Daniel Bolger’s ‘Why We Lost’
By ANDREW J. BACEVICHNOV. 14, 2014
The author of this book has a lot to answer for. “I am a United States Army general,” Daniel Bolger writes, “and I lost the Global War on Terrorism.” The fault is not his alone, of course. Bolger’s peers offered plenty of help. As he sees it, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, abysmal generalship pretty much doomed American efforts.
The judgment that those wars qualify as lost — loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives — is surely correct. On that score, Bolger’s honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America’s generals lets too many others off the hook.
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Toward what end? Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. “Defining the enemy defined the war,” he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is “everyone.” But if all Iraqis and all Afghans are the enemy, then the American failure extends well beyond matters of generalship.
Perhaps Bolger poses the wrong question. Perhaps instead of asking “Who is the enemy?” he should be asking “What is the aim?” What is the United States trying to achieve in the greater Middle East, and to what extent can military power contribute to that enterprise? Of course, that question is not for generals alone to answer. It rightly belongs to elected and appointed officials and more broadly to the American people. And that’s why blaming generals alone won’t suffice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/books/review/daniel-bolgers-why-we-lost.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
