Our misguided "wars of choice"

There are three key points about these wars of choice. First, in the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Mideast wars, the United States attacked the other countries first, not in self-defense, as in World War II. Lyndon Johnson expanded the war in Vietnam on the pretext that North Vietnam had attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, but Johnson knew that the claim was false. Nor had Saddam, Khadafy, or Assad attacked the United States. In the case of Iraq, the pretext was Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. As for Libya and Syria, the US interventions were allegedly for humanitarian purposes, to protect civilian populations against Khadafy and Assad. In both cases, the civilian populations ended up suffering horrific harms from the US interventions.

Second, since the birth of the United Nations in 1945, such wars of choice are against international law. The UN Charter allows for wars of self-defense and military actions agreed upon by the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council may approve military interventions to protect the civilian populations from the crimes of their own government under the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” No country can go it alone other than in self-defense…

Third, these wars of choice have been disasters, one after the next. In the Spanish-American war, the United States gained an empire and fertile farmland in Cuba, but also decades of political instability in that country and the Philippines that eventually resulted in Philippine independence and an anti-American revolution in Cuba. In World War I, the US intervention turned the tide toward the victory of France and the United Kingdom over Germany and the Ottoman Empire, only to be followed by a disastrous peace settlement, instability in Europe and the Middle East, and the rise of Hitler in the ensuing chaos 15 years later. In Vietnam, the war led to 55,000 Americans dead, 1 million or more Vietnamese killed, genocide in next-door Cambodia, destabilization of the US economy, and, eventually, complete US withdrawal.