War, what is it good for? In America, the answer is that, much of the
time, you’ll probably never know what it’s good for – or, in some cases,
even notice that we’re at war. Right now, the U.S. is ever more
deeply involved in significant conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and
increasingly Yemen – at least five ongoing wars in the Greater Middle East.
Yet, in the midst of Election 2016, with the single exception of the long-proclaimed,
long-awaited Iraqi-Kurdish offensive against Islamic State militants in the
city of Mosul (with U.S. advisers on the frontlines
and U.S. Apache helicopter crews in
the air), the rest of our spreading military actions might as well be taking
place on Mars.
The Taliban has recently attacked two
Afghan cities and is gaining
ground nationwide; Afghan military casualties have been soaring;
and American planes
and advisers
have been let loose there in a fashion unseen since 2014. Neither presidential
candidate has offered a peep on the subject, nor has there been a question about
that now-15-year-old war in any of the “debates.” (They must be
rigged!) In Syria, the U.S. air campaign continues,
largely unnoticed, while Washington tries to broker
a deal between the Turks and the Kurds (think
Hatfields and McCoys) for an offensive to take ISIS’s “capital”
Raqqa. (Good luck on that twosome working together!)
The New York Times recently
described the expanding but under-the-radar American war against the al-Shabab
terror movement in Somalia this way: “Hundreds of American troops now
rotate through makeshift bases in Somalia, the largest military presence since
the United States pulled out of the country after the ‘Black Hawk Down’
battle in 1993… It carries enormous risks – including more American casualties,
botched airstrikes that kill civilians and the potential for the United States
to be drawn even more deeply into a troubled country that so far has stymied
all efforts to fix it.”
As for Libya – oh, yes, Washington is in action there, too, even if you never
hear about it – the U.S. Air Force (drones, jets, and helicopters) has doubled
its air strikes against ISIS militants in the last month: 163 of them. And,
of course, there’s Yemen where the U.S. seems to be stumbling directly
into a new war without the slightest notice to Congress or the American people.
American destroyers have been responding to “missile attacks” that
– shades of the Tonkin
Gulf incident of the Vietnam War era – may or may
not have happened by firing
Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in territory occupied by the Houthi rebels.
This in a country already under siege from a brutal American-backed
Saudi air
campaign, significantly aimed
at its…