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At this point James Fallows sounds identical to Andrew Bacevich:
There were plenty voices telling similar things years ago already. The warnings about the idiocy of invading Iraq were loud in early 2002 for everyone who didn't restrict himself to American TV and newspapers. The warnings about the Afghanistan mission becoming pointless and being doomed to fail were plenty and even came from insider officials back in 2005/2006. Belatedly connecting some dots, I figure that some pundits and semi-insiders knew about failures to come in 2001 and 2004 respectively - not out of pure luck, but by observing facts unknown to me at the time.
The warring countries chose to ignore the voices of reason and to follow the pro-wastefulness faction. It was a failure to choose correctly. There is no excuse about these failures being unpredictable or invisible until very late. We had the wrong people in power and the wrong people enact wrong policies, period.
S O
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I greatly respect Fallows, and Bacevich (Mahr is a hack), but they both completely missed the fundamental issue regarding the employment or misemployment of American military force: disregard of the U.S. Constitution.
ReplyDeleteSimply put, the U.S. Constitution vested the power to make ware in the Congress, not the executive branch.
Post WWII abuse of this power has blurred the lines of conflict and contributed to the explosion of intervention.
It is more complex than that, but plainly stated, the Executive branch should be limited to the most modest uses of military power in the most exigent of circumstances (e.g. a hostage rescue).
This abhorrent state of affairs started by a well intentioned President Truman to aide Korea, and became codified by Kennedy/Johnson in Vietnam.
It is quite easy to wash one’s hands of responsibility by voting for legislation *funding* a war, rather than taking full moral and political responsibility by voting *for war*.
GAB