Spectre of endless wars coming back to haunt US
Thu, Feb 25, 2010
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are bankrupting America, writes Lara Marlowe in Washington

THE WARS in Afghanistan and Iraq are not going to plan for US president Barack Obama. In Afghanistan, America is about to cross the symbolic threshold of 1,000 deaths.

In Iraq, where 4,366 service members have been killed since 2003, there are indications that Mr Obama’s promised troop withdrawal may not take place as scheduled.

Governments in both countries have proven to be unreliable allies. Afghan president Hamid Karzai hectors the US for killing Afghan civilians in its airstrikes (up to 27 people, including women and children, last Sunday). He has enraged US commentators by decreeing himself sole arbiter of the Electoral Complaints Commission in the run-up to next September’s legislative election.

The commission, which had three members appointed by the UN, exposed widespread fraud in Mr Karzai’s re-election last year. Washington also feels let down by its Nato allies. The fall of the Dutch government last weekend, over the deployment of 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan, makes it likely the Netherlands will withdraw its forces this year.

In a lecture at the National Defence University this week, US secretary of defence Robert Gates said Europe’s anti-military views have become dangerous.

“The demilitarisation of Europe – where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it – has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” Mr Gates said.

The wars are bankrupting America, compounding its $12.4 trillion (€9.16 trillion) national debt.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired US army colonel and professor of history at Boston University, says it’s a myth that Republicans are hawks, Democrats doves. “In fact, the Obama administration has increased defence spending,” Prof Bacevich notes.

“We are now spending more on defence than at any time since the second World War . . . This ever-increasing level of defence spending is something that people shrug off. They don’t even pause to consider what it signifies.”

There is a guns or butter dilemma, but America ignores it.

The US spends $700 billion annually on defence – a third more than it did to confront the Soviet Union during the Cold War. By comparison, Obama’s healthcare plan would cost $950 billion over a decade. Deficit spending is the Republicans’ main grievance, yet no one in US politics questions the defence budget.

US defence spending became sacrosanct after the atrocities of 9/11. The consensus eroded when the Iraq war turned sour.

“One of the principal sources of energy informing the Obama candidacy was that he represented something fundamentally different,” recalls Prof Bacevich.

“Now, the president has re-constituted that post-9/11 consensus in favour of war.”

The consensus centred on Afghanistan, which Mr Obama called “the war we must win”. By contrast, Mr Obama promised to draw down troops levels in Iraq from 96,000 at present to 50,000 by September 1st, and a total withdrawal in 2011.

But this week, Gen Ray Odierno, the top US commander in Iraq, said he was briefing officials on contingency plans to delay the withdrawal in the event of political instability and violence after the March 7th Iraqi election.

Gen Odierno’s prediction that circumstances could thwart the withdrawal was seconded in yesterday’s New York Times by Thomas Ricks, the former Washington Post defence correspondent who wrote two books on the Iraq war and is now a senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security.

“The American people find themselves facing a situation in which both of these conflicts – the one that Obama rejected and the one that Obama, however reluctantly, embraced – both conflicts will likely be with us for the indefinite future,” says Prof Bacevich.

How does one explain the US public’s apparent acceptance of endless war?

“It’s certainly true that the Americans who benefit most immediately from the American way of life are not sending their sons and daughters to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . The great majority of the American people are oblivious to the actual sacrifices being made,” says Prof Bacevich. His own son was killed in Iraq in 2007.

The approximately 200,000 US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are drawn from a small pool, with many soldiers serving repeated tours of duty in both wars.

According to the Washington Post , at least 23 of the 73 US soldiers killed in Afghanistan since December previously served in Iraq.

What should Obama do? Prof Bacevich answers my question with another question: “What exactly is the threat we face, and from a broad strategic point of view, what’s the response to the threat?”

The threat, Prof Bacevich continues, is “violent, anti-western jihadism. That’s a real threat. It’s to be dealt with by a combination of measures to contain jihadism, and something like an international police effort to identify and root out the terrorist networks.

“There is no place on Earth that is the centre of the jihadist conspiracy, and that’s one reason why invading and occupying countries just doesn’t make sense.”

© 2010 The Irish Times