Mennonite Weekly Review

Prayers for an end to the war in Iraq got a disappointing answer Feb. 27. President Obama set Aug. 31, 2010, as the date when “our combat mission will end.” But far from bringing all the troops home, up to 50,000 will stay through the end of 2011.

And beyond that? U.S. wars have a way of planting permanent military outposts. Experts and military commanders expect U.S. troops will maintain a presence in Iraq for years to come.

Many Americans find these short-term plans and long-range prospects unacceptable. Some want the occupation to end because they opposed the war from the beginning. Others simply believe a country in financial crisis cannot afford expensive military ventures with vague goals and limitless timelines.

So now the Iraq war has an end that isn’t a conclusion, a withdrawal that isn’t a pullout. It’s hard to see how combat will stop in 2010 when Obama said one duty of the troops that remain will be “conducting targeted counter-terrorism missions.”

“You cannot leave combat troops in a foreign country to conduct combat operations and call it the end of the war,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. “You can’t be in and out at the same time.”

This isn’t the only war dragging down an overstressed military and a sinking economy. Add a troop buildup in Afghanistan, where a seven-year war is turning worse, and the risks to the nation’s moral and financial health multiply.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes: “I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fragile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time — with endless warfare.”

In Afghanistan, where people know something about wars that seem to go on forever, Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai offered this alternative to the U.S. plan to send up to 30,000 new troops: “Send us 30,000 scholars instead,” she said, as quoted by The Christian Science Monitor. “Or 30,000 engineers. But don’t send more troops. It will just bring more violence.”

Suggesting peaceful ways to quell violence in Afghanistan, Sojourners writer David Cortright observes that the United States “has pumped tens of billions of dollars into the region in a elusive search for military solutions… . The United States can exert enormous leverage, not by escalating the war but by offering to reduce our military presence and increasing our support for economic development.”

The same could be said of Iraq. Except that there the price tag, cited by the president in his Feb. 27 announcement, is “nearly a trillion dollars” and counting. And the human cost: more than 4,250 dead Americans; tens of thousands or perhaps more than a million dead Iraqis, depending who is estimating and what criteria is used; and those with broken bodies or minds, suffering from brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder.

On so many levels, we cannot afford these wars. The need continues to call for a real end and pray for a better answer.