When Americans talk about “forever wars,” they usually mean the long conflicts in the Middle East: Iraq and Afghanistan. The 20 years the U.S. spent enmeshed in those countries were painful and expensive, and people are still wondering what they ultimately accomplished. George W. Bush’s administration did manage to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, and Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, was killed on Barack Obama’s watch, but the underlying issues that propelled those wars were never fully resolved. It’s only a matter of time before they bubble up again.
But half a century ago, another forever war was officially declared, and it continues unabated: the so-called War On Drugs. The name is not a figure of speech or a metaphor. It’s what the war-monger types like to call a “kinetic action,” meaning “physical force, violence, or destructive energy.”
