I know we were told about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and that Iraq was a hotbed of terrorism. Neither one of these proved to be true once we invaded. Yet we persist. Now, however, our invasion has created one of the largest schools of terroism in the world. We have added to the radicalization of Islam and yet we don't seem to be aware of that.

We have spent five years in Afghanistan and Iraq and now it has been revealed that we have no plan for victory in either place. The old USSR spent something like nine years in Afghanistan and finally left with their tail between their legs. How many years will we stay? President Hamid Karzai controls little more than Kabul; warlords control the rest of the country. Poppy farming and opium production are at an all time high--all on our watch. Sectarian violence continues and now the Taliban and al Qaeda have figured out that by linking together, they have more power than they have ever had. Suicide bombings are on the increase and we want to increase the number of forces we have in Afghanistan. But do we have a plan for them?

I surely don't know the answer or I would have provided it long ago. We can only hope that the upcoming national election will provide the necessary leadership to find an honorable way out of both of these places.

Perhaps George Santyana summed it up best:

"It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.” —The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, Scribner's, 1905, p. 82