Destination? Non-victory
July was the worst month for U.S. casualties in Afghanistan — not just in 2009, but since the war began nearly eight years ago. Keep this awful truth in mind as you read the following observation on that war from our nation’s Commander-in-Chief:
“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.
Obama (echoing Bush) wants you to scale back your expectations: He’s saying, “Don’t expect us to break the enemy’s will and compel it to surrender la Japan in WWII.” Whatever else America may be doing in Afghanistan, the goal is not to achieve anything like a genuine victory: i.e., the defeat of the Islamist enemy.
But why? Why might Obama and many other people hold this view?
Two salient reasons come to mind:
1). since 9/11 the Bush administration failed properly to define the enemy in the war. For a while it was %