The Costs of Mideast Wars
Impending today are two of the most critical decisions Barack Obama will ever make, which may determine the fate of his presidency, as well as the future of the United States in the Near and Middle East.
The first is whether to approve Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for thousands more U.S. troops he says he needs to prevent “mission failure” — i.e, to stave off a U.S. defeat in Afghanistan.
The second is whether Obama will start up the road of “crippling sanctions” to war with Iran, to prevent Tehran from moving closer to a capacity to produce nuclear weapons.
If Obama approves McChrystal’s request, what will it buy him? Rising costs and casualties, deepening division in his party and his war-weary country, but no light at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel.
Indeed, it seems certain that 45,000 new U.S. troops would be but a down payment on an army of hundreds of thousands, for the years that it would take to build an Afghan army that can defend the government and people against a Taliban embedded in a Pashtun tribe that is half the population. And the odds that our Afghan allies would survive when we left would be no greater than the odds our Cambodian and Vietnamese allies would survive our departure in 1973.
Yet if Obama rejects McChrystal’s request, he risks resignations by generals and Republican savagery for lacking the moxie of Mr. Bush, when he doubled down in Iraq, named Gen. David Petraeus commander and agreed to a surge of 30,000 troops, which prevented a defeat the Baker Commission had all but predicted in 2006.
Obama is facing an awful choice.
Committing 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan will not assure victory, McChrystal is telling the president, but denying him the 45,000 troops may ensure an American defeat.
Being forced to make this Hobbesean choice will surely affect Obama’s decision on Iran. Seeing what a decade of war has done to his country, he cannot want a third war with a nation more populous than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Yet that is where the sanctions regime is inevitably headed.
The dilemma: The regime, backed by the Iranian people, is not going to give up its treaty rights to nuclear power, or the ability to generate it from yellow cake to enriched uranium. However, the knowledge and capability Iran gains from its investment in nuclear power will bring it to the edge of the red zone — the ability to “break out” and, perhaps in a matter of months, produce the highly enriched uranium that is the core of atom bombs.
Other countries that rely on nuclear power, Japan and South Korea, surely have the capability to produce an explosive device. They have preferred life without nuclear weapons.
Will Iran also be content with this, knowing that if it explodes a device, the Saudis, Egyptians and Turks will follow, that Israel would put a hair trigger on its nuclear arsenal, that the United States would retaliate massively against Iran if any nuclear weapon were detonated by Islamic terrorists on American soil?
The sanctions road appears headed for dead end, or war.
“Smart sanctions” that punish Iran’s leaders are not going to persuade them to give up a nuclear program for which they have already suffered and sacrificed greatly. And a cutoff of gasoline to Iran would hit hardest not the Revolutionary Guard but Iran’s middle class, which tends to be anti-regime and pro-Western.
As for an attack on Iran, what would be the purpose of bombing Natanz, when IAEA inspectors says that its thousands of centrifuges are producing only nuclear fuel, which has never left the facility?
When Israel bombed the Osirak reactor outside Baghdad in 1981, which was subject to inspections, Saddam Hussein started a secret program to build bombs. Would not an attack on Iran’s facilities that are under IAEA inspection lead inevitably to a regime decision to go for a bomb as the only deterrent against Israel or the United States?
As one steps back and looks at a decade of U.S. intervention and war in the Middle East, what has it all availed us?
Iraq cost 4,000 U.S. dead, 30,000 wounded and a trillion dollars. It divided our country, alienated the Arab world, and left scores of thousands of Iraqi dead, and hundreds of thousands wounded, widowed and orphaned.
The Shia who now run the country are moving away from us, and closer to Iran, as we depart.
In Afghanistan, after eight years, we face a longer and bloodier war or, says McChrystal, “mission failure.” With Iran, we are heading up a sanctions escalator toward yet another war. And 10 years of involvement has not brought the Palestinian conflict a centimeter closer to resolution.
The killers of 9-11 were over here because we were over there. How has being over there benefited us, to compensate for the cost?
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
Mr. Buchanan, just once – once – I would like you to write a column expressing regret for your support of George Bush over the last eight years, the President who has brought us to the catastrophic choices we now confront. Where is that long overdue mea culpa, Mr. Buchanan?
You know, Mr. Buchanan ran against Bush in 2000. And John Kerry didn’t exactly provide an antiwar alternative in 2004. The problems with this country’s foreign policy are a lot bigger than one awful president.
Daniel, true, in the abstract. But the problems of Iran and Afghanistan ARE the result of the policies of one awful President. And, yes, Buchanan ran against Bush, but in virtually every appearance on television after Bush won has defended Bush because he, Buchanan, is a Republican and that is what Republicans do: party over country every time.
Bush actually ran against nation building and proxy wars in 2000. He was extremely critical of Bill Clinton’s Kosovo campaign. Unfortunately, he also proved to be a servile dog. Once the neocons wrapped him around their fingers, he was sending our military to the Middle East to fight Israel’s wars for it.
He reserves the mea culpas for the long dead such as Churchill. He can write an entire book on the folly of that “good war”, but an obviously foolish war continuing, including our use of torture and other war crimes is still governed by people he apparently doesn’t want to criticize no matter the depth of the evil no more than Fox news will ever show or talk about abortion.
But one glaring thing which was not closed in the article is that Iran is right between the two other wars. Bombing or sanctioning Iran (for complying with the treaty we are not in compliance with?) would invite retaliation – not on these shores, but cutting off our supply lines from Kuwait (we need the gas in Iraq more than the middle class in Iran), or simply give the Taliban the tiny amount of aid much like we gave the Mujahadeen that let them inflict terrible damage to the USSR occupiers.
sheldon- he wrote columns against bush’s policies all through those years. including and especially the iraq war. where have YOU been?
PJB never once praised Bush for any foreign policy decisions. In his 2004 election columns, his line was that Bush was right on taxes and judges while Kerry was right on nothing. Fault him for that, but Buchanan has been a consistent critic of all foreign imperialism, Republican or Democrat. Read any of his archives, and you will find him desecrating Bush and the neocons within his administration. In fact, just read the archives of this magazine, which Buchanan helped start as an antidote to Bush Republicanism!
My father was in the army in WWI in France
My brother was in the army in WWII in the South Pacific
I was in the army during the Korean ‘conflict’
If none of this service had been performed, I doubt the history of the world would have changed.
Even MacNamara said that Viet Nam was a mistake4, ‘but we did it anyway’ in his memoirs.
Iraq was an abject failure. Costing, as you say, a wste of funds and soldiers.
Get out of Afghanistan….
Protect our borders, not other countries borders.
Pat, I agree with about 92.3% of your articles..keep it going, you are a breath of sanity.
jack
If we had not got into WW1 the Germans would have won. ( actually wouldn’t have been the worst thing because then WW2 wouldn’t have happened ) If we had not got into WW2 the Germans and Japanese would have won. A result that I know the American Conservative readership would have been thrilled with. If we had not got into Korea ( my father was there also btw ) the south koreans would have been screwed big time. That one I can go either way on.
[...] The Costs of Mideast Wars By sudhan Patrick J. Buchanan, The American Conservative, Sept 2, [...]
Lester, I agree he has written columns here more wary and critical. But on television – seen by far more people than AC posts – he toed the Republican positions down the line.
Ahh, Sheldon baby, that’s what Dems do, too. Party hackery is ruining this nation. Buchanan always criticized Bush for his Iraq adventure. Buchanan has repeatedly trashed all neocons, as he should.
Dear Mr. Buchanan, it is a thrill of some sorts to imagine I might actually be communicating with you. When I was younger, back in the eighties and nineties, you were painted by the press that I received as a far more ideological man than you seem to me to actually be. Since you have become a commentator and not a professional politician you have seemed to me to be a very rational and moderate man.
However, that admitted, I believe that it is necessary for us to succeed in Afghanistan even more than it is important for us to succeed in Iraq. The Taliban is the closest thing to a government that is responsible for the attacks of 9/11. It seems to me that they protected the man most responsible for the attacks of 9/11, who turned upon us after we helped him free his country from Soviet dominance.
Thus, I believe we should free Iraq, which was likely a strategic mistake, but not a bad thing to do, as Mr. Hussein was a bad person, and concentrate on Afghanistan, which is our area primary concern. We should not be there as occupiers, but as liberators. We must eventually leave them to their own decisions and deal with those as necessary.
I meant to say “area of primary concern”, not “area primary concern”. That stated I also meant that the difference between our fight in Afghanistan versus most others is that we are not there to make them the fifty first state. We don’t want their land. We’re there for the reasons I stated above. As I understand things, some in Afghanistan may have been and still be under the impression that the US was lacking the resolve to fight against them. If this is true then leaving now before at least mildly vanquishing the Taliban and Al Qaeda would only prove them right. Certainly, the time will come when we will leave their land. I don’t want it, and neither do most Americans.
Or maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about, and the twin towers fell as the result of some black ops work, and the military industrial complex is actually tricking the world into having these wars. Certainly war is the devil’s playground, and should be used only in self defense, but what do I know really? Maybe our president was born in Kenya, and it doesn’t matter that he had a parent who was an American citizen because that’s not enough; you’ve got to have both. I can’t really keep track of every conspiracy story out there, but if half of them are true then I really haven’t a clue.
The is nothing to point to a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan if we continue to pay for its security forces, maintain a strong reserve of air power, SOF and high quality light infantry and help the Pakistanis pummel their bases in Pakistan.
The problem for the communist regime after the Soviets left was that they stopped funding their Afghans and the US, ignored calls for diplomacy, and continued to fund our Afghans (some of which are now on the warpath against NATO).
McChrystal’s plan is an error because it uses funds to put US troops into villages where they are not wanted instead of improving the existing ANSF( it needs many more copters,the ability to call for air strikes, armored vehicles and much better compensation), and funding NGOs (who are generally wanted in the villages).
In five years if Obama signs off on McCrytsal’s plan the US will be in exactly the same spot it is know but with closer to 150,000 troops in Afghanistan, a fatal casualty list in the thousands and a total bill closing in a several trillions.
I’m not sure if I can accept your assessment of the situation, though it seems you know far more about the military and combat strategy than I do. I’m concerned by your statement that there is nothing to point to a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, even with the conditions you set to prevent it, because the MSM reports seem to indicate the Taliban already having control of much of the country. I’m not sure if you’re mistaken in your assessment of the situation as it is. That aside, I appreciate that you seem to recognize the unfortunate need for a continued engagement there, and I have little idea at this time if your strategy is correct. My gut, however, says that more people on the ground might be the key to stability.
It seems like we twice made the mistake of invasion without the force needed to secure the country invaded.
Bucchanan has actually criticized Bush many times regarding Iraq, working closely with (or under) israel, and potential plans to bomb/invade Iran.
And don’t forget that he has openly praised Obama for trying to get Iran to the table to discuss the issues.
Lastly, obviously, being one of the main contributors to this publication, certainly indicates that Bucchanan does not support the new neocon-driven Republican party.