The Obama Difference.

• Author: Zinn, Howard
• Position: It Seems to Me - Barack Obama - Viewpoint essay

It seems that Barack Obama and John McCain are arguing over which war to fight. McCain says: Keep the troops in Iraq until we "win." Obama says: Withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan.

As someone who has fought in a war (World War II) and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of human beings die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

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Did we "win" by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before: a dictatorship in South Korea, a dictatorship in North Korea--but more than two million people, mostly civilians, were dead, and we dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we "win" in Vietnam? The answer is obvious. We were forced to withdraw, but only after two million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we "win" in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait with only a few hundred U.S. casualties, but we killed tens of thousands of Iraqis in the process. And the consequences were deadly for us: Saddam still in power, leading us to enforce economic sanctions that led to the deaths (according to U.N. officials) of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and setting the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, we declared "victory" over the Taliban but the Taliban is back, with the attacks increasing, and our casualties in Afghanistan currently exceeding those in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce "victory"? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of our involvement there. Let me offer some sobering thoughts to those who say, as many do: Attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to 9/11. Hijackers direct jet planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 people. A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into...