Why Can't America Win Wars Anymore?

Why Can't America Win Wars Anymore? This question has been asked in many forms for many years (in MinnPost, the Atlantic, Ricochet, The Daily Beast, The LA Times, etc.). So let's look at the wars that we've won, and the wars that we've lost and see what we can learn.

We "won" the Libyan civil war, in that we bombed Qaddafi's military forces and helped the rebels overthrow and kill the dictator. But the place is falling apart now as various Libyan factions bicker with each other and ISIS is moving in to cause havoc.

We "won" the Iraq war, in that we destroyed the Iraqi military, killed lots of civilians, installed a puppet government and killed Saddam Hussein. But that puppet government turned out to be a puppet of Iran, not the United States. Now Iraq is falling apart again as ISIS fighters take over large swaths of Iraqi territory that the Shiite government can't hold because they have been treating the Sunni inhabitants of those areas like animals.

We won the Gulf War straight up: we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, crushed his army, placed a no-fly zone over the entire country and neutered his territorial ambitions for a decade. Some people think we "lost" because we didn't take Saddam out at that time.

But it was Dick Cheney, of all people, who so expertly explained why we had to leave Saddam in power in 1993: if Iraq fell apart, then Iran would gain power and then Syria would start falling apart, and then the whole Middle East would go to hell. It turns out the 1993 Dick Cheney was dead right: all the bad things the 1993 Cheney said would happen did happen when the 2003 Cheney invaded Iraq.

We lost the Vietnam war straight up. Yet for all the screaming about dominoes and the moaning about the blow to our prestige, "losing" in Vietnam has had a far more positive outcome than "winning" in Iraq. Communism has been defeated across the globe: China and Vietnam are now capitalist countries, with communist governments in name only.

The Korean War was a draw: we kept South Korea free, while the Chinese and Russians kept North Korea captive. North Korea is now a rogue state: a tyrannical feudal monarchy run by a deranged despot, with a ruling class that serves at the whim of the Supreme Leader and can be executed for offenses as trivial as falling asleep in a meeting.

We like to think we won WWII straight up. We freed western Europe and North Africa from the Germans. We freed Asia and the Pacific from the Japanese. But eastern Europe fell under Soviet control, and shortly thereafter China and much of Asia fell under communist rule.

To make sure we sustained our wins in South Korea, Germany and Japan we had to embark on a huge program of reconstruction and nation-building. We had to occupy these nations for years, babysit them while they wrote new constitutions, build numerous bases at tremendous expense and station troops there for up to 70 years -- and counting.

We like to think we won WWI straight up: we ejected Germany from the rest of Europe. But Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, and Germany fell into a terrible depression, partly due to an unreasonable treaty forced upon them by the victors, and 20 years later Germany started another war. WWI was supposed to the war to end all wars, and clearly it did not.

We "won" the Civil War in the United States, but to this day there are millions of Americans who celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America and a traitor to this nation. And these are the same people who today claim to be the "real Americans."

What do our victories and losses tell us? We can win wars to eject invaders and free people from slavery. We used moral suasion to convince the citizens of Germany and Japan that the Holocaust and the war crimes committed by the Japanese were wrong, and got them to change their ways. Stationing hundreds of thousands of troops there for decades made it stick.

But we lose wars that we have no moral standing in, or wars that prop up corrupt allies like South Vietnam. And wars never change anyone's minds about the rightness of their cause, or that a "way of life" based on the enslavement of human beings was worth fighting for. Incredibly, I'm talking about the American South, not Nazi Germany.

How does this apply to our current conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria?

We invaded Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda and bin Laden. We did that in short order, and therefore "won," but then we decided that we also had to get rid of the Taliban. We've been stuck there for 13 years now. (The Soviets were stuck with the same problem in the 1980s but called it quits when their country fell apart.)

We can't win in Afghanistan for two reasons: one is military, the other cultural. Militarily, Pakistan has been undercutting us from Day One in Afghanistan. For some reason Pakistan believes that an Afghanistan mired in eternal turmoil somehow diminishes the power of India, their sworn enemy. Now Pakistan is besieged by their own Taliban terrorists, who kill children by the hundreds. Both Afghan and Pakistani Talibans are essentially untouchable in their mountain aeries in western Pakistan.

Culturally, we have no traction in Afghanistan: we are perceived as invaders and Crusaders, an image perpetuated by American conservatives who keep making this a war between Islam and Christianity. The Afghan Taliban is not an invading force, they are native Afghan Pashto Muslims who have lived there for centuries. Yes, they're an evil misogynistic pack of scumbags, but it's still their country.

There the Americans are the interlopers, the ones using drones to shoot Hellfire missiles into wedding parties and bombing houses filled with children. Unlike the Germans and the Japanese, the Taliban didn't invade another country. We invaded them to get at a few foreign terrorists who were hiding out there. Our bombardment of an entire country to root out a small number of criminals puts us in a very poor light there.

And by the way. We were the ones who financed the Taliban and forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan. As Jon Stewart noted in "Learning Curves are for Pussies," the CIA says it's the only time doing such a thing worked.

It's the same story in Iraq. We are viewed as foreign invaders there. Some locals want to use us to destroy their enemies, but they don't like us, or trust us, or believe in democracy or the rule of law. If we destroy ISIS in the Sunni areas of Iraq, the Shiite government will send troops into those areas and kill the Sunnis for cooperating with ISIS. It's a lose-lose proposition.

We have even less standing to meddle in Syria, where our mortal enemy the Iranians are allied with our mortal enemy Assad who are fighting against our mortal enemy ISIS, and we're allied with people who used to say we were their mortal enemy, but now they'll only cop to despising us and cursing us for not giving them enough money and guns.

Viewing our successes and failures over the past century, it becomes clear that the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are not wars that we can win militarily. This is because these countries are made of ethnically and religiously diverse populations who have been at each others' throats for centuries, with lapses of atrocities when dictators like Saddam and Assad used their brutal powers to put a temporary stop to the internecine bickering.

To "win" these wars, we would have to replace the governments of these countries with an American-backed puppet government, along the lines of the post-WWII German and Japanese governments. We would have to segregate these countries into several separate provinces along ethnic and religious lines (Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Pashto, Turkmen, Alawite, etc.) , and forcibly repatriate millions of people into the "right" provinces. Doing this fairly is impossible because natural resources such as oil, water and farmland are not evenly distributed. We would have to trust the American government -- which Republicans keep telling us is incapable of doing anything right -- to pick ethnic and religious losers in a foreign country.

And then we'd discover that we already tried that a hundred years ago when the British divvied up the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Look how well that worked out!

We would have to spend a trillion dollars a year and station one or two hundred thousand troops in these countries for the next century in an attempt to force them to see reason. Meanwhile, our fighting men and women would face a constant barrage of IEDs and sniper fire as the local population tried to oust the foreign invaders.

You might think I'm making this all up, but Lindsey Graham's plan for the Middle East is what I outlined above, except he ignores the exorbitant cost and the number of American casualties. The South Carolina senator, Republican presidential candidate and self-proclaimed national security "expert" told NBC's Chuck Todd that we need to invade Syria and Iraq, and that we'll never get out. He has deluded himself into thinking that we can do this on the cheap, getting Turkey and Egypt to do all the heavy lifting, and that the people who have been attacking us for the last 13 and a half years in Afghanistan will simply stop shooting and bombing American soldiers in the Middle East if he's elected president.

This was George W. Bush's plan for Iraq. He pretended he could do it on the cheap, insisting that Iraqi oil would pay for it all. But he spent whatever moral currency America might have had in the Middle East by invading Iraq on false pretenses.

Military might can be used to eject foreign invaders like Germany from France, or Saddam from Kuwait. But it can't make people see reason, treat fellow citizens fairly or adopt a liberal democracy unless that's what they want. And right now, all anyone on any side in the Middle East wants is revenge.