One of the greats in American cinema in the '80s was Roadhouse. Relatively early in the movie, Dalton (Patrick Swayze) lays out his strategy for dealing with rowdy customers:
A comment on X focused my mind. Brian Cox wrote a takedown — a fairly brutal takedown and richly deserved — of Ted Lieu's threat to prosecute U.S. military members for war crimes. Our Jamie Wilson had the perfect answer: "Proportionality is how you get a forever war. You win wars and shorten the pain if you go in and simply crush your opposition."
This has been on my mind because I grew up on quagmires. Vietnam and hearing about Korea, the ensuing (and ongoing) unpleasantness in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Looking at the history, I see a consistent pattern: the U.S. strategy, too often, is to be nice. The whole history would take a book, or many books, but there is a consistent pattern: Kennedy and Johnson wanted to limit involvement, and it wasn't nice. Eisenhower and Nixon stopped being nice, and negotiations fairly promptly followed.
Of course, then in Vietnam, following Nixon's resignation, the Congress imposed constraints that meant we were back to being nice — leading, among other things, to the "killing fields" in Cambodia and the "boat people" escaping Vietnam. I'm sure my readers remember what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wars began with dramatic military victories, followed by the U.S. going back to being nice. Instead of moving on to decisive victory, in both cases we seem to have assumed that essentially fascist governments fall because They The People will reject them, so we start trying to impose representative democracy when too many of the previous government are frantically drooling over the chance to get theirs.
Jamie said it well — proportionality is how you get a forever war. Looking at a map, the victorious Afghan and Iraq campaigns had a strategy hidden in the war — Iran was, at least, temporarily, isolated. Carried on, with Iran surrounded on all sides by hostile governments, it would have been much more difficult to continue its attempts to control the Middle East.
Now, I want you to compare Iraq and Afghanistan with Germany and Japan. In both, the U.S. was not interested in being nice. Germany was nearly leveled, and we made a particular example of not being nice to end the war with Japan. The wars ended with decisive victories, and the result is that both Germany and Japan began to behave like "normal countries."
There's a side trip to be made about the USSR and China's attempts to reduce neighboring countries to vassalage, but that's a tale for another article.
Ronald Reagan was quoted by several people as saying, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.”
Dalton's policy was much the same: We win, they lose, and if that means not being nice, then don't be nice.
Wars are expensive in damage, disruption, and finally in lives lost or destroyed. I think history shows us a universal rule: wars end when one side or the other sees it as too expensive to continue. And quagmires — as we've seen far too often — are expensive. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan continued because the U.S., being rich, can be nice; the opponents, because the U.S. was being nice, could keep recovering, recouping, rearming.
The lesson here is that wars don't have to be quagmires if we take Reagan's advice: if you are in a war, the strategy has to be we win, they lose.
