Thirty years ago, I fought with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in the biggest tank battle since World War II, the Battle of 73 Easting. We broke the back of Saddam Hussein’s armored divisions and sealed Iraq’s defeat.
However, history reveals that the battle marked not the end of the Gulf War but the beginning of several forever-wars that plague the United States to this day. It is time to stop the pointless sacrifice of our troops and put a stop to these unnecessary wars.
Hussein’s generals signed a ceasefire agreement on March 3, 1991, with Allied leaders, following Iraq’s crushing defeat. Most of the American combat units withdrew from Iraq by the early summer of 1991, returning to their home bases. However, before all the troops had left, things started getting complicated. In an effort to protect vulnerable populations in northern Iraq and provide them relief supplies, the U.S. established Operation Provide Comfort in April 1991 (renamed Operation Northern Watch in 1997). A no-fly zone was established the next year in the south of Iraq, known as Operation Southern Watch, effectively putting two-thirds of Iraq under a no-fly zone. These missions resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of coalition air sorties and missile strikes until the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.
Meanwhile, the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, expanded the scope of our wars from Iraq to Afghanistan. The initial assault into Afghanistan included only a handful of U.S. troops working with local militia, but that number quickly grew. By December 2001, the U.S. had 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. As the mission to capture Osama bin Laden expanded, by the end of 2002, force levels stood at 9,700. When the Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003, the number of troops in both countries spiked to 78,000. The troop levels peaked at 187,000 troops in 2008. Our troops left Iraq for a brief time in 2011, but by 2014 they had returned. President Barack Obama had expanded the battlefield to Syria by 2015.
As should now be painfully obvious, the fighting we have done in the region, nonstop since the first troops were deployed in Kuwait in August 1990, has provided the U.S. with no strategic benefit. U.S. Forces won two major tactical battles in 1991 and 2003, wiping out Iraq’s conventional armies in mere weeks each time. We decimated the Taliban regime within months in 2001-02. We've won virtually every tactical battle against insurgents throughout the 2003-11 Iraq war and against the Taliban in every skirmish during the 20 years of war in Afghanistan. And yet, none of the conflicts ever end.
Every time a president or members of Congress float the idea of ending any of these wars, there is a reflexive and usually alarmist resistance among conventional Washington figures. There are "conditions" that must be met, advocates of forever-war usually claim, before we can withdraw. Most of these advocates never bother to quantify what these alleged conditions are. Those who do tend to offer up objectives suggest ones that are militarily unattainable. The net result of all of the efforts is the same: We are always fighting wars, which are perpetually costly and degrade our national security. Thirty years of unending war has had profound costs on our country.
Militarily, we have suffered thousands killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands with post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. Financially, some estimates suggest Washington has wasted a staggering $6 trillion on these wars.
That money could have funded a badly needed infrastructure overhaul at home, nearly three times over, or at least avoided trillions of dollars in debt. With any metric one wishes to apply, these forever-wars have cost America an astronomical amount. It is time to acknowledge reality, reform our foreign policy, and end these self-destructive wars.
Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of "The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America." Follow him @DanielLDavis1.
