In recent days, the Obama administration has been scrambling to hand off management of our latest war- this one in Libya – to someone (anyone) else.<\/p>\n
The message coming out of the Pentagon has been that this will be a “limited” engagement, low-risk, low-investment.\u00a0 In a word:\u00a0 Easy.<\/p>\n
I’m not a pacifist.\u00a0 I believe that war is an occasionally necessary tool.<\/p>\n
But any time a politician or a general tells you that a violent conflict will be easy, or limited, or someone else’s job to finish, hide your sons and daughters under the stairs.<\/p>\n
It was this kind of rhetoric — and not the lack of WMDs — that most infuriated me about the war in Iraq.\u00a0 We were promised a surgical conflict, a made-for-TV campaign of shock and awe and toppling statues.<\/p>\n
A decade later, we’re still sorting out the toll in lives lost, and tax dollars expended.<\/p>\n
When confronted with the inadequacy of war planning, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered that timeless self-justification:<\/p>\n
“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”<\/p>\n
He might have added that you come home from war not with the young people you might want or wish to have at a later time, but with men and women forced to pay a terrible physical, moral and emotional price.<\/p>\n
The suicides, the divorces, the substance abuse, the PTSD, the head trauma. We’re only beginning to understand what the last decade of perpetual war has meant to American society.<\/p>\n