Do our foreign alliances, or if your point of view is otherwise, "entanglements," make us more or less secure? Are their costs bearable, are they justifiable? Or, are the costs and risks so great that they actually weaken our security?
The author rehearses Bush's justification for Iraq and Afghanistan, not only the justification for the wars themselves but the articulated war aim as follows:
Defending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars during his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush said: “Our country does not seek the expansion of territory … [but] to enlarge the realm of liberty … We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire …”
So, in order to at least genuflect in the direction of our antipathy to empire, we said we were building democracy in Iraq. Why? Because democracies do not make war on each other, in other words so the theory goes, to make democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan is to make us safer.
What exactly was the syllogism that led us from a raid conducted by 19 terrorists with box cutters to sacrificing thousands of lives and tens of thousands of limbs and $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan? The line of argument that convinced me at the time to support making war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was bent on securing a nuclear weapon which he was liable to turn over to terrorists who could easily smuggle it into the United States and destroy one or more cities in the homeland. It is not clear to me that in signing onto a war for that purpose we were knowingly as citizens signing on to a war to make Iraq safe for democracy. Was it necessary to occupy the country and buy the China because we broke it?
It was clear that containment of Hussein was not really working, the food for oil scandal alone proved that, therefore it was necessary to take out the regime, but was it necessary to build a new democracy?
I had no trouble whatsoever in supporting a war in Afghanistan to the degree necessary to destroy the Taliban regime and deny the Taliban the geography to conduct training camps. Was it necessary to back a corrupt regime in Kabul to do this? Obviously, the Taliban is operating in the Waziristan area of Pakistan and it is inconceivable that we would invade their to build a new democracy. Rather, we are attempting to police the Taliban with drone strikes-just as, gasp, Joe Biden recommended.
Similarly, we just killed Anwar al-Awlaki with a drone strike without anyone suggesting that we should go into Yemen, occupy it, and construct a democracy there. The problem is that Al Qaeda can move its base of operations to any number of countries simply by buying a few commercial airline tickets. We cannot make war on them all, occupy them all and make democracies of them all.
To attempt to do so would certainly guarantee that we will lose the war on terror and I can think of no strategy which would be more profitable to the Islamists then to suck us into interminable wars which both bleed and bankrupt us. At the end of the day we will probably witness the reversion of Afghanistan and Iraq to the Muslim norm.
I believe that we can afford to wage war by drone strike and that certainly is not to wage imperial warfare.
All of this should be the occasion for us to rethink our entire strategy and tactics in the war against Islamic terrorism. The first hypothesis of that analysis should be that we cannot afford to continue doing what we are doing. Worse, doing what we are doing is hastening the day when the homeland will be struck as it bankrupts the country and enervates our armed forces and our intelligence forces.
It is not so much a question of what is moral but a question of what works.
