USA TODAY: …”Americans are used to being successful, and these wars have not been successes,” says Mark Lytle, the historian who writes the most current chapters of the U.S. history textbook Nation of Nations. “It erodes the image that Americans are exceptional.”
The wars have lasted almost a decade, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and claimed the lives of more than 5,000 U.S. servicemembers and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The impact on the U.S. military, and military families, is obvious. What about people and places with no military connection?…
In interviews, historians, social scientists, marketers, artists, critics, philosophers and other Americans described a new kind of war — limited in scope yet virtually unlimited in duration — that has a new kind of home front and a new relationship with society… (more)
