Yes, it’s from The New Republic, and though they are left-biased (meaning that they espouse liberal positions and may use some highly-charged language), they get high marks for factual reporting and source-checking.
Most Veterans Say America’s Wars Are a Waste. No One’s Listening to Them.
There's a widening gap between Washington's bipartisan militarism and veterans' bipartisan war-skepticism.
By ADAM WEINSTEIN
July 12, 2019
In spite of his confused account of U.S. history, his partisan snipes, and his dictatorial posturing, Donald Trump’s parading and speechifying in Washington on July 4 attempted to glom onto one of the last consensus issues in a broken American culture: We love to support our troops. “We celebrate our history, our people, and the heroes who proudly defend our flag—the brave men and women of the United States military,” Trump told a crowd of mostly VIPs at the Lincoln Memorial.
The “Long War” that began on September 11, 2001, added to veterans’ already-outsize role in the American narrative. Worship of military service has become an indispensable cog in every politician’s and corporation’s endearment strategy. But on the actual subject of war, almost no one in mainstream politics is actually listening to “the troops.”
That’s the main takeaway from the
veterans, published Thursday, in which solid majorities of former troops said the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were not worth fighting. The gaps between approval and disapproval were not even close to the poll’s 3.9 percent margin of error; barely a third of veterans considered any of those conflicts worthwhile:
Among veterans, 64% say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting considering the costs versus the benefits to the United States, while 33% say it was. The general public’s views are nearly identical: 62% of Americans overall say the Iraq War wasn’t worth it and 32% say it was. Similarly, majorities of both veterans (58%) and the public (59%) say the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting. About four-in-ten or fewer say it was worth fighting.
Veterans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan are no more supportive of those engagements than those who did not serve in these wars. And views do not differ based on rank or combat experience.
The only meaningful variation pollsters found among vets was by party identification: Republican-identifying veterans were likelier to approve of the wars. But even a majority of those GOP vets now say the wars were not worth waging.
There simply is no mainstream bloc among politicians of any party that seems interested in heeding that majority opinion. In a rare bout of consistency between 2011 and 2017, private citizen Trump beat a loud drum for withdrawal from Afghanistan—after President Barack Obama, who had campaigned on ending the Iraq war, approved an Afghanistan troop surge and laid the groundwork for U.S. involvement in Syria against ISIS. But like Obama, Trump as president has ended up deepening the U.S. commitments in Afghanistan, as well as adding troops in Syria. Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq veteran, earned plaudits from doves and isolationists for pushing an antiwar line in last month’s Democratic presidential debates, and ended up as the debate’s most-searched candidate on Google, a possible reinforcement of the Pew results. But Gabbard has virtually no traction as a presidential candidate, owing to her own flakiness, illiberal record, and coziness with Syria’s perfidious, genocidal dictator, Bashar Al Assad.
Bernie Sanders, of course, is the most mainstream antiwar politician in the U.S., which may help explain his consistently upper-tier showing in presidential preference polls—but neither Gabbard nor Sanders are considered “mainstream” Democrats. In this posited mainstream of American thought, “the Blob”—a motley amalgam of pro-engagement, pro-military national security “experts” advising both parties’ leaders—always wins the day.
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