We were all still trying to cope with the enormity of 9/11, all still shell-shocked from the video images and the magnitude of destruction and death. As we sat outside talking about this, my ex-marine friend assured me that this was going to mean war.
When I incredulously asked him "war on whom", his reply was chilling and I have never forgotten it. He simply said "whoever gets in our way". For years I have thought about that conversation. At the time I tried to argue that we could not just start endlessly declaring war against everyone or engage in a war against an idea instead of a nation-state. But he was dead certain that it was going to be war, and given his history, I should have believed him then...it would have made the following 18 months less traumatic to me and shattered my worldview of the effectiveness of peaceful protest just a little less completely.
The ex-marine knew the military and knew that people wanted vengeance for the feeling of vulnerability so many millions of Americans were feeling at that moment...something totally foreign to our shared experience of invincibility at home had detonated, and while I was seeking ways to understand the cause, he knew that the powers that be would not let a moment like that slip by without using it to build up the military even further.
WWII begat Korea begat Vietnam and that was a disaster across the nation.
It was nearly a decade later that Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks was perfect cover for the invasion of Grenada 3 days later. My ex-marine friend has served in the corps at that time and was not in Beirut that terrible day, but lost several friends in the blast. He knew what I did not (or what I convinced myself of because I did not want to believe it) - the US military is ready to wreak havoc in defense of the country, but it will be especially ready to avenge any real attack on Americans with overwhelming force. And it will destroy things on an unimaginable scale once it is unleashed. But breaking shit is not the same as fixing a problem. War should be used only in extreme situations and then only to create conditions to prevent further escalation and suffering. War is ugly, inhumane, evil...and most of the time unnecessary or the totally wrong tool for a job. But it is a knee-jerk response and it will happen again, despite our current opportunity to learn that lesson once more.
Our military is designed and trained to do one thing - destroy enemy capability to make war on us, to prevent the challenges to USA homogeny. On a massive scale, they are unbeatable. No standing army in history could stand up to the combined ordinance and firepower of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. No country on Earth has the wherewithal to repel a dedicated US invasion, predicated on the destruction of the force opposing it.
An enemy may extract a terrible price in lives and treasure; but in the end, if the order comes, our troops will invade and will destroy the enemy's ability to make open warfare, and they will win the fronts and large battles without exception. But then comes the harder part - subduing an unwilling people into a different, imposed lifestyle. We were able to do this in post-WWII Germany and Japan because there were plans to rebuild that used different skills than military invasion and conquest. The Marshall Plan and the remaking of Japan came after total conquest...Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan never saw a complete subjugation of the hostile forces because the enemy has not been a large standing armed force since Korea (a conflict that is technically still on-going, though negotiations between North and South Korea were discussed again in 2018...nothing official has been completed).
We were going into Afghanistan regardless of Bin Laden's hideout or not, and we destroyed their army and resistance in weeks...but we never had a plan to do anything after that and counterinsurgency and police states are way outside the wheel house of the armed forces of the USA. Always have been, probably always will.
Our problems start when the large scale fighting ends, and then we do the greatest disservice of all - we allow the perception to persist that somehow "we" lost...that our troops "failed"....that our sitting President "should have known" and that our intelligence services "lack situational awareness".
IMO, the outcome in Afghanistan was ALWAYS set in stone and NONE of this should be allowed to be categorized as a surprise.
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