pocket1_pita | Jon Carroll (Reply)

"The principal sin of the neoconservatives is overbearing arrogance. It is not so much that they have been wrong. It is that nobody has ever convinced them that they've ever been wrong."

I didn't say that. Oh, I said stuff like it a few times, but that particular quote come from David Keene, who is the chairman of the American Conservative Union. Like a lot of people on the rightish side of the political spectrum, he bought the rhetoric, he accepted the brilliance of Donald Rumsfeld's idea for a brand-new downsized "smart" army, he hung in there when things appeared to be going wrong -- and now he's angry.

I never believed the hype, but that gives me no special virtue. I was disinclined to believe George W. Bush from the first time I heard him speak. In one sense, it would have been nice if he'd been right because we would have had peace and stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, a national budget not distorted by war and war-related boondoggles, and a few thousand American citizens who would still be alive.

The neocons' great faith-based fantasy, that two wars could be fought at the same time without increasing the size of the military, has been an unimaginable disaster. The stop-loss policies succeeded in alienating the soldiers from their own civilian commanders, which is never a useful situation. Even the Republicans, with the exception of the folks in the bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue, are conceding defeat. Horse, barn door, bang.

But even if Rumsfeld had been a better tactician and strategist, even if the right generals had been given the right resources at the right time, the war would still have been wrong. In a civilized society, or one that pretends to civilization, wars are always a last resort. They are failures of diplomacy. Sometimes they are necessary, but they're never good.

This war was an unnecessary failure. If we had not invaded Iraq, if we had just let the U.N. inspectors do their work, if we had neutralized Saddam Hussein by other means, the world would be better. It's not that we fought the right war in the wrong way; we fought a deeply stupid war in a deeply stupid way.

Since we can't stay, we'll have to go. We'll have to cut and run, which is sometimes a good idea. Custer at Little Big Horn? He should have cut and run. Those 600 who rode into the valley of death? Had they turned around and ridden into the forest of life, things would have worked out better. Dying needlessly: overrated.

But we're still fighting another war. The invasion of Afghanistan was far more justifiable than the war in Iraq; we were attacking the guys that attacked us, in an effort to persuade them that attacking us was a really bad idea. Additionally, we were fighting the Taliban, a group that makes the systematic oppression of women a keystone of its national policy.

The Afghanistan war also suffers from the same Rumsfeldian lunacy. We don't have enough troops there to accomplish anything; we have just enough troops to kill and be killed. Afghanistan has historically been a death trap for foreign armies; maybe there's a way of changing that, but an underfunded, undersupported, undermotivated military is not the way to do it.

When the last Burger King in Iraq closes, when the Green Zone has turned red, when the Sunnis and the Shiites are butchering each other without our help, we will still be fighting in Afghanistan. We don't need an exit strategy; we need a strategic strategy. We need something other than neglect and despair.

So, you Democrats and you Republicans, you who seek national office for reasons other than avarice and ambition, you who would like to try a little more walk-walking and a little less talk-talking -- tell me what you plan to do in Afghanistan. What policies would you propose? What solutions would you advocate? Talk to me about Afghanistan. Talk to me about the opium economy; about the power of the warlord; about the mess up along the border with Pakistan. Talk to me about actual nation (re)building.

There's not a lot of prestige in working to make Afghanistan peaceful. Maybe it can't even be done. North Korea and Iran are far sexier issues; China and Russia are far more significant international powers. But I think we owe it to ourselves, to our own consciences and our sense of commitment to justice, to try to prevent the Taliban from taking over again. Isolationism is no smarter a policy than adventurism. Remember Kabul.

OK, we get it, it's just a mess. Candidly, and not to brag, we got it a long time ago. But we all live in the future; what's that going to look like?