That's an amazing statement coming from Bill Kristol, the Edsel of American national security visionaries. (It's even more amazing that Kristol tried to make his case by approvingly citing a letter to the editor lambasting the idea of war-weariness which stated "Did you serve? Did you volunteer to fight oppression in foreign lands? Did your son or brother or husband? If so, then I understand and sympathize with your complaint ... unlike most of those who utter this shopworn phrase.") Americans are fed up with mistakes and lies, world historical calamities where U.S. national security wasn't at stake.
Certainly, after the 9/11 attacks, the American war in Afghanistan didn't start that way. But the Bush administration tried to fight the war on the cheap and made matters worse when it began shifting troops, material and intelligence assets in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. As the Daily Beast reminded readers on Sunday, Osama Bin Laden was expecting to die in Tora Bora in December 2001. But the U.S. did not have the forces on the ground to prevent his escape, along with hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters and his top lieutenants to the tribal areas of Pakistan. In March 2002, President Bush downplayed that failure as no big deal:
"So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you...I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."
"Nobody in Afghanistan threatens the United States of America," Senator
John McCain explained in 2003. Why? Because, as he claimed two years later, "Afghanistan, we don't read about anymore, because it's succeeded."
But when candidate Barack Obama announced he would launch strikes within Pakistan to take out Bin Laden and other top terror targets, McCain, like President Bush and Mitt Romney, vehemently disagreed:
"Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested invading our ally, Pakistan?"
What about the confused leadership which actually invaded Iraq? There were no weapons of mass destruction, the proof of which the Bush administration could not allow "to come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Despite the assurances from the likes of Dick Cheney and John McCain, U.S. forces were not "greeted as liberators," and instead quickly became embroiled in a sectarian bloodbath that killed over 4,000 Americans, wounded 30,000 more and drained the Treasury of $1 trillion in a decade. The result is continued carnage and a Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad now closely allied with the mullahs in Tehran. Iran won and Iraq was lost the moment the United States began its campaign of "shock and awe."
Despite all of the tough talk from Republicans now, the United States was powerless to prevent Vladimir Putin's occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia during the August 2008 war with Georgia. (That's why President Bush used almost identical language to Obama's six years later.) So when presidential candidate McCain declared "today we are all Georgians" and Bill Kristol insisted "we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty," Matthew Yglesias rightly warned:
If Kristol really thinks we should go to war with Russia, he's being crazy and irresponsible. If he doesn't think that, then he has no business busting out these Munich analogies. Nowhere in his column does he propose a single concrete step with any meaningful chance of altering the situation - it's all dedicated to mocking doves, but utterly lacking in viable alternatives.
As it turned out, it later became clear just how irresponsible their tough talk had been. As an EU commission and revelations from Wikileaks later confirmed,
Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili—our man in Tbilisi—was responsible for starting an "unjustifiable" war with Russia in the disputed territories.
Now, despite grave warning from much of the American and Israeli defense establishments, the likes of McCain and Kristol want President Obama to launch a preventive war against Tehran over nuclear weapons they do not have. They demand increases in U.S. defense spending, despite having opposed any tax increases to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have already cost taxpayers $2 trillion—and will cost $2 trillion more over the next decade. And with Crimea already in Russia's pocket, McCain and company want the U.S. to send weapons to Kiev to help Ukraine—for hundreds of years part of Russia—fight Vladimir Putin.
Sadly for Bill Kristol and mercifully for the rest of us, the American people are largely rejecting his advice. Not so much because they are weary of war, but because they are tired of being misled by people like Bill Kristol, people who have almost always been wrong when it mattered most.
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