About whether no war that the US has fought in my lifetime was worth fighting

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Doddiemoemoe wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/184738>:

<< As a disabled veteran I have a few things to say... >>

Thank you for your service.

When I complain that the USA started an unnecessary war or used stupid
strategy in a war, that is NOT a complaint against the soldiers. The
soldiers courageously and skillfully with strength and great endurance
do their best to carry out the assignment that was given to them by
the civilian leadership (the President and Congress) using strategy
that was decided by generals appointed by the civilian leadership. So
all my complaints are about the Presidents and Congresses involved,
not about the soldiers.

<< Post U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, almost 3 million were killed.
(genocide?!?), we sat and watched 100's of thousands killed in Bosnia,
Ethiopia..not to mention the millions of Darfur(so many countries, so
many armed forces, all they could do was protect convoys of
aid...until it was delivered to a certain point). Tens of thousands of
troups from all countries who could never fire a gun who risked their
lives only to feed the oppressors..

After the FIRST persuian gulf conflict..when Colin Powel et. al.
were sitting signing the papers...Sadam Huesein insisted that his
Helocopters be allowed to fly so they could patrol/protect his
borders...as soon as the U.S. agreed...many, many, many innocent
Kuwaiti/Iraqui women and children were shot down by said
helocopters.. >>

Vietnam -- At least from the time that Lyndon Johnson became
President, he knew that the US could not possibly win the Vietnam War.
He can be heard saying so on his secret White House tape recordings.
And Robert McNamara said so in his belated memoir. (The Curtis LeMay
strategy of nuking the whole country until everyone on both sides is
dead does not count as 'winning' when the goal is 'protect' the
inhabitants from, in this case, Communism. Dead is not protected.) If
the US had not pursued and escalated a war that the civilian
leadership KNEW they couldn't win, far fewer people would have been
killed in total, and I believe far fewer people would have been killed
in the aftermath as punishment for supporting the US. Johnson's own
reason for continuing the war is that the American people would not
re-elect him if they thought he was a quitter (the phrase 'surrender
monkey' had not yet been invented). It is not worth fighting a war for
the purpose of making good PR for the President's re-election campaign.

I certainly acknowledge that there is evil in this world. The current
genocide in Darfur, and the previous war by the evil Sudanese
government against the people of south Sudan are prime examples. Of
Ethiopia, I suppose you mean the reign of evil military dictator
Mengistu Haile Mariam in the 1980s -- he was overthrown by an
Ethiopian revolution that as far as I know got no foreign assistance,
unless you count the revolutionary armies seeking independence of
Eritrea from Ethiopia as foreign. You didn't mention the genocide in
Rwanda. These are cases where the United States did not intervene
militarily, altho' I believed we should -- what's the point of having
the best army in the world if we can't use it to fight evil?

The civil war in Bosnia, with the extremely high level of atrocities
committed by the Serb nationalists, altho' other factions sometimes
committed atrocities, too, is another case where the United States did
not intervene to *fight* the bad guys. Bill Clinton only sent
peace-keepers after forcing all sides to sign a peace treaty which
treated arch war criminal Slobodan Milosevic as if he were an
honorable national leader, and gave the Serbs their own little
Republika Srpska where their war criminals could freely hang out at
sidewalk cafes. (Again, I had wanted the US to intervene militarily
earlier, but the US at least *did* intervene militarily against the
Serbs when they switched to attempting genocide in Kosovo, and that
had somewhat mixed results.)

Radio show THE WORLD (co-produced by WGBH and the BBC World Service)
did a series recently called 'How Wars End' which reported how the
American Civil War, World War I, the first Gulf War, and the Bosnian
civil war had ended. Here's the URL for the segment on Bosnia:
<http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/21646>. From a little more than
half-way down the scroll bar, the quotes are all about this being an
UNJUST solution. Forcing myself to select just one, "You could argue
that justice in Bosnia would have meant punishing the Serbs for their
ethnic cleansing. Instead they were rewarded for it with half the
territory in the country. But the Americans' immediate goal was not
justice, it was stopping the bloodshed; it was stability."

First Gulf War -- Saddam was in no position to INSIST on being allowed
to use helicopters, but Colin Powell granted it out of graciousness.
As soon as he noticed that Saddam was using the helicopters for murder
rather than transportation, he could have withdrawn the permission and
then shot down the helicopters, but he chose not to. The people being
shot down in Kurdistan and the south of Iraq were people whose areas
had risen up in revolution for their independence from Saddam's Iraq
BECAUSE President Bush 41 had encouraged them to do so as part of his
war strategy, but he did nothing to support their revolution, and only
did a little to save their lives after his poll numbers in the US
dropped because of it. IIRC that was the third time since 1975 that
the US had encouraged the Kurds to rebel military against Saddam and
then given them no support. 

In terms of getting rid of evil, the First Gulf War had only a tiny
success, the statelet of Iraqi Kurdistan able to grow up protected by
a no-fly zone. (It took them a while, with a couple of wars between
the two Kurdish political parties, including one in which one party
invited Saddam in to bomb the other party.) Outside of Kurdistan,
Saddam was left in power to oppress all the rest of Iraqi people, with
their suffering INCREASED by the US trade sanctions that the US had no
intention of ever stopping while Saddam was still alive.  

The First Gulf War got Kuwait free from Iraq so Iraq would not
dominate the world's oil supply (but my recollection is that the
Kuwaitis expressed their gratitude to us verbally, but not in discount
prices for their oil, and not in adding a touch of democracy to their
monarchy) and President Bush 41 thought that was a goal worth fighting
a war for; he called it 'Jobs, jobs, jobs'. I have a difference of
opinion with him: that war would have only been worth fighting if its
goal had been to depose Saddam entirely.

As for our current two hot wars, I had been demanding for years that
the US go into Afghanistan militarily to remove the warlords bombing
everybody everywhere and the even worse Taliban dictatorship. I
actually think it was good that the US armed Afghans to defeat the
evil Soviet conquerors, but I believe that our involvement gave us a
*moral duty* to clean up the mess left when that war was won, not just
forget all about Afghanistan. And once the Taliban refused to hand
over the author of the very violent attack upon our country, we even
had a legal right (under international law) to do so. But we should
have done it with *enough* troops and money and speakers of Pashto,
Dari, and Arabic to win the damn thing and do 'nation building'. Okay,
I'll admit that one is worth fighting, even if we screwed up how we
did it.

As for President Bush 43's optional war against Saddam's Iraq, I was
unlike most of my fellow liberals in that I believed that it didn't
matter if the motive was blood for oil, or revenge because Saddam
tried to assassinate his father, or some Freudian thing about wanting
to outdo his father, nonetheless 'regime change' in Iraq was a worthy
goal anyway. But not until we had sorted out Afghanistan, a
non-optional war, not unless we sent in enough troops and money and
Arabic speakers to win the damn thing, and a competent reconstruction
plan for 'nation building', and not unless we had a back-up plan in
case the first plan didn't work. The first plan was our soldiers march
in, the Iraqi soldiers throw down their guns and run away, and the
civilians welcome the American soldiers with flowers and kisses and
then immediately set up peaceable and orderly elections for an
American style democracy which is the natural instinct of all human
beings which only dictators' armed might prevents them from doing. I
hadn't expected any part of that plan to work, and the first two parts
did.