The Advantages of Covert War
By Adam Graham (08/28/06)
U.S. Troops are doing excellent work in Iraq. In what has been a long and expensive process, progress is being made towards a free Iraq. However, while praising of our troops and remaining dedicated to finishing the job we started, we must not close our eyes to changes that must be made in future engagements.
Iraq has exposed the challenge of having US Troops on the ground in the midst of constant domestic partisan combat and a 24 hour news cycle. The fiscal costs of fighting this war have been prohibitive as well.
What we’ve learned from Iraq is that setting up democracies in countries that have no memory of anything other than oppression is complicated. Too often, we’ve had to bite our nails, wondering whether Iraq would go the way of Iran. Should the US ever wage another campaign like Iraq?
My answer is no, for three reasons: the fiscal and political cost, the partisan environment, and the difficulty of nation building. If regime change through mass military operations isn’t practical, how can we effectively change unfriendly regimes?
Thomas Paine wrote regarding freedom, "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” The truth of this is that when freedom is handed to a people, it is often taken for granted. I would suggest our wisest course of action is to let men fight for and win their own freedom, rather than the US government handing it to them on a silver platter.
In a post-Iraq world, the US Government’s primary foreign policy initiative should be the covert financing of groups to undermine unfriendly nations such as Iran, up to and including providing citizens arms and training to overthrow their government. Providing arms to rebels is far cheaper than actually fighting a Nation. In addition, this would avoid US responsibility for rebuilding except in peripheral ways.
By fighting covert wars, the US would be better able to deploy resources as needed. Most importantly, should a nation for whatever reason require US military intervention, we’ll have natives on the ground who can more quickly take control of government functions. This can lead to a quicker draw down of US troops, which has been key to the lower casualties we’ve experienced in Afghanistan.
The dangers of not learning from Iraq are manifold. Attrition in the Armed Forces will become more of an issue if US Soldiers believe that their blood will be spilt on battlefields across the globe to fight for the freedom of others in a series of never-ending wars. It must be remembered that the US military exists first and foremost for the defense of the American people, not as global liberators and police men.
The fiscal costs of never ending, expensive ground wars will lead to economic collapse, as surely as the Soviet Union’s military spending brought the Evil Empire down.
The greatest danger we face, however, is that having spread freedom to other lands, we find it minimized here at home by a never-ending series of foreign ground wars. The long-term demands and limitations that war puts on the rights of a people cannot be ignored. At some point, either war or freedom will cease.
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