A General’s Apology for Iraq & Afghanistan
Taken together, the title and subtitle of Daniel Bolger’s Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars suggest it’s either another contribution to an increasingly crowded genre—a memoir from an American soldier who has served his country on the forlorn battlefields of our current wars in the greater Middle East—or a strategic analysis of those wars. In fact, Why We Lost turns out to be much more of a conventional narrative history than a personal account or a strategic study. While drawing on his experiences in the field—the author served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan—he relies heavily on primary and secondary sources in framing and fleshing out this story. General Bolger, it turns out, is not just a soldier, but a professional historian, with a Ph.D. in that subject from the illustrious University of Chicago. He has taught at West Point.
This is a serious book about a vexed and divisive subject. The author dutifully surveys the origin and context of these two grueling, protracted struggles, at home and abroad, and goes on to explore in some detail the evolution of U.S. military culture, and civil-military relations, since the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991. He provides balanced thumbnail biographies of the major players on both sides of the conflict, and well-observed sketches of ordinary soldiers, sailors, and Marines doing quite extraordinary things.
---
But whatever went wrong, surely it’s not just the generals who are at fault. We have to take a broader view. Better to start with the arrogance, ignorance, and inattention to history—our own as well as the histories of the places we invaded—displayed by the wars’ chief architects in the Bush administration. In the fog and confusion of post 9/11 America, they seemed to forget the wisdom of former secretary of defense William Perry, who remarked back in 1995 that “we field an army, not a salvation army.”
And then there is the very troubling distance that has grown up between the (less than) 1 percent of the country that serves in the active military and the American people as a whole, a distance that goes far toward explaining the public’s disconcerting indifference to the lame prosecution of these conflicts, in which the sons and daughters of a few bear the sacrifices that should be borne, if they should be borne at all, by the many.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/25/a-general-s-apology-for-iraq-afghanistan.html
