Why We Must Lose This War
by Jack Lessenberry, Detroit MetroTimes

Gwynne Dyer isn’t exactly a wimp. Not many guys from Newfoundland are. Born during World War II, he has been fascinated by things military all his life, and has served in three navies — ours, Canada’s and Great Britain’s. He has university degrees from all three countries too, and a Ph.D. in military and Middle Eastern history. During the 1980s, he produced and narrated the best documentary series about the nature of war that I’ve ever seen.

And here’s what he says about what we are doing:

“The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.”

He explains how we haven’t grasped that the world has changed, that we aren’t living in our old superpower world anymore, one in which we’re the leader of the forces of light against the evil dark powers of communism. Nor are we, in fact, even a military superpower in the way we like to think we are; in reality, our military machine can only be used against very weak countries. As he notes, “War with a serious opponent would lead to a level of American casualties that the U.S. public would not tolerate for long.”

What the world needs most in the long run (if there’s to be a long run), he reminds us, is a stable international order in which all nations gradually work on abandoning war as an acceptable way of settling any differences. Dyer isn’t starry-eyed about this; he thinks it will take a hundred years at least to get major countries to stop resorting to war, “for it is trying to change international habits that had at least 5,000 years to take root.”

Full story here.