"Tell Me How This Ends"

The title quotation is attributed to General David Petraeus but, as with most of his wisdom, it does not originate with him. It comes from studies performed by the military following the war in Vietnam to assure that we do not get dragged into quagmires of endless war again, and became an element of the Powell doctrine, in which he says that we should never enter a war without having a clear “exit strategy.”

Of course that went by the board in 2002 with George W. Bush, when they thought that Iraq would throw flowers at our tanks and that no exit would be required because we would just be passing through. The eventual exit was based on at least a pretense that the country had reached a position of stability; a pretense which has now been thoroughly debunked.

We are exiting Afghanistan later this year, for no reason that I can discern other than that Obama has decided it is time to leave. Our original entry was supposedly for the purpose of capturing Osama bin Laden, but we failed in that effort within a couple of months. We then were supposedly driving out Al Queda, which we effectively did within a year, at which point our mission seemingly changed to defeating the Taliban. No one can even really pretend that we have done that, but we are leaving anyway.

So now we are starting a war to destruction with the Islamic State, and are not even talking about when or how that one ends, other than admitting that if it ends at all it will be “a long time” before it does. We don’t even have any assurance that it will end at all.

So “how does this end” is no longer a question to which an answer is required before we enter a new war, it is a question which we no longer ask.