Chuck Hagel: Iraq and Afghanistan aren't ours to win or lose

Iraq and Afghanistan aren't ours to win or lose

By Chuck Hagel

Special To The Washington Post
Updated: 09/04/2009 07:10:58 PM MDT

The other night I watched the film "The Deer Hunter." Afterward, I remembered why it took me so many years to be able to watch Vietnam movies.

It all came tumbling back -- the tragedy, the innocent victims, the waste. Too often in Washington we tend to see foreign policy as an abstraction, with little understanding of what we are committing our country to: the complications and consequences of endeavors. It is easy to get into war, not so easy to get out. Vietnam lasted more than 10 years; soon, we will slip into our ninth year in Afghanistan. We have been in Iraq for almost seven years.

When I came to the Senate in 1997, the world was being redefined by forces no single country controlled or understood. The implosion of the Soviet Union and a historic diffusion of economic and geopolitical power created new influences and established new global power centers -- and new threats. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, shocked America into this reality. The Sept. 11 commission pointed out that the attacks were as much about failures of our intelligence and security systems as about the terrorists' success.

The U.S. response, engaging in two wars, was a 20th-century reaction to 21st-century realities. These wars have cost more than 5,100 American lives; more than 35,000 have been wounded; a trillion dollars has been spent, with billions more departing our Treasury each month. We forgot all the lessons of Vietnam and the preceding history.

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Are our policies worthy of these Americans' great sacrifices? That question must always be at the fore of our leaders' decisions. Threats to America come from more than Afghanistan. Consider Yemen and Somalia. Are we prepared to put U.S. ground troops there? I doubt we would seriously consider putting forces in Pakistan, yet its vast Federally Administered Tribal Areas and mountainous western border harbor our most dangerous enemies today. We must shift our thinking, now, to pursue wiser courses of action and sharper, more relevant policies.

The president and his national security team should listen to recordings of conversations that President Lyndon B. Johnson had with Sen. Richard Russell about Vietnam, especially those in which LBJ told Russell that we could not win in Vietnam but that he did not want to pull out and be the first American president to lose a war. Difficult decisions with historic consequences are coming soon for President Obama.

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http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_13272273

understand. So that's how it's played.

I live in Kansas, although not happily. There are a lot of Rupubs here, but the state is turning purple and is considered up for grabs. Please don't disparage a whole state because of some vocal fools who feed every negative stereotype. There are a lot of people here fighting the good fight.

but not enough of them altogether. And it may well be that the % of US citizens is equally, willfully ignorant of these facts. If so, we have true representative democracy. However I am not QUITE that pessimistic. Yet.

our country has been at war, wars of choice against people who didn't harm us excepting Afghanistan.
What other country can say that?