My generation has never seen America win a war

My generation, and the ones after that, have never seen America fully win a war, as they did in various previous wars. We have seen America lose two wars: Vietnam and Afghanistan. Korea was a stalemate in which the UN troops were driven back to the 38th parallel before an armistice was reached. Technically both countries are still at war as North Korea has never recognized any peace treaty or accord.

Iraq was a bad situation before we entered and turned it into a worse situation and the birthplace of Al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq. In 1999 that became ISIL, the organization that bedeviled the USA in both Iraq and Syria, as well as planted bombs in various parts of Europe. Going back in time, we placed Marines in Lebanon during President Reagan’s time only to lose a couple of hundred of them in a bombing and having to withdraw with our tails between our legs. As the book title points out, during these decades, we have been excellent at winning battles while managing to lose the peace. Really, even that book title is a misnomer. We managed to win battles regularly and still–in the long run–lost the war.

For the sake of completeness, I will mention that we have won several police actions, such as the invasion of Grenada and the invasion of Panama. But, those could not be reasonably considered to be wars.

As a Vietnam Veteran, I notice that whenever the USA loses a war, we begin a blame game whose underlying assumption is that there is no way that the USA could possibly lose a war. Therefore, there must have been mismanagement by either the President (and Congress) or the military. Even the book pictured above assumes the same. Notice that the title assumes that we could have won the peace. That is probably a mistaken assumption.

Behind this assumption, that we could have won the peace, is a national myth that we find most comforting. We are the shining light on a hill and everyone wants to be like us or at least should want to be like us. If any countries do not want to be like us, then either there is a government in power that is an evil government or the people need more education to understand why they need to want to be like us. That same assumption was behind much of the British Empire. Rudyard Kipling wrote verses about what he called “White Man’s Burden.” I highly recommend you read the poem as you will recognize many of the sentiments expressed therein. One of the most damning verses is that they do not understand now, and therefore hate us, that we are changing them for the better.

19th-century missionaries went out not simply with the idea of evangelizing cultures but also with the idea of bringing “civilization” to other cultures. By civilization, the missionaries meant that the cultures would become like British (and American) cultures. Not surprisingly, many missionaries were shocked when there were violent revolutions at the end of the colonial period in which good Christian converts insisted on not being governed by a foreign colonial power. Even more staggering to some of the missionaries was that after the colonials freed themselves from their overlords they still claimed to be Christians, but Christians who did not want their culture subverted by Britain, or France, or Portugal, or …

In Afghanistan, the collapse is due to a Muslim populace that does not wish to adopt Western values. Part of the reason for the rapid Taliban advance was not simply the collapse of the Afghani Armed Forces but also due to the fact that the Taliban has more support among the populace than the Westernized version of Afghanistan that we tried to build. I do not agree with Islamic Sharia law. But, apparently, a majority of Afghanis do. England did not give up India until after World War II. India promptly returned to being Hindu, while the eastern and western Muslim provinces seceded from India. While there are strong remains of English culture in India, nevertheless, India never changed its law and culture to be like England’s.

But, the USA can never lose. Therefore, you can read on social media (and news media) various accusations that try to explain why we lost (just like happened after Vietnam). Our military was never fully supported, they say. That is untrue, but those who espouse that explanation believe that a purely military solution was possible. The only purely military solution would have involved so much civilian damage that our souls would have been lost even if the war were won. I would point you to the histories of Spain and Greece under Muslim occupation. In Spain, 700 years of war. In Greece, 400 years of war. Do you really think that we could have kept up centuries of war without damaging our national character?

It is the fault of the current President. That is an incredibly narrow and inaccurate view. President Biden carried out the peace treaty signed by President Trump. Does President Trump not bear any blame? Does President Obama bear no blame for not carrying out his 2011 promise to leave Afghanistan? Does President George W. Bush bear no blame for engaging in what he claimed he would never do, which is nation-building? No, there is much blame to spread around, of which President Biden bears the least of all the Presidents. But, they say, President Biden could have planned the pull-out better! Again, that assumes that the USA can control events. The Taliban takeover following the collapse of the Afghani Armed Forces was not predicted by our own intelligence analysts (except, maybe, the CIA). Even if it had been predicted, honestly, what could have been done? Would it have been better to have another couple of hundred of our children killed in order to prove that we are in control? Yes, we lost 12. That is terrible.. But, the other option was to re-enter Afghanistan in full force again. I will guarantee you that in that case, the same people screaming now would have been screaming about President Biden’s violation of President Trump’s peace treaty.

Finally, there is a lesson to be learned. We are not the shining light on a hill that the Gospels speak about. That is the Church and only the Church. Our culture is not the index culture for all other cultures, nor should we assume that in all our diplomatic and belligerent interactions. We are not called to turn every democracy into an American-style democracy. If we value religious freedom then that means that there are some cultures whose view of the appropriate place of religion within their cultures is different than ours. Both Germany and England have state churches. We do not. Various Islamic countries may choose to have Islamic bases for their government. We need to learn to live with that. If we want to bring change, then we need to bring it as the Early Church did, and that is with many many martyrs who finally convinced the populace, by their examples, that Christianity is true.

The reasons above may be why, beginning with my birth year, the USA has never seen a war truly won.