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| US Marines come ashore during an exercise (File Photo) |
By Franz-Stefan Gady
In the history of war, the American experience is an unusual one.
Do Americans know what it’s like to go to war? The question is certainly not meant to insult to American servicemen/women and their kin who have endured 13 years of constant warfare. I have no illusion about the personal grief the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have visited upon many military families, the psychological toll inflicted, lives destroyed, and futures not to be had. Of course, the United States Armed Forces know what it means to go to war. During one of my last trips to Afghanistan, I reported from a remote combat outpost that had come under terrible attack. The heroic way those young soldiers dealt with the devastating situation alone in the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan will always remain with me as a shining example of the professionalism of the U.S. military.
But it can’t be denied that the U.S. experience – and in fact this is true for all Western countries – of going to war is a unique one in history: In the present day, Americans usually travel thousands of miles to the battlefield to fight, while their families are safe and secure from the enemy no matter what the outcome. There is no direct correlation between success on the battlefield and the safety of loved ones. (Of course, one could debate the positive and negative influences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on avoiding another major terrorist attack like 9/11.)
As a consequence, war is a lot “cleaner” for those of us who live in the United States and Western Europe than it is for large segments of the world population. For us, defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam do not mean burned down houses, mass public executions, mock trials, confiscation of property, rape and torture, or slavery. Yet this is what war felt like only 20 years ago in Europe, and it is how it still feels like today in places like Iraq and Syria. Sure, Westerners experience body bags, mutilations, and PTSD. War for American and European soldiers is certainly not pretty. However, no soldier in the West knows what it means to have to abandon your house, leave your ailing parents behind because they cannot walk, drop all your possessions, and flee the city where you had lived all your life within an hour from either a regular army out for plunder or, worse, a murderous band of thugs dedicated to wiping out any traces of your earthly existence.
Yet, for most of history that’s what it meant to go to war (and lose).
Read the full story at The Diplomat