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In my last post, I cited the example of a guy playing high school football in Texas who broke his arm early in the game, but continued playing until his arm was so swollen that his forearm pads had to be cut away at half time. For me, this was an unequivocal example of someone whose common sense was clearly overwhelmed by fealty to a highly militaristic sense of "honor," a self-destructive "duty" to sacrifice for abstractions like "manly honor" and "team spirit."
Go Panthers. Go Tigers. Go Yankees. Go Crazy.
Imagine my surprise when one commenter harshly chastised me for encouraging kids who break their arms to just "give up" and "fail." "You are saying that not quitting is bad," he wrote.
Right. When your arm is broken, not quitting is bad. When you're risking permanent disability for the sake of a triviality like a high school game, that's precisely what I'm saying. A word to all you athletes out there. If you break a bone or get hit so hard you can't remember what day it is, please remember to walk off the field (Quit! Fail!) before you lose something far more precious and irreplaceable than your bearings. Forget all the propaganda about how "quitters never win" and so on. I'm telling you that those who don't know when to quit are the biggest losers of all. I'm not talking about the adolescent drama of high school football; I'm talking about real life.
For all his brilliance, President Obama appears to have painted himself into a bloody corner of Afghanistan by following the very American anti-quitting script. American culture being what it is, I'm betting that he and his advisors agreed it would be self-defeating for an intelligent, literate, educated man to tell the public the brutal truth: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were colossal blunders at best, high crimes at worst, and both should be ended as soon as humanly possible. Maybe he could get away with something like that if he were a horse-rider or a brush-clearer, but a constitutional scholar? Not a chance.
How to tell the cold, horrible truth? Those who lost their lives in these wars were tragic sacrifices to the egos of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and the rest of the pallid cowards who misled a compliant nation into yet another bloody demonstration of American military might. To have said such a thing would have been politically impossible. Just ask Dennis Kuchinich.
So, Obama being Obama, he took the middle path. Iraq was "a mistake" he told us, but Afghanistan was "necessary." We can end the war in Iraq because we're going to "finish the job" in Afghanistan.
But what was that job again?
The United States proposes to impose a strong central government on a collection of tribal societies who have never been united by anything other than a figurehead king, but who have forever been separated by language, custom, endless cycles of vengeance, and the most impenetrable mountains on Earth. We are going to impose our idea of government on a region that has rebuffed every empire that sought to absorb it, from Ancient Rome to the USSR. Sure, and then what, General?
Who is going to pay for the army and police force the U.S. is proposing to create in Afghanistan? Once the dollars dry up, as they must, where will the funding for this central government come from? There's no oil in Afghanistan. The only source of hard currency is the heroin trade, which is the focus of America's other unwinnable yet never-ending war: The War on Drugs.
And even if we assume the nearly-inconceivable—complete success in Afghanistan—what's to stop Al Qaeda from simply relocating to Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, etc.? Is the United States going to invade, occupy, and govern every failed state on the planet?
Delusions of grandeur, anyone?
Like LBJ, Obama looks poised to squander his opportunity for bringing American culture back to some realistic sense of its place in the world. We could have a Great Society, as LBJ put it, but not if we lack the courage to quit.
