The wars in Afghanistan and Syria are not making us any safer.
Instead, these conflicts continue to cost our nation dearly in both human life and financial resources. Thankfully, though, in a development that’s long overdue — we’ve already wasted $6 trillion and lost thousands of lives — policymakers from both parties are becoming more vocal about the need to rethink our foreign policy and end our endless wars.
Politicians as diametrically opposed as President Trump and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have used similar language to decry our continued involvement in endless war. Additionally, an increasing number of organizations on the Right and the Left are joining forces to end endless wars, demonstrating the growing transpartisan consensus that is prompting policymakers to rethink our post-9/11 foreign policy.
This rising movement across the political spectrum has not gone unnoticed. In response, hawkish advocates from the foreign policy “blob” have launched a misleading effort to downplay the human costs and financial burdens of our nation’s endless wars.
Following Trump’s withdrawal of troops from the Syria-Turkey border in October, Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush who helped sell and defend the invasion of Iraq, wrote a Washington Post column calling Trump’s use of the term endless wars a “canard.” In the same column, Thiessen compared our troop deployments in combat zones such as Syria to our military presence in peacetime Germany and South Korea, where Americans have not faced active combat for decades. Thiessen even claimed, “U.S. forces are not doing the fighting” in Syria.
The dozens of service members who have received Purple Hearts in Syria since 2016 or the families of the four Americans killed in Syria earlier this year would likely object to the notion that Americans aren’t doing the fighting.
In a similar vein, prominent foreign policy pundit James Kirchick bizarrely claimed in another Washington Post column that the United States has not been in a “sustained military ground campaign for more than a decade.”
The veterans of the battles of Marjah, Sangin, the Conoco pump station in Syria, and the many other intense ground combat campaigns over the last 10 years would likely challenge Kirchick’s assertion. So would the families of the thousands of American troops killed or wounded in active ground combat in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and other countries over the last decade.
Sadly, even some members of Congress and policymakers have echoed these false attacks. This, unfortunately, includes Trump’s own special representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, who said demanding an end to endless wars “shows total ignorance.”
Fortunately, those who seek to keep the U.S. engaged in unwinnable and unnecessary conflicts are increasingly out of step with the American people.
Poll after poll has shown that a solid majority of the public, including veterans of recent conflicts, believes that we need to end the wars in places such as Afghanistan and decrease our military engagement abroad. For example, a recent Pew Research Center poll shows 62% of the public thinks the Iraq War wasn’t worth fighting, compared to just 32% percent who believe otherwise. The Pew poll revealed similar levels of opposition to the war in Afghanistan. In addition to being good policy, there is a clear benefit in the court of public opinion for policymakers in both parties courageous enough to support a more restrained foreign policy.
Thus, politicians should ignore the misleading arguments of those who have helped perpetuate our failed foreign policy status quo. Instead, they should embrace the emerging bipartisan consensus — and help finally bring an end to our endless wars.
Dan Caldwell (@dandcaldwell) is a senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.
