War in Afghanistan

Barack Obama is currently wrestling with the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, with the number 30,000 in today’s news. So this is a good time to review U.S. foreign policy. I was an original supporter of (the younger) President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2002. My argument was as follows: Iraq had made an agreement with the United States after the First Gulf War to allow U.N. inspections in order to determine that Iraq had gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction (defined as atomic, chemical and biological). However, as a result of President Clinton’s lack of will, this agreement was never enforced. The U.N. inspectors were allowed to look anyplace the weapons weren’t, but anytime they started to get close, Saddam Hussein clamped on the lid and refused to allow them to inspect further. It was fairly obvious that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (at least the chemical and biological kind) and was violating its agreement with President Bush’s father. I never bought the argument that these weapons were a threat to the United States. However, no nation can afford to have promises made to it held in contempt. Foreign policy, short of war, consists almost completely of agreements. Treaties, pacts, alliances, peace treaties, etc. all consist of agreements. If the other fellow gets the idea that he can flout any agreement he has made, then it becomes impossible to conduct foreign policy, and the nation’s affairs become a mess. Essentially war then becomes the only means of dealing with other nations. It is therefore essential that a nation enforces agreements made to it. This is a pre-requisite of foreign policy. President Bush’s arguments for the war were vastly exaggerated and were easy for the crazy left to shoot down, but this one point was valid. Also Saddam Hussein was definitely sheltering terrorists. Abu Abbas, the terrorist who attacked the Achille Lauro in 1985 and killed Leon Klinghoffer, was found hiding in Baghdad after U.S. troops took the city. At first, the war was prosecuted well. The Iraqi army was defeated, and about 80% of the Iraqi population (the Kurds and the Shiites) came over to the U.S. side. When Saddam Hussein was captured and executed, that should have been an end to it. For what else was there left to fight? We had won. At this juncture, President Bush came up with a new reason for continuing the war: to turn Iraq into a democracy. I must confess that this phase of the war was fought brilliantly. The Sunnis were won over to the American side, and by the end of the Bush Presidency Iraq was a democracy. The fighting had ended, and the U.S. had won the war by any conceivable standard. But by this time, I was having some very uncomfortable feelings. The war had ended. There was no reason any longer to fight. (Close to 100% of the Iraqi people were/are on our side.) And yet American troops remain in Iraq. This was one disconnect. Soon there were others. Why didn’t President Bush declare victory in late 2008 and pull American troops out of the country? It would have nailed down his argument against the left and brought a victorious conclusion to the major event of his administration. What happened to the war against Al Qaeda? This was the original reason for entering the Near East. After the battle at Tora Bora, Osama Ben Laden escaped over the border to Pakistan where he was not pursued by American troops. For the last seven years, the U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda. It has merely been pretending to. America’s Founding Fathers established a foreign policy of non-intervention. Jefferson put it best: “Peace, commerce, honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” And this policy was largely followed up until World War II. At this point, people who wanted to follow the traditional American policy of keeping out of world affairs were smeared as isolationists, and since that time America has been entrapped in a huge maze of alliances and has ta...

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