Must read: War, war and more war

The War Party, comprised of nearly all Republicans and most Democrats, manipulated by the security-industrial state and the Pentagon, the craftiest lobbying operation inside the Beltway, must be stopped. Nothing can be fixed -- infrastructure, housing, health care, poverty, social services, the environment -- until military adventurism is brought to an end.

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.

The rest of the story:
The Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another: War Without End by C.J.Chivers (New York Times).