Robert Gates view of the Obama and Bush administrations in his new book has certainly created controversy. The former defense secretary’s belief that President Obama was never really committed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has given the administration’s defenders and critics plenty of fodder for a long time to come.
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But what about Gates questioning how, or why, America goes to war in the first place?
It is horrendous to learn that any president might send soldiers into war knowing the futility of their mission. This is what happened in Vietnam, when President Lyndon Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara supposedly knew that war was unwinnable even as they continued to increase troop levels.
McNamara telephoned Johnson in 1966 to say, “I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North. I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher — 600,000; 700,000; whatever it takes.”
Johnson’s reply? He just grunted. The war escalated.
And to what end? At what price?
Robert Gates sees a worrisome deficiency of forethought in our foreign policy today, “Wars are a lot easier to get into than out of. Those who ask about exit strategies or question what will happen if assumptions prove wrong are rarely welcome at the conference table when the fire-breathers are demanding that we strike – as they did when advocating invading Iraq, intervening in Libya and Syria, or bombing Iran’s nuclear sites.”
Most Americans rightly view Vietnam as a mistake. The only silver lining to mistakes of such tragic magnitude is that we might learn from them.
What have we learned from Iraq? When al-Qaeda overtook Fallujah two weeks ago, the same people who were eager to invade Iraq in 2003 said this simply proved we should’ve never left. Some have said it was a mistake to withdraw from Vietnam.
This is circular logic. It is a refusal to look at the big picture.
Few in Washington ever ask: Should we have gone to war at all?
The American Conservative’s W. James Antle gives a cost/benefit analysis of our venture in Iraq and how much it accomplished concerning the war on terror, “after 4,500 Americans dead, 35,000 wounded, and $1.7 trillion spent, the type of Islamic militants who attacked us on 9/11 now have a greater foothold in Iraq than before we invaded.”
To hawks today who say the US should have remained in Iraq, Antle asks, “It was the Iraqi government that the United States put in place that wanted American troops to leave… Were we to undertake regime change again to preserve the occupation?”
More sober than their leaders, a majority of Americans now view the Iraq War as a mistake. In the wake of the Iraq War and over a decade in Afghanistan, they also believe we should not try to be the world’s policeman.
Gates wonders the same thing, “There are limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can do – and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military response.”
Gates’ paints a picture of a foreign policy establishment that is always eager for war but dangerously blind to its longterm consequences or even how to end it. He also wonders if the decision makers try to use the U.S. military far beyond what constitutes our true national defense or interests.
Gates even goes so far as to question the basic practicality of war, “my years at the Pentagon left me even more skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories or doctrines that suggest that war is anything other than tragic, inefficient and uncertain.”
Anything “tragic, inefficient and uncertain” should not be engaged in hastily.
What we should’ve learned about Iraq is the same lesson we learned in Vietnam—that both wars should’ve never happened in the first place. While most Americans certainly feel this way, sometimes Washington seems to have learned very little.
Gates’ task was to help conduct America’s wars the best he could. But even as someone who was fully committed to those efforts, the former defense secretary now believes America is too quick to engage abroad and too impractical about what we can accomplish. Writes Gates, “in recent decades, presidents confronted with tough problems abroad have too often been too quick to reach for a gun… the use of force too easy for presidents.”
Going to war should never be easy. It is true that mistakes will always be made, in foreign policy or any policy. Sometimes they will be very big mistakes.
But learn, we must.
Robert Gates is trying to learn from past mistakes and warn others about institutional problems with the American way of war. More should be listening.