Two years ago today, one of my sons-in-law was badly wounded in Afghanistan. At the time, the U.S. Army was less than truthful and it was several emotional days before he was flown out to Germany for first phases of major treatment. To this day we don't know if inquires made on our behalf by Senator mark Warner helped get him out of Afghanistan more quickly. After that, it was months of treatment and recovery. Thankfully, he had a largely full recovery. Many, including some of his friends whom I had the opportunity to meet, were not so lucky. He has since left the military and just completed the Warrior Hike to "walk off the war"up the Pacific Crest trail from Mexico to Canada. Sadly, the mindset in Washington that set the stage for the fool's errands in Afghanistan and Iraq is alive and well and puts the lives of other young Americans at Risk. Andrew Sullivan has a good take down of these morons and hypocrites who continue to admit that both wars have been disasters and that the USA lost them. Here are excerpts:
Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The president [Bush] himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.
These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again. To protect its own self-regard, Washington’s elite is prepared to send young Americans to fight in a war they cannot win and indeed have already lost. You see the blinding myopia elsewhere: Washington’s refusal to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture merely proves that it cannot face the fact that some of the elite are war criminals tout simple, and that these horrific war crimes have changed America’s role in the world.
What infuriated me about the decision to re-start the Iraq War last August – by a president explicitly elected not to do any such thing – was its arrogance, its smugness, and its contempt for what this country, and especially its armed forces, went through for so many long years of quagmire and failure.
My point is this: how can you behave this way after what so many service-members endured for so long? How can you simply re-start a war you were elected to end and for which you have no feasible means to achieve victory?
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