The front-page headline of Sept. 11 reads that President Obama will extend airstrikes. On the Op-ed page in the same edition, Nicholas Burns (“Obama’s battle plan”) calls for more aggressive military action in the Middle East and for getting Sunni Arab states “to contribute actual forces to the fight.” Meanwhile, Hugh Shelton (“US must distance itself from Iran”) opposes accepting aid from Iran in containing the Islamic State group, calling Iran a threat to the United States and recommending a more hostile attitude toward Tehran.
What is obvious is that US military action in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other far-off places has done nothing for people there or for people here. The frightful cost to Americans pales in comparison with the human suffering resulting from our military adventurism. Every life taken by our bombing increases the determination of the survivors to wreak vengeance on us.
Isn’t it time for our government to focus on fixing the problems we have here at home rather than futile efforts to fix things in countries that we don’t begin to understand?