Al Davis, the legendary owner of the Oakland Raiders who died today at 82, was famous for saying something that ought to chiseled onto every lintel in the Pentagon, needle-pointed into a Whitman sampler and hung in a frame on the wall of every member of Congress, and tattooed onto the knuckles of every general officer in the American military. That phrase is “Just win, baby.” Davis uttered those words in response to inquiries about his propensity for hiring players who troublemakers and soreheads and criminals. He didn’t care about their moral fiber. All he wanted, was for them to “just win, baby.”
It’s a little cynical to say that this should be the guiding precept for whether or not America goes to war, but in my lifetime, the wars that have been most damaging to American interests are the wars we have not won. I do not believe that we should have gone to war in Iraq, but neither can I tell you that no good has come from it. But what seems indisputably clear is that everything bad that happened took place because we did not go in and win that war. Instead, we toppled the government, then tried to conduct a bargain-basement occupation while chaos reigned. When did good things begin to happen? Only when the surge secured a victory, and it is to the eternal shame of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest of that claque that they so utterly failed to do that until months of disaster went by. We have now begun our tenth year of war in Afghanistan, and there is no end in sight, mostly because we do not know what the end looks like. We might have won the war when we overhrew the Taliban, but instead we switched over to Iraq, and failed to win the war. Now we do not know why we are there; we cannot say what we needs to be achieved before we can declare victory and come home. As a result, we are wasting blood and treasure, and President Obama should be embarrassed that he perpetuates the condition.
Lao Tzo is insightful, Clauswitz is shrewd, but no military thinker has ever bested Al Davis’ three little words.
Just win, baby. If you can’t, or won’t, then don’t.