Kevin Perrin was in Afghanistan 2005-2006 as a U.S. Army infantry major in an Embedded Training Team, serving eventually as acting J-3 for joint operations in the 14 northern provinces . His brief blog post recounts a quiet encounter with an Afghan border police colonel.

Without unnecessarily summarizing any lesson he learned then or realized later, Kevin Perrin reports the event as he experienced it — surely little could focus the mind more fully on the present moment than being “animal close” to a menacing, suspicious Golden Horde descendant with an AK-47.

I am especially impressed with the unobtrusive ways in which one conversation over chai is placed allusively in an enriching historical context: Roman auguries, Genghis Khan violence, and the mindset of centuries of western colonizers and interventionists (their frustrations and their contempt for those “wiry little fucks”). This encounter has happened before, and will again.

So we readers experience this scene as we experience good fiction, aware of the universals shadowing the specifics of this time and this place. We know or sense more than the central character himself openly acknowledges. Fortunately, we do not need any authorial explanation: Kevin Perrin’s reader gets the take-aways about the limitations of American intervention, the destabilizing culture clash, American soldiers’ distrust of the Other, the Other’s distrust of Americans, the corruption that distorts and hobbles poor countries at war.

And, in Perrin’s last line’s ironic fall back on western civility and polite truth avoidance, the reader gets the eventual admission of defeat and futility. Mission not accomplished. Ah, well.

John Bolton would harrumph at such defeatism, but John Bolton stubbornly lives in reality denial, 19th-century ignorance, and magical thinking. I trust instead Kevin Perrin’s experience, probity, modesty, and taste for nuance, and all those virtues are in his blog post. Kevin Perrin also writes way better than John Bolton talks.

But if you like cool wars and exciting international crises, and if you wish we would spend lots more on the military than either political party considers prudent, your candidate is Marco Rubio.

Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in May, 2015, Sen. Rubio promised to “use American power to oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace, or outer space.” Any?

The Obama Doctrine and the Rubio Doctrine

We might call the Obama Doctrine “Don’t do stupid stuff.” The Rubio Doctrine is apparently “Do stupid stuff.” After careful consideration, I prefer the former.

What Would Rubio Do?

If we take him at his word, Sen. Rubio would send the military to attack China for hacking Sony, and for island-building in the South China Sea. Sen. Rubio would attack Russia for its flights into UK and Ukrainian airspace, its annexation of Crimea, and its occupation of eastern Ukraine. Sen. Rubio would attack Saudi Arabia for violating Syrian airspace and for attacking Yemen. Sen. Rubio would attack Iran for stopping a freighter in the Straits of Hormuz.

If another Falklands war happened on his watch, Rubio would attack either Argentina or the UK, not sure which. They cannot both be the legitimate authority there. What if Israel invades Lebanon again? If Turkey gets more involved in Syria? If NATO intervenes again in Libya?

One war at a time, please!

How many of these Rubio interventions and wars could we manage at one time? The Pentagon has already abandoned its plan to be ready for two simultaneous wars.

American exceptionalism

Fortunately, no other country subscribes to Sen. Rubio’s idea of what calls for war, given American violations of airspace, international waters, and cyberspace. Imagine our panic if Russia or China said that they would use their power To “oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace, or outer space.”

Marco Rubio on the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Perhaps merely to exploit a Jeb Bush gaffe, Sen. Rubio did say that knowing what we know now, he would not have invaded Iraq. That answer was easy: the only people who today defend that invasion are the people responsible for it, or their brothers..

That 2003 invasion created chaos: we overthrew a stable (albeit tyrannical) Iraq, generated the rise of ISIS, the Sunni uprising, a continuing civil war, the empowerment of Iran in Iraq, uncounted civilian casualties, too many American casualties, an ongoing $3-$6 trillion butcher’s bill, diminished American prestige, and serious wear-and-tear on American military capabilities.

Despite that, a spokesman said that Sen. Rubio feels “the world is better off” without Hussein in power. In truth, not even Iraq is better off now than with Saddam Hussein in power.

War in support of business

While many of the foreign policy prescriptions Sen. Rubio outlined Wednesday were broad, he issued direct warnings to Russia, China, Iran and other countries that attempt “to block global commerce.” He singled out attempts to block transit through the South China Sea, where China claims control and is building islands, and the Strait of Hormuz and nearby Arabia, where Iran recently seized a Marshall Islands-flagged ship.

Nothing new here. Washington has a rich history of sending the American military to advance or protect business interests. Consider Commodore Perry, and early 20th-century interventions in Latin America as a start.

Damn international law, full speed ahead!

“Gone will be the days of debating where a ship is flagged or whether it is our place to criticize territorial expansionism,” Sen. Rubio actually said. Did he really say that?

As part of what he described as a three-pronged foreign policy doctrine, Sen. Rubio also called for boosting the military budget beyond levels imposed by automatic budget cuts agreed to in 2011 by both parties.

President Obama’s most recent budget called for $612 billion in defense spending, more than the sequester allows and more than the Republican House recommended, not counting the slush fund (Overseas Contingency Operations) to cover war costs.

Imagine having the world’s largest defense budget, and it doesn’t cover wars!

Human rights, too?

Seeking to look beyond sheer military power,  Sen. Rubio (echoing President George W. Bush) says he would support the spread of economic and political freedom, despite the obvious cautionary lessons he should have learned from the Bush debacle in the Middle East. Sen. Rubio promised to resist efforts by large powers to control smaller neighbors, excepting ourselves obviously. Sen. Rubio promised to advance the rights of women and religious minorities around the world, probably excepting here at home.

What about antiquities?

About the only justification for war that Sen. Rubio did not mention (nor does anyone else) was to protect antiquities. Here he misses an opportunity to appeal to neglected voters, the sort who attend opera and have memberships in art museums. With ISIS now demolishing some antiquities in Palmyra, I have to admit that I am susceptible to being wooed into supporting military intervention.

All wars inadvertently or knowingly destroy irreplaceable art and architecture as a by-product , but  to do so intentionally must be one of the most inexplicable and inexcusable human crimes committed in the name of religion or nationalism.

Presidential candidates’ promises matter

How astonishing and discouraging that we still live in a world where one person can initiate a war, even a nuclear war. Not just one dictator, but also one single person in the world’s oldest democracy.

The role of the Pentagon

America’s greatest debt to our senior military leadership today is not for its service and sacrifice in unnecessary wars and military operations, which is arguably the only kind we have fought since 1945.

Our greatest debt today to the Pentagon is for its restraining influence on war-happy presidents, when our military leaders explain the practical limitations and drawbacks and costs of one crazy idea or another.

They cannot stop cowboy presidents, but they probably slow them down. Historically, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior military leaders were not always voices counseling prudence, but these days I believe that they are.

Senior military leaders must cringe when they hear a presidential candidate promise to send the troops everywhere without debate. Every American voter should, too.

Turner should know better, if not from his own experience then from whatever preparation he has done to teach about the war at the University of Virginia, although the op ed piece suggests that he is more polemicist than scholar. I hope that he conducts his seminars with more scholarly humility and openness to nuance, alternative opinion, and complexity than this op ed demonstrates.

Invasion or civil war?

Turner writes that the United States engaged in the war because by ratifying the UN Charter and creating SEATO, we pledged to oppose armed international aggression.

The UN Charter does not authorize, let alone require, individual nations to send armies when they think an act of aggression has occurred. Law school professors know this, but they don’t have to mention in op ed pieces.

The Robert F. Turner Doctrine

Thank goodness Robert Turner has never been president, if he thinks America has pledged to send troops to oppose every instance of international aggression. We would be at war with Russia over Crimea and over Ukraine, in addition to our current wars and other military operations.

According to this implicit Robert F. Turner Doctrine, the United States would have had to enter every war in the Middle East after 1945, fighting for Israel in most of those wars, but fighting against Israel when it invaded Lebanon. We would have fought with Iran against the 1980 Iraq invasion, rather than covertly helping Iraq’s Saddam Hussein fight Iran, as we actually did.

The Vietnam War did not start with international aggression

Well, it wasn’t international once the French left. For the Vietnam War to be a case of international aggression, one would have to believe that what we called North Vietnam and South Vietnam were separate, sovereign countries. But they were not. North Vietnam fought its war to reunify one country, not to annex a second country.

Similarly, some ardent nationalists in the south wanted to reunify the country by invading and conquering the north, which was not a practical possibility but is more evidence against seeing North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate countries.

Was sending men and material into the south aggression? Yes, of course, as were the covert missions the US sponsored against North Vietnam.

I do not agree with Oliver Stone’s and Marilyn Young’s thesis that the United States “invaded” Vietnam. I assume that most people in Washington at the time sincerely thought of South Vietnam as a separate country with every right to invite our support. Washington supported South Vietnam’s de facto secession, having less devotion to national cohesion than it does in Ukraine now, or did in America in 1861.

But knowing what we know now, North Vietnam initiated a civil war, it did not invade a separate country. Well, yes, true, North Vietnam and the United States did send troops into Laos and Cambodia, and the US bombed both countries, which probably qualifies as international aggression.

The reunification that never happened

To believe that there were two separate nations, one must ignore the fact that the division into two entities was meant to be a temporary separation of military forces pending a unification election in 1956. Robert F. Turner ignores that fact.

Hanoi expected to win that election. According to Dwight Eisenhower, the CIA reported that Ho Chi Minh would sweep to victory had the election been allowed, even without rigging.

Why allow an election you will lose?

Apparently not even a cabal of Karl Rove, Kathleen Harris, Diebolt, and the United States Supreme Court could have prevented that victory by communists.

So the US did not allow that election to happen, as surely Turner knows, choosing instead to back Emperor Bao Dai and then Ngo Dinh Diem in the south. How ironic, then, that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution proclaims that the forthcoming US military operations in Southeast Asia were exclusively about assuring self-determination.

How the communists responded

From Hanoi’s point of view, their costly victory over the French colonialist occupiers should have meant that Viet Nam would be run by Vietnamese, namely themselves, of course, no opposition allowed. The refusal by the Vietnamese allies of the French in the south to cooperate in such an election meant, to Hanoi, that half of Viet Nam would yet again be subjugated by a foreign power, this time the more robust United States.

Their choices were to accept national division, like that in Korea and in Germany, or to go again to war. Like the Washington government in 1861, they chose war over division.

But they were not in a hurry to fight again, being a poor country — or half country — whose war preparation depended largely on convincing the USSR and China to begin sending military equipment and other support.

I’m sure that depending on foreign powers rankled the North Vietnamese leadership, especially depending on China, long an antagonist. But fighting a US-backed South Vietnam required a lot of help.

Robert Turner does not mention dates

The reunification election did not happen as intended in 1956, and the North began military operations in 1959, arguably in 1960. Thus Hanoi’s decision to send troops south came three years — three years! –after the election was to be held, at a time when the south had already become essentially a client state for the United States, utterly dependent on American aid. For three years it had been obvious that there would be no reunification election, three years during which both sides ruthlessly suppressed internal opposition to solidify their dictatorships.

Did Hanoi act in haste?

Some historians have in fact suggested that North Vietnam reluctantly sent forces south earlier than it thought best because of pressure from communists in the south, who had nearly exhausted their patience awaiting orders from Hanoi to begin armed struggle against the Diem regime. Their patience was running out because of Diem’s repression — they might all be killed or imprisoned before even getting started.

Hanoi, in this interpretation, began infiltrating and fighting earlier than planned out of fear that the southern communists would begin fighting on their own, becoming in actuality the independent movement that both they and Hanoi pretended it was all along.

Hanoi justified its decision to infiltrate troops into the south on the grounds that a puppet regime was once again subordinating Vietnamese interests to those of a foreign power, not that it admitted its infiltration right away, of course. Governments never tell the whole truth.

Robert Turner might not agree with their rationale, but it is an issue on which reasonable people can disagree.

Who lost Viet Nam?

In the absurd tradition of demanding to know “who lost China” when Mao triumphed, as if nothing could happen abroad unless Washington somehow allowed it or caused it, Robert Turner writes that South Vietnam lost the war because of two decisive factors, neither happening in Vietnam: the micromanaging “incompetence” of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, and a deluded peace movement that naively accepted Hanoi propaganda.

Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were the commanders-in-chief for the last six war years, but apparently neither was incompetent enough to merit Turner’s criticism, even though the military situation worsened during their presidencies.

If I had to come up with “two decisive factors” they would be about the regimes in Hanoi and Saigon. The United States did not “lose” Viet Nam to the communists. The communists won the war against the regime we backed. Some Vietnamese won the war, and some Vietnamese lost the war.

My own reading of history is that the two primary factors in our losing were (1) the communists were willing to make and demand of others any sacrifice for victory, completely unwilling to give up no matter how long it took, while (2) the corrupt regimes we supported alienated the populace and constructed a military hierarchy with too many officers whose first goal was to prevent or conduct coups, and to accumulate wealth, not to fight the communists.

The peace movement

Turner says that “protesters” forced Congress to stop funding combat operations. His simplistic thinking gives the peace movement far too much credit, although I know that some people in the peace movement are happy to accept that credit. Turner should reread the contemporary statements of Congressional representatives of both parties who declined to keep funding the war, statements which make it clear that everyone knew the war was lost, even the hawks in Congress.

Once peace talks were announced in 1968, quite a few people in the peace movement lost interest in ending the war, just as quite a few military personnel lost interest in fighting and dying in it.

At the Dong Tam base in the Mekong Delta where I was when the peace talks were made known, some guys started packing their duffle bags, expecting to go home the next day. Not being sent home right away did not help their morale and boost their fighting spirit.

And once the draft was ended in 1973, two years before the end of the war, the peace movement actually shrank and lost influence. Quite a few people who had opposed the war while they or someone they loved might get drafted lost interest once the draft was ended, and with it their own stake.

But when a war is lost, what is more appealing than the stabbed-in-the-back thesis?

Not everyone who opposed the war was a protester

More important than the shrinking peace movement was grim reality, known with far more insider detail by Washington than by protesters.

Turner chooses to ignore the blunt truth that more and more establishment figures in Washington and the military came to understand that the war was a mistake, the war could not be won, the war was degrading our military, the war was draining our treasury, and the war was damaging our national image and influence.

Sounds a lot like our War on Terror.

An increasing number of significant government and military insiders saw the hopelessness of our South Vietnam ally government (every bit as hopeless, uncooperative and counterproductive as our recent pals Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai).

Insider opposition to sending troops began at least as early as 1963. Anyone who doubts this should reread The Pentagon Papers, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection.

Clark Clifford was Secretary of Defense, not a protester, when he said of 1968 “I was convinced that the military course we were pursuing was not only endless, but hopeless.”

You can’t get more hawkish than Gen. Curtis LeMay, but even he in 1964 opposed sending American ground troops to Vietnam.

Some other Turner spin

Turner says millions lost their lives after the fall of Saigon, but he includes mass Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia. Perhaps Turner wanted American troops to fight the Khmer Rouge at the same time we were fighting the North Vietnamese, given our “pledge” and the sweeping Congressional authorization in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Ironically, the North Vietnamese eventually ended the Khmer Rouge regime without our help, after we left.

Like Turner I sympathize deeply with the plight of the boat people. The new Vietnamese government was at fault for the conditions that sent so many to sea, and the United States and other countries were at fault for not properly caring for the boat people who survived their time at sea.

Turner says that Ho Chi Minh was not a nationalist, because he was a communist, as if one could not be both. It might be time for Turner to refresh his understanding of why Venn diagrams exist. His simplification is uncomfortably like the idea I recently read that an American “cannot be both a patriot and a Democrat,” or Libertarian, or Independent, or Green.

It is clear to me that Ho Chi Minh was first a patriot and nationalist, committed to ending French imperial control of Viet Nam, no matter how many Vietnamese died in the process. Like George Bush in 2001, but with greater humility, Ho Chi Minh in effect endorsed the ends-justifying-the-means phrase, “Whatever it takes.”

When as a young man Ho Chi Minh looked for political philosophies that could help him free his country from France, the only strong condemnation of imperialism he found was in Lenin’s writing. The only country loudly claiming to oppose western occupation and exploitation of colonies like Vietnam was the USSR.

Did official North Vietnamese proclamations praise a communist China? Of course, as political expedience, since China was providing essential military support. Turner ignores the hundreds of years of deep enmity between China and Viet Nam, including the border war they fought in 1979. Their current conflict over the Spratly Islands is just the latest in a thousand years of antagonisms between Viet Nam and China.

Turner also ignores the ambiguities and conflicting opinions about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including the erroneous reports sent to Washington by the Navy in the initial confusion, and the fact that the American ships were supporting covert action against North Vietnam at the time of the incident.

Two Turner myths

Turner wants his readers to believe two myths that serve his call for less opposition to a president’s sending our troops here and there.

He says that “Congress snatched defeat from jaws of victory,” as if there had been any hope of a South Vietnamese victory. There was none. He is quiet about the role of Republican legislators and a Republican president in the vanishing support for the war.

Then he says that the war “bought time for Thailand and Indonesia,” preventing the dominoes from falling. That claim fits the neoconservatives’ revisionist idea that the Vietnam War was not a war, actually, but a battle within a war (the Cold War). So we didn’t lose a war after all, sort of.

Many Vietnam War veterans find it shameful to think that we were the first Americans to lose a war, and that some of our comrades sacrificed their lives in a lost and unnecessary war. Perhaps Turner is one of those veterans who is more comfortable with a revisionist interpretation that denies that the lost war was actually a lost war.

McNamara finally figured it out and Turner should pay attention

Anyone interested in the lessons of the Viet Nam War should carefully read what Robert McNamara identified in his In Retrospect (1995) as causing the failure of our intervention. It wasn’t protesters.

Richard Turner’s reason for wanting us to believe his myths

Turner says he wants to counteract “a reflexive hostility . . . to the use of U.S. military power anywhere in the world” that he says weakens America.

“Anywhere in the world?” Only a very small portion of the population is opposed to any military involvement abroad, period, but Turner‘s argument seems more reasonable if the only alternative is a straw-man extreme position.

“Reflexive hostility?” I’d say it is a reflective, not reflexive, belief that some wars are necessary and others are not, and we should think about this before deciding on war.

Many Americans probably have a prudent, common sense, quiet hostility to their government’s starting unnecessary, costly, counter-productive wars, especially when started with no definition of victory, no exit strategy, no plans for the day after victory or defeat, no sense of history and cultural complexity, no respect for inconvenient intelligence, and no awareness of the law of unintended consequences.

That is how Japan went to war against the US and allies in December, 1941, and it is not a model to be emulated.

I would like to read Robert Turner’s explanation of our fine victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his explanation for their aftermaths — the Sunni uprising, the dispersion of al-Qaeda to several nations on several continents, the creation of ISIS, the reprisal terror attacks in the west by lone-wolf self-styled jihadists, the crippling sectarian division of Iraq, Iran’s increased influence in Iraq, our many wounded veterans, the record-setting poppy crops in Afghanistan, and the $3-$6 trillion ultimate cost with its side-effect sequestration limitations on rebuilding our military.

Richard Turner wants Americans to be more happy about military operations “all over the world,” as if we and our elected careerists in Congress have not already abandoned war-making decisions to an imperial president of either party.

The anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War should remind us instead that America should never embark on a war that is not both necessary and legal. And when have we seen one of those wars recently?

“We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL”

Degrade, sure. Destroy one organization whose name will probably change anyway, maybe.

But destroy militant Islam with airstrikes? Not gonna happen.

When Obama promised to destroy Islamic State, his listeners surely took him to mean not just this one enemy, but whatever powerful, armed Islamic forces threaten our perceived interests in Syria and Iraq (and in other Middle Eastern nations, if this crisis expands).

What will Congress say?

Does anyone think that most members of Congress, especially its leadership, will support or oppose more war based solely on their perception of the national interest? Does anyone think Congressional reps will spend more time consulting with foreign policy experts and scholars than with political advisors? Not gonna happen.

Despite a typically pusillanimous Congress, it is unfortunate that our country has, de facto though not quite de jure, repealed the War Powers Act of 1973 and the Constitution’s war powers clause. Both political parties have created an Imperial Presidency  that allows one man to start wars. It’s good to be king.

More air attacks, more weapons, more support, more enemies

More air attacks will kill some militants and will also surely increase the number of men incensed enough to join our enemies. Some of the weapons given to sketchy groups will be captured by the people we are fighting, or sold to them on the black market.

If your family were starving and needed money to flee battles and escape cruel Islamic State rule, and President Obama gave you a nice shiny new American anti-armor weapon, would you fire it at an American vehicle captured by Islamic State, or would you sell it?

As Reuters has pointed out, many of our expensive August 2014 air attacks in Iraq were aimed at destroying expensive American military equipment that our pals in the Iraqi army left behind. This should be the stuff of satire, not headlines.

How big is Islamic State anyway?

Why is this not discussed? When Islamic State drove our expensive Iraqi army allies into retreat earlier in 2014, Stars and Stripes reports, “a stunned world watched several hundred Islamic State militants and their allies send divisions of Iraqi soldiers in full retreat.”

Later it was guessed that Islamic State’s juggernaut, moving rapidly towards Baghdad itself, was only about 12,000 soldiers strong. That is fewer soldiers than in a modern infantry division, and they were presumably far less organized, trained, and equipped.

Despite a decade of our costly training, the Iraqi army abandoned its weapons and fled out of fear of such a small force, and there is no hope that more American money and trainers can quickly make them an effective fighting force.

Even people in Washington seem to have panicked at the thought of Islamic State’s irregular soldiers. Defense Secretary Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke of “end of days” apocalypse. Perhaps they were merely prepping the American public for President Obama’s speech.

This week, the CIA says that Islamic State is now perhaps 30,000 strong. Even if the CIA happens to be telling the truth this time, and to actually have their facts right, Islamic State is still not organized, still not trained, and still not large. Not even close to large enough to hold the vast areas they have overrun while the Syrian army was otherwise busy and the Iraqi army was retreating.

What about Islamic State’s barbarism?

President Obama’s condemnation of Islamic State’s barbarism is proper, and the world should condemn it and try to end it.

But does barbarism always demand American military intervention? Apparently not, since even our allies in the region engage in beheadings, torture, the killing of POWs, the shelling of civilian targets, and the abuse of civilians. We do not attack all of the nations and armed groups in other parts of the world committing similar violations. Out of discretion I will not mention the fact that rogue elements of the American military and security apparatus have committed occasional human rights violations themselves.

What about the threat to America?

President Obama said “While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies.”

If threats are enough to unleash American attacks, North Korea better hunker down.

If President Obama’s action is justified by the threat of terrorist attacks here in America, aren’t we spending our attention and money in the wrong place? Reuters estimates that a mission involving a single aircraft striking Islamic State forces can cost $100,000, money which arguably makes us less safe, and which could have been spent on security here.

Our reliance on the Iraqi army

Over a decade, under calmer circumstances, we have spent billions trying to rebuild that army that President Bush disbanded, only to see them hastily retreat from a small irregular force. I hope by now that even George W. Bush and the smug men he sent to run Iraq understand that they should never have disbanded the Iraqi army that Saddam Hussein left us.

Fox reports that training the Iraq army could cost another $100 billion over the next decade.

Is military involvement simpler now than in 1991 and 2001? No!

The Middle East is dramatically more complicated and less stable than it was for either of the wars the two Bush presidents started against Iraq. Today there are far more complex relationships among the factions, and more factions.

Today the region is more chaotic than before. There’s the Arab spring, the Sunni revolt ignited by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a decade of civil war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil war in Syria, splintering and realignments among Islamic militants, and a governance crisis in Egypt.

In addition to that chaos — no matter how much flag waving Obama did in his speech — there is today a weakened America, whose own military has been somewhat degraded by two long wars, whose military budget is stressed, and whose national debt has increased by our financing those two wars with borrowed money.

American exceptionalism

Does anyone not see President Obama’s call to arms as pandering to American hubris? While he should be seeing to it that other nations and organizations do most of the heavy lifting, instead he said that only America can make the world right. “Our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden. But as Americans, we welcome our responsibility to lead.”

Those who know history are condemned to watch others repeat it

Increasing our military involvement is lunacy, but governments are known for continuing bad policies.

During the Viet Nam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara once agreed to a particular bombing campaign and then asked a question of the Air Force that should have awoken even him from his bureaucratic stupor: “If this bombing doesn’t work, what should we bomb next?”

If it repeatedly doesn’t work, and it repeatedly makes things worse, try not doing it any more.

Depending on who is asking, this question might be about the veteran’s own participation, but most often it is probably about American foreign policy. Was the war worth the cost in lives, national debt, and catastrophic unintended consequences?

But the op-ed writer, Brian M. Welke, hears the question as being about his own participation. Fair enough.

Was all that death and loss worth it for Brian M. Welke?

Yes, “It was worth it,” he writes. “In my heart and mind, the answer doesn’t matter whether Iraq stands on its own or collapses into a sea of blood and hate.”

A sea of blood and hate

As it happens, just as Welke’s op ed is published (in August 2014), Iraq is collapsing into a sea of blood and hate. ISIS advances at its leisure against our expensive Iraqi army, capturing our weapons, and brutalizing civilians and POWs. The Iraqi government seems paralyzed by succession rivalries and corruption (just like its neighbor, our friends in Afghanistan), and much of official Washington in a panic.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that ISIS poses an “imminent threat” to the United States. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey spoke about ISIS as an apocalyptic, end-of-days existential threat to world civilization.

No wonder Brian Welke does not want to think in geopolitical terms about whether the war was worth it! No Republican does, and few veterans do.

I’m happy for Brian Welke personally that he is at peace with his involvement in this catastrophe. His answer is deeply disturbing, but it is not at all surprising.

Not just because Welke graduated from Pat Robertson’s Regent University and is thus steeped in both the Christian glorification of sacrifice and in neocon politics. And not just because he is employed by the Republican Party that started the wars. And not just because his op-ed was published by The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages support the GOP. Welke’s piece appeared above a Karl Rove piece.

“It’s not who wins or loses, but how you play the game”

Like many veterans of lost wars, Brian Welke chooses in his op ed to ignore catastrophic results in favor of a happy contentment based on good intentions, the nobility of sacrifice, and a perceived national noblesse oblige.

Veterans are always far more moralistic than soldiers

Soldiers, by training and by practical necessity when in the weeds, are mostly practical thinkers, problem-solving workers rather than philosophers. A soldier in a fire-fight lives “in the now” more completely than a Buddhist monk.

Why losing a war makes veterans moralistic

The primary solace for soldiers on the losing side is the idea that sacrifice for a worthy cause is inherently valuable, perhaps more important than mere military triumph. The quasi-religious nobility of “sacrifice” allows veterans to some extent to accept the immeasurable suffering of war, especially the suffering and deaths of our comrades.

A noble cause also lets veterans invoke to themselves the ends-justifying-the-means argument to rationalize away anything that they observed or did themselves that might have violated their own sense of morality, or violated international law.

Bravely insisting that (no matter what the outcome) a war “was worth it” allows us veterans to avoid or to at least better suppress those emotions we might feel too intensely and too painfully. If we say to ourselves that “it was worth it,” veterans can perhaps avoid some dangerous cocktail of grief, political anger, moral revulsion, survivor guilt, shame, alienation, and remorse.

The political subtext

Welke mentions his “sacrifice” three times, which seems a little beyond the manly modesty we expect from veterans. I have long felt that we veterans should let other people praise our virtues, not do it ourselves quite so often and openly. But despite its lofty abstractions and declaration of personal pride, Welke’s op ed turns out to be about party politics, not abstract virtues.

Here is a paean to American exceptionalism, support for interventionism, and an attempt to defuse the Iraq war chaos as a campaign issue.

Using a weak rhetorical device that Regent University should have warned him against, Welke rejects any discussion of the war’s costs, its delusional origins, its mostly incompetent civilian leadership, its cultural blindness, its hubris, and its role in inciting anti-Americanism — by simply dismissing the motives of anyone who differs with him: “There will always be naysayers, armchair generals, academics and talking heads who are quick to question everything.”

I hope that Brian Welke does not ridicule critics of President Obama with language like that. Actually, I am confident that he does not, as he should not.

President Bush said that the war was fought in part to “free the Iraqi people.” Instead, that war wasted trillions of borrowed dollars, inflicted thousands of casualties, exposed Iraq to deeper barbarism, immiserated countless civilians, and created far more people who are violently anti-American.

It does matter that Iraq is collapsing “into a sea of blood and hate,” and neither Brian Welke’s pride nor his political party loyalty should distract us from a truthful answer to “Was it worth it?” The answer is no.

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No one can fault a government for prosecuting a Bradley Manning or an Edward Snowden if they violate laws so as to damage the national interest. But everyone should criticize inhumane treatment, prosecutorial misconduct, misuse of classification laws, the increased privatization of national security, excessive national secrecy, incompetent security programs, wasted tax dollars, sham oversight, lies to oversight committees, lies to the public, closed courtrooms, and abuse of power.

Governments certainly have a legitimate interest in keeping secrets, even though the grim truth is that all governments misuse this right to protect political parties from embarrassment, and to keep citizens uninformed or misinformed about some important matters.

In Edward Snowden’s case, we ordinary citizens have yet to discover whether his revelations damage the national interest in some way, or merely embarrass the government. Nearly every day, though, we learn more about NSA abuses, and we often learn about high ranking officials (like the author of the Patriot Act) who share our shock.

The people who seem to have learned something significant from Snowden’s disclosures are not terrorists, but the American public and our allies.

Personally, I do not trust the assurances of the intelligence bureaucracy or Congress, two institutions that thrive on lies. Whether or not Snowden’s whistle-blowing did any damage, our government has been exposed as violating the Constitution and lying about it to Congress and to the public.

Any terrorist who had not long ago assumed that western governments’ surveillance is deep and thorough is too stupid to survive long. Snowden’s revelations could not have surprised them.

Any ordinary American who does not understand that there are risks to ordinary Americans from secret government surveillance by an unaccountable bureaucracy is probably not much smarter.

Discrediting a whistle-blower like Snowden will be made very easy if the government has access to every email and telephone call. Thanks to President George W. Bush, the FBI can break into Snowden’s home (as they can break into yours), copy all of his computer files, and hide the fact that they did so. The TSA can legally do the same at any airport, seizing laptops and copying their contents without explanation. Thanks to President Obama, these abuses have continued and been expanded.

Some commentary distracts us from the serious issue of state surveillance by focussing on Edward Snowden as an individual. I understand that most people prefer human-interest stories and pop psychology to ideas and analysis, but some people who should be above that, like David Brooks of The New York Times, go out of their way to divert attention from large issues to amateur psychologizing about one person.

The effort to discredit Snowden (as a loner, for example, or high school dropout) demonstrates the vulnerability of ordinary people who oppose terrorists. In theory, a government could eventually have enough intimate knowledge to arrest or intimidate every citizen. We would all be cowed in to submission.

You personally have nothing to hide? Maybe your favorite candidate for the presidency or Congress does, and maybe that candidacy will be destroyed by NSA leaks of personal correspondence. Maybe your company’s trade secrets will be sold by a private contractor to a competitor, and your company will fold, taking your job with it.

Metadata ironically cost the job and much of the good name of a C.I.A. director, David Petraeus, when a search of metadata showed his connection to Paula Broadwell.

Imagine the potential metadata record of the Bush family connection with the bin Laden family. Combine that with the ability of a president (thanks to George W. Bush himself) to simply declare someone an enemy combatant and imprison him at Guantanamo, and you must realize that no one is safe.

As technology, bureaucracy, media noise and citizen complacency expand, we approach a time when the American government will have (and by computer quickly process) all of our emails and internet use. They might be there already.

Short term, I worry a little less about an Orwellian police state than I do about the commercial uses of this information. The internet is relentlessly driven by the commercial collection of data about you, dear reader, and the rest of us, so that we can be targeted with ads today, and perhaps denied health insurance tomorrow.

If you want a sense of how many companies are harvesting data about you, see what cookies are on your computer right now, then download and install Ghostery, a free program that will identify and thwart the covert tracking on those internet pages you visit.

If NSA and Homeland Security employ hundreds of private contractors, themselves employing hundreds of thousands of employees (like Edward Snowden) with access to your data, how many of them will eventually sell data? How much would one smartphone company spend to learn the secrets of its competitor? How many employees would sell data to China? How much more stock market manipulation will be possible?

David Brooks finds Snowden a sad example of disaffected, alienated geeks. Brooks’ general principles, like most of his political ideas, are centrist, bland and unexceptionable. Brooks actually lamented kids today who allow their consciences to trump their loyalty oaths and their career interests.

I hope that by now David Brooks has rethought that sense of priorities. We need more people who place the good of the country above self-interest, and Edward Snowden appears to be one of them.

The British have already figured out that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were blunders, that Tony Blair misled his country, that the UK economy cannot afford to continue the war, and that the wars have damaged their forces. Maybe some day we Americans will face those truths, too.

The national interests of the UK have been damaged, but that is not enough. Administrations, organizations, and systems have their own interests to watch out for. Consider this news, as reported in the London Evening Standard on Jan. 14, 2011.

The United Kingdom’s special envoy to Afghanistan (until he was dumped in the summer of 2010 for speaking too frankly), former ambassador Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, has told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons that in 2007 Sir Richard Dannatt (then the Chief of the General Staff) offered two benefits to British troops in Afghanistan.

Neither reason involves al-Qaeda, terrorist attacks against the UK, opium production, nation building, or human rights. Care to guess?

The first benefit was that the war would assure more financial and materiel support for the forces, forestalling a cutback in defense spending. While financial support was never considered adequate, and the lack of helicopters was widely considered a scandal, the British army in general liked the additional equipment that they did get. These were “new resources on an unprecedented scale.”

Gen. Dannatt reported said that if the troops were not used in Afghanistan, they would be lost in budget cuts. Use them or lose them.

A bigger defense budget is a solid benefit that any defense contractor or military bureaucrat can understand.

The second bad reason that Gen. Dannatt offered, according to Cowper-Coles, was that fighting in Afghanistan was an opportunity for the British army to “to redeem their reputation in the eyes of the Americans after the criticisms of their performance in Basra.”

Oh, great, more death and maiming to restore some notion of “honor.”

Anytime we are baffled by why wars and other catastrophic real world events occur, events that require the decisions and collusion of many people who should know better, we should fall back on the single question that most often leads us to understanding. That question is cui bono? Who profits?

In the case of war, the profit usually goes to some defense contractors and their investors, to political parties and individual politicians who continue wars rather than risk votes, a few people in the Pentagon whose career success depends on various weapons systems, and those commentators who get paid handsomely to state opinions supporting the interests of those contractors and political parties.

The rest of us pay dearly, starting with the families who suffer casualties. America’s current wars are helping to bankrupt America, having cost about $1.1 trillion as I write this on January 19, 2011 (to see how much this has increased by the time you read this, look here).

Sarah Palin has declared herself a “tea party hawk,” arguing against any decrease in the defense budget (while arguing for a balanced budget). Her delusional stand has pleased some Tea Party supporters (furthering her TV and public speaking career and possibly her political career) and so we can count her among the people whose careers have profited from the wars.

Cui bono? Not you, gentle reader.