D-day second.

Obama’s surge strategy is beginning to take shape, and it isn’t encouraging for those of us who question this ongoing occupation (and who have questioned the war since the beginning). The Times of London quotes a U.S. commander as describing this action in terms of a “D-Day Moment”, but in the context of a conflict that has lasted nearly twice as long as America’s part in World War II, this would seem in relative terms more like a second. Also, rather than attacking the flank of the most powerful military force in the world, we are invading a battered, impoverished region of one of the planet’s most miserable nations – a place where people struggle to subsist, and where large-scale conflict will likely result in a major displacement of the population, perhaps approaching the scale of what is now occurring across the border in Pakistan’s tribal departments.

I guess it’s up to all of us to ask, how much more of this? We’ve been in Afghanistan for almost eight years, and we are further from the place we’d said we were going than when we started. Setting aside the basic illegitimacy of our invasion, the simple fact that we’ve been there so long with neither a clear mission nor an end point in sight would be enough to sour the public’s taste for this imperial project. Unfortunately, with the change of administration, it’s as though someone has pushed the reset button. The Bush team fucked it up, the argument goes, so Obama needs to set things straight. As the president said, we took our eye off the “ball” by invading Iraq – thus the crime of invading Iraq becomes a rationale for compounding the crime of invading Afghanistan. We’re acting like a serial killer, one driven on by his/her own twisted logic. Someone grab a bit stick. (Make mine wintergreen.)

All right, I know… I’ve gotten on my soap box about this before, but the reason why these lousy, pointless wars have so much staying power is that there is NO CONSCRIPTION and NO WAR TAX LEVIES. Our system has corrected for this oversight, which proved the undoing of our last major imperial enterprise – the Indochina wars. By eliminating these two age-old institutional pillars of warfare, we have effectively disconnected the bulk of our population from the costs of warfare. Fueled by borrowed treasure and the victims of economic misfortune, our wars have become self-perpetuating. Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be a great deal harder to stop than was Vietnam (and it was hard to stop the Vietnam war, with the end coming far too late for the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). This flurry of recent fighting is just another flare up in what has proven a far longer, more difficult campaign than anyone thought going in. The real D-Day question is, when will our V-E day arrive?