While I make no claims to precognition, in early 2003 I could certainly foresee that the American public would one day be where it is today… beaten down by the war in Iraq and ready to call it quits. In fact, among the numerous reasons I was opposed to going to war in Iraq was the ramifications of being where we are today, and, given recent history, it was not terribly hard to predict this moment. This concern was, of course, on top of the fact that Saddam Hussein did not seem to be any greater threat to American security than any of the other brutal dictators in the world today. I admit that I was as fooled as the rest of the world about the lack of mass casualty weapons in the country. Who’d have thought that Saddam would give up pursuit of such weapons, and then put his position in jeopardy by refusing to submit to inspections? (We may never know if he knew he had given them up.) Yet, there seemed to be no sound reasons for believing he would use these weapons (or could successfully use them against US targets.)

As the title suggests, the point of this little article is that America needs to be more cautious in choosing to go to war, and more steadfast when considering exiting them. As one looks at the polling numbers on US warfare throughout the 20th century, World War II is about the only conflict of any duration in which US support did not substantially flag. For the others, there is a distinct inverse relationship between the progress of time and the people’s interest in maintaining a state of war. I hope that Afghanistan will mark another such war that the American public is willing to see through to the end. So far, there seems to be much less of a drop in support for the conflict in Afghanistan than has been seen with respect to Iraq (though a drop has certainly occured), and I don’t think it is simply that it has been much less deadly. I think that World War II and the war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan represent wars that were brought to us, and, therefore, they solidified our will to endure. Most of the other conflicts we have participated in have been much less successful in instilling this will. It is certainly reasonable that America would lose faith in the value of the war in Vietnam, though it should have perhaps been more of a concern when entering the war. The security implications of that war for America were much more nebulus than those of World War II, dominoes or not.

I expect that many who read this will agree with the notion that we should be more calculating in our decision to go to war. War is, after all, among the most devastating activities to which a society can be subjected. It is always costly and ravaging, and there is no guarantee that being stronger by all the conventional measures of power (economic, technological, military professionalism, etc.) will save you from the misery it inflicts. Because, even if one is militarily more capable, an opposition willing to take it on the chin and keep coming can eventually wear one down.

I suspect the position that America should show more endurance once it enters a war will have much less appeal. So what is my argument for following through in the wars that we enter? First, while there is no one that doubts the capabilities of the American military, there are plenty who doubt the resolve of its leaders and citizenry to see wars through to the end. For this reason, anytime we jump into a war, and then jump out as the water begins to roil, we reinforce the notion that we are eminently beatable. This, in turn, reduces our security, because those who would attack us will say: “Yes, war with America will be arduous, but, if we just show more will than they, victory is ours.” Second, we should not wish to repeat the history we saw unfold when the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989. This is widely discussed, and I won’t harp on it any more than that.

It is often said that decision-makers need to have an “exit strategy.” While this is nice in theory, the fact of the matter is that no one develops exit strategies, because people don’t enter battles they don’t think they can win. They summon up the courage by denying possibility of defeat, and the cognitive dissonance of failure is like a shard to the brain. Imagine a football coach of a team that is down by 17 in the beginning of the fourth quarter saying: “Johnson, here’s what we’re gonna do, you are going to strip down and streak across the field, and, during the distraction, the rest of us are going to haul-ass for the bus. Way to take one for the team, Johnson.” Despite the best petitioning of Fred Ikle, policymakers don’t give good thought about how to gracefully depart a war, and so it falls to us as a concerned citizenry to make them take the utmost caution in making that decision at dawn rather than dusk.