The numbers are in and, rather surprisingly, 57% of Americans now approve bringing in ground troops in the military effort against ISIS. Indeed, 65% of Americans believe that the Islamic State is a "major threat" to the United States.
It's looking more and more like we are going to war.
President Obama assures Americans that ISIS is going to lose. Of that, I have little doubt. Much like Saddam Hussein in the last war that the United States engaged in in that region, the stated enemy will surely have the life choked out of them.
But to me, that is not the problem.
The problem is, who wins in a war like this?
After all, if we can agree that Saddam Hussein definitely "lost" in the last war, being forced from power and eventually found, quite literally, in a hole in the ground, then who exactly won the war?
The United States? The so-called "Coalition of the Willing"?
That hardly seems possible to any objective party. After all, even if Saddam Hussein was ousted, and even if nobody was lamenting his forced departure from power, the fact of the matter is that the war in Iraq proved to be a fiasco. Some suggested, and with some reason, that it possibly ranked as the biggest blunder in the entire history of American foreign policy.
Whether it did or not, it is hard to argue that the Iraq war was a huge success. It lasted much longer, proved far more difficult, and far more costly both in terms of people lost and people injured than the rosy predictions prior to the war. Not to mention the unbelievable price tag on the war, which has been estimated as somewhere between two to three trillion dollars, which is just a tad over the estimated costs by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld prior to the actual outbreak of the war, when he predicted that it would cost somewhere between $50 to $60 billion.
War is costly, and war destabilizes. The Islamic State may indeed pose a threat, but I still cannot help but wonder what would replace it if, indeed, it is eliminated from Iraq and Syria.
After all, American forces were in Iraq for a decade, and the Islamic State filled in the vacuum of power and order in the region that most likely resulted from American military involvement to begin with.
Remember, Iraq was not a hotbed of terrorism before the Iraq invasion of 2003. However much we might have abhorred Saddam Hussein, he was not exactly a terrorist, even though that was part of America's "Global War on Terror".
Now, of course, there is undeniably visible terrorism from inside of Iraq, as well as Syria. Indeed, the Islamic State appears to be, as President Obama suggests, terrorists.
But will another war there really cure all the ills? Is the third time a charm with a war waged against some evil villain in Iraq? How many casualties will be suffered on both sides? How many injured and maimed? How much will such a war cost the American taxpayers? How much will Americans continue to support the war when the inevitable bad news breaks through? If the war goes on and on, from weeks into months and years, even if the enemy this times around, the Islamic State, is thrown out of power? And what if they, like the Taliban, begin to have a comeback some months or years down the road?
Do we really have the stomach for another war? And at what point do we need to admit that we are, indeed, addicted to military ventures, to war? How often can we be moved by images of soldiers returning home to their families after long tours overseas under dangerous conditions, before we begin to question how much we actually need to send the troops out there to begin with?
This all seems pretty amazing to me. We never seem to learn.
Vietnam should have taught us something. Instead, we as a nation turned to an ugly, flag-waving, chest beating form of nationalism when President Reagan came to power, and believed in the invincible military machine that was portrayed to us. We rejoiced after the invasion of Grenada, then Panama, and finally, the big one: the first war against Iraq.
That was the victory that, some suggested, vindicated the American military following the fiasco of Vietnam. We were back!
This was around the time that the Cold War (at least the first one) was wrapping up. The Soviet Union would be officially disintegrated before the end of 1991, and so many Americans felt that they were floating on a cloud. The United States now ranked as the world's only real superpower!
That sense of euphoria died down a bit after an economic recession that cost George H. W. Bush the election, but an economic boom again had Americans feeling good about themselves in the nineties.
Our sense of invulnerability, of course, did not last. It ended on the morning September 11th, in 2001. By then, of course, we had another Bush in the White House, and he and his administration shamelessly used that tragedy to launch a war of aggression under false pretenses against Iraq, and that while we were already involved in a war against Afghanistan (and while Bush was continuing to emphasize across the boards tax cuts (particularly for the richest and most powerful among us, of course).
That war of aggression was Iraq.
Iraq had seen a lot of war over the decades. A war against Iran in the eighties. The war waged against it by a U.S. led, and U.N. backed, coalition that pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, which he had invaded and then annexed in 1990. Air strikes against it in later in the nineties, under the Clinton administration, as well as massive deaths resulting from the embargo imposed on Iraq by the United States. Then, of course, the military invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the longer lasting war that followed for the next decade.
Now, just after President Obama officially ended the war in Iraq, he is asking us to consider engaging in yet another war involving ground troops in Iraq. Air strikes only have proven effective to a limited extent, because apparently ISIS has American military manuals instructing them on how to get through air strikes and continue their war effort.
And again, I wonder how ISIS got so damn powerful, so damn quickly? Have they managed to do it by somehow getting their hands on American weapons? If so, what would that mean with the prospect of bringing yet more American military personnel and weapons into the region?
At what point is war not going to be the automatic solution? Is it not supposed to be an absolute last resort? So much for that!
So, an American president is, once again, calling for a global effort to oust a terrorist threat in Iraq. This would mark a third war against Iraq by American military forced in three consecutive decades now. For Iraq, it would be the fourth major war for a fourth consecutive decade.
We will be asked to believe that, this time, the buck stops here. This time, stability and peace will be built to last. And no, we are not at war with Islam, even though we just seem to go to war against predominately Islamic nations time and time again.
For a long time, Americans seemed hesitant to engage in another war. It was almost as if they just might have learned something from bad experiences of the recent past.
But I remember a poll a year or two ago that suggested that most young Americans, knowing what they know now, would still repeat the Iraq war exactly as it happened. That bears repeating: knowing all of the facts, including the lies that led up to the invasion of Iraq, they would still enter the war and do things pretty much as they were done.
And now, we seem on the precipice of another war, yet again. And, once again, it will begin with a majority of Americans supporting a war in Iraq.
History repeats itself.
For the First Time, Americans Support Ground Troops Against ISIS The Islamic State's brutality has dramatically shifted public opinion in the United States. ADAM CHANDLER, FEB 19 2015
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