I thought I would be able to take the comfortable, protected view of evaluating twenty years later whether going to war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq was a good idea. My view in those early years, not always as clearly stated as I would like because I kept getting distracted into in-the-moment debates, was that it is difficult for the citizen to know whether the moral justification is adequate, and so I allowed that there is actually a fairly low threshold for moral justification. The difficulty is going to be the practical justification: Is this wise? One would think that I would be the reverse of this, but conflicts between nations have an iceberg quality to them, and few can see whether the reasons below the surface have validity. There are perhaps a very few things that are visible to all, such as whether one country is currently actively causing harm to another, and perhaps if they are an imminent danger. Also, it is usually clear if one country is entering another country. Beyond that, the breaking of treaties, the economic harm, often quite extensive but quite deniable, the history of trustworthiness, the encouragement of behind-the-scene allies - all these are very hard to quantify.
But the wisdom of war can often be fairly simple: what do we have to spend, what do we hope to gain? It is not only politicians who prefer to engage in moral posturing instead, picking out selected aspects to stir up the populace, it is actually all of us. All the newspapers, TV channels, magazines, podcasters, and bloggers all mark out their space and then defend it, like birds chirping to notify others of their territory and willingness to defend it. I complained bitterly that we seemed unable to even get to that question in the early 2000s. (Humorously, I originally wrote "early 200s" and was quickly corrected. But that too. Becoming emperor usually ended in murder or execution, and one has to wonder if they ever stopped to consider whether it was worth it, simply as a practical matter. It is always the main question of war that the citizen might actually have some insight on.)
I said at the time that we would not know whether it was worth it, even in 20 years. The almost universal view now that neither war was worth it is actually a red flag that we are now overlooking major things because of the current cultural and electoral climate. That it was 80% approved of in 2003 was a bad sign. That it is 80% disapproved of now is an equally bad sign. It is not a discussion for another day, but for another decade or two more, and even then...what do we think of the Thirty Years War now? Opinions still vary widely on whether the French Revolution was a good thing.
It comes up, of course, because of Ukraine and the possibility of our increasing our assistance there. The moral justification is pretty straightforward: Russia's claim that Ukraine is just Russia is insane, and their perceived need to protect themselves is understandable, but in this case it's uh, not their country that they are trying to make do things. Plus lots of us know Ukrainians and like them. Politicians like to focus on these sorts of issues.
OTOH it means supporting dangerous fascist/mafia bastards, especially in Eastern Ukraine. So we get into the ambiguity of that iceberg, and what that massive amount of ice is built from.
Again, I think the citizen has a hard time knowing enough to sort this out. We not only have prejudices and poor news sources, we also don't even know a lot of the backchannel info the leaders and people who do business there know. We can't.
Yet the citizen can still get a pretty good grasp on "What is this going to cost?" (Multiply the estimate by at least 10X, by history) and "What do we hope to gain?" (Discount this by at least 75%, by history.) If this looks like an argument against any deeper involvement, you can read it this way, yes. Yet you will also notice that there are plenty of wars that could still go forward under the simple cost-benefit evaluation. It's just that we won't do that - not only Joe Biden or whoever, but AVI as well -we want to feel righteous when war is at stake, not merely calculating. But being merely calculating might result in a better morality in the long run. At least we will lie to ourselves less.
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I should reflect on this, but honestly I've given up. I thought it was right; I thought it was enough, in Iraq, that we were fighting a regime that used rape rooms as a tool of state policy. I thought a lot of things, and Grim's Hall is old enough that you can read some of them in real time.
We were wrong, I think now, because we weren't strong or good enough. Those of us who went were; I never knew better men than the ones I met at war. Our nation was not, and therefore we should never have gone at all.
But it's past time to think. It's time now, as it was before, to pray.
I thought at the time that it was the right thing to do. Knowing what we know now, it may have been a mistake, though I doubt it. It's a fact of the human condition that national leaders must make big decisions based on very limited information. Saying that we know better now and therefore they should have done it differently back then is meaningless. Yet that is the gist of many people's argument. That said, I especially blame Obama for getting us out of Iraq prematurely for shallow political reasons while escalating our exposure in Afghanistan. He gratuitously weakened a strong position in one area and doubled down on a weak position in another area. I also blame Biden for the final Afghanistan debacle -- on its own demerits and because I suspect it was a major influence on Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.
I think you are right that the country wasn't strong enough or determined enough. We had plenty who started in undermining us and signalling to our enemies that they could wait us out. But as that is what happened in VietNam, and somewhat what happened in Bosnia, because we thought nation building was our "real" job, perhaps we should have understood that about ourselves before we got in. The American people last about 3 years max with a war (if you measure from escalation to seriousness to decision to leave) - always have - and to stretch them beyond that a leader has to expend enormous political capital.
There probably is some "interest calculation" going on behind the scenes all the time anyway. Some is that internal political jockeying you mentioned in an earlier post, that has no connection with the interests of the country as a whole, or even of a significant part of it. And, of course, we have the old favorite boogeyman (who is unfortunately not always imaginary) of particular small groups or individuals who stand to benefit.
Of course Chesterton had some words to say about calculation:
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.' Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, 'If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments, but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.' Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death.
War is what people do when they think they have no choice in either defending themselves, or they think they can benefit from one.
Russia has no choice whatsoever and has to destroy Ukraine as a weapon that can be used against them. A map will show you why. The CIA couped Ukraine in 2014 and sent the Nazis they used to do that coup to claim the Eastern part which wanted no part of the Bandera rump, that is the Nazi part of Ukraine going back into WW2. This is where the Azov and other Nazi groups come from. These people fought for the Germans in WW2 and killed Americans among others.
There was a force of about 80,000 Azov and Azov stiffened troops assembled in the east in Feb 2022 that was about to try to blitzkrieg to the Russian border taking back the Donbass. Russia struck first.
The actual force used was not very large for the task at hand, and the SMO was supposed to take back the rest of the Donbass, and a buffer with water for Crimea.
One of the only times I have seen Putin make a serious mistake. He really should have realized that this was game on for the CIA/NATO cabal, and that they were happy to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Now its a real war. Russia is mobilizing its forces which are substantial, and are preparing to fight NATO. They will win this war, they have no choice. They will fight it under a nuclear umbrella which is also substantial.
Pray that the Russian army is successful in Ukraine, as the alternative is that we all die.
I thought you were a little late telling us that the Russians/Chinese/anyone-but-Americans were right and might have caught the flu or something.
As far as Afghanistan goes: 9/11 was an attack from a group based in Afghanistan, and there really was no choice except to take whatever steps were necessary to prevent future attacks. As long as the US military was in the country, there were no more attacks. Perhaps we could have done it better, or more efficiently, or more effectively, but it was both necessary and sufficient to protect the US. It will be interesting to see what the future brings, now that we have handed over incredible amounts of military equipment to a group of medieval terrorists.
Iraq was much more iffy. There was no direct threat from Iraq, but it was possible to make the case that there was a long-term, indirect threat. I thought it was right at the time, now I am more agnostic. It will depend on what happens in Iraq in 10, or 20, or 50 years.
Ignoring the facts is dumb. That America did start this in so many ways is hard to dispute, unless you believe the lies they told you. Trivializing this is not useful. A great deal of your capacity in several areas is depleted. You cannot keep Ukraine supplied with things as simple as ammunition anymore, which means you are running out too. NATO is already in the fight, not just training etc. The Ukrainian forces have nothing like American/NATO surveillance capability and NATO C&C is what is running this war.
Russia has said it will, and is obviously preparing to, fight NATO, as the Ukrainian forces will be used up fairly soon. This is what they are doing all along the very long front, killing Ukrainians is the purpose. Taking territory is not a priority.
The recent Israeli SS reveal, that the real numbers in the war are almost 10/1 in dead. So some 20,000+ Russian dead and over 180,000 Ukrainian dead so far. To the last Ukrainian, is not just a catch phrase.
The Saudis just banned American phones, and only Chinese phones are allowed there. A data point in the churn.
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