The War Pig

Budget cuts are looming for the Pentagon's elite Hot Pink Fern Brigade.

I am starting to read Ahamed's Lords of Finance.  I'm in that tricky phase of a good but challenging book where I'm having trouble getting that inertial mass going that will propel me through the lives and world of pre-Depression era central bankers.  You know, a beach read.

Ahamed gives a good description of what has commonly been called the first age of globalization from roughly 1870-1914.  He has a quote from the spring of 1914, whereby one wise European says that continental war was unthinkable because it was too damned expensive.

It occurs to me that little has changed.  We have hidden some of the costs well.  A professional, well trained volunteer army backed by the world's most extraordinary military infrastructure means that the human cost in lives is lessened and hidden and the cost in maiming and wounding can also be obscured.

And the orgy of Bushonomics, whereby tax cuts always pay for themselves and "deficits don't matter" until a Democrat gets elected, we have hidden - to some degree -  the financial costs of the war, too.

Which is just another way of saying, we have to stop fighting wars, especially the never-ending ones.

Afghanistan will never be what we want it to be.  Best case scenario is a nuke-free, smaller Pakistan: a country in name only, riven by tribal factions and held together by a dictatorship of the elite.  Same goes for Iraq.

The compelling reasons for staying there are lost on me.

After shooting bin Laden in the face (Update: still dead), we needn't light bonfires of US tax dollars and sacrifice the cream of our youth because we worry about "emboldening" anyone.

The idea behind the surges was to create a security window for civic institutions to blossom.  Under that logic, we will NEVER leave.  And if the choice is between NOW and NEVER.  I choose NOW.

We no longer have an obligation to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We did, at one point perhaps, have an obligation not to leave Iraq in chaos, after we destroyed their state.  We've paid our debts.  Time to go.

I know Obama won't go for it.  I know we will only see a small draw down in Afghanistan.  But it's nice to dream.

(Oh, and I won't count Libya as a war until we have ground troops there.)

Obama is rightly called the "only adult in the room" when it comes to DC politicians.  But just this once, I'd like to see him cut to the chase and make a bold call rather than a reasoned, judicious decision.