The American way of war

I’m not sure we can do it anymore—wage comprehensive war from vigorous beginning to unambiguous conclusion. Our last successful conflict (not counting brief military actions) ended in 1945. Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan ended inconclusively at best and ignominiously at worst. But the situation developing in Iraq now might be even worse than ignominious: a never-ending, half-hearted reaction to the enemy crossing enough red lines.

Even World War II (the successful one) had its ambiguities. By 1944, the public was fed up with rationing and casualty lists; a major factor in the decision to drop the atomic bomb was fear of losing public support for the war. The aftermath wasn’t so tidy, either. The Best Years of Our Lives, a movie released in 1946, followed three veterans as they tried to readjust to civilian life. In one scene, a loudmouth at a drugstore soda fountain berates one of the uniformed vets, telling him the whole war was a mistake and we’d been fighting the wrong enemy. Sound familiar? Every one of our declared (and undeclared) conflicts faced a chorus of dissenters, some of which even threatened to leave the union. Waging war was never something democracies do best, but it may be becoming impossible.

Vietnam is sometimes called the “living-room war” because Americans could see it every night on their television screens. They also saw the defeats, the protests, and the demonstrations—negative upon negative, until conventional wisdom agreed that we had no business in Vietnam. The first Gulf War faced down its critics mostly by outrunning them—it was over before they had a chance to suit up. Going into Iraq, after a successful foray into Afghanistan, met with the favor of the majority at first, but the fears it would become “another Vietnam” became a self-fulfilling prophesy until the troop surge of 2007, whose success was only grudgingly acknowledged.

Iraq might as well be known as the “internet war,” for all the theories and counter-theories it dumped on our desktops and (as the years dragged on) mobile devices. Conspiracies are no longer limited to the random loudmouth at the local drugstore; they are everywhere, undermining national confidence and seeding national doubt. Americans are supposed to be “war-weary” by now, but the vast majority of us have only experienced the conflict on our computer and television screens. That’s enough to remind us that wars are brutal, ugly, exhausting, and largely unrewarding for everyone, not just combat soldiers. No sane person wants them, not even those evil “corporations” that supposedly make a killing on government contracts.

And yet, wars are inevitable; history tells us that. At the beginning, they are fueled with outrage (Remember Pearl Harbor!), but outrage burns out quickly and what’s left is a long, hard slog, as Donald Rumsfeld once said. President Barack Obama gets a lot of criticism for his haphazard approach to Middle East conflict, but Americans share some of the blame. Wars are inevitable, but unless they’re short, we may never win another one.