Chimera "A fanciful mental illusion or fabrication." (The Free Dictionary)
"If we're going to authorize use of military force, the president should have all the tools necessary to win the fight that we're in," Boehner told reporters. "I'm not sure that the strategy thats been outlined will accomplish the mission that the president wants to accomplish." Speaker, US House of Representatives, John Boehner, February, 2015
NEWS FLASH
There is no such thing as victory in this fight. Look at what we did to the Iraqi Army. We then got open sectarian warfare, and we now have ISIL. If we get ISIL, then what do we get? More Boko Haram? More lone wolves like Fort Hood? We take out much of the terror training infrastructure in Afghanistan. We are still there a decade later.
We have been here before, but we never learn.
During the early phase of LBJ's torturous process in Vietnam, his mentor, Senator Richard Russell, told him it was a morass that he would trap him. Any light that LBJ thought we saw at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming locomotive. Russell told LBJ to find himself a Vietnamese leader who would take power demand the USA leave the country. Russell, a rock-ribbed conservative and racist, had advice John Boehner would do well to consider.
This is not WWII. Even then, we defeated two major military powers, at which point we immediately fell into the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, plus a series of ill-conceived limited war activities.
Victory means we are safe from our defeated enemies. It Is time we face the reality that safety in this world is a chimera. We now live in a world of dynamic, violent conflict that will continue to flick across tribal, ethnic, economic, national, and religious cleavages throughout the world. International violence in this age is "whack a mole" conflict. It pops up one place; we knock it down; it immediately pops up someplace else.
All of this means that AMERICAN foreign policy has to now go beyond our traditional concepts of war and victory. We have to think very seriously and in very new ways about our decisions to engage in violent international conflicts. (What do we gain by trying to get between Russia and the Ukraine? What can we hope to achieve, except to extend by some time a war that's outcome is obvious?)
We must also define our end points in these engagements in very different ways. There will be no USS Missouri moments in these "wars," where some evil empire prostrates itself before AMERICAN might.
I don't really know how all of this should play out, but I do know that pre-historic approaches to, and mind-sets about, modern foreign policy and international violence, like those trumpeted by The Speaker, will not serve us at all well.