Billy Boy kicked MANY cans. Baa-Daa-Bing. I’ve lost count of the cans kicked by our present pathetic excuse. Makes Bubba Clinton look almost adroit. (NOT!)

The democratic way of war since WW2 has been problematic.

Most people intuitively understand that the logical objective of war is to defeat the enemy. And not just technical defeat, but defeated in a way that his threat and danger is conclusively eliminated and our system of peace is imposed.

China’s intervention in the Korean War moved us off the logical objective to war. The restraints placed on our side in the Vietnam War were all about the Korean War. We’ve also fought our wars within the contextual frame of the global community, which means we’ve fought under complicated political limits. Our missions haven’t been straight man-2-man fights, at least not for our side. Our deployments have been restrained for similar reasons as police are restrained.

The big-picture restraints are often in direct conflict with the small-picture needs of the mission. Bush Senior badly bungled the post-war of the Gulf War due to the big-picture restraints that have everything to do with our democratic way of war since WW2.

To Clinton’s credit, he maneuvered within the big-picture restraints to set up the legal and policy conditions to go back for regime change in Iraq and impose our system of peace, which should have been done in the 1st place as the logical objective of the Gulf War. My fault with Clinton is that Op Desert Fox should have been OIF, and from a legal and policy standpoint, it was. But practically, Clinton kicked the can. At least Op Desert Fox set the precedent and the stage for OIF.

Maybe that’s what Obama is already planning to do and just can’t say so in public.

He did use R2P as an excuse to break Qaddafi. Maybe he’ll have everyone believing he’s planning to hit a few minor targets Clinton-style, and then break out a target list like Michael Corleone taking care of family business.

Keeping a war going via direct and heavy US military force? The US military can perform amazing feats, but I think we need to be very careful with that one.

Great comment overall, and as for that last part, if history tells us anything, it’s that the American people will not continue to support an open-ended war with vague, murky objectives. Get in, win it, and get out.

For a while the Civil War seemed to be a stalemate, and a peace movement started in the North, which argued for a negotiated settlement.

We weren’t in World War I long enough for that to happen. American troops only started arriving in Europe in large numbers in early 1918, and the war was over by the end of the year.

Our involvement in World War II was only a little over 3 1/2 years from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day. But given the horrific casualties on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, if it hadn’t been for the atomic bombs we would have had to invade the Japanese home islands, and that would have made D-Day look like a picnic. I think a popular movement to end the war with a negotiated settlement would have arisen at that point. Many Americans would have considered further bloodshed to be pointless, since Japan was no longer a threat to the U.S. by then.

Korea and Vietnam seemed like they had no clear objectives to most Americans (certainly not “victory”), so they didn’t have broad-based support.

Most recently, Iraq and Afghanistan showed what can happen when a war drags on too long. While the strategy may have been sound, and was achieving success, the government changed hands and the incoming party felt the need to repudiate the policies of its predecessor.

I think this is an inherent problem with long wars in a democratic society. I think it’s also the reason why our space program has been spinning its wheels for the last 40 years. Any project that requires a long lead time to come to fruition is subject to alteration or cancellation when the political winds shift.

This one leans toward achieving a negotiated settlement in Syria with Assad stepping aside. Hmm, what are the chances of that? Remember when we offered amnesty and a luxurious retirement in Switzerland to Saddam Hussein? I believe that a similar deal was offered to Gadaffi. Damn, those Muslim dictators can’t be bribed. And when/if he does step aside, who decides what happens next? Details…….they bedevil.

Yes, that’s true. But it’s also true that letting Assad win, which looks pretty certain now, is also going to lead to many evil consequences for people in Syria, Jordan, and Turkey while it allows Iran, Russia, Hamas and Hezbollah to grow stronger. None of that is good for Israel or the U.S. Nor can we calibrate or control what can happen then.

A stronger Iran means a more dangerous and probably nuclear armed Iran. Does that lead to a nuclear armed ME? Considering the Saudis fear the Iranians, it must almost certainly happen. Then where do we go?

On the other hand, if we take Assad down, how do we calibrate or control what happens then? Pace Egypt and Libya, we have little control on outcomes in the Muslim world. Libya and Egypt look to become havens for terrorists and their planning organizations. Without Assad what happens in Syria? Another place where al Qaeda can thrive? Or continued civil war between the FSA and al Nusra? Or?

As far as being morally indefensible, the only thing I can say is that we are not engaged with an enemy that follows any moral code. We keep getting mixed up about what we are facing. Yes, we would like to stop the killing. Tell that to the Islamic fanatics that are doing most of it. We don’t have the stomach to do the kind of killing that would actually defeat the Islamists. Can we at least help them in killing one another? The answer is that we don’t have the stomach for that either. We have wondrous weapons, but weapons without will don’t mean much. Assad, Putin, and Iran are all rejoicing in that.

Like I say, there are no good choices in Syria. I think General Keane’s strategy is the lesser of several evils.

A sneaky objective of keeping a war going by assisting, supplying, and training the underdog to even up the odds is one thing. There’s nothing sneaky about directly and heavily applying US military force.

To use direct and heavy US military force to keep a war, with all of its destructive effects, going rather than to shorten that war is morally indefensible, invites nasty consequences, and implies a calibrated outcome control I don’t think is possible.

It brings to mind the extraordinarily clumsy decision by Bush Senior, that only could have seemed plausible in the Oval Office, to encourage open revolt against Saddam, but then only support that revolt if and only if it was carried out by Baathist officials and military officers he imagined we could control.

And what about the nasty consequences if it didn’t happen exactly as imagined? Which of course, it didn’t.

Iraqis like Muqtada’s father and uncles (and brothers, I believe), rising up against Saddam, risking, and losing their lives merely on the universal trust the world had in the word of the American President in 1991. Honor go poof.

And when those Iraqis got slaughtered for trusting the American President, guess who had to reconcile that betrayal up close and personal. It wasn’t Bush Senior. It was the American soldiers on the ground in Iraq, fully armed and equipped with the pre-drawdown Desert Storm military, who were ordered to stand down and not assist or intervene on behalf of the Iraqis begging them face-to-face, and who got a front-row seat to the slaughter of those same Iraqis.

Clinton made his mistakes with Saddam, but Bush Senior’s bungling of the immediate post-war with Iraq is much more to blame than Clinton for the failure of the disarmament mission that led to OIF and problems we faced in OIF. If I was Muqtada, I’d hate America with every atom of my being, too.

Bush was admirable and honorable on Iraq, but his family and America had a lot to make up for.

Keeping a war going via direct and heavy US military force? The US military can perform amazing feats, but I think we need to be very careful with that one.

I recognize that McCain and Graham are invested in the idea that the Muslim world can be reformed from the outside or that there are moderates that can be useful to the goal of “shrinking the gap.” At this point, I’m skeptical of that.

Doing nothing leads to a loss of credibility. We lost credibility during the Clinton years and it led to 9/11. Do we want to be seen as a total paper tiger with all that such a reputation entails?

These are all gnarly questions that I hope much smarter people than me are thinking long and hard about. Keane’s strategy seems to me to be calculated to make us credible again without putting boots on the ground or creating a wider war. But neither is gauranteed. Nothing is riskless.