Almost 10 years in this swamp and we still haven't taken down a bit player on the world's stage. Trillions of dollars gone or committed. Hundreds of thousands dead. Millions displaced. More instability in the world. Financial crisis in the US, largely due to this misadventure (distract the public with cheap houses and real estate inflation, place all war spending off-budget).

...I'm against a timetable. In wars, you declare when you're leaving after you've succeeded....

Fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to get a group largely based in Pakistan?

Who the hell has won at this point?

I'm left with more questions than answers, like:

How does one fund perpetual war? I would like to hear Senator McCain's response to such a question.

Also, to further study the Vietnam analogy, even though we 'lost', the long term outcome is an interesting case study. Yes, the communists took over - for several decades. But then what happened? Vietnam slowly started opening up and is now, while not an ally per se, is not an enemy either.

So I'm left wondering what Sen McCain's primary concern is - is it just the desire to save face by not losing, by not being embarrassed by an inferior fighting force? Reading the Sentor's comments makes me wonder whether we've lost perspective of what we're really supposed to be doing there - which is perhaps Eric's point in mentioning the Powell doctrine.

Wayne Swickley’s implied question is a good one. John McCain isn’t even the only failed presidential candidate with direct military experience who’s in the Senate, something which might otherwise justify having him be the “go-to guy” when the media has questions about something related to the military. There’s also John Kerry, and now that the Swift Boat crowd has been revealed to be another Karl Rove dirty trick, his experience, while not based on years as a prisoner, seems just as relevant as McCain’s. Maybe more so, since McCain was a Navy pilot with no inkling of what was happening on the ground in Vietnam, while Kerry was on the ground (and water) with first-hand knowledge of what the war was like.

Swickley is also correct about the Senate – I couldn’t name Wyoming’s two Senators without a Google search, which I’m not going to do.

We invaded Iraq under false pretenses, as everyone except George Bush and Dick Cheney seems to realize. Saddam Hussein may well have been the Middle Eastern version of Adolf Hitler, but he posed no threat to the United States, and ample evidence has since been provided to support that idea.

I wonder how many Iraqi families lost family members to errant bombs or bullets while we were busy fighting there for basically no reason? Why would an Iraqi family, not supportive of Hussein, but simply trying to live their lives within the bizarre constraints of that society, finding themselves without electricity and their livelihood destroyed by the invasion, respond positively to family members being killed as “collateral damage” by American troops or aircraft? How long before they consider the U.S. a friend? My guess is, "never."

Similar questions apply to Afghanistan. Unlike Iraq, we at least had a plausible military mission there originally, but I’m in agreement with Eric – “Nation-building” is not the forte of our armed forces, nor, I would argue, should it be. I want our forces to protect the United States, its citizens, and its political and economic interests as directed by Congress and the President, which is their constitutional role. Leave the “nation-building” to the State Department.

The reason for our invasion of Afghanistan has long ago faded into the “fog of war,” and what I’m hearing from Washington, whether civilian or military, not only doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t begin to justify the thousands of young Americans whose lives have been lost in the Middle East since 9/11/01, or the financial black hole it has created, which – vampire-like – is sucking the blood and energy from an already-sickly economy.

The Powell Doctrine seems pretty much the policy we followed in WW2, and to a degree, in Korea. Many of Powell’s rhetorical questions have simple answers in the context of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, that answer is “No.”

The concerns about endless war are legit. But it’s important to note that the Powell Doctrine has its own problems — namely that it’s a Cold War relic. Its underlying set of assumptions presume a balance of power situation like that during the 1980s. The biggest of these assumptions is that force is binary — all on or all off. As Madeleine Albright famously asked Powell: “What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?” Iraq is as much a creation of the Powell Doctrine as it is of what you call the McCain doctrine. Ditto for Afghanistan. When force failed to achieve the desired outcome, we had no fallback position.

Breaking down the essential questions the Powell Doctrine wants to pose before entering a conflict reveals the flaws clearly:

“1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?”
This presumes force can only be used in support of the most important security interest, as opposed to economic or humanitarian interest or less-than-vital security interests. Do Somali pirates really challenge our vital national security interests? No, they’re a nuisance but still arguably worth deploying a small flotilla to the Gulf of Aden. We’ve been taking on such small-scale players since the Barbary Wars. Small-scale force has a purpose.

“2. Do we have a clear, attainable objective?”
Modern states don’t obtain political objectives through military action and arguably haven’t since the wars that created Israel. Rather, they use military action to establish conditions that are most favorable for the desired political outcome. After that, it is up to other actors — the State Department, USAID, warring factions, NGOs, etc. — to achieve the desired political objective. This necessarily precludes a “clear, attainable objective.”

“3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?”
Clearly important, but hardly doctrine neutral.

“4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?”
This sounds nice and very kum-bah-yah. But sometimes an immediate, violent intervention yields better results than an orderly, gradual escalation of force. All indications are that Rwandan blood-letting could have been more easily halted with an immediate intervention instead of the drawn out process that happened. This question, more than any other, points to the Cold War origins of this doctrine.

“5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?”
Just as modern states don’t use militaries to attain political objectives, modern conflicts don’t end with one battle or even one war. They are conflict cycles with periods of greater and lesser confrontation that all fit within the scheme of the larger conflict. Look at America’s conflict with Iraq from the 1990s until today, Israel’s conflict with HAMAS and the PLA or any number of other conflict cycles. I say “modern conflicts,” but there’s nothing in this worldview that a Greek during the Peloponnesian War wouldn’t recognize.

“6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?”
See number three.

“7. Is the action supported by the American people?”
This has two flaws. The first is that the American people aren’t always able to accurately judge what is a “vital national security interest.” We were, after all, a sleepy nation prior to World War II. In such circumstances, public support is more a readiness measure than a guide to whether the war is worthwhile.
The second is that the American people might not be as necessary as we like to think. Under Clausewitzian views of warfare, there are three crucial elements to waging war: The state, the military and the people. A war is lost when just one of those three elements no longer has the willingness or ability of to wage war.
The relevant strength of each part of this trinity will vary over time and place, but it has long been presumed that Americans don’t have the stomach for war once they stretch on — that is, the people were the weak part of our trinity.
Yet we’ve sustained two wars for years despite widespread opposition. People may not like them, but they haven’t risen up against them. Our apathy has made the people part of the Clausewitzian trinity so perilously irrelevant as to almost render it a duality. This is the complete opposite of the situation in Vietnam and an almost Orwellian development.

“8. Do we have genuine broad international support?”
Broad international support is important, and the lack of it hamstrung us in Iraq. Yet it is illogical for a doctrine that presumes a threat to a vital national security interest to depend on broad international support for action. With close to 200 states and uncounted non-state actors, broad international support is far from a given, even in a just war.

For as long as I have been alive we have lived with wars and rumors of wars. And I came on the scene after "the war to end all wars."

Wars happen because someone or some state wants something that someone or some other state does not want to give. It may be security, or power, or territory, or resources, or any number of things people desire. It may simply be, as in the case of the jihadists, to force others to think and live as they do in the name of a god.

Wars have long been studied with a view to deciding when a war is "justified," and Powell's rationale is just one of them. But it seems that no matter who wants a war, s/he is always persuaded that it is a "justified" one. At least they SAY it is.

Some in recent times have declared that war is NEVER justified. But they seem to be a minority, and their views do not seem to prevail.

There was a time when it was thought that defense of one's borders justified a navy sufficient to keep an enemy from our shores, and that a standing army was a threat to our internal security. Those times are gone.

But, as in Hitler's case, when one spends millions to build up a powerful war machine, one must face the fact that it will wear out and/or become obsolete. It has no other purpose than to wreak destruction, so if it is to produce value it needs to be used.

After World War II, with the cold war, our country and its leaders believed we needed a huge war machine to deflect the threat of world domination by countries under the thumb of Marxist regimes. And so we built one.

Having it, we found reasons to use it, in Korea, and VietNam, and elsewhere from time to time. Win or lose, we used up some of that otherwise useless materiel. When the cold war ended, we found other uses for it, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our volunteer armed forces, if there were no wars, would wither from lack of use and opportunity for promotion. Our weapons, if not used up, would wear out and/or become obsolete.

On the world stage, our physical might and technological superiority give us political clout, adding another reason to keep it going.

Threats, real and imagined, fuel our fears for our own safety and lead us to threaten the safety of others.

No-one seems to ask the basic questions:

>IS war EVER "justified"? Or is it (as a famous draft protester said in the VietNam years) simply the continuation of Cain's murder of his brother Abel?

>Do we go to war over and over again, like Hitler, because we have to "use" the war machine we have created?

>Will we be overrun if we do not overrun others? Does anyone REALLY know?

>Is "our way of life" really so much better than other ways of living that it must be spread by force? These days that may seem questionable.

>Are we "our brothers keepers," with an obligation to come to the aid of the oppressed elsewhere in the world? And do we care about them?

As I come to the waning years of an already long life, I ponder these questions in the night hours and more and more see the raging debates as so much sound and fury, avoiding the real issues about war.

It seems to me that throughout history peoples have feared other those who build and maintain huge war machines -- and with good reason. If we have such a machine, should we not expect to be feared? And, of course, hated because of the fear we generate?

And it seems to me we could well afford to simply step back and let some peoples go after each other, if that's what they want to do -- unless they ask for our help.

And if they do in fact think to attack us or our friends, let them know their country will be uninhabitable for a few thousand years, and let it go at that.

This is an argument that I don't give a lot of credence to, because if you follow the logic of this argument, then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

Well said, John.

My dad loved to fly. Coming of age in the late 1930s, he got a degree in aeronautical engineering, and after Pearl Harbor, became a pretty highly-decorated Navy fighter pilot in the Pacific. When the war was over and Japan had surrendered. He got a job as an engineer with an aircraft company that’s since been absorbed by Boeing, but over time, his test flights for the company became increasingly frequent, and he’d generally left the desk behind by the time I started school. Shortly after my 7th birthday, he was killed on what should have been a routine test flight of a production Navy fighter jet.

I’ve often wondered, had he lived, how he would have responded to risking his life on 46 combat missions against Japan, only to see Honda and Mitsubishi, who were busy manufacturing weapons to be used against him during the war, selling cars in the U.S. a generation later. What purpose did his risk serve?

I’ve also often wondered how my Mom, who was left with 4 little kids when he was killed, reconciled the loss of her husband to the manufacture of weapons with the (temporary) affluence his occupation brought us?

Dad disliked the military, but then as now, the military had ample taxpayer dollars with which to build the coolest, fastest airplanes, and he loved flying the coolest, fastest airplanes. Perhaps that nearly adolescent fascination with “cool” and “fast” not only did him in, but supports a substantial part of the ongoing military-industrial complex.

One of the real benefits of foreign travel, especially for a child, is to discover, usually in surprise and wonder, that there are numerous, non-American ways by which one might live happily. My one trip to Europe, when I was 11 going on 12, was a revelation on so many levels that I still remember much of it clearly, more than half a century later, and it’s been a life-long topic of conversation with my sisters, who also went on that trip. It’s perhaps understandable that every culture thinks of itself as being superior to other, different, cultures, but sincerity of belief bears little relation to the truth, and John’s question in this regard is an excellent, soul-searching one – is our way of life so much better than others that it merits being spread at the point of a gun?

Who, exactly, so seriously threatens our political, economic and social system(s) that they pose a legitimate threat to “overrun” the United States? So far, at least, terrorists are generally state-less – they’re operating on their own agenda, and traditional military forces and techniques have proved remarkably ineffective at neutralizing them. We’re maintaining a gargantuan defense apparatus, serving in the process to subsidize a host of industries (and jobs) that contribute nothing to GDP, but depend on the maintenance of that military machine, when, as far as I can see, there’s no legitimate threat of invasion by anyone.