The ‘Forever Wars’ aren’t really ending under President Biden
Forever war keeps on simmering, and it could all too easily boil again.
By Bonnie Kristian | Updated Aug 3, 2021 1:46 PM
President Joe Biden said last week that by the close of this year, the United States will no longer have a “combat mission” in Iraq. After 18 years, the war in Iraq will finally be over. Or maybe it will simply be scaled down and shoved out of the public eye until a near-inevitable re-escalation.
This is the third end to a U.S. military intervention Biden has announced in just half a year in office. Going by the headlines, he’s effectively overhauling U.S. foreign policy for the first time in a generation, actually accomplishing the conclusion of “forever wars” promised but never delivered by his two immediate predecessors, former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. But read past those headlines with the first two announcements and a rather different pattern emerges.
In early February, Biden said the United States would no longer support “offensive operations” of the Saudi-led coalition intervention in Yemen’s civil war. Though he specified that would include halting “relevant arms sales,” Biden’s statement was light on detail, and six months later, his administration has never clarified exactly what U.S. backing was discontinued, what was retained, and what qualifies here as an offensive operation. The Biden team even declined to answer those crucial questions when they were posed by lawmakers from his own party: A letter from some congressional Democrats went unanswered for months, and when the reply finally came, it ignored nearly everything they’d asked—including the key question of whether Washington will supply the Saudi navy, whose multi-year blockade is helping to starve Yemeni children to death.
https://taskandpurpose.com/opinion/biden-forever-wars-iraq-afghanistan/
