We Don’t Win

Tom Engelhardt knows that wars can be won and that won wars can change geopolitical conditions: “don’t think for a moment that war never solved a problem, or achieved a goal for an imperial or other regime, or that countries didn’t regularly find victory in arms. History is filled with such examples.”

Engelhardt also observes that despite our military funding, technology, and skill we haven’t achieved this for a long, long time: “The U.S. military has not won a serious engagement since World War II: the results of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq ranged from stalemate to defeat and disaster. With the exception of a couple of campaigns against essentially no one (in Grenada and Panama), nothing, including the ‘Global War on Terror,’ would qualify as a success on its own terms, no less anyone else’s. This was true, strategically speaking, despite the fact that, in all these wars, the U.S. controlled the air space, the seas (where relevant), and just about any field of battle where the enemy might be met. Its firepower was overwhelming and its ability to lose in small-scale combat just about nil.”

This is too grim. In addition to the skirmishes he mentions, we pushed Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991. And though our action in Panama might have been against “no one,” and even though our opponent in Panama was (as is often the case) an American creation, the geopolitical effects of retaining the canal are significant.

Overall, though, Engelhardt is obviously right. And he suggests that this should at least cause us to pause to wonder if “something in the nature of imperial war now precludes victory, the achieving of goals, the ‘solving’ of problems in our present world.”