A legacy of war and human folly

In 2008, Barack Obama dramatically won the US presidential election by pledging to end the two highly costly American wars of aggression-intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Declaring a borderless “war on terror,” President George W. Bush had ordered the invasions in 2001 and 2002 allegedly in retaliation for the September 11 airplane bombing attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, attributed to the Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden.

Now, with seven months remaining of his second four-year term, Obama faces the near-certain prospect of having to leave behind the continuing Afghanistan and Iraq wars – plus deepening American involvement in the Syrian civil war where he has ordered the deployment of Special Operations Forces.

Also he will be remembered for having approved the seemingly interminable covert military operations and aerial strikes using drones against suspected “terrorist” groups in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The drone strikes have been severely criticized for causing civilian casualties, dismissively referred to as “collateral damage.”

Thus Obama will leave a legacy as “the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war,” as the International New York Times put it in a recent report. And, take note, he has carried out each military campaign without seeking, nor being granted, specific authority by the US Congress – much less the issuance of a formal declaration of war.

Per the INYT, Obama would have a “longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt [World War II], Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon [the Vietnam war for both], or his hero Abraham Lincoln [US civil war].”

By launching covert military operations and drone attacks, Obama has violated the sovereignty of nations with which America is not formally at war. One of them is a long-time US ally – Pakistan, which has protested twice over US operations that killed two high-value targets in its territory. Pakistani authorities were informed of the actions only after these had been carried out.

(The high-value targets were Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, taken down in his hideout in a covert operation in 2011, and Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, reportedly killed by a drone strike while travelling in a car in Baluchistan last week.)

Why has Obama gotten himself so deeply in such a war quagmire?

“No president wants to be a war president. Obama thinks of war as an instrument he has to use very reluctantly,” notes military historian Eliot A. Cohen of the Johns Hopkins University. “But we are waging these long, rather strange wars. We’re killing lots of people. We’re taking casualties,” he laments.

His closest advisers, interviewed by INYT, say Obama has heavily relied on covert operations and drone strikes because “he is mindful of the dangers of escalation, and has long been skeptical that American military interventions work.”

Moreover, he was quoted in that report as having declared (when he received his Nobel Prize for Peace in December 2009) that humanity needed to reconcile “two seemingly irreconcilable truths – that war is sometimes necessary and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”

And by his subsequent acts, Obama has provided evidence for that statement.

Specifically, the US war of aggression against Iraq has been convincingly exposed as more than folly: it was deception. The reason cited for launching it – that President Saddam Hussein was harboring “weapons of mass destruction” – was proven utterly baseless.

Yet three years after he had ordered the full withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011, Obama began sending “military advisers” back in to help the battle against the Islamic State – whose leaders have sprung from the ranks of Iraqi militants previously held and tortured in US military prisons in Iraq. There are now more than 4,000 US troops in Iraq.

(As of end-May 2012, the Pentagon tallied American military casualties in Iraq thus: 4,425 killed, 32,223 wounded in action. The war had cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion.)

In the case of the Afghanistan war now on its 15th year, Obama first reneged on his pledge to end it by ordering the deployment of 30,000 additional troops in 2009. The justification was to improve the military situation as to warrant the gradual withdrawal of troops in the ensuing years. In May 2014, he ordered the total withdrawal of US combat troops by the end of 2016.

But in August 2015 he announced his plan to leave behind 5,000 of the 9,800 troops remaining there until early 2017. By then Obama would have bowed out of office, bequeathing to his successor an unfinished war. Reason: the Taliban (Al Qaeda’s ally), which the US war drove out of state power and its leaders into exile in Pakistan, have regained control of more Afghan territory than they had at any time since 2001. They thus pose risks to the weak US-backed government and to the American troops there.

(As of October 2015, US military casualties numbered 2,326 killed and 20,083 wounded, plus 1,173 civilian contractors killed. The financial cost of the war was conservatively placed at $1 trillion.)

Obama had been pressuring the Pakistani authorities to convince Taliban leader Mansour to negotiate a peace agreement with the Afghan government. Allegedly Mansour spurned peace talks.  Weeks ago Obama ordered the drone strike against him. He called the killing “an important milestone” in his Afghanistan war. But…is it?

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