Fighting Our Own Wars

Andrew J. Bacevich writes tough truths for RealClearWorld. His basic point: the U.S. isn't good at creating foreign armies that will stand fast against determined opposition.

What are the policy implications of giving up the illusion that the Pentagon knows how to build foreign armies? The largest is this: subletting war no longer figures as a plausible alternative to waging it directly. So where U.S. interests require that fighting be done, like it or not, we're going to have to do that fighting ourselves.

In circumstances where U.S. forces are demonstrably incapable of winning or where Americans balk at any further expenditure of American blood -- today in the Greater Middle East both of these conditions apply -- then perhaps we shouldn't be there.

To pretend otherwise is to throw good money after bad or, as a famous American general once put it, to wage (even if indirectly) "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." This we have been doing now for several decades across much of the Islamic world.

Actually, Bacevich overlooks a major exception in the mujaheeden of Afghanistan who, with our aid, threw out the Soviets. The difference? Like the Kurds they were already fighting and merely needed our help. The Russians may have managed this in Syria with Assad's Alawites.

Perhaps a foreign legion is a feasible intermediate step between "doing the fighting ourself" and "bugging out?" Worth a try.