Why Do We Fight? Don't Ask
The forever war is allowed to continue in as many places as it does for as long as it has because virtually no one in a position of authority wants to demand an end to it.
Derek Davison commented on the three U.S. strikes in Somalia that have taken place in the last few weeks, and noted that there is hardly anyone asking why the U.S. is engaged in hostilities in Somalia in 2021:
There’s no questioning why al-Shabab, whose current ambitions don’t extend beyond Somalia and whose reach extends no further afield than neighboring Kenya, should be regarded as a threat to the United States. There’s no questioning why the 2001 AUMF is still on the books at all some 20 years later, when everyone involved in planning and carrying out the September 11 attacks is either dead or in hiding. There’s no questioning the absurdity of claiming the right “self-defense” in reference to another country’s military in a battle in which no American personnel were at risk. All of that is just How It Is, apparently, and there’s no sense wasting our beautiful minds on the subject.
The other wars that the U.S. is currently involved in are like this. Once the U.S. gets involved in a conflict, it never fully extricates itself. It doesn’t matter if the original reason for this involvement made any sense, and it doesn’t matter if there is no real legal authorization for it. It doesn’t matter that it has nothing to do with defending the United States, because once the military is involved somewhere it can claim to be defending itself without having to account for why they are there.
The U.S. joins wars all the time, but it hardly ever leaves them, and there is usually far more opposition to leaving than there is to going in. One reason for that is that very few Americans are even aware that the U.S. is at war in many of these places. The public does not clamor for withdrawal because most of them don’t know that there is anything to be withdrawn. Another is that the costs of these wars are kept out of sight, and the victims are rarely acknowledged and their deaths are never counted. It is quite difficult for people to mobilize against an invisible war that they don’t know anything about, and as Davison points out the reporting about these wars helps to keep it that way:
But we really don’t know the “why,” do we? Why, in the year 2021, is the US military still bombing Somalia? On a more normative level, why is it allowed to bomb Somalia? Based on the coverage of these three most recent strikes, it’s not even clear whether anybody cares enough to ask anymore.
The answer to the second question is that no one, least of all anyone in Congress, is prepared to act to stop it from happening. The forever war is allowed to continue in as many places as it does for as long as it has because virtually no one in a position of authority wants to demand an end to it. There is no political pressure on members of Congress to do this because the public is largely kept in the dark, and most members of Congress are hardly profiles in courage when it comes to matters of war in the first place. We fail to stop our government from doing these things, and no one else has the power to put a stop to it.
Somalia provides a good example for why the 2001 AUMF should be repealed and not replaced. Al Shabaab obviously had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t even exist as an organization when those attacks occurred, and the men that belong to the group today would have mostly been children when they happened. They can’t do anything to the U.S., and until the U.S. started waging war on them they had no particular reason to want to do anything. They have been added to the list of official enemies because they are deemed an “associated force” of Al Qaeda, but this language about targeting associated forces isn’t present in the original authorization. It is something that the government made up later to serve as a catch-all to justify military action against various militant groups. Bombing Somalia to get at members of Al Shabaab in 2021 because they are “associated” with Al Qaeda is a bit like bombing Argentina in the 1960s to strike at the acquaintances of dead Nazis. It’s an absurd waste and completely unnecessary to the security of the United States.
Nothing more disappoints me than the complete abdication of Congress, especially the Progressive Left of the Democratic Party. I came of age during the Vietnam War and well remember Democratic Senators like William Fulbright railing against LBJ and the war, and holding public hearings for all Americans to be educated on this criminal war.
That has all changed and the Democratic Party is as much wedded to Pentagon spending and endless wars as the Republican Party. Even the supposed threat of a “fascist tyranny” under Trump didn’t deter Democrats from increasing National Security State funding. We have become a democracy in name only, as our executive, legislative, and judicial branches, along with the MSM, are wholly owned and operated by Corporate America. This doesn’t end well.
A fine piece. A few things stick out to me:
(1) In media coverage and public justifications for attacks on states and organizations that have not attacked the United States, vague words which imply a relationship without stating what that relationship actually consists of are used to scramble the minds of the public. We often hear that a group is "linked" or "connected" to another one. This is nothing but a linguistic trick. The concept of a "link" or a "connection" is so broad that it can describe any kind of relationship at all, no matter how small. I am "linked" with the Bush Administration by virtue of being an American citizen who was alive during Bush's presidency. Russia is "linked" with Spain in the sense that both countries have formal diplomatic relationships. I am "connected" with Coca Cola corporation because I work for a company that once had them as a client, though I never worked on any matters involving Coca Cola. Are any of these "links" remotely meaningful? No. Instead of letting the media get away with merely reporting that one group is "linked" or "connected" to another, they should ask to know what those "links" actually ARE. The SDF group in Syria, for example, is "linked" to the PKK because it is in fact a different name for essentially the same organization, with the same leadership and the same objectives.
(2) In Somalia and many other cases, I do not think the public pays much attention to what the American military and federal government are doing unless it involves uniformed American troops staging a ground invasion. When the American military merely institutes a no-fly-zone or better yet conducts a remote missile strike of a foreign state, Americans don't pay much attention or even necessarily think of these things as acts of war. We are conditioned to think that a "war" means uniformed American troops on the ground, fighting another country's military, or perhaps fighting in the air using combat jets. We are visual creatures, and these issues can seem deeply abstract if the description of a military act doesn't look like "our guys fighting their guys" in our mind's eye. There has got to be a way to change this. Assuredly, most farm boys in rural Pakistan have just as much of a grievance against the US when an American drone kills their brother as they would if a uniformed American serviceman did so. We shouldn't be surprised when such people resent America and balk by asking "what did we ever do to you?" A death via a drone operated from a warehouse in San Antonio isn't any different from the Pakistani boy's point of view than an American shooting their big brother dead point blank.