Even Trump gets rare moments of mental sanity: “our post-9/11 wars have been a mistake”

Trump Is Right: Our Post-9/11 Wars Have Been a Mistake

 by Andrew J. Bacevich

Mauricio Lima/The New York Times

US Special Forces soldiers at a front-line outpost outside Manbij, Syria, on Feb. 7.

By Andrew J. Bacevich February 16, 2018

In a typically offhand remark, President Trump the other day rendered his personal assessment of our various post-9/11 wars, interventions, and punitive expeditions. “Seven trillion dollars. What a mistake,” he said. “But it is what it is.”

The seven trillion is merely a guesstimate, of course. No one, least of all the lords of the Pentagon, really knows how much our sundry military campaigns, large and small, have cost. Yet at this point, total expenditures certainly reach well into the trillions. And whatever the current tally, that sum will inevitably increase as our wars drag on and as downstream obligations – care for veterans, for example – pile up for decades to come.

That Trump himself should characterize those wars as mistaken represents a moment of plain speaking rare in today’s Washington. After all, as the current commander in chief, he owns that mistake and its myriad consequences. We may doubt that the generals occupying senior positions in his administration share their boss’s assessment. Nor, in all likelihood, does the national security establishment as a whole. Yet it qualifies as more than mildly interesting that the individual exercising supreme authority views the entire enterprise as misbegotten.