Before more troops, a plan

President Obama recently assigned an additional 450 troops to Iraq. In one of its recent issues, The Economist magazine opined that the United States should continue to be involved in the Middle East to counter the presence of the Islamic State, provide stability in the oil market and counter nuclear proliferation. In one of his most recent op-ed pieces, Charles Krauthammer said that we should begin providing large amounts of military supplies to the Iraqi Kurds.

Before we make any more massive commitments, I hope we will do the following:

• Develop an overall grand strategy and make a realistic assessment of the operational assists necessary to accomplish our goals. We failed to do this in Iraq and instead of the promised short war, the killing continues.
• Determine whether the goal for which military action is initiated is worth the cost. From 2001 to the beginning of the 2008 recession, the government debt held by the public increased from 56 percent of the gross domestic product to 64 percent of it. More important we lost the lives of 6,700 military personnel and 52,000 of them were wounded.
• Recognize that accomplishing ambitious goals will entail a major commitment of time. Seventy years after the end of World War II, we still have troops in Germany and Japan, places far more stable than the Middle East.

Military action is expensive in lives and money. Future decisions on its use need to be better than the ones we have made since 2001.

JOHN PIEPHO, Cape Girardeau