Daily Times

Is it not about time that the US won a war? Some will rightly observe that every war the US started, it lost. Forget the misnomered wars on drugs, poverty, racism and the like. Think instead about Vietnam, the war on terror, Afghanistan and the second Iraq war. Why did we lose or, more generously, fail to succeed in each? Understanding why and permanently imbedding that understanding in the nation’s DNA for future generations would be an invaluable New Year’s resolution to keep.

The Iraq War of 1990-1991 was not part of this list because we did not start it and, more importantly, because the coalition succeeded in its objective of evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, destroying a large measure of his army in the process. Yet, in the four other “wars”, the nation failed.

In Vietnam, intellectual arrogance and cultural ignorance conspired to harden a brittle anti-communist ideology, igniting an ultimately unwinnable war that claimed over 58,000 US lives and many times more Vietnamese lives. Because the “greatest generation” of World War II, a hyperbolic accolade, was forged during a time when the Nazi and fascist threat was the clear and present danger, it was understandable for that ideology to carry over into the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its ally Red China were cast as and believed to be new incarnations of Hitler. After Stalin rolled up much of Eastern Europe and the iron curtain descended by 1947, containing communism was the appropriate response. And the belief that Soviet communism was monolithic became dogma.

Had John Kennedy not been assassinated, no one knows whether the US would have become trapped in South East Asia’s killing fields. Nonetheless, the national mantra was that communism had to be stopped at the Mekong to prevent it from spreading to the Mississippi. That the US could “pay any price and bear any burden” in defence of liberty was sheer arrogance. And the White House understood little about Vietnam, its culture and the will of the north that would trump the world’s most powerful military.

Unappreciated at the time (and perhaps since) was, surprisingly, the Kennedy administration’s lack of experience and maturity in governing. Despite being labelled the “best and brightest” and its World War II and subsequent credentials, Kennedy’s cabinet was vastly overrated except in its arrogance over presumed superior intellectual abilities. Yes, the Cuban Missile Crisis was turned into what seemed a US victory although it probably extended the Cold War by a decade because Nikita Khrushchev was forced to reverse his stand on cutting back on defence. And presidential inexperience remained largely invisible as a fatal flaw in waging war until 2001.

These characteristics of lack of experience, arrogance and cultural ignorance would return with a vengeance and become principal contributors to failures in the war on terror and the subsequent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite selecting a cabinet that was filled with prior governing experience, that was insufficient to overcome President George W Bush’s inexperience. And September 11 would have tested the most experienced of presidents let alone one who was only months in the job.

Bush was overly dependent on the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and not sufficiently confident to take charge of his vastly more experienced cabinet, which included Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. While al Qaeda was the culprit of 9/11, the real target was Saddam Hussein. Deposing Saddam would redefine the geostrategic landscape of the region, or so the president naively believed.

Smashing the Taliban with virtually no US ground forces in a matter of weeks reinforced the arrogance over what could be achieved politically through battlefield victory. Arrogance produced groupthink and absolute certainty over the presence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And the lightning victory over Saddam in 2003 would enable quickly turning post-war Iraq to the Iraqis. By 2006 or 2007, Bush had grown in the job, realising the failures that permeated his watch.

Barack Obama fell into a similar trap. Afghanistan was the “good war”, Iraq the bad one. Hence, with supreme arrogance and ignorance injected with inexperience, the sound bite became strategy: exit Iraq as early as possible. Set an end date to coalition military operations in Afghanistan to force Afghans to provide for their own security. As before, the White House lacked any real cultural understanding of the regions or the people.

Will five or six decades of this unhappy history be repeated by future presidents? Who knows? But not forgetting this history is a resolution worth keeping.

The writer is chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business and senior advisor at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council. His latest book, due out this fall, is A Handful of Bullets: How the Murder of an Archduke a Century Ago Still Menaces Peace Today