McConnell Likes His Wars Won, or Lost—But Not Ended

Oct. 20, 2019 (EIRNS)—If any one Member of Congress gets the “Colonel Blimp” award for liberal imperial war-blundering this week, when so many of them are competing for it, it must be Mitch McConnell (KY), the Senate Majority Leader. Veterans of all of America’s wars since Korea and Vietnam will find McConnell’s demands in his op-ed from oct. 18 depressingly familiar. They, or their children and grandchildren, must go on fighting, go on “re-upping,” in endless attempts to install around the world just exactly the governments, or the ungovernable divisions, which the military-industrial complex wants. Withdrawing any U.S. force is betrayal, pure and simple, of some “local fighting force.”

The Washington Post headlined the op-ed, “Mitch McConnell: Withdrawing from Syria Is a Grave Mistake.” The Senator says “retreat” will invite the “brutal Assad regime in Syria” to expand its influence—over Syria, mind you! And “Russia will leverage its increasingly dominant position in Syria”—which has been a formal ally of Russia for decades. He avers that northern Syria should, by rights, be controlled by “Turkey, our NATO ally”; and who could believe it to be better that Syria and Russia should control it? Once Turkey is fairly in there, writes the senior Senator, “we should create conditions for the reintroduction of U.S. troops and move Turkey away from Russia.” A fantasy, but otherwise a wonderful formula for American soldiers, endlessly in harm’s way enforcing the division of Syria into multiple warring parts. “We should retain a limited military presence in Syria and maintain our presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.” A great war-word, “limited.”

And on and on in Afghanistan. “Whatever happens in Syria, this situation must chasten the United States from withdrawing from Afghanistan before the job is done. We must recommit to our Afghan partners....” Another decade, or two?

Finally the Senator states the endless war doctrine outright. “As neo-isolationism rears its head ... we can expect to hear more talk of ‘endless wars.’ But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars are won or lost.”

To the Senator, then, referring to the United States’ last 28 years of continuous regime-change military deployments in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, the Balkans, etc. as “endless war,” is just so much “rhetoric.”