Maybe calling the last decade of war "traumatic" was the giveaway. I don't know about you, but kicking our enemies' asses from one side of Central Command to the other hasn't been traumatic for me. Perhaps for the anti-war Left more comfortable with an American military in retreat, it has been traumatic. Tough.
I'm not up to really dealing with the article, after reading this:
Yet for all the focus on those drawdowns, the larger strategic change underway is taking place in Europe, where American troops have been stationed in large numbers since World War II. Afghanistan and Iraq, after all, were never meant to be long-term commitments, and while that thinking proved disastrously optimistic, the decade of war in Afghanistan — and two in Iraq, if one draws the timeline back to the 1991 Gulf War — pales next to an American presence on the European continent dating to D-Day, June 4, 1944.
OK. I guess we didn't need additional resolutions for Iraq in 2003--if one draws the timeline of our war back to 1991. And disastrously optmistic? Really? Optimistic, sure. But we did defeat our enemies on the battlefields of Iraq (when the traumatized Left said it was impossible, recall) and we are winning in Afghanistan (which until we won in Iraq was the Left's "good war"). Or am I forgetting something? Perhaps the trauma of the past decade is too great for the author to conclude anything else.
But more to the point. D-Day was June 4, 1944? In what alternative timeline did we not delay the invasion until June 6th because of weather? And two, doesn't the American landing at Salerno, Italy, on September 9, 1943, count as a presence on the European continent? Forget it. He's rolling:
So I'll just say that I'm in favor of maintaining a robust presence on the continent indefinitely even if our hopes of 1945 turned out to be disastrously optimistic. It isn't over until we say it is over. And it isn't over in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Europe for that matter. We should stay in all three, I say.
