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Band Apart
John Barry 10/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
President Obama and his advisers are grappling with questions about Afghanistan far deeper than merely how many troops to send. How do they handle the Taliban, the central government, the countryside versus cities? The larger strategy that the troops, however many of them, are there to implement remains unresolved.
Exit Tragedies
Christopher Dickey 7/23/2009 12:00:00 AM
Military historian Martin van Creveld said back in 2005 that the American-led invasion of Iraq was "the most foolish war since the Emperor Augustus sent his legions into Germany in 9 B.C. and lost them." Except to correct the date (A.D. 9, in fact), the influential Israeli scholar says his opinion of the Iraq adventure hasn't changed. And as it starts to wind down, with a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces due inside the next 30 months, van Creveld's vision of the U.S. military's final days in Iraq is, well, pretty grim. "Several years ago I wrote an article in which I said the invasion would end exactly like Vietnam, with people hanging from the skids of helicopters," he told me over the phone this week. "I may have exaggerated a bit. But not much."
Echoes of Vietnam
7/16/2009 12:00:00 AM
Afghanistan is now Obama's War. He promoted it in his election campaign as the good war (in contrast to Iraq, the bad war). He sealed his ownership of it by ratifying his predecessor's decision to send more troops. His incoming staff dismissed prophecies that Afghanistan risked becoming a quagmire like Vietnam—consuming ever-larger numbers of troops for a steadily receding political goal—as unwarranted gloom. But as a make-or-break offensive gets underway in Afghanistan designed to neutralize the Taliban ahead of next month's presidential elections, similarities to Vietnam already loom.
Christian Soldiers
Kathryn Joyce 6/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
Ever since former president George W. Bush referred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God." Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration's legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.
FACTCHECK.ORG
GOP Convention Spin
Viveca Novak 9/3/2008 12:00:00 AM
Lieberman said Obama hadn't "reached across party lines" to accomplish "anything significant," though Obama has teamed with GOP Sens. Tom Coburn and Richard Lugar to pass laws enhancing government transparency and curtailing the proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons.
The Basra Model
Michael Hirsh 4/3/2008 12:00:00 AM
The outcome of the Battle of Basra is still unclear. But as things stabilize in that critical city—the southern gateway to Iraq's oil wealth—Basra may well turn out to be Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Kasserine Pass. That notorious battle, which took place in Tunisia in late February 1943, marked the first large-scale encounter between untested American troops and the battle-hardened Germans. The Americans, to put it mildly, did not do well. But they quickly fired incompetent commanders, adjusted in tactics, and never lost another major battle. In Basra the nascent Iraqi Army—also riddled with incompetence and self-doubt—actually came out looking better against Iraq's well-established militias than the American Army had 65 years earlier against the entrenched Nazis, says retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. "At Kasserine we got our asses kicked. These people didn't," McCaffrey says.