As Joe Biden plans to end the deployment to Afghanistan it needs to be remembered that it was once the Obama administration’s “war of necessity” as opposed to the deployment in Iraq, which they ended.
The Belmont Club piece “The Ten Ships” posted on May 14, 2010 critiquing the strategy of ‘ending the war on terror where it began’ has become a site classic, and gets better if anything, with age.
The Ten Ships
One of the reasons the Navy opposed a Southwest Pacific campaign during the Pacific War was the shrewd appreciation that once bureaucracy started on a task it would grow with it like a cancer whatever its original purpose. Admiral King wasn’t against an action in the Solomons. He was just afraid tha…
It was as I predicted: the weakening of the Middle Eastern oil weapon and the slow change in popular radical Islamism that finally ended the main threat — not the bizarre ‘war of necessity’. The fall of ISIS, not the Biden exit, is the event that deserves to be remembered.