Today I flew with a friend across the Appalachian Mountains. We climbed up to 41,000′ in a six-seat jet and landed three hours later at a small airport where we picked up two children, aged 8 and 11. They’d been visiting their mother, who is stationed at a nearby military base. We brought them back to a military airport in New England where they were picked up by their father. The mother, a warm person in her 30s, is suffering from a serious form of cancer. She’s going into a West Coast hospital soon for an experimental operation that might prolong her life, but it also might kill her. So we found ourselves, at a small FBO, witnesses to what might be the children’s last visit with their mom.
What made the scene even sadder for me was learning that the mom had previously been sent to Iraq for 17 months. In some abstract sense it might be nice to protect Iraqis from each other, but it is painful when you see the cost to America’s children who lose time with their parents. Our lives on this Earth are short. Is it really necessary that we spend any significant part of them in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan?
[Note that I am not arguing for pacifism. We live in a sometimes-unfriendly world and I can accept that sometimes we find it necessary to drop bombs on people who don’t like us. Flying enough bombing missions to destroy a hostile nation’s military, industrial, and transportation capabilities (after which point it is tough to see how they could be a significant threat to anyone) is a fairly straightforward project and one to which our military is well-suited. “Moving into a country on the other side of the globe and trying to turn it into a 51st state” seems to be a better description of what we’ve been trying to do and the cost just makes me weep.]
And on top of it, after major combat with the big weapons systems, we could still effectively patrol the country with Predator drones and harass them until the end of time if they chose to continue to be hostile.
It was wrong to go there, and depending on your opinion it may have been criminal to go there. Accepting it was well intentioned (big assumption) there is no good way for it to end, we can only hope for it to end quickly. How can I tell my daughters they have to go to substandard schools, where you can’t drink the water, so we can pay for anti drug efforts in Afghanistan? If our efforts are helping with terrorism, at all, our government hasn’t made that case, at all. I live in a nice medium size city in Washington state, btw, I’m not talking about inner city Detroit or something for crying out loud. And if this is what it’s like in my town, what do kids have to deal with in Detroit? In Los Angeles? If we’re going to fight the war on poverty why not start here?
Yup, Mission Accomplished should have been the end, not the beginning.