OPINION:
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Some would say that House Speaker Mike Johnson — third in line for the presidency — is an accidental leader.
Elected to Congress in 2016, the Louisiana Republican had no expectation that seven years later, he would be speaker in these troubling times. A faithful Christian who believes in God’s providence in our lives, Mr. Johnson must wonder whether his being selected speaker was providence or punishment, particularly as he struggles to keep his position.
He rose to power when “my way or the highway” Republicans ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a fit of anger. It was an entirely unnecessary public tantrum by publicity-addicted partisans who claimed that Mr. McCarthy mishandled issues important to them. One of those issues was Mr. McCarthy’s declared support for financial assistance to Ukraine, a thorny dispute haunting Mr. Johnson now.
Seizing on waning public support for U.S. aid to Ukraine — $75 billion thus far, the size of Virginia’s annual budget — far-right House Republicans resorted to comparing that aid to the lack of funding for U.S. border security. Coupling that with the bourgeoning national debt and disgust over continuing resolutions to keep the government afloat, the anti-McCarthy cabal successfully ensconced him in the pantheon of former speakers. Mr. Johnson must wonder if his plinth in that hall is being placed today.
This week, the speaker faces pressure to fund Ukraine with a much-needed $60 billion aid package for ammunition and other materiel. That funding is essential if Ukraine continues to successfully resist Russia and retake territory lost over recent months. Republican isolationists complain the war amounts to what they call a “forever war.” This is how they characterized the two decades of counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan and Iraq following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
There were lessons to be learned from the global war on terror, as it was officially known. The war in Afghanistan continued well beyond a rational point. The mission should have been clear: Track down and punish the terror network that instigated 9/11.
The mission creep toward nation-building for a country locked in the seventh century was a profound mistake. The U.S. would have found it easier to force France to drop the French language in favor of German than to democratize a tribal country like Afghanistan. That forever war should have been quite limited.
The war in Iraq was not required at all. While it is fair to suggest that the U.S. coalition could have dispatched Saddam Hussein after the 1990-1991 Gulf War, he was more of a pain than a problem by 2003. Moreover, the claim that he had engaged in building a nuclear program was never proved.
That war was, therefore, predicated on a false premise. While it did not last as long as the Afghanistan quagmire, it spun off yet another vexing problem. The rise of the Islamic State is rooted in disaffected Sunni Iraqis who hated America’s Middle East presence. Compelled to remain in western Iraq and eastern Syria to crush the ISIS threat, we are still there now to blunt any resurgence. The charge that this is a “forever war” is partly true, but to interpret Ukraine similarly is to draw the wrong lessons and misapply them to a very different scenario.
In no recent war since the U.S. pushed Iraq out of Kuwait have we witnessed naked aggression like that of Russia seizing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, followed by Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens the international order today as seriously as Nazi Germany’s unjustified invasion of Poland did in 1939. Even then, Russia was complicit, invading eastern Poland 16 days later.
Therefore, as he faces being removed by the far right, Mr. Johnson must not take the wrong lessons from America’s so-called forever wars. The lessons from those conflicts are miscalculation and mission creep. The facts of the war in Ukraine are quite different and, if ignored, portend a wider conflict in Europe involving the U.S. It is utter folly to allow Russia to win because, as surely as it is, it will then turn toward a wider conflict with NATO, likely beginning in the Baltic states, which they covet for reincorporation into the Russian bloc.
Congress should not hesitate to fund Ukraine with the $60 billion to sustain that nation’s fight. Republicans would do well to recall the words of President Franklin Roosevelt in his fireside chat on Dec. 29, 1940: “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the guns, the tanks.”
We must not allow our weariness from “forever wars” to set the stage for something far worse.
• L. Scott Lingamfelter is a retired Army colonel and combat veteran (1973-2001) and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates (2002-2018). He is the author of “Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War” (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and “Yanks in Blue Berets: American UN Peacekeepers in the Middle East” (UPK, 2023).
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