The U.S. Military is really good at killing people and winning wars. For all the vitriol over the “lost wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, one thing is certain: the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces aren’t to blame. Historically, politicians and civilian leadership and their policies are — whether that’s getting us into needless wars or ending them early, it makes no difference.
A central theme to Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of my largest complaints about those conflicts in which I served for three and a half years, is that we weren’t doing the things needed to win. First, “victory” was not well-defined. Were we killing UBL, were we defeating the Taliban, were we nation-building, or were we doing all three and more? And second, we had a mission to “win” but weren’t given the resources necessary to win. Soldiers and Marines aren’t nation-builders; and many of them showed up to their first or second deployments without understanding the way forward, which is a failure of leadership and education as much as it is of poor policy and lack of guidance.
So we cut and ran in Iraq, and left the country to its own devices, which had been a civil war since the mid-2000s. And then along comes the Islamic State, and the Administration can’t figure out if they’re Islamic or un-Islamic (not that it particularly matters), and they can’t figure out a strategy that is a) sellable to the American public, b) sellable to the world community, c) sellable to Marxist ideologues, and d) congruent with the Administration’s policy that, deep down, Islamic State fighters are just misunderstood and angry because life is difficult.
