Rather than celebrating Veteran’s Day, I wish we could celebrate Armistice Day or, you know, the end of all war as we know it. That would be wonderful. I would much rather like to live in a world without conflict.
The unfortunate truth is that we don’t.
I come to this Veterans Day with dread. I often am asked what the United States will learn from its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
We have not rid the world of war. It continues in its small scale fashion at this very moment in conflicts all around the world.
“I think that if we can learn one thing, it’s to avoid reflexive and violent solutions,” said Sjursen. “The truth is, we probably needed less of me, less machine guns, less people who were trained to fight, and more diplomats and aid workers to get at the root problems of terrorism.”
Sjursen was deployed to Iraq in 2006 and then Afghanistan in 2011. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, he paid tribute to one of the fire crews killed in New York.
There is no doubt one question left unanswered as we witness the daily advances made by the Taliban in Afghanistan: what difference did an American presence make? The same extremist group the U.S. sought to topple after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, remains strong, bent but unbroken.
Imagine you’re President Joe Biden. You need $2 trillion dollars to fund one of your stated priorities – infrastructure. You learn of a war plane, the F-35 Lightning II, that would cost as much as $1.7 trillion to buy, field and maintain over the next 50 years. It’s $200 billion over budget, and more than ten years behind schedule. What do you do?
When President Joe Biden announced that US forces will leave Afghanistan by September 11 2021, the objections and remonstrations were swift. As retired Marine combat veteran Matthew Hoh writes in CNN, “these protests are nearly all disingenuous, false and specious, and meant to utilize fear to continue a tragic and purposeless war.”
When President Joe Biden announced that US forces will leave Afghanistan by September 11 2021, the objections and remonstrations were swift. As retired Marine combat veteran Matthew Hoh writes in CNN, “these protests are nearly all disingenuous, false and specious, and meant to utilize fear to continue a tragic and purposeless war.”
Once upon a time, President Joe Biden advocated for a vastly smaller military footprint in Afghanistan. We can only hope that, as President, he has the courage to follow through.
Lawrence Wilkerson: If Biden wants to actually respect and protect American troops, he must put a stop to stupid, endless wars.