Mr. Taibbi is incorrect -- the politicians learned their lessons well. They made a fortune on the Afghani occupation, a war otherwise of so little importance to Congress that they never bothered, as the Constitution requires, to declare war, but allowed president after president to use the military like a play toy. And nobody cared.
If 16 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, why did the US invade Afghanistan? There were signatures by Saudi Royals on checks given to some of the terrorists cells (see Prince Bandar and his wife Haifa).
On the other hand, Afghanistan was a drug colony. Afghanistan is the world’s leading opium producer. The poppy fields were guarded by US and NATO soldiers. In the Helmand province alone, under British troop control, opium production rose 400%.
International finance and terrorism are addicted to drug money and rely on it for their operations.
That’s the hard truth, but no one is supposed to say it.
Afghanistan sits on $1 trillion worth of rare earth minerals, far more valuable to US—and to China, which has offered to help Afghanistan in our absence, a bid to corner the market on these essential minerals. If China succeeds, we're screwed. At least until Elon can set up a mining colony on a nearby asteroid.
If you have been paying ANY attention to reality AT ALL you’d know that whether China succeeds or not we are screwed. It strikes me that most folks are in hard-core denial of the fact that the “American Empire” is circling the drain and picking up speed as we spin. It is also remarkable how very few of us actually recognize how utterly unsympathetic and indifferent most in the USA seem to be to the attitude of inhumanity which permeates every nook and cranny of our system of our national governance. It seems to me that the good old USA is about as fucked up as can be and that most folks are like the proverbial frog in the pot of water as we all pick and quibble at small and ridiculously insignificant details of what is happening while totally missing the big picture.
If they want it so badly, let China invade and occupy Afghanistan. We can buy their production on a free market.
The cost of the Afghan war has far exceeded the trillion in rare earths you mention. To profit from them the US would have to run the mines and kill most of the civilians. It's an absurd economic position.
"We're" screwed?? Who are you referring to? Are you one of the elites that will rake in cash from the mines?? I'm okay with buying shit from China if that's who's got it. Pick your poison!
All of which minerals will become even *more important the more humankind goes with electric cars running on lithium batteries, which also require some rare earth minerals.
REALLY ? I knew they were "spendy" to mine, but I had no idea the U.S. had any of them. The way the U.S. "whines" for rare earths, I, apparently inadvertently *assumed we didn't have any,
Now the whining makes a LOT more sense ! TKY ! If we can get them from somebody *else's country, why wouldn't we ? ;-D ;-D
That said, those statistics depend on proven reserves by some means. If some geologist hasn't found evidence of the ore, it's not proven. It's like oil. If you asked people 40 years ago about oil in North Dakota, they'd have laughed. Nowadays...
Yep. Rare earths aren't even all that rare, it's more the trouble you have to go to separate them from ground they're in.
Per usual, the US took the short term view on not developing them here, preferring to have the processing done elsewhere, the PRC being the big winner as usual.
Really, given the immaturity of our elite( ahem), especially contrasted with the maturity and vision of those leading the PRC, the reality that the Chinese will dwarf us economically before this century is done, is as safe a bet as can be made, especially given the utter wastefulness of placing so much of our technology and finance on the military.
We would do well to copy the Chinese approach, which seeks to be a regional military power and a global economic one. Training for the 100 meter dash when the real event is the Marathon is a poor plan, but one we are following.
But anyone can find YouTube videos showing the opium shipments out of Afghanistan - in convoys protected by the military. Nobody has to say anything about something that obvious.
While I agree that the CIA and other agencies use these operations to generate their own covert funds, on a macro level, flooding the population with drugs is one of the most effective means of getting the population to destroy itself, destroy minds (often promising ones who become demoralized and turn to drugs), and just an altogether brave new world system where as Huxley put it in his infamous speech "The Final Revolution": people will learn to love their servitude.
If one has the choice between running a totalitarian state with boots on the ground enforcement, or a Brave New World-type scenario where people have all the tools and instruments to create their own alternative realities, the latter is much more subtle and effective. And it works in such that way that often times, even though people are aware that they are not free, they are just a little too comfortable to actually fight back, and they have just the right dosage and choice entertainment to not want to risk losing it all.
If people can become disgusted enough with that kind of system, then the oligarchs are in big trouble.
Here's a fun quote from Dr. Timothy Leary's biographical work "Flashback", where he recounts the kind of rich correspondence he was engaged in with Aldous Huxley:
Huxley:
``These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.''
Leary reflection's on Huxley's thoughts:
``We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.''
I'd argue that it's more than just a revenue generation activity, but sure I'd like to see more from the investigative journalism community about how the Sackler family (and other Rx companies) were able to flood the U.S. with opioids just as the first waves of returning combat veterans were being diagnosed with PTSD and, more relevantly, painful injuries. Don't get me wrong; there's been a lot of work done to expose these companies and individuals but it's almost like the business model evolved. After Vietnam there was a heroin epidemic. After the Iraq/Afghanistan veterans came home we got a prescription opioid epidemic. Is there a coincidence or have those at the very top who profited from the original heroin boom merely figured out how to cloak the flooding of America with dangerous drugs under a veil of legitimacy (while our gaze was distracted, I might add)?
"[F]looding the population with drugs is one of the most effective means of getting the population to destroy itself, destroy minds ..."
Thanks. Agreed.
I was viciously ridiculed by a couple of people in the commentary of Matt's recent Obama article for hypothesizing that the *root*, not the ostensible or plausible cover, reason for the ruthless implementation of 100% COVID vaccine compliance, along with ruthless indefensible suppression of even research on preventatives and cures, is to normalize bodily-invasive access, at the individual level, for any reason it might be needed in the future. The seasonal flu vaccine campaign just didn't cut it to establish this compliance...and here we are. I'm not completely wedded to this idea, but it is certainly plausible given the past horrors we have learned.
The sociopaths who claw their way up the political chain are not experts, they are unbound killers who Will. Do. ANYTHING. ... for example - Tuskegee. Northwoods. Rome. ... just off the top of my head ... But the list is really very long...
I would hypothesize that TPTB do not want a control group of substantial size to remain. This could be from one of two reasons, both nefarious, but one downright wicked in its nature. Firstly, they know that they don't know the long-term effects of this gene therapy, which is what it is, and the poor suckers that mindlessly take the clot-shot will be fuming murderously angry if they finally figure out that they were human lab rats for an experiment that over time had shown to have gone awry. The other, more diabolical hypothesis is that the long-term effects of The King's Serum are intentional, particularly given the already known and documented evidence that it has on reproductive systems (far beyond statistical chance) and that the long-term effects are intentional and nefarious in nature.
That said, it won't be long before we - those that refuse to be pricked under orders of The Prick in Chief (party be damned) - are given the equivalent of yellow stars to wear on our sleeves. I see THAT unfolding as I type.
Notice that I make no claims of truth. It's because I just don't know the damn truth. But when the government, media, and every NGO from East to West lies to you on a drum-beat basis, you can make a decent estimate that the next "claim" too will be a bald-faced lie. That, coupled with this frantic push to take the spike protein toxin in a syringe has my BS meter so far into the red that it's broken.
My body, my choice. Anyone that disagrees with me can F off as it is THEY that are self-centered and cowardly to the core, not to mention credulously naive to the point of being useless to society.
That’s actually why I started the “Escaping the Brave New World” podcast, to explore the very nuanced and subtle nature of our current brave new world, which includes the insane drug culture and entertainment world. I thin it can be defeated though because it’s based on a fundamentally flawed and perverted idea of human nature and the mind.
Beyond just pointing out all the perversions of truth and subversive ideologies, I think it’s important to emphasize what a healthy mind and creativity looks and sounds like.
The fact that the system has worked for so long isn’t really proof that it’s correct. In a sudden moment or crisis and realization, all of a sudden decades of work and conditioning can quickly erode. The whole thing is like a great game of Jenga, it all depends on a scientific-like precision of the narrative, but as soon as we start to reach a point of discontinuity, extreme turbulence, we start to see a bunch of new singularities pop up. In these moments, the whole narrative matrix can come down in one great crash, just like a game of Jenga.
As someone said earlier, there really is this Orwellian culture today where the only acceptable narratives are the state-sanctioned narratives, and everything else is considered weird conspiracy theory. However I don’t think that kind of thing can be defeated with just cold hard facts and logic, there needs to be a sense of creative insight whereby we don’t just try to defeat ugly ideas by exposing their insanity, we defeat ugly ideas with beautiful and good ideas. This is admittedly more difficult, but it’s necessary. Dante’s Commedia comes to mind. He takes you through Hell, but he does so in order to show the reader the way Paradise. They need to first have a real sense of Hell if they’re to actually make the longer journey.
That being said, for those not too far gone cases, the work of Whitney Webb on the defense and BigTech 360 degree bio-medical surveillance is very good.
The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”
To what end would this “world political unity” be aimed? Several pages later, Huxley’s vision is laid out in all of its twisted detail:
At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
This is it. If people get that, they have the master key to understanding the current situation.
I recently saw the movie “Gattaca.” That gives a pretty good idea. Elysium and Utopia (on Amazon Prime) are two other interesting examples of what the eugenicist wet dreams look like.
I like Tim Leary; he had some important insights. But he's waay out of his depth on that one, in misidentifying monotheism as the great adversary of mind expansion. I think Tim's extrapolating mostly from his own conflicted upbringing, about which he was always quite candid; I recommend that the curious read his autobiographies, which, while lucidly written and entertaining (and action-packed!), also indicate the limitations of his own conditioning and the narrative frame imposed by it.
Anyway, the psychedelic revolution in consciousness was always bigger than Leary, and contained many currents running contrary to Leary-thought. (I can practically hear Tim saying "Leary-thought! good one!")
It was none other than his fellow psychonaut Al Hubbard who obtained some sort of dispensation from the Vatican endorsing the potential of mind-opening substances in leading people toward piety and holiness. Hubbard was, like Leary, Roman Catholic; unlike Leary, he wasn't "lapsed." LSD explorer Clare Boothe Luce was also Catholic; her husband Henry, another voyager, retained his Protestant affiliation. As did Ken Kesey. To say nothing of what happened with Alan Watts, Richard Alpert, and Art Kleps. And so it goes...a much more colorful and variegated set of perspectives than the dreariness of the colorless allcolor of techno-atheism of the New Jacks of Silicon Valley.
"they have just the right dosage and choice entertainment to not want to risk losing it all."
The question is, "lose it for what?" What's the alternative to a life of enjoyable leisure? Who stops anyone from pursuing a life of productivity, inovation and personal growth? Creativity and "self-actualization"? No one I know of in the US? At least nothing organized?
Sure, the IRS has been engineered to enforce the economic class structure, no doubt of that. Becoming a billionaire is hard these days, becoming a millionaire 30 years ago was just as difficult. That's what the progressive tax structure is designed to do?
Other than that, anyone willing to put in the work and time can have a nice life on their country estate with a big TV, horses, fast cars, etc. It's hardly impossible? So what is it you suggest America is missing, other than legal access to heroin?
Sorry, are you saying you're not aware that most schools are simply brainwashing kids and young people? How exactly are we living in a free world if most of the education people are getting is garbage, if not outright brainwashing?
What about the media? Do you think an MSM churning out constant fabricated lies 24/7 is really the sign of a "free society?"
You haven't heard about Critical Theory and all the other insane ideologies taking over the education system, and especially targeting children?
If all this is news to you, congrats, you're a happy denizen of the brave new world!
While correlation does not equate to causality it can be at times be considered prima facie evidence for investigation into why the opium epidemic in the US exploded just after we invaded Viet Ghanistan. Inquiring minds want to know if a linkage exists, would you not agree?
It isn't difficult and doesn't require great leaps of insight? The so called "opium epidemic" exists in the US due to an aging segment of the population that happens to be in the majority at present? Nothing mystical about it, just millions of old people who've, over the course of their lives, messed themselves up? That's about it?
No Unicorns. No mystical or nefarious causes, just a bunch of old folks who fell off ladders?
That "cash crop" never belonged to us and any American who thinks it does is a royal POS in my book and should be lined up against a wall for being a walking, breathing POS excuse for humanity.
It's a crazy idea, suggesting the US spent all that money for the opium production. If we wanted, we could easily match that by sultivating opium in Arizona. It's not hard to grow and it isn't expensive.
Maybe your response was intended for someone else? (Horatio Flemm's comment has generated a lengthy subthread.)
I wasn't suggesting the U.S. had anything to do opium production. When I mentioned drug convoys protected by the military, I meant the Afghan army not the U.S. army.
There are apparently many who think that the U.S. had an interest in seeing opium produced but that's not my view.
In the dystopia we’re now all prisoners of, no one is supposed, or allowed to, say anything that’s true. Only official narratives are permitted. Just ask Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
If the all-powerful dystopia of which you speak were an actual reality, no one would have access to the sagas and disclosures of either Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, and you'd be identified, hunted down, and disappeared simply for mentioning their names.
Commenting online is no real threat to any part of the ruling class, if this is all we do, and so far it is. They'll hunt us down and disappear any of us when we are perceived as a threat to their tyranny. Read Vincent Bevins' "The Jakarta Method" for a full description of how the US has done this systematically for decades, and continues the pattern. It might just help redefine "reality" for you.
OBL was known to be resident in Afghanistan. The govt of Afghanistan was advised to surrender him and the Taliban laughed at that. OBL was trapped in Tora Bora and was there for the killing but the US Army insisted on getting him (and the credit); which allowed him to escape to Pakistan. That's where the real justification ends and the BS begins.
The Taliban offered to hand over OBL on at least one occasion. The Bush Regime laughed at that. But don't take my word for it, here's the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy site The Guardian reporting on it.
The Taliban *reasonably* asked the Bush Regime for some sort of proof and they couldn't bother to provide any (just as they still cannot be bothered to provide it to the American people), probably for "nashunul suckurity" reasons.
You see, the US Government is the world's mafia enforcer and Muricah isn't bound by any of the rules or laws that it holds other countries to.
The Obama operation to "capture" OBL was a kill mission from the get-go. There was no way that OBL would have been "allowed" to face even a military tribunal because his testimony would likely have blown some pretty serious holes in the official narrative. Besides, at that point in time we were "looking forward, not backward."
It is true the Taliban offered to hand him over. The offer probably should have been made on September 12th, not that it would have made much difference. No one was in the mood for negotiation at the time.
The privilege of being the leader of the rules-based order - we get to break pretty much any rule we want because no one can hold us accountable. Another reason that other countries don't see the system as having quite the same benefits we see in it.
True. In fact the leadership in China and Russia frequently call out the hypocrisy and meaninglessness of the "rules based order" (vague and non-concrete) which the US leadership often trots out instead of calling it "international law", which is sufficiently concrete to justify prosecuting many US actions in international and national courts.
Afghanistan was AQ’s crash pad, there’s no doubt about that. Did we let the biggest scumbag regime on the planet off the hook b/c of Bush family cronyism-of course.
Irrelevant. It's not just the Bush (crime) Family that benefitted. It was their vast network of cronies, former "business partners", ex spooks, think tanks, NGOs, hedge funds, sovereign wealth fund managers and so many others. That the Bushes could only benefit to a certain financial degree does not negate that it was Bush who let the Saudis (the real perpetrators of 9/11) off the hook (not to mention failed to investigate or prosecute Israeli ties) so that he could pave the way for the war on Iraq, which was already planned and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan when all we really wanted was a small group of alleged terrorists.
So in some way it's not irrelevant, just misses the real point that Stxbuck was making. Bush and Cheney let Saudi Arabia get away with the biggest terror attack in history (unless you count US military actions abroad - the people there do) because of family and business ties when he was the one person in the world with the power and justification to take them down, despite the Saudi-American wealth ties and alleged mutual strategic interests.
My mind is drawn to that massacre in Vegas in 2017. I remember seeing a video of one of the Saudi royals escaping from a hotel with bodyguards around him while it was going on. Never found out the real story on that one, they just blamed a single nutjob for it, however implausible that seemed.
I mean, I know the geopolitical reasons why the Saudis get so much slack, but within the borders of the US? Anyway, break the oil addiction and you break Saudi power.
Let's not forget that Carter funded, armed, and gave intelligence to mujahideen 6 months before the USSR invaded. He did it for the purpose of baiting the USSR into invading to protect themselves from a dangerous nation on their southern border. Carter did this out of the kindness of his Christian heart because he hated godless communism.
Brzezinski probably didn't think of himself that way, same as Kissinger didn't think of himself as Nixon's boy. And in retrospect, Reagan even asked Brzezinski to stay on. He refused.
" We can choose whether drug money goes to the Taliban, or Purdue Pharmaceuticals. We can choose whether we support the Sackler family or the Sina Loa Cartel. That’s it, those are the options. I don’t like the Sackler family, but at least they aren’t beheading anyone."
That the Sacklers, Purdue Pharma and many other opioid producers aren't beheading anyone is meaningless for two reasons: 1) The Taliban in their present configuration aren't known for beheading people and 2) The damage that those companies have done in the United States is far worse than a few beheadings. Just because for so long it was cloaked by fake legitimacy and legality doesn't make the millions of deaths, ruined families, ruined local economies and tremendous burden on the American taxpayer are "better" than some (US realpolitik created, funded, trained, abetted) terror group far away. If we hadn't invaded Iraq, there never would have been an ISIS. If we hadn't initially funded, trained and armed the mujahideen it's highly likely the Taliban would never have risen to power. If we hadn't tried to destroy Syria it's likely Al Nusra and other regional terror groups would never have come into being.
The War on (some) Drugs is a fiasco and assault on civil liberties, but ending it wouldn't have done one thing toward curbing the military adventurism that the USA has been engaging in since more than a hundred years before the Cold War and which has only picked up steam after.
That's a silly and awful take on the situation regarding Afghanistan. The war was NOT winnable despite the delusions of this author. Just as the War on (some) Drugs is also NOT winnable.
While I disagree on the scope and scale of CIA involvement in the trade of illicit drugs (I do think they're the enablers and protectors of some of the biggest cartels and producers), the article makes a sound point:
Millions of losers
The story is much more nuanced than some “CIA controls the world’s drugs” conspiracy theories make out. There are no U.S. soldiers loading up Afghan carts with opium. However, many commanders are knowingly enabling warlords who do. “The U.S. military and CIA bear a large responsibility for the opium production boom in Afghanistan,” Professor Mercille said, explaining:
Post-9/11, they basically allied themselves with a lot of Afghan strongmen and warlords who happened to be involved in some way in drug production and trafficking. Those individuals were acting as local allies for the U.S. and NATO, and therefore were largely protected from retribution or arrest for drug trafficking because they were U.S. allies.”
From the ground, the war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites, which immediately begin to embezzle the massive profits that quietly disappear into black holes. All the while, millions of people pay the price, suffering inside a militarized death zone and turning to drugs as a coping mechanism. In the story of the opium boom, there are few winners, but there are millions of losers.
Your understanding of the Taliban and our war aims there are as incorrect as your spell spelling "imminent", using the word "immanent", which has a totally different meaning.
Our foray into Afghanistan was doomed from the beginning because it had as its target not getting bin Laden and then leaving( we had a total of 37 US troops on the ground at Tora Bora, where he was holed up), and instead paid Afghan mercenaries to go get him as we bombed from the air, the Afghans then going in and being paid more by bin Laden to look the other way, as is their culture, but to be the appetizer to whet our appetite for the real wars to come in Iraq, Syria and the big prize, Iran, all of which were either outright disasters, or would have been, (Iran) if attempted.
The Taliban, unlike AQ, has no interest in any country outside their own, and can we please remember these people are the end winners in our policy back in the 80's to give the USSR its own Vietnam an irony in that it has come back to give us our second one? It hurts, I know, but once again, the belief by our politicians, most of whom either were or would have been draft dodgers, or are combat virgins, that our military is the answer to any and all problems has been a resounding failure, not that either they or our media will admit it
Being a Vietnam vet, I knew this would happen 19 1/2 years ago, and that when it did, all the advocates of war would go around pointing fingers, playing political games of blaming someone else, and would find willing accomplices with our worthless media, being unable to accept the fact that their lies led to needless deaths and dismemberment and cost trillions of dollars, no one truly being held accountable.
If you can show me any concrete examples of their trying to spread their beliefs around the world, I will change my mind.
The planning for 9-11 was done in San Diego, Miami and Germany; Hamburg, if I remember correctly, and not a single Afghan or Taliban was involved, though a shit load of Saudis were, not that seems to matter to our political elites. If AQ does reassemble in Afghanistan, I cannot think or a safer place for us to have them; a landlocked country with few outlets to the world.
If Islamic terrorism is so great a threat, then why have so few here been killed by it? Are you telling me a Muslim couldn't just buy a gun here and blast away, like we do to each other on the regular?
Take a look at the number of Americans killed by drunk drivers, plain old murders, work place accidents, or even our horrible junk food diet and then try telling me our reaction to 9-11, one where we didn't even try to get bin Laden, the supposed mastermind, wasn't a complete bait and switch, the ultimate winners being the MIC and their political pimps.
If you feel so strongly, take your second amendment implements over there and go at it, but give me a heads up, and I'll give you some of the tips I learned in Vietnam decades ago. And while you're over there, just think back to how this all started with our aiding these people, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, in our desire to play The Great Game, all to give the USSR its own Vietnam. There was a movie about it, Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks, if I remember correctly, so it must have been the right thing to do, consequences be damned.
I'm no expert on Afghanistan, but isn't that because the international jihadist activities of the Taliban are ostensibly managed by the Haqqani Network, which raises funds from the same Arabic groups that Al Qaeda does, has large numbers of Chechen, Arabic, Uzbeki and other foreign fighters, offers refuge and support to Pakistani terrorists targeting India and which bombed India's embassy in Kabul? There doesn't seem to be any real difference between the Haqqani Network and the Taliban. But perhaps most importantly, if neither one have broken ranks with Al Qaeda in the last 19 years, you really have to question your belief that the Taliban is solely interested in ruining their own countrymens' lives.
“Your understanding of the Taliban and our war aims there are as incorrect as your spelling "imminent", using the word "immanent", which has a totally different meaning.”
Yes, I know it does. I spotted and corrected the mistaken spelling of that term almost immediately after posting the comment, suspecting I'd used the wrong term—but, in the process of doing that, I neglected to copy-and-paste the corrected copy, replacing, instead, the original mistake once more. Unlike you, my efforts to correct my misspellings and other copy-editing errors are not flawlessly executed; the challenge is compounded by the truly shitty software on which this site "runs" and the hardly-less-shitty state of layman-technology in the rest of computer-linked communications..
Given that you submitted or willingly “served” in the U.S. war in Vietnam, your own life-mistakes dwarf my own faulty copy-editing, “genius.” My greatest respect is reserved for those not already in the U.S. military who, facing the call to join up, _ refused _ it, or those, if already in uniform, the order to muster for deployment, in either case by conscientious objection to fighting in that war. (re-edited and re-corrected--again).
Apparently, _ anyone _ can make a mistake. What really counts is how stupendous and life-ruining the mistakes are and whether, once made, one can learn something valuable from them.S
"Empires always fall, and for the same reasons."
No, they don't. Empires can fall for many and varied reasons. Incompetence and bad-luck, even when compounded, are not necessarily the same things.
Go polish your combat-awards, tough guy. You've now had all the time and attention you'll get from me in this forum.
Here's the revised/corrected copy to which the "reply" just above refers:
Readersaurus
16 hr ago
I believe the reasoning went something like this (a paraphrase) :
We blundered in not recognizing a manifest threat bred and promulgated from a foreign source--and we allowed it to fester as it made meticulous plans to strike us at home and abroad. Saudi Arabia, the putative native territory of the recent assailants (11 Sept. 2001) is but one such breeding ground --and not that (perhaps) most likely to breed the next imminent danger. Where else could that come from? The Taliban. And what is their home-ground? Afghanistan.
The initial reasoning was neither stupid nor irrational. There was a certain sense to it from both a political (policy) and military point of view. Moreover, (in the wake of such popular "Remember Pearl Harbor"-like phrases, i.e. "Whatever it takes!") with Bush essentially telling his general command that they'd have what was one of the most unrestrained of remits, their hands "untied", in the prosecution of the war, the response in Afghanistan began as early as October of 2001--as opposed to the Iraq war, which began in March of 2003. At the inception of the Iraq combat, such was the spectacle of was referred to in the press as "Shock and awe" and looked like it, that some people still confuse the Iraq hostilities as having begun prior to those, much less mediatized, in Afghanistan.
Well, that's a Narrative. Requires an impressively aggressive amount of editing to come up with one that inaccurate. But if you want to believe it, who cares about scholarly discipline?
Yes, I know. In the 2020s, a book of more than fifty pages constitutes a "big, thick, book" and, in this rather unfriendly comment-writing-&-editing software, 2 "deletes" and re-posts constitute for some what's called an "impressively aggressive amount of editing."
Wait, in a post of some 215 words, treating summarily a theatre of war which spanned twenty years (and much more), did I omit to mention some important details?
Your copy is pithier, of course--it being far easier to allege "inaccuracy" without even bothering to specify any of it.
Noting the inaccuracy of your potted history is preferable to allowing it to stand unchallenged, as if it were authoritative.
I've spent too many hours of research and link offerings in detailing specific objections in disputes like this one to do it any longer, when the topic is as general as this one. Most of what I'd have to say would merely be a re-phrasing of the work of others. I can direct readers to a rich archive that authoritatively refutes the insinuations and unstated premises of your cheesy partisan framing, though https://news.antiwar.com/tag/afghanistan/page/404/
Antiwar.com has another seven years of articles preceding that 404 page (thus far) archive, which only goes back to 2008. I presume that those articles are also archived somewhere. There are also plenty of other sources, of course. But the 13 years of tagged dispatches and opinion columns found in that Antiwar.com archive make for a good antidote to your facile summary.
What you fail to address is the complete lack of any coherent plan AFTER the occupation. Why is that? Why is it that for over half a century, we've been engaging in these "conflicts" over and over without any plan for what comes after? There's a reason for it, and that reason could be why we engage in them in the first place.
It's not that complicated. The "plan" was that the semi-moderate, semi-democratic government we helped stand up would prove marginally capable of holding power and governing an Afghanistan that, we believed, was never entirely enthralled with Taliban rule in the first place. You can criticize that assessment for being wrong, but you can't say there was no plan just because it didn't play out that way. I mean, that exact same plan has sort of played out that way in Iraq.
I actually enjoy his posts. He's one of the few people here I make a point of reading on a regular basis despite disagreeing with him on some issues. Always cogent and to the point.
In fact, I noticed he hasn't been posting recently. Good to see him back.
oh man, not the "paid hack" thing...that's so trite.
Not that I'd even know where to apply for a Paid Hack position, but anyone who reads enough of my posts ought to realize that there isn't a single Special Interest that would consider hiring me. I'm too Politically Unreliable.
Some of the time you get conservatives that mouth the proper platitudes, but progressives always view the Constitution as an impediment to what they believe will be better governance.
Please don't fool yourselves into thinking this "war" was about consevative, liberal, progressive, communist, anarchist, racist or any other idealogy. It always was and ever will be about funnelling money into the hands of the ruling capitalist elite, who are the ones who always benefit from war; any war, anywhere. Looking at our neighbors instead of at the ruling elite is why they get to continue doing this over and over and over again. As long as we keep seeing each other as "the problem", the problem will continue.
Oh, they started it alright. It was just via another arm of the larger beast/octopus that determines such actions---always for the benefit for the select few, the Owners. As long as their financial portfolios expand, then they've won. And that's generally after the CIA has fertilized the fields of foment.
In other words, 'They' always win, for the Fix is in, the vertical integration of U.S. systematized warfare as capitalism remains permanently manifested (never ending as policy,) in spite of a given conflict quasi-concluding, as depicted on TV or NPR, etc.
"It always was and ever will be about funneling money into the hands of the ruling capitalist elite"
Forgive the tongue and cheek, but capitalism by most accounts began in the 16th/17th centuries through the Dutch and English trading companies. Was humanity without war prior to these evil capitalists? If not, then who were the ones "who always benefit from war; and war, anywhere" at that point in time?
Hi JT! It was about money/resources then, too - feudal, imperial, whatever system. Each system brings its own values, priorities, and acceptable losses to warfare. In this case, it is capitalist values, priorities, and acceptable losses, so that's the flavor in discussion.
At least now that progressives have political power — back in the ‘60s when it was their speech being suppressed progressive were all about free speech (albeit not so much other aspects of the constitution like the 2nd amendment)
True progressive are NOT in power. Liberals aka moderate Republicans (Obama, Clintons, Biden, etc. ) are still fighting the Cold War. Please tell them it ended when the Berlin Wall came down.
Actually in the 1960s it was the progressives who were pro-2nd Amendment and the Republicans (Reagan, as governor of California) who were against it. Remember the Mulford Act?
For better or worse, the 2020 occupation of the Michigan State Capitol building by armed citizens has a close antecedent in the actions of the Black Panther Party at the State Capitol in May 2, 1967 in Sacramento, CA. https://capitolweekly.net/black-panthers-armed-capitol/
"progressive" vs. "conservative" is such a false opposition. Terms that vague have to be defined in the mind of each separate reader, as each of us tries to guess the intent of the writer.
That insurmountable semantic problem alone indicates that it makes more sense to just stamp the entire post as Incoherent.
The 14th Amendment: "progressive" or "conservative"?
The 14th Amdt predates the Progressive movement in this country, which originated in the late 19th century. True, the modern progressive wing of the Democratic party only partially resembles the original movement. And no one is as 'conservative' about say Social Security as a 'progressive' - who will oppose actually making the program more progressive by adding means testing. So yes, the labels are problematic for many specific things if still somewhat useful for some broad strokes.
All of Wilson's heirs, and most particularly in foreign policy, are progressives (even if they are in neo-con drag).
Well, that's a pretty good clarification of the thrust of my earlier comment- which is that the definitions of "progressive" and "conservative" used in this country have a way of morphing into meaninglessness- defined in different eras according to criteria that vary to the point of being arbitrary and whimsical.
It's three days later but i'm kind of surprised no one pointed out that Congress eventually gave the fig leaf for every one of these interventions except Korea. They don't call it a declaration of war, just an "Authorization for the use of military force" or a "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". Korea was the only real anomaly, where Congress didn't pass a specific authorization but immediately went to work restoring the draft and funding the war. Some kind of 'implicit' authorization was at work there.
Even Taft said he would have voted for it, so I have no clue why Truman didn't seek it. Maybe he was trying to make a point. If so, bad point, and one that hasn't carried over through the years.
My guess is that if you looked deep into what happened in Korea, you would see the same pattern Matt describes: we're not welcome, we lie about why we're there, we partner with a corrupt entity, and then continue to believe our own bullshit that we're making a difference. So, we're now pushing 70 years of this same crap over and over. My guess is there's a deeper reason for it, and some of the comments here may be revealing that reason.
I've said it before and will say it again to the point of tedium. but I think Ike was a decent guy and his great mistake was letting the Super Dulles Bros. run wild. He just didn't want to see open conflict again.
Everybody's living with the consequences now, of course.
Eisenhower had it both ways. From Guatemala to Korea. Thanks for the warning re: the MIC, Ike. Only after you sicced the CIA and State Department under the Dulles brothers on the world. And then professed shock at JFK's assassination by certain "associated" elements.
Harry's "I'm shocked! SHOCKED!!!" op-ed about the "dirty tricks department" is only exceeded in the realm of comedy by Allen Dulles's frantic efforts to suppress it.
Nah you can't conflate all of these things. Motives of the 1940s to early 1960s were not the same motives as today. Vietnam, like Algeria, was part of the French Empire that was pulling away as part of the decolonization period following WWII. Each one is different. For the origins of the Vietnam War, see "Embers of War, The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam."
Yes and no. The 38th Parallel was established after WW2 by the US. But the US put the Japanese, and Korean collaborators, back in charge of the govt and that pissed off the Koreans. Hostilities ensued and the US declared martial law. Then a general election was held for S Korea that is widely considered to have been a sham perpetrated by the US. Also, the 38th Parallel may have divided the country, but it's people were still mixed and there were lots of socialists in S Korea. Finally, N Korea was far from a pawn in the Chinese Civil War. It's thought by many that their actions in that war may have been the key to the communist victory in China.
It all went to hell when it was discovered that a “real” war would require financing by selling war bonds. Now an “undeclared” war is financed by simply stealing money from tax payers without their permission. War is easy to launch without the fuss of selling war bonds.
One must draw a binary conclusion. The people who started the war, and those who have continued it, are either stupid or evil. Maybe both; evil for doing it, and stupid if they thought it would end well. Psychopaths don’t think things through. This applies to all the flag waivers who have continued to support sending troops to Afghanistan (and elsewhere) saying they were defending our freedom. Bullshit!
It is as much an indictment of our complacent media as it is the crooks in industry and government. Without a functioning press there is no counter weight to the corruption.
They aren't complacent. They are usually cheerleaders for whatever saber-rattling the U.S. is doing. People still read the New York Times even after it was Dick Cheney's sock puppet on Iraq. Cheney's Halliburton made so much money they are probably still counting it. Remember the air drops of plats of U.S. currency? "The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
I recognize that you are employing hyperbole here, but I can assure you that military members and their at-CONUS spouses did care.
This war fucked up a lot of lives. Primarily Afghan lives; secondarily American lives. Ultimately I feel less sorry for the Americans than the Afghans; there wasn't a draft, after all, and I don't recall the Afghans getting to vote on their choice in the matter.
"[T]he politicians learned their lessons well. ... So will it happen again. You bet ya!*"
Not to worry, folks -- we don't even need to wait for 'again'!
The MSM is now painting one hum-dinger of a picture out there. "Left" and "Right" are uniting together in universal outrage: "Something MUST Be Done!"
The Squad will lead a chant at an outdoor camera-masked gathering of their protest start-up, Democracy in Action(R):
"What do we want?"
"Instant gratification!"
"When do we want it?"
"NOW!"
The principals are now gaining the invigorated public support they seek ... and will soon see the launch of a new Coalition-of-the-Willing(R), complete with full new branding (TBD). Coming to a puppetized President near you!
In this short clip from Groundhog Day Bill Murray represents the military-industrial-complex that produces the infinitely repeating insanely macabre war loop:
The Best way for a Quick end to that Point is....Lies in front of Congrss, on matters of Conflicts or WARS....Trial for Treason....With the Firing Squad.....Starting at the TOP.....
I don't think on this one. This was ALL Biden he finally gets to be the decider. I would call Biden's leadership style Obtuse Empathy. He desperately wants to been seen as a smart ,sensitive, caring figure who is on the right side of history (as if history can been seen in such a lens) He jumps in front of what ever empathy parade is in the gestalt at the time no matter the secondary effects or if its even true. Its as though he has been waiting his whole life to drop the line, "whose child should he send to die for someone else's civil war?" That line, perhaps gives him a false sense of immunity from what ever consequences arrive from his decision because his heart is in the right place there fore any negative consequence is in service to the greater noble, poetic position. Its like rescuing a seagull from a fishing net and ripping its wings off to free it. That being said , I'm glad we getting out it was not an easy decision but the gracelessness and utter cluster fuck is all on Biden and his generals.
Also note that we ended up pulling our military support of South Vietnam because Congress refused to continue to fund it. Strange to think that Biden was in the Senate at the time.
I keep making the same point. Biden fucked up far worse than people are recognizing. You're right: the difference with the Republic of Vietnam is that congress pulled the rug out from under their government. In Afghanistan, Biden had bipartisan support for maintaining the security situation, and apparently, he let the policy naifs in his administration decide that the government in Kabul didn't need our intelligence and air support. Who in congress advocated ending all non-combat support? As far as I know, the idea wasn't really mainstream.
I'm sure that there are people who will say that Afghanistan is different from Vietnam and that the Taliban was always destined to topple the government quickly. To such people, I offer one additional observation: the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan survived for over three years after the end of Soviet combat operations. The communist government only collapsed after the financial and other non-combat support ended with the collapse of the USSR.
Let me repeat. By moving to the center, an unpopular communist Afghan government survived three years while our liberal government, a government at least nominally respecting their religious traditions and deferring to custom on thorny issues of universal human rights where custom and universal human rights conflicted, survived just three days.
There's precedent to believe that the American-backed government could have continued indefinitely with modest amounts of non-combat support. Biden's advisers and handlers just threw in the towel.
The news isn't all bad, though. I have to remind people that when we invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban only controlled ninety percent of the country. The other ten percent was in the hands of Dostum and other rebels, and they had only assassinated Massoud a day before the attack on the United States. Afghanistan is a tribal, stone-age sewer, and in time, Afghanistan will revert to type: I think that the descent into civil war will happen in two to three years. The Taliban is a loose confederation of people with a lot of different and conflicting interests, and they'll enjoy nominal control today but a problem if they try to exert actual control outside of their bases of power.
Well said. ... But the two were very different. Our original military mission in Vietnam was to guard air bases there. Fine. Then that genius Gen. Westmoreland thought we needed troops to take part in combat. Every time he screwed up, he asked for more troops. The body counts were fiction. No progress was being made. The light at the end of the tunnel was a mortar round during the Tet Offensive, which put the whole thing to bed for the American homefront.
We couldn't keep pouring billions into Vietnam. We had started with paying for the French in the early 1950s, bombed the North until it was practically flat, and attacked with units meant for World War II, not jungle guerrilla warfare. It was a mess from beginning to end. And the North was hell-bent on taking the South and uniting the country. It was not going to give up, ever, and there was nothing the U.S. could do about it.
Meanwhile the people of the South had grown soft, like all puppet populations do. They still spoke French like their previous colonial masters and were good Catholics, while the Buddhists burned. On the streets, weapons, goods like liquor and cigarettes, and even heavy machinery were stolen practically right off the trucks, and often taken by the North. The booze and cigarettes were sold in the street, along with super-cheap and potent opiates (which the local population had always enjoyed). Close to the end, we had more soldiers in the hospital for VD and drug addiction than for battle wounds. Ringing in the GIs' ears was the North's propaganda: "Don't be the last to die in Vietnam."
Once they got started, the North only took 6 weeks to enter Saigon and end the war. That's how bad the South's military preparedness was. Most officers threw off their uniforms and ran.
I do Carol. it was horrible. I live in San Diego county, which was then even more of a navy town than it is now, and my family lived in a neighborhood adjoining Miramar NAS (then the home of the Top Gun school). Lots of military families on my block. It was not a good time.
Bit of a difference there. We were pushing people off the roof of the Embassy in Saigon two years *after the troops had been withdrawn ! So, similarities, but no
"I am surprised at the apparent ineptitude of the withdrawal"
I do not intend this as a criticism of you or your comment, but I do surmise that you may not have had many dealings with the US military in the recent past.
No question the US military has it's challenges in the competence department, but where did America get this idea about losing with dignity?
I mean, we lost. If you want dignity when you leave you win, or in this case don't pick wars you can't win.
The French in Vietnam and Algiers. The Italians in Ethiopia and Libya. The Spanish in Morocco. The Japanese in Manchuria, the Israelis in Lebanon, America in Beirut and Vietnam.
Where is this proud tradition of being defeated and leaving with honor I'm having such a hard time finding in history?
I think I just figured it out. Americans did not realize they had lost in Afghanistan so were surprised by the exit. Wow, and they say the generals were disillusion.
Well you don't always know if the war you pick is winnable. At the beginning of the US version of the Vietnam War, the only acceptable opinion in the US was "of course it's winnable." It's a raggedy-ass little 10th-rate country, according to LBJ. All those brilliant men said it was winnable. They had facts and charts and a guy from Ford Motor Company to run it all in a very rational manner.
Hindsight is 20-20, and LBJ didn't know what we know today. And there are also different kinds of losing. If the winner demands unconditional surrender, that's going to be a different end than one that is negotiated by two parties sick of going at it. ... But I'm afraid I'm talking into a historical black hole here, because you don't know these obvious points.
I disagree (that you don't always know if a war in winnable) and Sun Tzu does as well.
Knowing if a war in winnable is in part about setting achievable goals (the first gulf war) sometimes it's about not inserting yourself into a civil war (Vietnam Afghanistan) where an enemy can win simply by outlasting you.
"It's a raggedy-ass little 10th-rate country, according to LBJ."
That doesn't refute the need for achievable goals, it confirms it. If your argument is that some men substitute personal ego for achievable goals well yes, but that only confirms the need to set achievable goals.
"Hindsight is 20-20, and LBJ didn't know what we know today"
Despite popular American folklore, Vietnam was not the first insurgency in world history where a ragtag group beat a greater power that had all the best generals and smartest people in the room. LBJs failure to know history, know himself, or know his enemy is not confirmation that we just can't know if wars are winnable. It's a history lesson in arrogance leading to an escalation in an unwinnable war. There were plenty of people from those in the ground to his own defense secretary that acknowledged that the war was unwinnable. I'm not even sure how the LBJ analogy factors into this since it seem to hurt your main point and bolster mine.
I see the point more as "don't go to war for commercial reasons."
In Vietnam, the French wanted help regaining their former colonies in what had previously been French Indochina . (Remember how the "Peace Talks" during the Vietnam war were always held in Paris, and people wondered, if this is really a war between the U.S. and SE Asia, how the futz does Paris feature into this picture at all ?) That turns out to be why.
The only "metric" the U.S. dared turn out on our "progress" in Vietnam was "body count", men women & children. You know you are in a war with a *secret goal, when the only measure you can come up with for progress is not "territory gained" or true changes in "hearts and minds", but body count. Even the troops on the ground quickly saw thru that gossamer goal.
The Americans, nicely fixed for oil at the time, needed rubber. Personnel Carriers run on rubber. Back then, we had no such thing synthetic rubber, and Brazil had the world rubber market by the throat as the "only girl in town", with her monopoly of the time. Vietnam had then, and continues to produce today, some of the world's premium rubber trees.
If a war starts over a full-out lie, (more of an excuse), like that risible "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution", you can bet your bippy this is a war for commercial gain, more than a war that MUST be fought. The last war that HAD to be fought by the U.S., was WWII, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Vietnamese fought and ousted their "Colonial Masters" the French, from Vietnam following the Battle of Bien Dien Phu in 1954. The Vietnamese fought under the command of the militarily estimable General Giap.
General Giap, in sort of an "old home week" heartbreaker, also commanded the Vietnam Peoples Army (NVA) when the Americans arrived. In the cities of Vietnam, (not as much the Villages out in the Boonies), the Vietnamese, including the children, spoke flawless French when the American troops arrived.
Ironically, the U.S. which started out in *Revolution against being a colony of England, was also assisting the French in re-establishing their colonies in SE Asia.
My dealings with the US military are very infrequent. I'd say it happened once only. But after that one I thought if the experience was representative then all hope was lost.
The event in question was visiting one of the aircraft carriers anchored by the shore on the West coast. There were many people wanting a tour. I had to get up at 4:30 am to secure a spot on a trip later that day. People got on and off the boat via a number of ferries. Long story short, we spent what seems like close to 10 hours waiting to get on and a couple more to get off, significant part while on a ferry. It was a complete and utter disaster. Complete chaos. Pretty much like in the Kabul airport. I thought if that's the way the US military conducts such simple things, what chance is there it will do anything right?
Marines had to be sent back into Saigon too when the airlift out of there went sideways. North Vietnam was supposed to take 2 years to take over the South. It took them 6 weeks. If we had engaged with South Vietnam military as an equal partnership, the outcome might have been over a table rather than at the end of a tank barrel. ... Funny tho how Biden invoked the very things he should have kept quiet about: comparisons to Vietnam.
"Biden invoked the very things he should have kept quiet about: comparisons to Vietnam."
I have never been more impressed with Biden's demented candor than in the past couple of days; he has risen in my esteem. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Can American adults not admit that invading and occupying Vietnam was a disastrous mistake and that invading and occupying Afghanistan was a disastrous mistake? What are the other things politicians "should keep quiet" about?
It is funny to me that Biden got a free pass from the media during the '20 primaries and the general but now they're after him with knives out for demonstrating some decisive leadership. Don't go off script.
There are no more filters left in Biden's brain. He's going to start actually saying the quiet parts out loud now. hahaha About 56% of Americans in a June 28, 1970 poll thought the US Vietnam War was a mistake. So some already had come to that conclusion.
Imagine still being in uniform over there in the jungle, risking your life in a war people stopped supporting. Soldiers quickly found out which of their buddies knew the shit about staying alive, and followed him, whether he was in charge officially or not. I don't have anything against the people who served there, as long as they did so in good conscience. They did their duty even though the political and military leadership failed them.
Even MORE Americans back home thought the US Vietnam War was a mistake after the Tet Offensive in January of 1968. The NVA and the Cong thought they had *lost that engagement, but the Americans back home saw it as THE last straw. Wish you had been there, but somehow reading about it in a book long *after the fact seems to make you even "better" informed. ;-D Lock 'n' LOAD , Thomas !
Key lines: "I’m accused of writing militaris[m] by those who either don’t know the difference between description and advocacy or who deny there is a difference."
"I’m still proud of my unit and the men I served with. They weren’t exactly my brothers, but they were the folks who were alone with me."
He wrote the LACEY series of stories about a future in which ubiquitous government/corporate surveillance has rendered personal privacy an obsolete concept, but those are tales for another time. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1861071.Lacey_and_His_Friends
I have to agree. I despise everything about the man, but that speech he gave yesterday was absolutely brilliant. At least on this point, I have to admit I was absolutely wrong about him.
I knew he would be in political trouble for this. It was the good idea and what the majority of people wanted, not to mention it will save the lives of the unwashed masses.
The only ineptitude was the failure to realize that no one was going to save the intervention this time. I believe there was hope in some quarters that Biden would decide he didn't want this to happen on his watch and send a couple brigades there to fight it out until he was out of office.
What I was talking about was not the loss of the war, which seems pretty inevitable given the donnée, the characters, and the original script, but the disorganization at the end.
There is some meat to that. Not the way she said it, but the US is not sitting on its ass right about now. The Afghan government is dead, however. They're not striking anyone, mostly removing uniforms and making their peace with their new overlords.
You are assuming that it would have been possible to avoid this outcome through “planning”. I’m not convinced that it would have been. Once we decided to leave, the Afghan “forces” knew they would lose, so they took the payoff and abandoned the fight. That would have required even more US forces to take over the holding action.
There really was no better plan than to just rip off the band-aid. They should negotiate with the Taliban to get their allies out. They could threaten to drone the hell out of them if they don’t cooperate.
Maybe instead of "threatening to drone the hell out of them", we should apologize for the devastation and let them know their help means everyone will be of their way faster.
The "nuke 'em, drone 'em" guys upthread and downthread here are a complete trip. It's self-centered autists enthralled by the power fantasies technology gives them, utterly out of touch with actual human life and the possibility of empathy and compassion for someone who is... not them.
Maybe they should apologize for sheltering Bin Laden after 9/11. Just saying that, if they'd like to move on, they could cooperate with the ending of this mess. If not, we can continue the "devastation" from the air.
An ICBM is almost all "transport mechanism" and easy to
see coming. The MRVs, shot completely up out of the
atmosphere, and then, pre-adressed, "reenter" (thus, Multiple
Re-Entry Vehicles) as nothing but the warhead, almost too tiny to see. ICBMs are now incredibly archaic "City Busses" in terms of modern warfare, and have been for some time. Our own ICBM silos are being rented out to "Doomsday Preppers" up in Wyoming.
Drones! Use your technological advantage. Hope it can be avoided, but if not we should be forceful and brutal. They need to see a clear choice in their behavior.
The old "why they hate us" nonsense. I suppose as always "we meant well too." This is the old manufacturing of consent, military division. They know very well why they hate us: We make their lives hell, day after day.
I'm confused by this comment. I thought Al Qaida was the 'enemy'? Were we fighting the Taliban? Anyway, I thought we weren't fighting at all anymore there, just helping prepare their own military...?
The U.S. military employs terrorists all the time, so it's hard to keep score. There is no good guy and bad guy like in World War II. It's called "the management of savagery" and is why we get into bed with criminals like the House of Saud and Zionists.
Yes. This substack software is SO maddening with "message creep" down the queue until your comment is so far from its *intended target that things can get *highly confusing. The best I can do, and it is not much, is to purposely include the name of person to whom I am responding, (see above) so that, at least, I might avoid insulting someone to whom my message was *not intended ! ;-D
Well, that's debatable :) I don't think it really matters who, Biden or not. Military didn't want to leave, so whoever would give the order would get punished...
I support withdrawal too (should have been while the building were still smoldering from our invasion). The original withdrawal date was May, 2021. Early in the fighting season. We could have been rolling during the winter and early spring with civilians first then military trailing (original plan). Instead, we hit the prime months for Taliban mobility and armament. We vanished from forward bases and left the withdrawal hanging for months and our asses flapping in the breeze. How were that many military planners and "deciders" that far off to try for a bizarre 9/11 symbolic date?? At least the corporate military suppliers will get to see how their wares we surrendered will work in enemy hands, I guess.
This can't be repeated enough. During the winter the Taliban have a hard time moving around because of the weather. Once May hits, they get mobile. The original plan was to get our people out during winter when there's very very little resistance. Biden spent that time 'reviewing' Trump's plan -- finishing in very late April. By then it was clear Biden was going to break Trump's deal, and the Taliban were going to resume hostilities against Americans unless another deal was reached. And this one gave them 4 months to mobilize and plan.
Also by breaking the US's word by not withdrawing by the original May date, they ended up giving more propaganda fodder to the Taliban: "Look, the US is not gonna withdraw, they lied, come join us".
I do not think this was a military failure. That is too easy by half. There is something fatally wrong with the US and its people. (And I include others in the West.) To continue to carry out illegal and therefore murderous crimes against human beings especially in countries with people who are racially different requires especial viciousness. It also requires deep hostility towards non-White peoples that seems to be woven into the American and Western psyche. That viciousness elicits an unbeatable response. The failure is also down to woeful ignorance and insularity. You can beat a state perhaps, but a people is much more difficult. Will we learn anything, or will it be paramount to pick another country to victimize as quickly as possible so that the drums can beat again?
Woven in. Not hand-stitched, mind you, woven. We're talkin' _looms_--it's in the warp and woof of our very making. Before the loom, either there was no such stuff in us--which is just hardly believable, is it?--or all that weaving had to be hand-done. So much hand-stitching, so little time!
Eventually, Watson and Crick would produce their landmark work, throwing millions of weavers (and looms) out of work.
There is something fatally wrong with the US and its people. (And I include others in the West.) To continue to carry out illegal and therefore murderous crimes against human beings especially in countries with people who are racially different requires especial viciousness. It also requires deep hostility towards non-White peoples that seems to be woven into the American and Western psyche."
The U.S. and its people are fatally flawed by the deep hostility towards non-White peoples--a feature "woven into the American and Western psyche"?
" (And I include others in the West.)"
So, this is a "Western" culture thing.
Well, I wonder, where in the world are you from, Beverly? "Too (something, something) by half" is a phrase often said by British (i.e. esp. English) people.
Wouldn't, say, Barry Obama, Madelaine Albright, Condi Rice, and Hillary Clinton all be similarly tainted and flawed--by the vicious anti-Non-White "in-search-of-enemies" culture into which they were born and raised? And, if much of these abhorrent human--excuse me, Western European--failings of humane character are found in the same ways and to the same degrees in the bloody tyrannies of Black sub-Saharan Africa, I suppose that's not the fault of Africans. It must be "our fault"-- _my_ fault, really, as a child of the fatally-flawed U.S. & Western European culture.
I suppose you want, among I-don't-know-what-else, a reparation check. To whom should that be made payable and where should it be sent? Mogadishu?
I'll light a candle to your patron saint, Caterina de'Pazzi, the next time I'm in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista a Careggi. Finally, a specialist's problematic matter: where do find your supplier of instruments for mortification of the flesh? On-line? I guess I ought to get some in order to feel properly ashamed of myself.
We invaded Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden in 2001. We killed him in 2011. At the very least, the withdrawal should have happened a decade ago, but in reality, invasion should have never happened. It was the wrong country.
It's those hockey-playing, Cuban-cigar smoking canucks from Canada I'm worried about. I hear they are going to flood the US with affordable medications.
American hubris knows no bounds. I suppose its inevitable given the power of the country.
Its easy to blame politicians, and convenient for the public to forget and ignore its own responsibilities for the pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"In October 2001, a poll by CNN/Gallup/USA Today indicated that about 88% of Americans backed military action in Afghanistan"
Who in that poll thought "military action" meant social engineering at gunpoint to turn goat-herding savages into gay-rights democrats? As opposed to killing Bin Laden and going home.
Nah, it was always going to be bad. A fast withdrawal may have even saved lives. No serious policy expert ever thought slowing down withdrawal would amount to anything in the end.
We are not talking about the speed of the withdrawal. We are talking about how it was done.
Soft targets and equipment should be pulled out first, not last.
And this should have been done by May as Taliban has problems operating in winter. Instead Biden broke the May promise and left it till the last day in summer when Taliban is the most mobile.
Right. In Vietnam also we had to leave a lot of foreign-born assets in Saigon for the Communists to round up and torture. I don't think anyone lines up for the US anymore other than for a payday.
Ahh. Make you feel better about being American. I see. Not a neocon, btw. Not even an American. Always great to see the level of discourse and thought in America is much as we all think it is.
Oh, please. At the very least there should have been a plan to remove vulnerable people, soft targets, assets, equipment, etc., prior to the cut and run. You know this. Don’t act like you don’t.
The CIA partnering with the military to keep their jobs going infinitely along with enrichment to oil companies, arms dealers, Raytheon, Boeing, et al, keeps me wondering why I keep wanting to be proud of the USA. Why should I be patriotic to the cabal in this country that’s run by the NSA, CIA, FBI, warlord companies, the crooked media, and all the rest of the tyrants who have shit on the Constitution? I’m so over what we have become. The darkness of this debacle is the last straw. The government and the military have screwed our troops, screwed all the young men and women who serve and sacrifice their lives. It’s devastating.
I'd defend to the death my family, and my community - but I have about as much respect for DC and the people there as your average Afghani has for the scum of Kabul that were in charge up until yesterday. That's the real reason our elite (Dems and Repubs) shit themselves about Jan 6th - they know how little credibility they have and that our govt is only secured by the people's faith in it.
That kind of tribal love though is just what the Afghans have. They only love themselves and their extended group. Basing a society on that takes you morally backwards about 3000 years. Who is my neighbor?
The question for modern man has always been how to balance individual rights with the need for collective action, which needs a state apparatus. I know that anarchy and pure 'isms like socialism are attractive, but they are all too optimistic about human nature.
That's not it. The military does not want these. They are following orders. The prime mover is that Cheney got logistical support for military operations added to outsourcing. So, now the military industrial complex MUST have hot war, boots on the ground to profiteer. They don't just need plans, missiles, tanks and other weapons.
Objectively, they should have left sooner, except for the embassy personnel and soldiers. I feel for them. The rest should have realized this was the likely outcome six months ago and made plans.
Bro, it’s a 3rd world country. Those folks can’t just grab their passport and an overnight bag, call Uber and shag ass out of the country like we can .
Lol. What? We're commenting on an article on the internet. The internet. What we're all doing right now could not be more low status or inconsequential.
An agenda? Please. That's just narcissism. My only agenda online is my own edification and intellectual stimulation.
The Taliban was letting people leave Tuesday. Everyone is queuing up at the airport now with no problem. It's just a lot of people to move at once.
"The Taliban vowed Tuesday to respect women’s rights, forgive those who fought them and ensure Afghanistan does not become a haven for terrorists as part of a publicity blitz aimed at reassuring world powers and a fearful population."
I guess we will find out if they mean it. I'm willing to allow people to change.
I mean we could be jaundiced and cynical. Or we could be jaundiced and cynical. Giving young guys AK-47s and allowing them to do what they will without repercussions is not a recipe for peace anywhere.
I think it’s horrifying. I don’t think America is the guilty party though. Also, I’m not into indulging my own or others’ selection bias. 9/11 doesn’t happen and Afghanistan is just as bad, except you don’t even think about it, just like you don’t think about Eritrea right now.
Objectively? We dumped a lot of money and goods into the country, but waged a war and a proxy war via Afghans we armed, destroyed a lot of crops, disrupted lifestyles....maybe it would have been better without us. Maybe worse. Can't replay history.
Clearly unlike yourself, of course, whose online "handle" is a *now very tired, and thus *very unoriginal, line from a once hysterical Cheech and Chong routine. Anyone who DOES have a sense of humor DEMONSTRATES IT. They do not just sit around browbeating 330 million people in their own narcissistic and self-deluded conceit that they have ANY, much less the ONLY, sense of humor in the entire U.S. Get over yourself, "Giggles".
I'm even more cynical than Matt. I prefer the theory that at least some of our foreign policy elites in Washington knew very well what was going down, and their "surprise" is nothing but theater, meant to conceal from the public how utterly conceited and mercenary they are.
The reason they hated Donald Trump so much was because he not only tried to make decisions that they didn't approve of (like pulling the US military out of Syria and Afghanistan), but he exposed them every time they resisted him. This also underlines the reason so many Americans voted for him: They were sick and tired of the way the DC 'shadow government' has been running foreign policy for the last few decades. If open borders, immoral wars, and unfair trade agreements are not in the interest of the great majority of Americans, then whose interests are these so-called 'experts' representing?
I'll one-up you on the cynicism. I think we're seeing a deliberately, purposefully manufactured crisis.
The same media that still covers for Hunter Biden is suddenly vociferously critical of his dad?? Yep, we're watching a script play out. Only question is what's the end goal.
The end goal seems to be the erosion of individual rights, the destruction of the American working class, followed by the middle class, and confiscation of as much wealth as the ruling class thinks it can get away with -- not necessarily in that order.
Maybe so. The Dems are in a bit of a pickle. Kamala is not well-liked, and the more she opens her mouth, the more unpopular she'll be. Perhaps it's inevitable that the GOP will retake the White House in 2024, and it's just a matter of getting a Deep State approved candidate into place and finding a way to keep Trump out.
On the other hand, this could be a prelude to "justifying" more military adventures over there.
Kamala is not only not well liked, she's shown even less competence than Joe has. So they both somehow get 86'd - President Pelosi? Better a weekend at Bernie's Joe than either of those two.
They sacrificed Cuomo to keep the rabble in their cheap seats.There's too much going on outside the arena right now that they don't want unwashed catching on to.
I suspect that some would want to try it. Somehow I don't think the public would swallow it though. The Dems already tried her twice, and the proles seemed to resent he being shoved down our throats so much the second time they went for Trump. Can't imagine third time would be the charm.
Same goes with the CIA being 'shawckt, shawkt, I tell you,' about the 'being blindsided' by the collapse of the USSR. What a joke on too many unthinking Americans. The CIA was on the inside of the USSR manipulating events before, during, and after the fall of the Soviets. They paved the way for the Chicago Boys, being their actual Wall Street advance guard, facilitating the divvying of resources among the world's already-wealthiest; which forms the central thesis of the CIA mission statement: "Make More Money for the Owners."... Lol, it might as well be "Do No Evil," insofar as what they have always done versus what they piously project.
Why I enjoy my truly perverse albeit well-founded cynicism observing their 'woke' recruitment efforts as of late; i.e. NOBODY---but especially the CIA or FBI---could be that transparently and panderingly patronizing and expect to get away with it w/o an innate institutional conceit and hubris so far gone they too believe "We create our own reality." Unfortunately they have plenty of adherents and acolytes singing along with them. So they may be right after all.
Good analysis, and good writing! I'd be interested in hearing your take on the pandemic, and the worldwide response. Maybe publish something. Seriously.
Trump was not seen as someone who could reliably run the MIC and Wall Street so that it profited the usual suspects. That's what freaked out the establishment, and is why we got 4 years of Russigate, etc. Hillary? Absolutely. She already had blood all over herself. Perfect candidate.
You'd love Thomas Sowell. He's been pointing this bs out for years. The bureaucrats who make these horrific policies and decisions are *never* held accountable for them. Maybe an odd low level scapegoat now and then. But the big boys just party on.
Thomas Sowell is an AMERICAN TREASURE. The study of his writings should be required curriculum in every high school in America...and they should be not only read but DISCUSSED. He would also make an excellent role model for young men everywhere--his life story would teach them a lot.
When I taught high school, I used chapters from Sowell's Basic Economics when doing my capitalism vs socialism debate (this was 2013-2018). Many of my students were uncomfortable because they'd only ever known a spendthrift government. They were also shocked that Sowell was black. And this was an extremely diverse group of kids, not just black and white.
It's interesting (but not surprising) that it would not occur to most people that a wise, brilliant, and articulate author is a Black man. I'd ask why he hasn't been highlighted on the MSM media, but I know the answer: (1) he's currently a conservative thinker and (2) he doesn't fit the narrative of a person who shouldn't be expected to be able to obtain a voter ID.
I'll bet you were a wonderful teacher who asked his student to actually think--critically--about issues.
Thanks. I tried. It’s a mentally exhausting profession. I think they were surprised at his race because they assumed conservative economics was only for white people and was somehow racist. Pretty crazy.
I read one of his early books which has stood the test of time Knowledge & Decisions and virtually all he has written since then. His interests are legion and his works regarding world cultures are most enlightening. I once wrote him to point out that he was the heir to Frederick Hayek.
It would better serve the Black community and humanity in general, if it were Thomas Sowell's portrait painted on walls of buildings rather than that of drug dealers like George Floyd. Why would a community make a criminal an icon for their youth to look up to and try to emulate? (Wow, if I become a criminal I can be famous, too!) In Baltimore, a youth center has been named after drug dealer Freddie Gray. It should have been named after someone like Thomas Sowell. Again, same question to the community.
Yeah, your minds are all fucked up in that way you see from so many conservatives today. I can tell there's a madman just below the surface. Just use the word "nigger." You will feel better. Them dog whistles making me deaf.
Yikes! I actually like reading Sowell, but that's one of the uglier combinations of "well he was no angle" and "black people are the real racists" I have run into here on Substack. I suddenly feel like I landed on one of those secret police social media sites.
"Have your read Taibbi's: I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street?"
If your a Taibbi fan, and I assume you are, it might give you a different viewpoint on police brutality.
Sowell will always be correct as long as we treat whistle blowers as criminals. Snowden did all of us a favor by showing us we are all being spied in all the time.
Sowell is black, so conservatives rush to him as if he were The Saviour himself. They do this with other black conservatives too. This is probably because they bought into an idea told them on daddy's knee that all blacks are Democrats. So suddenly, eureka! We've got one of our own now! If the liberals get down us, we will flash our Magical Conservative Negro and get out of any disagreement for free.
He's a simpleton and what dumb people think a smart person looks like. Read Chris Hedges instead.
Have you actually read his works? Apparently not, because even if you disagreed with his conclusions, you would never call the man a simpleton. You sound like someone who is relying on other people's opinions of him rather than primary sources.
I take it you haven't read much of Sowell's work. And, just for the record, liberals are worshipping George Floyd (felon, drug dealer, and more), so maybe you shouldn't go there.
There was a choice and it could not have been clearer; moreover, American voters saw that choice and made it in favor of a certain Donald Trump, the incumbent. Then it was defrauded in a process which lacks for nothing in outrageous infamy of the just observed disgrace in Afghanistan.
We suffer from unlearned lessons until we learn them.
Not if we are all seriously struggling from various vaccine induced autoimmune conditions. I've seen what it does to people. Once it takes hold, interacts and attacts the weakest link in any particular human being's genetic makeup, the unique conditions that manifest per individual are so debilitating, it's all a person can do to make it through the day.
Yes, I have a broad education, and it's reflected in what and how I write. I don't copy and paste from Tucker Carlson. I know, though, Americans don't trust people who can write with anything like style. It's a git 'er done society. Make a point. Follow the argument. What a grim bunch. I've only talked about things related to the US military's fiascoes. Sometimes I joke.
You brought up COVID and every white man's favorite House Nigger, Thomas Sowell. Maybe you want to talk too about how the election was stolen from Trump. Anyway, I unsubscribed. Fuck you and the rest of the human garbage in this comment section, which is fucking torture. I'll leave it to you and those who can barely write a coherent sentence or reason anything out for themselves.
Pretty blanket statement-- "all" . Which can be treated, but not with a magic pill-- it takes reliance and responsibility for your health. Ready to sign up?
Wait- are you actually saying to induce an autoimmune reaction via vaccine so that you can practice good health to manage it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Treat your body well so your immune system is strong and you don’t need an experimental drug that creates an autoimmune reaction?
Ah no-- not saying that-- YIKES--saying take responsibility for your health. Yes treat your body well, get off the meds, reduce your sugar and caffeine, sleep, don't drink tons, deal with your emotional stress, your family baggage, get into nature, find your light your purpose, don't sell out for money -- the "joy" doesn't last-- right Mr. Bezos.
SSDD. over and over and over.. ad nauseum. Stand up a boogey man, pimp endless propaganda, enroll the plebians, invade, secure the resources sought by oligarchs, prop up a "western friendly" puppet regime, bail. and the let the rent flow to the oligarchs, bought with the plebeians blood. so "patriotic", so "proud". rich man's games. as if any R or D ever gave a fu&k.
I remember right after 9-11, scratching my head and thinking, "Afghanistan?! Really?!" Here's one of the poorest nations on Earth, with almost inhuman geography, composed of small tribal cultures, with an economy based on opium, and the military superpower of the world attacks this country? What the hell, over?
This is the formula outlined in L. Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team". An eye-opening book on the history of US covert operations, even in its abridged (government-approved) edition.
"The United States did an excellent job of installing a government in Afghanistan that's a mirror image of our own: brazenly corrupt, abjectly incompetent, overrun by psychofascist religious fanatics, and on the brink of collapse."
Near the top of the long list of things that both saddens and sickens me about the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan is that a lot of people got very, very rich by keeping the "war" going for 20 years.
So what are you going to do about it? How about make some noise, boycott firms that made that money (and yes they do make civilian things), put your money and voice behind it.
can we be perfectly clear? who "won"? Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, and lets not forget their "shareholders" (70%+ of "shareholders" are just wall st scumbags, btw). trying paint this as a d or r thing, or any celebrity political inbred, exposes a deficit of critical thinking in any reader or poster. THIS is what murica does best. destroy everything based on lies, for a the profit of a few inbreds.
They were going to win regardless, even in peacetime. The real organizations that profited were smaller subs, who were brought into existence only to facilitate this 'endless' war. Little organizations that started with nothing and ended up with 500 or 1000 employees based on no merit but just that they were body shops that had contacts within the agencies responsible for procurement. A lot of these places are going out of business or already have done so, and good riddance.
There are a lot of set-asides in government contracting for small subs, "women-owned small businesses", minority owned businesses, etc. The large primes you call out have to search out such organizations to provide most of their work force.
Yep. I sold in to government entities. There were set asides for small business and women and minority owned. The government was under GSA contract so pricing was lower for them. The small business , minority owned were charged full and they in turn sold to the government at a markup.
Speaker: What in your mind is the best reason for the U.S. to enter World War I?
John Reed: Profits.
As I recall, J.P. Morgan had loaned a ton of money to the English, so we had to make sure they were on the winning side. U.S. didn't need to enter WWI.
It's something to realize that you've lived through two decades of the steady collapse of the legitimacy of America's elite to rule over its people. The argument in a liberal democracy is that we are to be ruled (via elections) by honest and capable people, and in the modern liberal democratic context, a knowledgeable class of the best and brightest experts.
Well, that legitimacy has been shot to pieces so many times across all sectors of American society, from politics to education/higher education, culture, religion/faith, finance, corporate, you name it. There is a rottenness at the heart of America's ruling class and that rottenness has been made worse by the increasingly blatant realization that America's ruling classes really doesn't, deep inside, care about America or even think America as a force is special or unique.
I hate to bring up Donald Trump, given how polarizing his name is, but one can trace the visceral hatred and reaction the American establishment had to Trump was that he effectively called out them for what they were, shallow and contemptuous, morally bankrupt and not governing for the best of America but for special interest groups, often sharply aligned to their own financial and personal interests. In what previous generation could a prominent politician call wide swathes of American people names like deplorables and with all the implications that they were not fellow countrymen but a different species they not only didn't really understand, but didn't really want to be bothered with?
I am going off on a tangent somewhat from the fall of Afghanistan, but that the speed apparently caught the American intelligence and political leaders completely off guard and clearly without serious plans for the long term safe evacuation of people and supporters before any handover, is only yet another exhibit in the long term collapse of the capabilities and moral authority of America's ruling classes, both elected and non-elected. So that is why I am hardly surprised. I wasn't surprised because I knew it would end in this quagmire, 20 years ago, when Bush II first launched the invasion of Afghanistan. How or why would he succeed when the Russians and British had failed? I watched for 20 years as trillions were poured into the country ostensibly to rebuild its infrastructure, all by people and designed by people who fully believed that it was only a matter of time before the Taliban returned. It was always a lie, it was a lie everyone understood for a long time, but that we persisted with this lie for so long is only a testament to the failures of America's ruling classes. Yet again.
Yes, they are incompetent, but the supposedly most sophisticated military and administration in the history of the world having NO exit plan at all reeks of an agenda.
Stunning yes, surprising no. Sons of icons, sons of business icons, sons of politicians. You know what they say -- dont worry about taxing the subsequent generations of wealthy people, by the third generation they have squandered it all
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. The past 40 years demonstrate how the laws of plutocratic gravitation cause everything to bend around the interests of the wealthiest. They have armies of flunkies to invent ways for this to happen, e.g. framing estate taxes as 'death taxes'. It's the flunkies who spin stories purely about the plight of hard-working family farmers who can't leave the spread to their young'uns, when the estate taxes actually touch hardly anyone below an eight-figure net worth. The plutes themselves hardly have to lift a finger, much less the winners of the sperm lottery their trophy wives give birth to.
Stranger yet, that group is sharply divided in some respects, but neither of the prevailing leaders and majority factions on either side has shown any capability to forthrightly address the biggest problems we face.
And they never will because they aren't the least bit interested in addressing them. The only problems they will address are the ones that guarantee them voters (those dependent on the state or mesmerized by the CNN/MSNBC narrative readers) or money in their pockets (lobby interests).
Our bloated-beyond-recognition government is corrupt all the way up and down the ladder (those in power, not the minions), has no comprehension of what it's like to live in the real world, and has a collective subpar work ethic.
Can you imagine how long any of us would last in the business world if we worked at the pace of the government, didn't meet deadlines, didn't bother to even read documents that we distributed in the name of the company, made illogical or harmful decisions, looked the other way when informed of corruption, or expected to get paid back wages if we were furloughed because the company was bankrupt?
They ALL (every branch, every agency, every contractor) need to be sent home so that we could re-create the government that the founders envisioned--a government that does only those things that the states cannot do. It would suffice to have a small executive branch, a scaled-down justice department, and a legislative branch--ALL with only the benefits and privileges that the masses have.
All laws and regs should apply to everyone equally, including the government folks. We can throw out the thousands (or millions) of unneeded laws and regs, and keep the handful that serve the public interest per the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The only agencies needed are (1) a treasury department (receipts and payments at the federal level), (2) an internal affairs department (interstate roads, interstate transportation, essential infrastructure, food production, public aid, etc., and (3) an external affairs department (military, defense, diplomacy, international trade, passports, federal land, our borders, etc.). The states can handle everything else quite well.
Once the government is re-created, the laid-off employees could apply for a job and compete with other applicants based on merit. If they don't perform well on the job, they get laid off.
There you go...a bird's-eye view of how to begin to fix our broken country. Yeah, I know, just a bit (LOL) simplistic and unrealistic, but I can dream, can't I?
"I hate to bring up Donald Trump, given how polarizing his name is, but one can trace the visceral hatred and reaction the American establishment had to Trump was that he effectively called out them for what they were, shallow and contemptuous, morally bankrupt and not governing for the best of America but for special interest groups, often sharply aligned to their own financial and personal interests."
One of the BEST explanations of the reasons I've ever seen! Great post, Thomas. Would you mind if I "steal" that explanation to post elsewhere?
"that the speed apparently caught the American intelligence and political leaders completely off guard"
Well... the "intelligence and political leaders" who called this one correctly got fired, quit, and/or moved off to other jobs.
I think it's worthwhile to question why exactly policy moves in lockstep with ideology ("we must continue to occupy Afghanistan because we have always occupied Afghanistan") when the professionals -- military and intel -- on the ground keep telling the people in charge it's a loser and we need to get the fuck out.
I have taken heat for this -- and I can lay plenty of other shit on Biden, deservedly -- but I don't think this one is on him. He wanted to GTFO as early as the "surge" year of 2010.
W. Bush and Obama are to blame for this. The peace deal was in the cooker for years; only Trump had the stones to pull the trigger on it.
Joe should have committed seppuku like 40 years ago, according to me. While we're at it, can we get a citizenship waiver for Takashi Miike and elect him POTUS?
What I found interesting about Biden's speech yesterday, for anyone willing to listen, is that he addressed all the complaints we are seeing here today. He does not argue things went perfectly, but he does explain the decision making that led to the evacuation mess we see today, such as the request by the Afghan government to not withdraw all soft targets on day one to prevent a panic of government confidence. Obviously that was a bad call if you magically knew the entire country would collapse in 72 hours, but as he pointed out, that only confirmed the rightness of the decision to leave.
He said it best. What we are seeing is what we would have seen 5 years ago, and would have seen 5, 10, or 20 years from now.
Enjoy this everyone. I suspect it may be the last time I have anything good to say about President Biden.
Well, to be fair, "nobody" really *expected much out of Biden, save that he would serve as a "placeholder", and simply function as the "Un-Trump". So, for an old duffer we have been watching in elected office for 100 years, he really *has not been doing *that badly.
But this horse pucky with the "evacuation" came off like it *HAD been "honcho-ed" by Trump. Excuses be damned. If this whole mess is being "led" by a committee of incompetents, then let's admit *that. It could not have been more poorly handled if it had been run by a sleepy platoon of distracted kindergarteners.
In many ways Bill Clinton and Bush Sr. were responsible for this as well. They used the post cold war peace dividend to build military bases across the world, to include a base in Saudi Arabia to harass post Gulf War I Iraq.
In the end it all just an ongoing scam against the American people. They are all guilty, including Biden who used his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to get a Democratic majority Senate to Support the original 2002 resolution that sent us to Afghanistan.
Spot on. Like I say, we need better elites. It seems our best and brightest are now siphoned off, after attending Groton and Harvard, to become financial capital whores. Quickest way to repay any school debt.
There used to be the idea that a moral wealthy man or woman, at a certain age, would go into public service. Many did. They were giving back to the system (capitalism) that made their wealth possible. Most of the so-called "wise men" of the US in the early 20th century were of this type:
Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under President Harry S Truman
Charles E. Bohlen, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the Philippines, and France
W. Averell Harriman, Special Envoy for President Franklin Roosevelt
George F. Kennan, Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, State Dept. Director of Policy Planning
Robert A. Lovett, Truman's Secretary of Defense
John J. McCloy, a War Department official and later U.S. High Commissioner for Germany.
There doesn't seem to be a system of noblesse oblige anymore--Jeff Bezos flies into space-- and I bet most people don't know that liberalism in the Democratic Party once served a healthy purpose in the capitalist system. Both these systems provided a safety valve. The poorer classes were given an extra scrap so that they wouldn't rise up and burn down the White House. It's a continuing process of what FDR really did: save capitalism in the U.S. The New Deal was a vaccine against socialism.
This is everyone's fault. G.W. Bush & the neocon crowd got us into this pointless invasion, then we voted them back into office for a 2nd term. We voted Obama in, who doubled down on this nonsense, then we gave him a 2nd term. Trump tried to ramp this crap down a bit, so we ran him out of office post haste & installed the current Catastrophe in Chief. Now we have the inevitable denouement, which was guaranteed from the start. Our leaders are responsible for this. I'm responsible for this. You're responsible for this. Etc, etc, ad nauseum
Congress was supporting the effort because war is always popular until the casualties start hitting home. With a draft in Vietnam, it hit everyone, with this war, it was focused on certain communities - blacks, Southern whites - who do not have much representation in the media.
This is another thing that has been true since time immemorial. Most countries use their most declasse individuals to fight their wars. The dregs of English society who populated Wellington's army at Waterloo was well-recorded. Ditto the Russian forces in the Napoleonic wars, the Roman armies at the end of the Republic and afterward, etc. Earlier Roman armies like the one Scipio Africanus led were composed of Roman farmers with wealthier cavalry, but that changed over time.
What you're saying about Vietnam is historically incorrect. During the draft, and before college deferments were canceled, the draft hit... blacks and poor whites. So no, it didn't hit everyone. Once college deferments were canceled and the draft did for a short time hit everyone - lo and behold, the Vietnam War immediately began to be wound down. A few years later the draft was canceled as well. Anything to prevent middle class white boys from being sent abroad to fight in unnecessary wars.
What inaccuracy is there? It's just what I said. The deferment system was an irrelevancy to the main point, that a widely distributed draft destroyed public support for the war, same as the draft during Korea did.
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that the U.S. *has no draft. Many people do, completely in error. The fact is that the U.S. presently has no ACTIVE draft. But ask any male turning 18 whether or not SSS (Selective Service System) LAW requires him, under penalty of full felony, to *register for with the SSS right up to this very day.
The U.S., therefore, has a presently "inactive" draft. However, let us not fool ourselves, if the "need arose" we are prepared to go from inactive draft to *active draft in less than 48 Hours. Now that women are making "inroads" into the Military Services, there have also been Legislative attempts to make *them susceptible to the draft as well. So far, without, success, but it is not an illogical position.
I'm not positive everyone registers for Selective Service, but I know when I went for a security clearance (~2001), it was like the third question on the list, and if I hadn't registered, I would have been denied until I did.
That's a distinction without a difference. There's de facto no draft in the US, and there isn't going to be:
"The effort to enforce Selective Service registration law was abandoned in 1986. Since then, no attempt to reinstate conscription has been able to attract much support in the legislature or among the public."
The war wasn't stopped to keep Sen. Dipshit's son safe. It was stopped because it had little political support in the US. Yes, it was when the coffins came home to the small towns that opinions changed.
Exactly. In the college deferment era, there was actually more support for the war among the boomer generation (then in their teens and twenties) than among their parents. The moment college deferments no longer existed, and middle class white boys were finally expected to fight and die in Vietnam, support for the war magically evaporated.
That was the AUMF being sold simultaneously as both a quick in and out raid and an open-ended justification to do everything else Anti-Terrorist, forever.
I think only one Congressperson read the fine print.
To get Bin Laden because he attacked us. Once that was done we had no business there, and had no business nation building at any time. He also voted against the other War on Terror bills.
Once that was done? The wars started in 2011. Bin Laden was killed in 2011. So you're saying that Paul supported the wars "only" for a full decade? Amazing.
You can and you should. This mess is in that administration's hands. Afghanistan was the wrong country; bin Laden wasn't even there. There is also significant blame to lay on Reagan's CIA who created and trained the Taliban.
GEN Tommy Franks wanted the Army to have the glory of killing OBL and that was how OBL escaped Tora Bora. Even still, that's not the reason we ended up sticking around and trying to nation-build.
The Afghanistan mission was presented by various media talking heads and official spokespeople by turns- as a fast snatch-and-grab of Osama, or as long-term nation-building. And the American audience was invited to pick whichever rationale they preferred.
You can't vote against the perpetual war and expect success. Try it and see.
Somehow the pacifist Trump voters are the saddest of all to me. I don't mean "pathetic" in a derogatory sense at all -- I think that they are well-meaning people who expected him to deliver on campaign promises he clearly did not deliver on. The Pentagon is a tough nut to crack -- in the bon mot of the people who work there, "a self-licking ice-cream cone."
Donald Trump tried...and tried...and tried to deliver on his campaign promises but the entire deep state hated his guts for trying and threw everything they could think of or fabricate against him to thwart his efforts. The man has my deepest respect and admiration for standing tall and continuing to fight for the America and American people he loved.
Trump had it in his power to cashier any General (or appointee) that thwarted him; he had plenty to choose from. What he lacked was the spine (or balls) to follow through.
So the cabal was going to target and destroy Trump's loved ones? Interesting. Which loved ones? Destroy how? When did this all happen? And why didn't it happen? Is there any tangible proof for any of this? Do we know whether the cabal threatened previous presidents and their loved ones? Or even Biden and his loved ones? Also, if Trump was aware of the cabal before the 2016 election, why did he even run in the first place? And if he was brave enough not to be intimidated by the cabal, why did he do so little while in office?
The permanent government is made up of the financiers like Goldman Sachs, and big business, including the military industrial complex, and the intelligence services. The rest of it is just playing musical chairs with Congress, the president, etc.
The people we elect serve the permanent government, or are quickly shown they will have no career without doing so. We only choose the people who have almost no power to change anything. The permanent government is not elected, of course. It is there, term after term.
What the establishment wants in politicians is simply people who will act as courtiers to those members of the permanent government, and keep the money flowing in the right direction. Trump was deemed too erratic to do this. He was an unknown, un-vetted by the keepers of the orthodoxy of the elite. That's why the horror at his election.
Funny how the deep state didn't put up a fight when Trump passed things that Republicans want (like tax cuts) but fought him tooth and nail when he tried to pass things that Democrats want (infrastructure, better health care). It's almost as if this deep state is a pro-Republican and anti-Democrat deep state.
Hey, I think it/she/he has had some good things to say. I'm not the master genius of all time and I don't run things around here, but a rule of thumb that has served me well is that when you engage in ad hominem, you're losing.
This comment section would be incredibly boring if we ran all dissenters out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered. First of all, we would be suffering a deficit of tar and feathers.
I"m no fan of Trump, but the intelligence services, in coordination with the Democratic Party, undermined him from Day 1. As if that isn't horror enough (think about it: the CIA trying to run the U.S. like it was El Salvador), the Democrats then convinced millions he was a Russian agent. Instead of, you know, trying to figure out why they lost.
Again, you're assuming that this "horror" somehow only existed during the Trump presidency. If the deep state magically appeared on the day Trump was elected, how did it ever burrow, uh, deep enough to become the deep state? It makes zero sense. So either the deep state has always existed and has always run the US like it was El Salvador *and is still running the US like it was El Salvador* - or the deep state is just a silly fairytale that conspiracy theorists tell their grandchildren. Take your pick.
Polls show the current rank and file of Democrats love the deep state, while the GOP are against them. This is a complete flip from the 1960s. I think the Democrats know who their friends are.
So the deep state's are antithetical to the Democrats' values but align perfectly with the Republicans' values? Well yes, that's exactly what I tried to say. The deep state is deeply Republican.
Who canceled the Keystone pipeline immediately upon assuming office? Who canceled the boarder wall ASAP as well? And Biden somehow couldn’t take a different action on a FP decision as every other President has done when they didn’t alike their predecessors deals and plans? Now who looks like an asshole? Your TDS is no longer covering your behind here.
I don't understand what you mean here. Trump kissed the ass of Kim Jong-Un, Putin, Erdogan, the Taliban, basically everyone that the security state would have fought gladly. No one thinks ass-kissing is good, but I got my vote's worth out of him. He ended the Afghan war, finally. True, he didn't do it in a triumphalist way, but he did do it in a way that was really hard to undo. In the end, Biden blinked.
And oh by the way, I give Biden credit for blinking in the end. He could have sent brigades in and fought it out, but he said 'fuck no' to that, I presume.
Actually it's exactly what the citizens want. Remember the 2004 election? It was the only election in the last few decades when the Republican president won the popular vote. And why? Because the voters overwhelmingly supported Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In early 2002, public support for invading Afghanistan and going to war with Iraq was over 80%. It was nauseating how people lined up behind the MSM to support it. (Much like a current soon to be catastrophic situation that we are in, only this time the sheep have actually offered themselves and their children up to the sacrificial, “experimental” altar.) I guess next, the American people will be pouring gasoline over themselves and lighting a match. Cult USA.
It is horrifying how QUICKLY, WILLINGLY, and EAGERLY millions of people will UNQUESTIONINGLY do what a person identified as an "expert" tells them to do.
In an era when people are neither educated to think for themselves nor encouraged to do their own research, people have become intellectually lazy; hence, "experts," media news readers, and bureaucrats become demigods to be unquestioningly believed and followed obediently.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised...Hitler demonstrated that phenomenon in 1930s Germany. During the economically difficult times in Germany, it took a very short time to create the mass hysteria and Hitler worship that swept over Germany with devastating results.
(NO, I'm NOT comparing today's situation to the Holocaust--I'm comparing how easy it has been to whip up mass hysteria and obedience.)
I said it above but people in general always support war until the casualties start biting. It's the patriotic thing to do, after all. If they think the war has a point, the casualties won't be as much of a deterrent, but this thing never had much point.
You mean, like, the XBox version of Hiroshima of American adolescent video gamer fantasies. You know, gather all of those Talibans into a five square mile area, and then- NUKE!
A-bombs would be just the ticket for the limestone geography and underground aquifer of Afghanistan, no doubt. As long as you don't live on the same planet.
You're probably right that a lot of Americans would prefer that outcome to "the copout".
That is because *far too many people are ignorant of the fact that a "Hiroshima" ending is no longer possible. We don't *make nukes that small anymore. With micro-circuitry, a bomb equal in power to that used in Hiroshima could be made the size of a baseball and left on any park bench. The Hiroshima bomb was a small H Bomb.
We don't have anything that "restricted" in power in the era of A-Bombs.
We didn't even know about what our own nukes would do that had very little to do with size and power. It was not until the 1990s that Carl Sagan introduced us to "Nuclear Winter". The concept that even during an exchange using *small (at that time) nuclear weapons, the detritus *alone kicked up by such weapons would BLOCK OUT THE SUN for at least 30 days. Imagine what world *crops would look like after 30 days without the Sun. Recognize, also that weather circumnavigates the Globe. We cannot A-bomb one place, without having that radiation carried by the weather, blowing right back around into our *own faces ! This is what Sagan called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Even Reagan got on board with that idea. I worked with these weapons during the Vietnam War, and I can tell you that when I got out in 1971, the U.S. had no CLUE about the scientific "points" Sagan made about the insanity of these weapons in the Nineties.
Yes. The combination of first being *woefully uniformed, and the active state of NOT thinking on top of THAT, is the reason that we don't want people who cannot comprehend nuclear weapons (like Trump, who wanted to know, since we put so much money into nukes, why don't we *use them more often) to have access to the nuclear release codes.
Our citizens are so dumbed down and conditioned to unquestioningly believe anything the corporate media or elites tell them, that most of them are voting for only a familiar name or a "pretty" face and nothing else.
"Because the voters overwhelmingly supported Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Don't forget the voter support for state-sanctioned torture. Ooooohh yeah. Fun country.
I'm not here to defend John Kerry's entire political record, but the trashing of a guy who actually went to Vietnam as opposed to a guy who couldn't show up for his ANG duties was pretty wild. It worked.
Kerry was kind of a douchebag who hurt himself more than anyone else did. If he'd been a little more circumspect about the things he said coming back to the US after his time in Vietnam, he would have had less trouble later. He had to know that whatever he said or did, the Vietnam thing was going to follow its own trajectory. At least, he should have known.
Kerry, as a Skipper of a River Patrol boat, was doing one of the *MOST dangerous jobs *open to a Naval Officer in Vietnam, present day armchair generals aside. What he did and said coming back from Vietnam took more *STONES than the Establishment could handle,
but it all HAD to be said.
Ending the Vietnam War was not *about "go along to get along" with the Establishment.
The only place Kerry ever failed, was when he did *not produce his Naval Combat War Record as a silent rebuttal to the "Swift Boat" hyenas coming after his military service. But, apparently, he was just too much a patrician to get down in the "mud, the blood and the beer" with the "Swift Boaters". Pity that. Don't run for the office if you can't maneuver with the opposition.
Far from being a "douchebag", Kerry was an *officer willing to tell the *Establishment where they could "put it". With 58,000 American *dead to represent, the Establishment needed to HEAR what Kerry had to say, whether they were willing to "applaud it" or not !
He comes off as a douchebag. This isn't about anything in particular he said, it's about his general demeanor.
Apparently he rubbed his fellows in the Navy the wrong way or they wouldn't have stood up and shat all over him during 2004.
Do you really think Kerry shortened the war with what he said and did? I doubt it. The war wasn't going to end until Nixon found a way to do it that protected him politically.
He also played hockey at the time. An image of him playing hockey, a non-homosexual sport for regular guys, may have improved his "image." There was no hockey picture.
My respect for Kerry has actually grown some over the years.
I'm aware of his many shortcomings and understand why he is disliked, but I don't think he gets enough credit for things like looking into the the connection between the CIA and selling crack in LA during the 1980's (his senate investigation was in 1986). His hearing landed like a thud. No one in the media wanted to pick it up. I think it scarred him and he gave up investigating 3 letter agencies after that.
The Kerry Committee report found that "the Contra drug links included... Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."[5]
Ya, Hillary had all the foreign intervention courage of a diplomat who had never been shot at. For all his other failures, Kerry did not suffer from that.
Yup you elect who mirrors you-- are you swayed by tax cuts -- then there is a man, are you swayed by patriotism--then there is a man. Its a reflection of the people. Everywhere this is the case-- just really obvious in the US
Obviously not. There is a lot of blame to go around. The Biden administration biggest error was in execution. They should have secured our people and our material (weapons)
They were hoping against hope that someone would find an excuse to keep fighting there. That's why the date extension and such. Figured they could extend it indefinitely, but they didn't count on the Taliban being so...effective.
Rice and Power in a foxhole together would make for a riotous sitcom on the order of M*A*S*H. I want Armando Iannucci directing it. "Oh, shit, a grenade! what do we DO with it?!"
As someone who lived through the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, almost 20 years ago I told my uber-patriotic 'we are the United States of America, we can do whatever the hell we want' friends, this what it would end up like. One thing I was wrong about - I thought it would happen much sooner than 20 years.
Why it is one of your major industries-- HUGE money maker? and if you can get some oil or other resource from the country you are invading even better.
Oh I know! My plumber was in Kandahar. The stories I heard and the PTSD I see in him. Just another example of our federal govt ass kissing the US-- we get a few contracts thrown our way-- so disgusting. All so their buddies get more money and my plumber Dario gets a broken marriage, nightmares and on meds the rest of his life-- and he got off easy!
1. Our Foreign Policy Establishment needs to be gutted and filled with people who have common sense, humility and some sense of honor.
2. Our Intel Community needs to be gutted and better regulated and kept on a tight leash. Everything they say needs to be taken with a very serious grain of salt. They are better at spying on us than gaining intel from across the globe.
3. We need to really really rein in the military industrial complex and its influence on our politicians.
4. Our civilian leaders need to be more like Lincoln and challenge our military leaders. Congress needs to stop cozzying up to generals and colonels and start demanding honest answers and then they need to listen to those honest answers.
5. We need to find some way of cutting off the rotating of intel and defense personnel from government service to corporations and then back again.
You need to realize none of this will ever happen. Government is a mechanism for consolidating power and wealth among an elite few. Too many people don't understand what the government/state is and isn't. This will help:
The problem with getting rid of the state is that many people seem to want governments and the state and the other entities it creates to continue. Thus far, outside of a few anarchocommunists living in the woods, there are not a whole lot of alternative examples for them to see. Of course, there are lots of theories, but ideas are cheap.
Getting rid of the state isn't the solution. It's diving the state into say - oh I don't know - let's say 50 of them. This preserves the nation as a whole when one or more of them inevitably go tyrannical or financially bust. Meanwhile the citizens always have an alternative to which they can escape to without much trouble. I really don't understand why Federalism isn't championed more.
Federalism got a bad name when the southern States abused the principle to keep black people on the plantation, following Reconstruction.
Beyond that, the "Federalism" of the US is not like anyone else's federalism; our 50 states range in size from Delaware to Alaska, and vary in population from Wyoming (.581 million) to California (39.6 million).
I'd welcome a constitutional convention that re-mapped polities more rationally. But it isn't anything to be done under the current circumstances- which, I fear, are showing up the gross deficiencies in the American educational system, and the anti-intellectual character of the US as a society.
For Federalism to work, Americans would need to allow some people to make choices they may not agree with. We have built an entire police state with the largest prison system in the world to ensure that never happens.
Another source for this, and a very good and entertaining writer, is Bill Bonner’s Daily Diary. A “degenerate empire” is how he describes the USA. For a while, that bothered me. Unfortunately I’ve come to see the truth in it. Too many termites in the governmental structure.
Last week, for no particular reason, I google mapped A Shau valley, the site of my last operation in Vietnam in late summer 1968 with the 101st, called "Summerset Plain."
We were on a firebase on the east rim of the valley at least two weeks before the ground assault began, one company of infantry, one battery of artillery and me as the artillery spotter. There were nearly daily B-52 runs, fire from 16" guns off the coast of Hue, Puff the Magic Dragon paid nightly visits and the whole valley floor was basically bomb crater inside bomb crater, and while we did get artillery fire from the NVA and occasional ground probes, it was obvious they saw what was coming and were leaving for the time being, being content to fuck with us as they felt like it, dawn revealing their favorite trick; our claymores turned 180, now facing us.
It was their country, and eventually, they knew we would leave.
So, looking at the valley today, the first thing I said out loud, was, "That's not the A Shau", because what I saw was roads, villages, and restaurants, hotels, markets, etc. all with reviews, and even a tourist site for Hamburger Hill, another pointless battle fought a couple years after I left, and not a single sign of the destruction we had brought to it.
How could this be, I thought, it must be wrong, and then I backed out of the valley, going east and sure enough, there was the ocean, there was Hue, and my dumb American brain finally saw the truth; that was the A Shau, the illusion was us there 52 years ago, the Vietnamese were the reality, just as surely as we are our own reality in this country, a place we should stay and tend to its many serious problems.
Anyone who was in real combat in Vietnam and was honest about what they experienced, knew this would happen; we would eventually lose because the government we were backing was corrupt and had no real support, that trying to defeat a force composed of people who live there and who have some level of support greater than that of the government, and who would fight us where and when and even if they wanted, could not lose, because at some time, either now or 5 years or 500, we would leave and they would remain, and when that happened, the advocates of the war would rush in and blame everyone but themselves for it, and be given endless air time by our worthless media. Once again, the lives of US military, and especially of the people in those countries we invaded, would become political footballs, useful only for scoring points.
We have been done in by our own hubris and lack of accountability. After Gulf War I, the US loudly proclaimed we had discovered the secret to winning wars lickety split; the combination of high technology, maximum firepower effectively concentrated and rapid speed was the answer, we were told, but the reality was we had met an enemy stupid enough to be positioned in open desert, in static positions, with no air cover. To find such an enemy a second time is beyond being lucky, as the last 19 1/2 years of utter futility have shown.
It's too bad Donald Rumsfeld didn't live to see this, but it's comforting to know those two Vietnam draft dodgers, one of them now a hero to the establishment Dems, who started these wars and the rest of the D.C. elite are still alive to do so. My hope is the Taliban erects a Mission Accomplished banner in Kabul; that would be a fitting end to these last nearly 20 years of utter stupidity and venality.
How fitting that all this can be traced to our 1980's attempt to give the USSR its own Vietnam in Afghanistan and did so, only to culminate in giving us our second.
Can we please throw all the bums out and start voting for parties that do not give us one catastrophe after another?
It's sad to say, but I don't think it matters. It's the entrenched elite that dictate. Anyone that makes it to higher levels of politics is immediately ensconced by them, and those former peons now feel special to be a member of that crowd, and be rubbing elbows with billionaires. They see a great future in it, and they don't want to lose it. I think it's a human thing, and it's unavoidable. However, they don't want to betray their principles so they justify.
An example would be a politician speaking out about climate change and at the same time taking money from Exxon. They will say things like, "Yes, I took money from them, but Exxon cannot tell me what to do with that money. I will do great things with that money." But the bottom line is that unless the Pol does Exxon's bidding, they won't get any more money. The Pol knows this, but it's unspoken, so they can deceive themselves into believing their own BS.
Is there really a way to fix that system? I don't see it, and frankly, with Court decisions like Citizens United, it gets further and further out of reach.
When I was there in 1968(it was 53 years ago, not 52: I'm an old man and sometimes forget what year I'm in!), it wasn't just the natural environment that was so different, it was the total lack of any sign of previous human habitation, other than an abandoned Special Forces camp, triangular shaped, that was directly below us in the valley floor. This place was way out in the boonies, very near Laos, and to my arrogant American eyes, I just couldn't conceive of anyone ever living there, so to see what the Vietnamese had done to it just wasn't within what I could grasp.
Simply put, it was a free fire zone; if something moved it was going to draw our fire.
Yes, you're right; our efforts in this world, the good and in this case, bad, are, for all their horror, insignificant to this living planet. As much damage as we do to it, it will eventually far outlive us. This reality is hard for people to accept, especially for those running this country, one they consider exceptional, which in their minds, is really just in reference to themselves.
My strongest wish is that we learn from all these attempts to remake the world in our image, to accept other peoples' right to live as they please, to accept some humility and realize we have neither the right or even capability to control a planet that yearly grows less inclined to be reshaped as we see fit.
Mr. Taibbi is incorrect -- the politicians learned their lessons well. They made a fortune on the Afghani occupation, a war otherwise of so little importance to Congress that they never bothered, as the Constitution requires, to declare war, but allowed president after president to use the military like a play toy. And nobody cared.
Even after they were all caught out for lying to the public for YEARS about the war (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/) nobody at all, no politician, no general, no lobbyist, lost any of their money, reputation or power but continued on all the same. The voting mob couldn't have cared less.
So will it happen again. You bet ya!
If 16 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, why did the US invade Afghanistan? There were signatures by Saudi Royals on checks given to some of the terrorists cells (see Prince Bandar and his wife Haifa).
On the other hand, Afghanistan was a drug colony. Afghanistan is the world’s leading opium producer. The poppy fields were guarded by US and NATO soldiers. In the Helmand province alone, under British troop control, opium production rose 400%.
International finance and terrorism are addicted to drug money and rely on it for their operations.
That’s the hard truth, but no one is supposed to say it.
Afghanistan sits on $1 trillion worth of rare earth minerals, far more valuable to US—and to China, which has offered to help Afghanistan in our absence, a bid to corner the market on these essential minerals. If China succeeds, we're screwed. At least until Elon can set up a mining colony on a nearby asteroid.
If you have been paying ANY attention to reality AT ALL you’d know that whether China succeeds or not we are screwed. It strikes me that most folks are in hard-core denial of the fact that the “American Empire” is circling the drain and picking up speed as we spin. It is also remarkable how very few of us actually recognize how utterly unsympathetic and indifferent most in the USA seem to be to the attitude of inhumanity which permeates every nook and cranny of our system of our national governance. It seems to me that the good old USA is about as fucked up as can be and that most folks are like the proverbial frog in the pot of water as we all pick and quibble at small and ridiculously insignificant details of what is happening while totally missing the big picture.
If they want it so badly, let China invade and occupy Afghanistan. We can buy their production on a free market.
The cost of the Afghan war has far exceeded the trillion in rare earths you mention. To profit from them the US would have to run the mines and kill most of the civilians. It's an absurd economic position.
"We're" screwed?? Who are you referring to? Are you one of the elites that will rake in cash from the mines?? I'm okay with buying shit from China if that's who's got it. Pick your poison!
@bobD111
All of which minerals will become even *more important the more humankind goes with electric cars running on lithium batteries, which also require some rare earth minerals.
The US has a fair supply of rare earths. We choose not to exploit them because of cost.
HBI
REALLY ? I knew they were "spendy" to mine, but I had no idea the U.S. had any of them. The way the U.S. "whines" for rare earths, I, apparently inadvertently *assumed we didn't have any,
Now the whining makes a LOT more sense ! TKY ! If we can get them from somebody *else's country, why wouldn't we ? ;-D ;-D
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277268/rare-earth-reserves-by-country/
That said, those statistics depend on proven reserves by some means. If some geologist hasn't found evidence of the ore, it's not proven. It's like oil. If you asked people 40 years ago about oil in North Dakota, they'd have laughed. Nowadays...
Yep. Rare earths aren't even all that rare, it's more the trouble you have to go to separate them from ground they're in.
Per usual, the US took the short term view on not developing them here, preferring to have the processing done elsewhere, the PRC being the big winner as usual.
Really, given the immaturity of our elite( ahem), especially contrasted with the maturity and vision of those leading the PRC, the reality that the Chinese will dwarf us economically before this century is done, is as safe a bet as can be made, especially given the utter wastefulness of placing so much of our technology and finance on the military.
We would do well to copy the Chinese approach, which seeks to be a regional military power and a global economic one. Training for the 100 meter dash when the real event is the Marathon is a poor plan, but one we are following.
HUDRF in Greenland is working on RE mining
Good point about Afghanistan's cash crop.
But anyone can find YouTube videos showing the opium shipments out of Afghanistan - in convoys protected by the military. Nobody has to say anything about something that obvious.
The CIA (and their contractors) are the world's preeminent drug production and smuggling cartel. Nobody else is even close.
While I agree that the CIA and other agencies use these operations to generate their own covert funds, on a macro level, flooding the population with drugs is one of the most effective means of getting the population to destroy itself, destroy minds (often promising ones who become demoralized and turn to drugs), and just an altogether brave new world system where as Huxley put it in his infamous speech "The Final Revolution": people will learn to love their servitude.
https://youtu.be/2WaUkZXKA30?t=0
If one has the choice between running a totalitarian state with boots on the ground enforcement, or a Brave New World-type scenario where people have all the tools and instruments to create their own alternative realities, the latter is much more subtle and effective. And it works in such that way that often times, even though people are aware that they are not free, they are just a little too comfortable to actually fight back, and they have just the right dosage and choice entertainment to not want to risk losing it all.
If people can become disgusted enough with that kind of system, then the oligarchs are in big trouble.
Here's a fun quote from Dr. Timothy Leary's biographical work "Flashback", where he recounts the kind of rich correspondence he was engaged in with Aldous Huxley:
Huxley:
``These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.''
Leary reflection's on Huxley's thoughts:
``We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.''
More on that here:
https://youtu.be/smVvJzijAek?t=0
I'd argue that it's more than just a revenue generation activity, but sure I'd like to see more from the investigative journalism community about how the Sackler family (and other Rx companies) were able to flood the U.S. with opioids just as the first waves of returning combat veterans were being diagnosed with PTSD and, more relevantly, painful injuries. Don't get me wrong; there's been a lot of work done to expose these companies and individuals but it's almost like the business model evolved. After Vietnam there was a heroin epidemic. After the Iraq/Afghanistan veterans came home we got a prescription opioid epidemic. Is there a coincidence or have those at the very top who profited from the original heroin boom merely figured out how to cloak the flooding of America with dangerous drugs under a veil of legitimacy (while our gaze was distracted, I might add)?
"After Vietnam there was a heroin epidemic."
Robert Stone's DOG SOLDIERS (1974), albeit fictional, is a key work on this topic. Won the National Book Award.
You're walking, talking evidence many American's have learned absolutely nothing fromm the failed "war on drugs". Nothing.
"[F]looding the population with drugs is one of the most effective means of getting the population to destroy itself, destroy minds ..."
Thanks. Agreed.
I was viciously ridiculed by a couple of people in the commentary of Matt's recent Obama article for hypothesizing that the *root*, not the ostensible or plausible cover, reason for the ruthless implementation of 100% COVID vaccine compliance, along with ruthless indefensible suppression of even research on preventatives and cures, is to normalize bodily-invasive access, at the individual level, for any reason it might be needed in the future. The seasonal flu vaccine campaign just didn't cut it to establish this compliance...and here we are. I'm not completely wedded to this idea, but it is certainly plausible given the past horrors we have learned.
The sociopaths who claw their way up the political chain are not experts, they are unbound killers who Will. Do. ANYTHING. ... for example - Tuskegee. Northwoods. Rome. ... just off the top of my head ... But the list is really very long...
I would hypothesize that TPTB do not want a control group of substantial size to remain. This could be from one of two reasons, both nefarious, but one downright wicked in its nature. Firstly, they know that they don't know the long-term effects of this gene therapy, which is what it is, and the poor suckers that mindlessly take the clot-shot will be fuming murderously angry if they finally figure out that they were human lab rats for an experiment that over time had shown to have gone awry. The other, more diabolical hypothesis is that the long-term effects of The King's Serum are intentional, particularly given the already known and documented evidence that it has on reproductive systems (far beyond statistical chance) and that the long-term effects are intentional and nefarious in nature.
That said, it won't be long before we - those that refuse to be pricked under orders of The Prick in Chief (party be damned) - are given the equivalent of yellow stars to wear on our sleeves. I see THAT unfolding as I type.
Notice that I make no claims of truth. It's because I just don't know the damn truth. But when the government, media, and every NGO from East to West lies to you on a drum-beat basis, you can make a decent estimate that the next "claim" too will be a bald-faced lie. That, coupled with this frantic push to take the spike protein toxin in a syringe has my BS meter so far into the red that it's broken.
My body, my choice. Anyone that disagrees with me can F off as it is THEY that are self-centered and cowardly to the core, not to mention credulously naive to the point of being useless to society.
Yes. Absolutely.
That’s actually why I started the “Escaping the Brave New World” podcast, to explore the very nuanced and subtle nature of our current brave new world, which includes the insane drug culture and entertainment world. I thin it can be defeated though because it’s based on a fundamentally flawed and perverted idea of human nature and the mind.
Beyond just pointing out all the perversions of truth and subversive ideologies, I think it’s important to emphasize what a healthy mind and creativity looks and sounds like.
The fact that the system has worked for so long isn’t really proof that it’s correct. In a sudden moment or crisis and realization, all of a sudden decades of work and conditioning can quickly erode. The whole thing is like a great game of Jenga, it all depends on a scientific-like precision of the narrative, but as soon as we start to reach a point of discontinuity, extreme turbulence, we start to see a bunch of new singularities pop up. In these moments, the whole narrative matrix can come down in one great crash, just like a game of Jenga.
As someone said earlier, there really is this Orwellian culture today where the only acceptable narratives are the state-sanctioned narratives, and everything else is considered weird conspiracy theory. However I don’t think that kind of thing can be defeated with just cold hard facts and logic, there needs to be a sense of creative insight whereby we don’t just try to defeat ugly ideas by exposing their insanity, we defeat ugly ideas with beautiful and good ideas. This is admittedly more difficult, but it’s necessary. Dante’s Commedia comes to mind. He takes you through Hell, but he does so in order to show the reader the way Paradise. They need to first have a real sense of Hell if they’re to actually make the longer journey.
That being said, for those not too far gone cases, the work of Whitney Webb on the defense and BigTech 360 degree bio-medical surveillance is very good.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/06/investigative-reports/a-leap-toward-humanitys-destruction/
Whitney Webb is a force of nature and she deserves all the help she can get to get out this important story.
Her work is for anyone who might be asking questions like “is the third dose also mandatory? What about the fourth?”
Otherwise, the recent three part series published on Off-Guardian on the new eugenics and Transhumanism should be read the world over.
“How the Unthinkable Became Thinkable
Eric Lander, Julian Huxley and the Awakening of Sleeping Monsters”:
https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/12/how-the-unthinkable-became-thinkable/
To quote Julian Huxley:
The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”
To what end would this “world political unity” be aimed? Several pages later, Huxley’s vision is laid out in all of its twisted detail:
At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
This is it. If people get that, they have the master key to understanding the current situation.
I recently saw the movie “Gattaca.” That gives a pretty good idea. Elysium and Utopia (on Amazon Prime) are two other interesting examples of what the eugenicist wet dreams look like.
I like Tim Leary; he had some important insights. But he's waay out of his depth on that one, in misidentifying monotheism as the great adversary of mind expansion. I think Tim's extrapolating mostly from his own conflicted upbringing, about which he was always quite candid; I recommend that the curious read his autobiographies, which, while lucidly written and entertaining (and action-packed!), also indicate the limitations of his own conditioning and the narrative frame imposed by it.
Anyway, the psychedelic revolution in consciousness was always bigger than Leary, and contained many currents running contrary to Leary-thought. (I can practically hear Tim saying "Leary-thought! good one!")
It was none other than his fellow psychonaut Al Hubbard who obtained some sort of dispensation from the Vatican endorsing the potential of mind-opening substances in leading people toward piety and holiness. Hubbard was, like Leary, Roman Catholic; unlike Leary, he wasn't "lapsed." LSD explorer Clare Boothe Luce was also Catholic; her husband Henry, another voyager, retained his Protestant affiliation. As did Ken Kesey. To say nothing of what happened with Alan Watts, Richard Alpert, and Art Kleps. And so it goes...a much more colorful and variegated set of perspectives than the dreariness of the colorless allcolor of techno-atheism of the New Jacks of Silicon Valley.
Damn good post. Kudos my friend. Well thought out.
David. Thank you for sharing this!
"they have just the right dosage and choice entertainment to not want to risk losing it all."
The question is, "lose it for what?" What's the alternative to a life of enjoyable leisure? Who stops anyone from pursuing a life of productivity, inovation and personal growth? Creativity and "self-actualization"? No one I know of in the US? At least nothing organized?
Sure, the IRS has been engineered to enforce the economic class structure, no doubt of that. Becoming a billionaire is hard these days, becoming a millionaire 30 years ago was just as difficult. That's what the progressive tax structure is designed to do?
Other than that, anyone willing to put in the work and time can have a nice life on their country estate with a big TV, horses, fast cars, etc. It's hardly impossible? So what is it you suggest America is missing, other than legal access to heroin?
Sorry, are you saying you're not aware that most schools are simply brainwashing kids and young people? How exactly are we living in a free world if most of the education people are getting is garbage, if not outright brainwashing?
What about the media? Do you think an MSM churning out constant fabricated lies 24/7 is really the sign of a "free society?"
You haven't heard about Critical Theory and all the other insane ideologies taking over the education system, and especially targeting children?
If all this is news to you, congrats, you're a happy denizen of the brave new world!
While correlation does not equate to causality it can be at times be considered prima facie evidence for investigation into why the opium epidemic in the US exploded just after we invaded Viet Ghanistan. Inquiring minds want to know if a linkage exists, would you not agree?
The crack epidemic correlated with the support of right wing dictatorships in Latin America in the eighties.. but who can say?
It isn't difficult and doesn't require great leaps of insight? The so called "opium epidemic" exists in the US due to an aging segment of the population that happens to be in the majority at present? Nothing mystical about it, just millions of old people who've, over the course of their lives, messed themselves up? That's about it?
No Unicorns. No mystical or nefarious causes, just a bunch of old folks who fell off ladders?
Oops? Starting over here...
Yes this comment software sucks. I hope they fix it one day soon.
Staring over here Huff. Wider Stance? Best of Times to you?
That "cash crop" never belonged to us and any American who thinks it does is a royal POS in my book and should be lined up against a wall for being a walking, breathing POS excuse for humanity.
OK, then.
And what group do you mean by "us"?
It's a crazy idea, suggesting the US spent all that money for the opium production. If we wanted, we could easily match that by sultivating opium in Arizona. It's not hard to grow and it isn't expensive.
Maybe your response was intended for someone else? (Horatio Flemm's comment has generated a lengthy subthread.)
I wasn't suggesting the U.S. had anything to do opium production. When I mentioned drug convoys protected by the military, I meant the Afghan army not the U.S. army.
There are apparently many who think that the U.S. had an interest in seeing opium produced but that's not my view.
In the dystopia we’re now all prisoners of, no one is supposed, or allowed to, say anything that’s true. Only official narratives are permitted. Just ask Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
If the all-powerful dystopia of which you speak were an actual reality, no one would have access to the sagas and disclosures of either Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, and you'd be identified, hunted down, and disappeared simply for mentioning their names.
I'm just tired of hype, that's all. Hype is ubiquitous on Internet comment pages, on practically any topic of controversy.
Read Bevins' book and then come back and tell me it's all hype.
Commenting online is no real threat to any part of the ruling class, if this is all we do, and so far it is. They'll hunt us down and disappear any of us when we are perceived as a threat to their tyranny. Read Vincent Bevins' "The Jakarta Method" for a full description of how the US has done this systematically for decades, and continues the pattern. It might just help redefine "reality" for you.
OBL was known to be resident in Afghanistan. The govt of Afghanistan was advised to surrender him and the Taliban laughed at that. OBL was trapped in Tora Bora and was there for the killing but the US Army insisted on getting him (and the credit); which allowed him to escape to Pakistan. That's where the real justification ends and the BS begins.
The Taliban offered to hand over OBL on at least one occasion. The Bush Regime laughed at that. But don't take my word for it, here's the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy site The Guardian reporting on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5
The Taliban *reasonably* asked the Bush Regime for some sort of proof and they couldn't bother to provide any (just as they still cannot be bothered to provide it to the American people), probably for "nashunul suckurity" reasons.
Related: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/9/11/taliban-offered-bin-laden-trial-before-9
You see, the US Government is the world's mafia enforcer and Muricah isn't bound by any of the rules or laws that it holds other countries to.
The Obama operation to "capture" OBL was a kill mission from the get-go. There was no way that OBL would have been "allowed" to face even a military tribunal because his testimony would likely have blown some pretty serious holes in the official narrative. Besides, at that point in time we were "looking forward, not backward."
It is true the Taliban offered to hand him over. The offer probably should have been made on September 12th, not that it would have made much difference. No one was in the mood for negotiation at the time.
The privilege of being the leader of the rules-based order - we get to break pretty much any rule we want because no one can hold us accountable. Another reason that other countries don't see the system as having quite the same benefits we see in it.
True. In fact the leadership in China and Russia frequently call out the hypocrisy and meaninglessness of the "rules based order" (vague and non-concrete) which the US leadership often trots out instead of calling it "international law", which is sufficiently concrete to justify prosecuting many US actions in international and national courts.
The whole edifice of 'international law' is contingent on the US being a hegemon. It makes sense that a hegemon would carve exceptions out for itself.
Without a hegemonic US, international law won't survive long anyway.
Google "The USA is not agreement capable" for another facet of our lopsided foreign (and moral) policy.
Afghanistan was AQ’s crash pad, there’s no doubt about that. Did we let the biggest scumbag regime on the planet off the hook b/c of Bush family cronyism-of course.
Oh the ties between American and Saudi wealth vastly outstrip the ability of the Bushes to benefit.
Irrelevant. It's not just the Bush (crime) Family that benefitted. It was their vast network of cronies, former "business partners", ex spooks, think tanks, NGOs, hedge funds, sovereign wealth fund managers and so many others. That the Bushes could only benefit to a certain financial degree does not negate that it was Bush who let the Saudis (the real perpetrators of 9/11) off the hook (not to mention failed to investigate or prosecute Israeli ties) so that he could pave the way for the war on Iraq, which was already planned and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan when all we really wanted was a small group of alleged terrorists.
So in some way it's not irrelevant, just misses the real point that Stxbuck was making. Bush and Cheney let Saudi Arabia get away with the biggest terror attack in history (unless you count US military actions abroad - the people there do) because of family and business ties when he was the one person in the world with the power and justification to take them down, despite the Saudi-American wealth ties and alleged mutual strategic interests.
My mind is drawn to that massacre in Vegas in 2017. I remember seeing a video of one of the Saudi royals escaping from a hotel with bodyguards around him while it was going on. Never found out the real story on that one, they just blamed a single nutjob for it, however implausible that seemed.
I mean, I know the geopolitical reasons why the Saudis get so much slack, but within the borders of the US? Anyway, break the oil addiction and you break Saudi power.
How did I leave out western energy companies and MIC contractors?
Let's not forget that Carter funded, armed, and gave intelligence to mujahideen 6 months before the USSR invaded. He did it for the purpose of baiting the USSR into invading to protect themselves from a dangerous nation on their southern border. Carter did this out of the kindness of his Christian heart because he hated godless communism.
I would sooner blame Brzezinski for that, though Carter was the dummy for listening.
@HBI,
Well, Carter or his "hirelings" as it were ! ;-D ;-D
Brzezinski probably didn't think of himself that way, same as Kissinger didn't think of himself as Nixon's boy. And in retrospect, Reagan even asked Brzezinski to stay on. He refused.
9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in the USA
http://www.whale.to/b/tarpley_synthetic.pdf
I just read a good comment on FB about that. "The world has been moved by opium for millenia. It just moved."
https://apxhard.com/2021/08/17/america-failed-in-afghanistan-because-of-the-war-on-drugs/
we failed here because of our war on drugs.
You mean The War on The Bill of Rights. Corrected that for you.
You hear a LOT about the 2nd Amendment, but so far it's holding up MUCH better than the 4th and now the 1st.
" We can choose whether drug money goes to the Taliban, or Purdue Pharmaceuticals. We can choose whether we support the Sackler family or the Sina Loa Cartel. That’s it, those are the options. I don’t like the Sackler family, but at least they aren’t beheading anyone."
That the Sacklers, Purdue Pharma and many other opioid producers aren't beheading anyone is meaningless for two reasons: 1) The Taliban in their present configuration aren't known for beheading people and 2) The damage that those companies have done in the United States is far worse than a few beheadings. Just because for so long it was cloaked by fake legitimacy and legality doesn't make the millions of deaths, ruined families, ruined local economies and tremendous burden on the American taxpayer are "better" than some (US realpolitik created, funded, trained, abetted) terror group far away. If we hadn't invaded Iraq, there never would have been an ISIS. If we hadn't initially funded, trained and armed the mujahideen it's highly likely the Taliban would never have risen to power. If we hadn't tried to destroy Syria it's likely Al Nusra and other regional terror groups would never have come into being.
The War on (some) Drugs is a fiasco and assault on civil liberties, but ending it wouldn't have done one thing toward curbing the military adventurism that the USA has been engaging in since more than a hundred years before the Cold War and which has only picked up steam after.
That's a silly and awful take on the situation regarding Afghanistan. The war was NOT winnable despite the delusions of this author. Just as the War on (some) Drugs is also NOT winnable.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-afghanistan-drug-trade-opium/277780/
While I disagree on the scope and scale of CIA involvement in the trade of illicit drugs (I do think they're the enablers and protectors of some of the biggest cartels and producers), the article makes a sound point:
Millions of losers
The story is much more nuanced than some “CIA controls the world’s drugs” conspiracy theories make out. There are no U.S. soldiers loading up Afghan carts with opium. However, many commanders are knowingly enabling warlords who do. “The U.S. military and CIA bear a large responsibility for the opium production boom in Afghanistan,” Professor Mercille said, explaining:
Post-9/11, they basically allied themselves with a lot of Afghan strongmen and warlords who happened to be involved in some way in drug production and trafficking. Those individuals were acting as local allies for the U.S. and NATO, and therefore were largely protected from retribution or arrest for drug trafficking because they were U.S. allies.”
From the ground, the war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites, which immediately begin to embezzle the massive profits that quietly disappear into black holes. All the while, millions of people pay the price, suffering inside a militarized death zone and turning to drugs as a coping mechanism. In the story of the opium boom, there are few winners, but there are millions of losers.
But...you said it.
Your understanding of the Taliban and our war aims there are as incorrect as your spell spelling "imminent", using the word "immanent", which has a totally different meaning.
Our foray into Afghanistan was doomed from the beginning because it had as its target not getting bin Laden and then leaving( we had a total of 37 US troops on the ground at Tora Bora, where he was holed up), and instead paid Afghan mercenaries to go get him as we bombed from the air, the Afghans then going in and being paid more by bin Laden to look the other way, as is their culture, but to be the appetizer to whet our appetite for the real wars to come in Iraq, Syria and the big prize, Iran, all of which were either outright disasters, or would have been, (Iran) if attempted.
The Taliban, unlike AQ, has no interest in any country outside their own, and can we please remember these people are the end winners in our policy back in the 80's to give the USSR its own Vietnam an irony in that it has come back to give us our second one? It hurts, I know, but once again, the belief by our politicians, most of whom either were or would have been draft dodgers, or are combat virgins, that our military is the answer to any and all problems has been a resounding failure, not that either they or our media will admit it
Being a Vietnam vet, I knew this would happen 19 1/2 years ago, and that when it did, all the advocates of war would go around pointing fingers, playing political games of blaming someone else, and would find willing accomplices with our worthless media, being unable to accept the fact that their lies led to needless deaths and dismemberment and cost trillions of dollars, no one truly being held accountable.
Empires always fall, and for the same reasons.
"The Taliban, unlike AQ, has no interest in any country outside their own..."
I wonder if they will come to believe your opinion of their opinion?
https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/status/1426713093099249669
If you can show me any concrete examples of their trying to spread their beliefs around the world, I will change my mind.
The planning for 9-11 was done in San Diego, Miami and Germany; Hamburg, if I remember correctly, and not a single Afghan or Taliban was involved, though a shit load of Saudis were, not that seems to matter to our political elites. If AQ does reassemble in Afghanistan, I cannot think or a safer place for us to have them; a landlocked country with few outlets to the world.
If Islamic terrorism is so great a threat, then why have so few here been killed by it? Are you telling me a Muslim couldn't just buy a gun here and blast away, like we do to each other on the regular?
Take a look at the number of Americans killed by drunk drivers, plain old murders, work place accidents, or even our horrible junk food diet and then try telling me our reaction to 9-11, one where we didn't even try to get bin Laden, the supposed mastermind, wasn't a complete bait and switch, the ultimate winners being the MIC and their political pimps.
If you feel so strongly, take your second amendment implements over there and go at it, but give me a heads up, and I'll give you some of the tips I learned in Vietnam decades ago. And while you're over there, just think back to how this all started with our aiding these people, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, in our desire to play The Great Game, all to give the USSR its own Vietnam. There was a movie about it, Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks, if I remember correctly, so it must have been the right thing to do, consequences be damned.
I'm no expert on Afghanistan, but isn't that because the international jihadist activities of the Taliban are ostensibly managed by the Haqqani Network, which raises funds from the same Arabic groups that Al Qaeda does, has large numbers of Chechen, Arabic, Uzbeki and other foreign fighters, offers refuge and support to Pakistani terrorists targeting India and which bombed India's embassy in Kabul? There doesn't seem to be any real difference between the Haqqani Network and the Taliban. But perhaps most importantly, if neither one have broken ranks with Al Qaeda in the last 19 years, you really have to question your belief that the Taliban is solely interested in ruining their own countrymens' lives.
Fear mongering. I wonder if that guy lives in one of those super bat cave fortresses like Osama did, lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgWrnahej2c
okay, the Taliban have a rhetorical interest in countries outside their own.
RE (michael t. nola)
“Your understanding of the Taliban and our war aims there are as incorrect as your spelling "imminent", using the word "immanent", which has a totally different meaning.”
Yes, I know it does. I spotted and corrected the mistaken spelling of that term almost immediately after posting the comment, suspecting I'd used the wrong term—but, in the process of doing that, I neglected to copy-and-paste the corrected copy, replacing, instead, the original mistake once more. Unlike you, my efforts to correct my misspellings and other copy-editing errors are not flawlessly executed; the challenge is compounded by the truly shitty software on which this site "runs" and the hardly-less-shitty state of layman-technology in the rest of computer-linked communications..
Given that you submitted or willingly “served” in the U.S. war in Vietnam, your own life-mistakes dwarf my own faulty copy-editing, “genius.” My greatest respect is reserved for those not already in the U.S. military who, facing the call to join up, _ refused _ it, or those, if already in uniform, the order to muster for deployment, in either case by conscientious objection to fighting in that war. (re-edited and re-corrected--again).
Apparently, _ anyone _ can make a mistake. What really counts is how stupendous and life-ruining the mistakes are and whether, once made, one can learn something valuable from them.S
"Empires always fall, and for the same reasons."
No, they don't. Empires can fall for many and varied reasons. Incompetence and bad-luck, even when compounded, are not necessarily the same things.
Go polish your combat-awards, tough guy. You've now had all the time and attention you'll get from me in this forum.
Mr. Nola, thank you for your service.
Here's the revised/corrected copy to which the "reply" just above refers:
Readersaurus
16 hr ago
I believe the reasoning went something like this (a paraphrase) :
We blundered in not recognizing a manifest threat bred and promulgated from a foreign source--and we allowed it to fester as it made meticulous plans to strike us at home and abroad. Saudi Arabia, the putative native territory of the recent assailants (11 Sept. 2001) is but one such breeding ground --and not that (perhaps) most likely to breed the next imminent danger. Where else could that come from? The Taliban. And what is their home-ground? Afghanistan.
The initial reasoning was neither stupid nor irrational. There was a certain sense to it from both a political (policy) and military point of view. Moreover, (in the wake of such popular "Remember Pearl Harbor"-like phrases, i.e. "Whatever it takes!") with Bush essentially telling his general command that they'd have what was one of the most unrestrained of remits, their hands "untied", in the prosecution of the war, the response in Afghanistan began as early as October of 2001--as opposed to the Iraq war, which began in March of 2003. At the inception of the Iraq combat, such was the spectacle of was referred to in the press as "Shock and awe" and looked like it, that some people still confuse the Iraq hostilities as having begun prior to those, much less mediatized, in Afghanistan.
Well, that's a Narrative. Requires an impressively aggressive amount of editing to come up with one that inaccurate. But if you want to believe it, who cares about scholarly discipline?
Yes, I know. In the 2020s, a book of more than fifty pages constitutes a "big, thick, book" and, in this rather unfriendly comment-writing-&-editing software, 2 "deletes" and re-posts constitute for some what's called an "impressively aggressive amount of editing."
Wait, in a post of some 215 words, treating summarily a theatre of war which spanned twenty years (and much more), did I omit to mention some important details?
Your copy is pithier, of course--it being far easier to allege "inaccuracy" without even bothering to specify any of it.
LOL!
Noting the inaccuracy of your potted history is preferable to allowing it to stand unchallenged, as if it were authoritative.
I've spent too many hours of research and link offerings in detailing specific objections in disputes like this one to do it any longer, when the topic is as general as this one. Most of what I'd have to say would merely be a re-phrasing of the work of others. I can direct readers to a rich archive that authoritatively refutes the insinuations and unstated premises of your cheesy partisan framing, though https://news.antiwar.com/tag/afghanistan/page/404/
Antiwar.com has another seven years of articles preceding that 404 page (thus far) archive, which only goes back to 2008. I presume that those articles are also archived somewhere. There are also plenty of other sources, of course. But the 13 years of tagged dispatches and opinion columns found in that Antiwar.com archive make for a good antidote to your facile summary.
What you fail to address is the complete lack of any coherent plan AFTER the occupation. Why is that? Why is it that for over half a century, we've been engaging in these "conflicts" over and over without any plan for what comes after? There's a reason for it, and that reason could be why we engage in them in the first place.
It's not that complicated. The "plan" was that the semi-moderate, semi-democratic government we helped stand up would prove marginally capable of holding power and governing an Afghanistan that, we believed, was never entirely enthralled with Taliban rule in the first place. You can criticize that assessment for being wrong, but you can't say there was no plan just because it didn't play out that way. I mean, that exact same plan has sort of played out that way in Iraq.
See Ike's "Military Industrial Complex."
Mascot is a paid hack “influencer” but sucks at it because he is a pompous asshole
I actually enjoy his posts. He's one of the few people here I make a point of reading on a regular basis despite disagreeing with him on some issues. Always cogent and to the point.
In fact, I noticed he hasn't been posting recently. Good to see him back.
Making friends and taking names.
oh man, not the "paid hack" thing...that's so trite.
Not that I'd even know where to apply for a Paid Hack position, but anyone who reads enough of my posts ought to realize that there isn't a single Special Interest that would consider hiring me. I'm too Politically Unreliable.
maybe I should re-name myself Big Mascot.
You know, to get in better touch with a sense of humility.
I've never met or even seen online anyone who doesn't know that the US war in Afghanistan began before the one in Iraq.
"a war otherwise of so little importance to Congress that they never bothered, as the Constitution requires, to declare war"
I believe that the last time war was legally declared by Congress was WWII, 70-ish years ago. Korea was a "police action."
So much for the Constitution. Who gives a shit?
Some of the time you get conservatives that mouth the proper platitudes, but progressives always view the Constitution as an impediment to what they believe will be better governance.
Please don't fool yourselves into thinking this "war" was about consevative, liberal, progressive, communist, anarchist, racist or any other idealogy. It always was and ever will be about funnelling money into the hands of the ruling capitalist elite, who are the ones who always benefit from war; any war, anywhere. Looking at our neighbors instead of at the ruling elite is why they get to continue doing this over and over and over again. As long as we keep seeing each other as "the problem", the problem will continue.
And there's the rub. If it wasn't for this endless insanity, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup, etc, could not exist.
Exactly. The MIC didn’t start the war, but they damn sure kept it going for 20 years.
Oh, they started it alright. It was just via another arm of the larger beast/octopus that determines such actions---always for the benefit for the select few, the Owners. As long as their financial portfolios expand, then they've won. And that's generally after the CIA has fertilized the fields of foment.
In other words, 'They' always win, for the Fix is in, the vertical integration of U.S. systematized warfare as capitalism remains permanently manifested (never ending as policy,) in spite of a given conflict quasi-concluding, as depicted on TV or NPR, etc.
The show must go, and will go, on.
Shit yeah
"It always was and ever will be about funneling money into the hands of the ruling capitalist elite"
Forgive the tongue and cheek, but capitalism by most accounts began in the 16th/17th centuries through the Dutch and English trading companies. Was humanity without war prior to these evil capitalists? If not, then who were the ones "who always benefit from war; and war, anywhere" at that point in time?
Hi JT! It was about money/resources then, too - feudal, imperial, whatever system. Each system brings its own values, priorities, and acceptable losses to warfare. In this case, it is capitalist values, priorities, and acceptable losses, so that's the flavor in discussion.
At least now that progressives have political power — back in the ‘60s when it was their speech being suppressed progressive were all about free speech (albeit not so much other aspects of the constitution like the 2nd amendment)
I WISH the progressives had political power. Those with the power are neo-liberals posing as progressives.
True progressive are NOT in power. Liberals aka moderate Republicans (Obama, Clintons, Biden, etc. ) are still fighting the Cold War. Please tell them it ended when the Berlin Wall came down.
Actually in the 1960s it was the progressives who were pro-2nd Amendment and the Republicans (Reagan, as governor of California) who were against it. Remember the Mulford Act?
The Republicans weren't against guns so much as black people owning guns.
Progressives have no power. Neoliberals are in charge.
For better or worse, the 2020 occupation of the Michigan State Capitol building by armed citizens has a close antecedent in the actions of the Black Panther Party at the State Capitol in May 2, 1967 in Sacramento, CA. https://capitolweekly.net/black-panthers-armed-capitol/
When I saw pictures of the Michigan guys, I thought: Government agents.
"progressive" vs. "conservative" is such a false opposition. Terms that vague have to be defined in the mind of each separate reader, as each of us tries to guess the intent of the writer.
That insurmountable semantic problem alone indicates that it makes more sense to just stamp the entire post as Incoherent.
The 14th Amendment: "progressive" or "conservative"?
The 14th Amdt predates the Progressive movement in this country, which originated in the late 19th century. True, the modern progressive wing of the Democratic party only partially resembles the original movement. And no one is as 'conservative' about say Social Security as a 'progressive' - who will oppose actually making the program more progressive by adding means testing. So yes, the labels are problematic for many specific things if still somewhat useful for some broad strokes.
All of Wilson's heirs, and most particularly in foreign policy, are progressives (even if they are in neo-con drag).
Well, that's a pretty good clarification of the thrust of my earlier comment- which is that the definitions of "progressive" and "conservative" used in this country have a way of morphing into meaninglessness- defined in different eras according to criteria that vary to the point of being arbitrary and whimsical.
It's three days later but i'm kind of surprised no one pointed out that Congress eventually gave the fig leaf for every one of these interventions except Korea. They don't call it a declaration of war, just an "Authorization for the use of military force" or a "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". Korea was the only real anomaly, where Congress didn't pass a specific authorization but immediately went to work restoring the draft and funding the war. Some kind of 'implicit' authorization was at work there.
Even Taft said he would have voted for it, so I have no clue why Truman didn't seek it. Maybe he was trying to make a point. If so, bad point, and one that hasn't carried over through the years.
My guess is that if you looked deep into what happened in Korea, you would see the same pattern Matt describes: we're not welcome, we lie about why we're there, we partner with a corrupt entity, and then continue to believe our own bullshit that we're making a difference. So, we're now pushing 70 years of this same crap over and over. My guess is there's a deeper reason for it, and some of the comments here may be revealing that reason.
Iran and Korea in the ‘50s, Vietnam in the ‘60s and Afghanistan now. Eisenhower warned us.
I've said it before and will say it again to the point of tedium. but I think Ike was a decent guy and his great mistake was letting the Super Dulles Bros. run wild. He just didn't want to see open conflict again.
Everybody's living with the consequences now, of course.
Ouch. Just hearing their last name makes me want to punch myself in the face many times.
Try sitting in IAD waiting on the little train to take you to your terminal, reflecting on who the airport's named after and what it means.
I greatly appreciated your memoir as dictated to Charles Portis.
Yup. Eisenhower was very clear and straightforward.
Eisenhower had it both ways. From Guatemala to Korea. Thanks for the warning re: the MIC, Ike. Only after you sicced the CIA and State Department under the Dulles brothers on the world. And then professed shock at JFK's assassination by certain "associated" elements.
Well, him and Truman.
Harry's "I'm shocked! SHOCKED!!!" op-ed about the "dirty tricks department" is only exceeded in the realm of comedy by Allen Dulles's frantic efforts to suppress it.
Ahh, the good old days! lol!!
Nah you can't conflate all of these things. Motives of the 1940s to early 1960s were not the same motives as today. Vietnam, like Algeria, was part of the French Empire that was pulling away as part of the decolonization period following WWII. Each one is different. For the origins of the Vietnam War, see "Embers of War, The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam."
Yes and no. The 38th Parallel was established after WW2 by the US. But the US put the Japanese, and Korean collaborators, back in charge of the govt and that pissed off the Koreans. Hostilities ensued and the US declared martial law. Then a general election was held for S Korea that is widely considered to have been a sham perpetrated by the US. Also, the 38th Parallel may have divided the country, but it's people were still mixed and there were lots of socialists in S Korea. Finally, N Korea was far from a pawn in the Chinese Civil War. It's thought by many that their actions in that war may have been the key to the communist victory in China.
Roger Degueldre’s ghost is laughing his ass. Go big or go home-that’s the new choice in modern police actions”.
Degueldre? Try Skorzeny. "Je ne regrette rien"
Didn’t the NDAA cover them?
It's easy for forget the perspective of the psychopaths who run our government. Thanks for the reminder.
It all went to hell when it was discovered that a “real” war would require financing by selling war bonds. Now an “undeclared” war is financed by simply stealing money from tax payers without their permission. War is easy to launch without the fuss of selling war bonds.
Or some indication of popular support, which a vote by Congress would at least nominally supply. The Imperial President does what he wants.
One must draw a binary conclusion. The people who started the war, and those who have continued it, are either stupid or evil. Maybe both; evil for doing it, and stupid if they thought it would end well. Psychopaths don’t think things through. This applies to all the flag waivers who have continued to support sending troops to Afghanistan (and elsewhere) saying they were defending our freedom. Bullshit!
Right on brother. It is unadulterated BS.
It is as much an indictment of our complacent media as it is the crooks in industry and government. Without a functioning press there is no counter weight to the corruption.
They aren't complacent. They are usually cheerleaders for whatever saber-rattling the U.S. is doing. People still read the New York Times even after it was Dick Cheney's sock puppet on Iraq. Cheney's Halliburton made so much money they are probably still counting it. Remember the air drops of plats of U.S. currency? "The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
"nobody cared"
I recognize that you are employing hyperbole here, but I can assure you that military members and their at-CONUS spouses did care.
This war fucked up a lot of lives. Primarily Afghan lives; secondarily American lives. Ultimately I feel less sorry for the Americans than the Afghans; there wasn't a draft, after all, and I don't recall the Afghans getting to vote on their choice in the matter.
Perhaps not. This sort of adventurism can only really ever be financed by currency hegemony and ours is at an end.
"[T]he politicians learned their lessons well. ... So will it happen again. You bet ya!*"
Not to worry, folks -- we don't even need to wait for 'again'!
The MSM is now painting one hum-dinger of a picture out there. "Left" and "Right" are uniting together in universal outrage: "Something MUST Be Done!"
The Squad will lead a chant at an outdoor camera-masked gathering of their protest start-up, Democracy in Action(R):
"What do we want?"
"Instant gratification!"
"When do we want it?"
"NOW!"
The principals are now gaining the invigorated public support they seek ... and will soon see the launch of a new Coalition-of-the-Willing(R), complete with full new branding (TBD). Coming to a puppetized President near you!
-------------
*Kudos for quoting broken-clock Palin
In this short clip from Groundhog Day Bill Murray represents the military-industrial-complex that produces the infinitely repeating insanely macabre war loop:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/KnoeQOzo6o9Q/
Millions die but it is immortal.
The Best way for a Quick end to that Point is....Lies in front of Congrss, on matters of Conflicts or WARS....Trial for Treason....With the Firing Squad.....Starting at the TOP.....
I support the withdrawal. But it's hard not to see the way it was done as a foreign policy disaster.
Isn't the basic rule to pull out the soft targets first and the troops last?
Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, I think we can all agree that the U.S. has created a humanitarian shitstorm in Afghanistan.
I am not surprised that the Taliban won, but I am surprised at the apparent ineptitude of the withdrawal.
Really? surprised-- do you remember Saigon?
Few Americans are old enough to remember Saigon, and it's certainly not being taught in history class.
Biden is old enough to remember, but not lucid enough to remember.
I doubt that he gives a damn. He's just doing and saying whatever his handlers are telling him to do and say.
I don't think on this one. This was ALL Biden he finally gets to be the decider. I would call Biden's leadership style Obtuse Empathy. He desperately wants to been seen as a smart ,sensitive, caring figure who is on the right side of history (as if history can been seen in such a lens) He jumps in front of what ever empathy parade is in the gestalt at the time no matter the secondary effects or if its even true. Its as though he has been waiting his whole life to drop the line, "whose child should he send to die for someone else's civil war?" That line, perhaps gives him a false sense of immunity from what ever consequences arrive from his decision because his heart is in the right place there fore any negative consequence is in service to the greater noble, poetic position. Its like rescuing a seagull from a fishing net and ripping its wings off to free it. That being said , I'm glad we getting out it was not an easy decision but the gracelessness and utter cluster fuck is all on Biden and his generals.
Biden is old enough to remember the American Civil War, but not lucid enough to remember the day the Taliban took Kabul.
And he's dumb enough to bring it up.
America: Huh, Afghanistan.
Biden: IT'S NOT GOING TO BE LIKE VIETNAM!
America: It looks sort of like Vietnam.
:-)
I remember Saigon. It took two years for it to fall after the deal was signed.
Also note that we ended up pulling our military support of South Vietnam because Congress refused to continue to fund it. Strange to think that Biden was in the Senate at the time.
I keep making the same point. Biden fucked up far worse than people are recognizing. You're right: the difference with the Republic of Vietnam is that congress pulled the rug out from under their government. In Afghanistan, Biden had bipartisan support for maintaining the security situation, and apparently, he let the policy naifs in his administration decide that the government in Kabul didn't need our intelligence and air support. Who in congress advocated ending all non-combat support? As far as I know, the idea wasn't really mainstream.
I'm sure that there are people who will say that Afghanistan is different from Vietnam and that the Taliban was always destined to topple the government quickly. To such people, I offer one additional observation: the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan survived for over three years after the end of Soviet combat operations. The communist government only collapsed after the financial and other non-combat support ended with the collapse of the USSR.
Let me repeat. By moving to the center, an unpopular communist Afghan government survived three years while our liberal government, a government at least nominally respecting their religious traditions and deferring to custom on thorny issues of universal human rights where custom and universal human rights conflicted, survived just three days.
There's precedent to believe that the American-backed government could have continued indefinitely with modest amounts of non-combat support. Biden's advisers and handlers just threw in the towel.
The news isn't all bad, though. I have to remind people that when we invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban only controlled ninety percent of the country. The other ten percent was in the hands of Dostum and other rebels, and they had only assassinated Massoud a day before the attack on the United States. Afghanistan is a tribal, stone-age sewer, and in time, Afghanistan will revert to type: I think that the descent into civil war will happen in two to three years. The Taliban is a loose confederation of people with a lot of different and conflicting interests, and they'll enjoy nominal control today but a problem if they try to exert actual control outside of their bases of power.
Well said. ... But the two were very different. Our original military mission in Vietnam was to guard air bases there. Fine. Then that genius Gen. Westmoreland thought we needed troops to take part in combat. Every time he screwed up, he asked for more troops. The body counts were fiction. No progress was being made. The light at the end of the tunnel was a mortar round during the Tet Offensive, which put the whole thing to bed for the American homefront.
We couldn't keep pouring billions into Vietnam. We had started with paying for the French in the early 1950s, bombed the North until it was practically flat, and attacked with units meant for World War II, not jungle guerrilla warfare. It was a mess from beginning to end. And the North was hell-bent on taking the South and uniting the country. It was not going to give up, ever, and there was nothing the U.S. could do about it.
Meanwhile the people of the South had grown soft, like all puppet populations do. They still spoke French like their previous colonial masters and were good Catholics, while the Buddhists burned. On the streets, weapons, goods like liquor and cigarettes, and even heavy machinery were stolen practically right off the trucks, and often taken by the North. The booze and cigarettes were sold in the street, along with super-cheap and potent opiates (which the local population had always enjoyed). Close to the end, we had more soldiers in the hospital for VD and drug addiction than for battle wounds. Ringing in the GIs' ears was the North's propaganda: "Don't be the last to die in Vietnam."
2 years vs Taliban took barely a few days. Looks like Biden is very progressive!
Once they got started, the North only took 6 weeks to enter Saigon and end the war. That's how bad the South's military preparedness was. Most officers threw off their uniforms and ran.
I do Carol. it was horrible. I live in San Diego county, which was then even more of a navy town than it is now, and my family lived in a neighborhood adjoining Miramar NAS (then the home of the Top Gun school). Lots of military families on my block. It was not a good time.
So sorry for you and your neighbours💗
@Carol Jones
Bit of a difference there. We were pushing people off the roof of the Embassy in Saigon two years *after the troops had been withdrawn ! So, similarities, but no
direct equivalent.
@Carol Jones
This was kind of a bone-chilling reminder of *exactly that, wasn't it ?
Yeah. Didn't seem to need a rerun.
"I am surprised at the apparent ineptitude of the withdrawal"
I do not intend this as a criticism of you or your comment, but I do surmise that you may not have had many dealings with the US military in the recent past.
"Ineptitude" doesn't begin to cover it.
No question the US military has it's challenges in the competence department, but where did America get this idea about losing with dignity?
I mean, we lost. If you want dignity when you leave you win, or in this case don't pick wars you can't win.
The French in Vietnam and Algiers. The Italians in Ethiopia and Libya. The Spanish in Morocco. The Japanese in Manchuria, the Israelis in Lebanon, America in Beirut and Vietnam.
Where is this proud tradition of being defeated and leaving with honor I'm having such a hard time finding in history?
I think I just figured it out. Americans did not realize they had lost in Afghanistan so were surprised by the exit. Wow, and they say the generals were disillusion.
"don't pick wars you can't win"
The US policymaking community seems to be perpetually struggling with this concept, like kindergartners struggling with Play-Doh.
Military people are becoming sick of dying for... no clearly articulated reason?
Well you don't always know if the war you pick is winnable. At the beginning of the US version of the Vietnam War, the only acceptable opinion in the US was "of course it's winnable." It's a raggedy-ass little 10th-rate country, according to LBJ. All those brilliant men said it was winnable. They had facts and charts and a guy from Ford Motor Company to run it all in a very rational manner.
Hindsight is 20-20, and LBJ didn't know what we know today. And there are also different kinds of losing. If the winner demands unconditional surrender, that's going to be a different end than one that is negotiated by two parties sick of going at it. ... But I'm afraid I'm talking into a historical black hole here, because you don't know these obvious points.
I disagree (that you don't always know if a war in winnable) and Sun Tzu does as well.
Knowing if a war in winnable is in part about setting achievable goals (the first gulf war) sometimes it's about not inserting yourself into a civil war (Vietnam Afghanistan) where an enemy can win simply by outlasting you.
"It's a raggedy-ass little 10th-rate country, according to LBJ."
That doesn't refute the need for achievable goals, it confirms it. If your argument is that some men substitute personal ego for achievable goals well yes, but that only confirms the need to set achievable goals.
"Hindsight is 20-20, and LBJ didn't know what we know today"
Despite popular American folklore, Vietnam was not the first insurgency in world history where a ragtag group beat a greater power that had all the best generals and smartest people in the room. LBJs failure to know history, know himself, or know his enemy is not confirmation that we just can't know if wars are winnable. It's a history lesson in arrogance leading to an escalation in an unwinnable war. There were plenty of people from those in the ground to his own defense secretary that acknowledged that the war was unwinnable. I'm not even sure how the LBJ analogy factors into this since it seem to hurt your main point and bolster mine.
@Thomas Hancock
I see the point more as "don't go to war for commercial reasons."
In Vietnam, the French wanted help regaining their former colonies in what had previously been French Indochina . (Remember how the "Peace Talks" during the Vietnam war were always held in Paris, and people wondered, if this is really a war between the U.S. and SE Asia, how the futz does Paris feature into this picture at all ?) That turns out to be why.
The only "metric" the U.S. dared turn out on our "progress" in Vietnam was "body count", men women & children. You know you are in a war with a *secret goal, when the only measure you can come up with for progress is not "territory gained" or true changes in "hearts and minds", but body count. Even the troops on the ground quickly saw thru that gossamer goal.
The Americans, nicely fixed for oil at the time, needed rubber. Personnel Carriers run on rubber. Back then, we had no such thing synthetic rubber, and Brazil had the world rubber market by the throat as the "only girl in town", with her monopoly of the time. Vietnam had then, and continues to produce today, some of the world's premium rubber trees.
If a war starts over a full-out lie, (more of an excuse), like that risible "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution", you can bet your bippy this is a war for commercial gain, more than a war that MUST be fought. The last war that HAD to be fought by the U.S., was WWII, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Vietnamese fought and ousted their "Colonial Masters" the French, from Vietnam following the Battle of Bien Dien Phu in 1954. The Vietnamese fought under the command of the militarily estimable General Giap.
General Giap, in sort of an "old home week" heartbreaker, also commanded the Vietnam Peoples Army (NVA) when the Americans arrived. In the cities of Vietnam, (not as much the Villages out in the Boonies), the Vietnamese, including the children, spoke flawless French when the American troops arrived.
Ironically, the U.S. which started out in *Revolution against being a colony of England, was also assisting the French in re-establishing their colonies in SE Asia.
My dealings with the US military are very infrequent. I'd say it happened once only. But after that one I thought if the experience was representative then all hope was lost.
The event in question was visiting one of the aircraft carriers anchored by the shore on the West coast. There were many people wanting a tour. I had to get up at 4:30 am to secure a spot on a trip later that day. People got on and off the boat via a number of ferries. Long story short, we spent what seems like close to 10 hours waiting to get on and a couple more to get off, significant part while on a ferry. It was a complete and utter disaster. Complete chaos. Pretty much like in the Kabul airport. I thought if that's the way the US military conducts such simple things, what chance is there it will do anything right?
@sasha
au contraire, sasha ! You experienced the very *essence of military life !
It is called "Hurry up and *WAIT ! " ;-D
hahaha! :)
There is a reason the term snafu (situation normal, all fucked up) originated in the military
@Coco McShevitz
Likewise, FUBAR (fucked up beyond all repair [or beyond all recognition])
Agree on that one. Could relate stories but...nah.
@HBI
Couldn't many of us, yes ..........
But civilians often have a devil of a time believing the
old standards on *bone-crushing ineptitude ! Of the
right hand *never knowing what the left hand is doing....
Of the ...... You're right, "but ...nah."
Marines had to be sent back into Saigon too when the airlift out of there went sideways. North Vietnam was supposed to take 2 years to take over the South. It took them 6 weeks. If we had engaged with South Vietnam military as an equal partnership, the outcome might have been over a table rather than at the end of a tank barrel. ... Funny tho how Biden invoked the very things he should have kept quiet about: comparisons to Vietnam.
"Biden invoked the very things he should have kept quiet about: comparisons to Vietnam."
I have never been more impressed with Biden's demented candor than in the past couple of days; he has risen in my esteem. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Can American adults not admit that invading and occupying Vietnam was a disastrous mistake and that invading and occupying Afghanistan was a disastrous mistake? What are the other things politicians "should keep quiet" about?
It is funny to me that Biden got a free pass from the media during the '20 primaries and the general but now they're after him with knives out for demonstrating some decisive leadership. Don't go off script.
There are no more filters left in Biden's brain. He's going to start actually saying the quiet parts out loud now. hahaha About 56% of Americans in a June 28, 1970 poll thought the US Vietnam War was a mistake. So some already had come to that conclusion.
Imagine still being in uniform over there in the jungle, risking your life in a war people stopped supporting. Soldiers quickly found out which of their buddies knew the shit about staying alive, and followed him, whether he was in charge officially or not. I don't have anything against the people who served there, as long as they did so in good conscience. They did their duty even though the political and military leadership failed them.
@Thomas Hancock
Even MORE Americans back home thought the US Vietnam War was a mistake after the Tet Offensive in January of 1968. The NVA and the Cong thought they had *lost that engagement, but the Americans back home saw it as THE last straw. Wish you had been there, but somehow reading about it in a book long *after the fact seems to make you even "better" informed. ;-D Lock 'n' LOAD , Thomas !
I find sci-fi writer David Drake's essay on his experience in Vietnam incredibly moving: https://david-drake.com/2009/vietnam/
Key lines: "I’m accused of writing militaris[m] by those who either don’t know the difference between description and advocacy or who deny there is a difference."
"I’m still proud of my unit and the men I served with. They weren’t exactly my brothers, but they were the folks who were alone with me."
He wrote the LACEY series of stories about a future in which ubiquitous government/corporate surveillance has rendered personal privacy an obsolete concept, but those are tales for another time. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1861071.Lacey_and_His_Friends
I have to agree. I despise everything about the man, but that speech he gave yesterday was absolutely brilliant. At least on this point, I have to admit I was absolutely wrong about him.
I knew he would be in political trouble for this. It was the good idea and what the majority of people wanted, not to mention it will save the lives of the unwashed masses.
That's always a sure loser inside the beltway.
The only ineptitude was the failure to realize that no one was going to save the intervention this time. I believe there was hope in some quarters that Biden would decide he didn't want this to happen on his watch and send a couple brigades there to fight it out until he was out of office.
What I was talking about was not the loss of the war, which seems pretty inevitable given the donnée, the characters, and the original script, but the disorganization at the end.
There is some meat to that. Not the way she said it, but the US is not sitting on its ass right about now. The Afghan government is dead, however. They're not striking anyone, mostly removing uniforms and making their peace with their new overlords.
We will wear them out by making them climb over our corpses! Huzzah!
Afghan Barb
You are assuming that it would have been possible to avoid this outcome through “planning”. I’m not convinced that it would have been. Once we decided to leave, the Afghan “forces” knew they would lose, so they took the payoff and abandoned the fight. That would have required even more US forces to take over the holding action.
There really was no better plan than to just rip off the band-aid. They should negotiate with the Taliban to get their allies out. They could threaten to drone the hell out of them if they don’t cooperate.
Maybe instead of "threatening to drone the hell out of them", we should apologize for the devastation and let them know their help means everyone will be of their way faster.
The "nuke 'em, drone 'em" guys upthread and downthread here are a complete trip. It's self-centered autists enthralled by the power fantasies technology gives them, utterly out of touch with actual human life and the possibility of empathy and compassion for someone who is... not them.
One might say it shows a right wing authoritarian streak. :)
Sieg heil!
..and, ouch. You got me.
We droned them constantly over the past 20 years.
Gee, I wonder why the Taliban was so popular and unified?
Maybe they should apologize for sheltering Bin Laden after 9/11. Just saying that, if they'd like to move on, they could cooperate with the ending of this mess. If not, we can continue the "devastation" from the air.
No point. It's like intervening in a chapter of the Arabian Nights.
China's ICBMs can reach your city.
@Thomas Hancock
So can the ancient MRVs on any nuclear submarine.
An ICBM is almost all "transport mechanism" and easy to
see coming. The MRVs, shot completely up out of the
atmosphere, and then, pre-adressed, "reenter" (thus, Multiple
Re-Entry Vehicles) as nothing but the warhead, almost too tiny to see. ICBMs are now incredibly archaic "City Busses" in terms of modern warfare, and have been for some time. Our own ICBM silos are being rented out to "Doomsday Preppers" up in Wyoming.
Inevitable pilot captures and hostage taking.
Drones! Use your technological advantage. Hope it can be avoided, but if not we should be forceful and brutal. They need to see a clear choice in their behavior.
The old "why they hate us" nonsense. I suppose as always "we meant well too." This is the old manufacturing of consent, military division. They know very well why they hate us: We make their lives hell, day after day.
The war was good for profits for awhile, but I guess Boeing and Raytheon wanted a new challenge.
I'm confused by this comment. I thought Al Qaida was the 'enemy'? Were we fighting the Taliban? Anyway, I thought we weren't fighting at all anymore there, just helping prepare their own military...?
The U.S. military employs terrorists all the time, so it's hard to keep score. There is no good guy and bad guy like in World War II. It's called "the management of savagery" and is why we get into bed with criminals like the House of Saud and Zionists.
Insert hilarious laughter here!
note: this is out of context. I was replying to Politically homeless.
@Patricia Kane
Yes. This substack software is SO maddening with "message creep" down the queue until your comment is so far from its *intended target that things can get *highly confusing. The best I can do, and it is not much, is to purposely include the name of person to whom I am responding, (see above) so that, at least, I might avoid insulting someone to whom my message was *not intended ! ;-D
@Atma: Thanks for pointing this out, along with a way to handle it.
We actually fought alongside the Al Qaida in Syria against Assad, so "Al Qaida is the enemy" might be a little more confusing than people realize.
Some say it was done that way to punish Biden...
LOL!!! does Biden even know he is alive?
Q.: "does Biden even know he is alive?"
A. : https://www.librarything.com/topic/333711#7579196
This is pure gold :)
He's alive, well and extremely relevant.
Well, that's debatable :) I don't think it really matters who, Biden or not. Military didn't want to leave, so whoever would give the order would get punished...
Yeah, I'm sure that psychopath is just devastated.
Are you suggesting Biden is a masochist?
It's hard to imagine being both a masochist and a kidsniffer.
He gets the kids' hair then chokes himself with it.
HAW HAW
😂
well, here's your Breitbart Yahoo level of commentary...
@Mascot
You had to know we'd get there eventually.
Nothing would surprise me :)
you must have residual trust or optimism.
I support withdrawal too (should have been while the building were still smoldering from our invasion). The original withdrawal date was May, 2021. Early in the fighting season. We could have been rolling during the winter and early spring with civilians first then military trailing (original plan). Instead, we hit the prime months for Taliban mobility and armament. We vanished from forward bases and left the withdrawal hanging for months and our asses flapping in the breeze. How were that many military planners and "deciders" that far off to try for a bizarre 9/11 symbolic date?? At least the corporate military suppliers will get to see how their wares we surrendered will work in enemy hands, I guess.
This can't be repeated enough. During the winter the Taliban have a hard time moving around because of the weather. Once May hits, they get mobile. The original plan was to get our people out during winter when there's very very little resistance. Biden spent that time 'reviewing' Trump's plan -- finishing in very late April. By then it was clear Biden was going to break Trump's deal, and the Taliban were going to resume hostilities against Americans unless another deal was reached. And this one gave them 4 months to mobilize and plan.
Also by breaking the US's word by not withdrawing by the original May date, they ended up giving more propaganda fodder to the Taliban: "Look, the US is not gonna withdraw, they lied, come join us".
One has to start wondering if it's incompetence or on purpose.
"Hanlon's razor is a principle or rule of thumb that states "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"."
I really disagree with Hanlon's razor now a days because it's always the same people who are making the same stupid decisions again and again.
I do not think this was a military failure. That is too easy by half. There is something fatally wrong with the US and its people. (And I include others in the West.) To continue to carry out illegal and therefore murderous crimes against human beings especially in countries with people who are racially different requires especial viciousness. It also requires deep hostility towards non-White peoples that seems to be woven into the American and Western psyche. That viciousness elicits an unbeatable response. The failure is also down to woeful ignorance and insularity. You can beat a state perhaps, but a people is much more difficult. Will we learn anything, or will it be paramount to pick another country to victimize as quickly as possible so that the drums can beat again?
> It also requires deep hostility towards non-White peoples that seems to be woven into the American and Western psyche
lmao, midwit alert
Woven in. Not hand-stitched, mind you, woven. We're talkin' _looms_--it's in the warp and woof of our very making. Before the loom, either there was no such stuff in us--which is just hardly believable, is it?--or all that weaving had to be hand-done. So much hand-stitching, so little time!
Eventually, Watson and Crick would produce their landmark work, throwing millions of weavers (and looms) out of work.
There is something fatally wrong with the US and its people. (And I include others in the West.) To continue to carry out illegal and therefore murderous crimes against human beings especially in countries with people who are racially different requires especial viciousness. It also requires deep hostility towards non-White peoples that seems to be woven into the American and Western psyche."
The U.S. and its people are fatally flawed by the deep hostility towards non-White peoples--a feature "woven into the American and Western psyche"?
" (And I include others in the West.)"
So, this is a "Western" culture thing.
Well, I wonder, where in the world are you from, Beverly? "Too (something, something) by half" is a phrase often said by British (i.e. esp. English) people.
Wouldn't, say, Barry Obama, Madelaine Albright, Condi Rice, and Hillary Clinton all be similarly tainted and flawed--by the vicious anti-Non-White "in-search-of-enemies" culture into which they were born and raised? And, if much of these abhorrent human--excuse me, Western European--failings of humane character are found in the same ways and to the same degrees in the bloody tyrannies of Black sub-Saharan Africa, I suppose that's not the fault of Africans. It must be "our fault"-- _my_ fault, really, as a child of the fatally-flawed U.S. & Western European culture.
I suppose you want, among I-don't-know-what-else, a reparation check. To whom should that be made payable and where should it be sent? Mogadishu?
I'll light a candle to your patron saint, Caterina de'Pazzi, the next time I'm in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista a Careggi. Finally, a specialist's problematic matter: where do find your supplier of instruments for mortification of the flesh? On-line? I guess I ought to get some in order to feel properly ashamed of myself.
We invaded Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden in 2001. We killed him in 2011. At the very least, the withdrawal should have happened a decade ago, but in reality, invasion should have never happened. It was the wrong country.
Any same person realizes this. The equipment and soft targets were left in place and made vulnerable for a reason. And it's obviously not a good one.
Let them build up again, so we have to go back again to fight the terrorists! Cycle continues.
Just add Afghanistan to the long list of countries left in a similar way
> Obama Birthday Party Guests Play Light-Hearted Game Of 'Pin The Drone On The Middle Eastern Country'
https://babylonbee.com/news/obama-birthday-party-guests-play-light-hearted-game-of-pin-the-drone-on-the-middle-eastern-country
Which country will be next?
Amen. What if we secured our southern border and instead took on our Afghani allies as the next batch of refugees?
It's those hockey-playing, Cuban-cigar smoking canucks from Canada I'm worried about. I hear they are going to flood the US with affordable medications.
Absolutely the correct take, IMO. Why is it so hard to understand you should pull out in a secure organized manner?
One has to start wondering if it's incompetence or on purpose.
"Hanlon's razor is a principle or rule of thumb that states "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"."
I really disagree with Hanlon's razor now a days because it's always the same people who are making the same stupid decisions again and again.
You overestimate the competence of the military.
American hubris knows no bounds. I suppose its inevitable given the power of the country.
Its easy to blame politicians, and convenient for the public to forget and ignore its own responsibilities for the pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"In October 2001, a poll by CNN/Gallup/USA Today indicated that about 88% of Americans backed military action in Afghanistan"
Who in that poll thought "military action" meant social engineering at gunpoint to turn goat-herding savages into gay-rights democrats? As opposed to killing Bin Laden and going home.
Nah, it was always going to be bad. A fast withdrawal may have even saved lives. No serious policy expert ever thought slowing down withdrawal would amount to anything in the end.
Oh, bullshit.
What would a slow withdrawal have done?
We are not talking about the speed of the withdrawal. We are talking about how it was done.
Soft targets and equipment should be pulled out first, not last.
And this should have been done by May as Taliban has problems operating in winter. Instead Biden broke the May promise and left it till the last day in summer when Taliban is the most mobile.
Right. In Vietnam also we had to leave a lot of foreign-born assets in Saigon for the Communists to round up and torture. I don't think anyone lines up for the US anymore other than for a payday.
Try thinking out of the neocon box.
Ahh. Make you feel better about being American. I see. Not a neocon, btw. Not even an American. Always great to see the level of discourse and thought in America is much as we all think it is.
Oh, please. At the very least there should have been a plan to remove vulnerable people, soft targets, assets, equipment, etc., prior to the cut and run. You know this. Don’t act like you don’t.
Amen
The CIA partnering with the military to keep their jobs going infinitely along with enrichment to oil companies, arms dealers, Raytheon, Boeing, et al, keeps me wondering why I keep wanting to be proud of the USA. Why should I be patriotic to the cabal in this country that’s run by the NSA, CIA, FBI, warlord companies, the crooked media, and all the rest of the tyrants who have shit on the Constitution? I’m so over what we have become. The darkness of this debacle is the last straw. The government and the military have screwed our troops, screwed all the young men and women who serve and sacrifice their lives. It’s devastating.
I think there’s a difference in feeling patriotic toward your country vs. feeling patriotic toward your government.
I'd defend to the death my family, and my community - but I have about as much respect for DC and the people there as your average Afghani has for the scum of Kabul that were in charge up until yesterday. That's the real reason our elite (Dems and Repubs) shit themselves about Jan 6th - they know how little credibility they have and that our govt is only secured by the people's faith in it.
Amen.
That kind of tribal love though is just what the Afghans have. They only love themselves and their extended group. Basing a society on that takes you morally backwards about 3000 years. Who is my neighbor?
The question for modern man has always been how to balance individual rights with the need for collective action, which needs a state apparatus. I know that anarchy and pure 'isms like socialism are attractive, but they are all too optimistic about human nature.
I used to feel quite different and it took a lot of corruption and incompetence in DC to make me feel as I do now.
That's your fault. Why did you elect these people?
I hear that!
Yes
Don't forget the Afghan citizens who worked alongside us, who are likely to be sacrificing their lives and those of their family in the weeks ahead.
Agreed. Why couldn't we have taken them back as refugees instead of the millions of economic refugees pouring across our southern border?
If only the Afghans could have gotten to Mexico.
We are bringing back quite a few. The Taliban is letting people leave if they want to, according to the latest news from AP.
God I feel sick. Same shit that happened in Iraq.
@SpeakerFTD
WELL SAID, and there are *thousands of them !
That's not it. The military does not want these. They are following orders. The prime mover is that Cheney got logistical support for military operations added to outsourcing. So, now the military industrial complex MUST have hot war, boots on the ground to profiteer. They don't just need plans, missiles, tanks and other weapons.
Cheney got 39 billion out of Iraq for Halliburton.
great point
This is the most sensible thing your government has done in Afghanistan since September 10, 2001.
Do you not even attempt to empathize with the people desperately trying to flee Kabul right now?
Objectively, they should have left sooner, except for the embassy personnel and soldiers. I feel for them. The rest should have realized this was the likely outcome six months ago and made plans.
Bro, it’s a 3rd world country. Those folks can’t just grab their passport and an overnight bag, call Uber and shag ass out of the country like we can .
I'm opening a new Taliban taxi service called "Uber Shag Yer Ass." Please dress appropriately.
No, but they can hop over the Pakistani border. It's not far, and porous.
He has another agenda.
Lol. What? We're commenting on an article on the internet. The internet. What we're all doing right now could not be more low status or inconsequential.
An agenda? Please. That's just narcissism. My only agenda online is my own edification and intellectual stimulation.
The Taliban was letting people leave Tuesday. Everyone is queuing up at the airport now with no problem. It's just a lot of people to move at once.
"The Taliban vowed Tuesday to respect women’s rights, forgive those who fought them and ensure Afghanistan does not become a haven for terrorists as part of a publicity blitz aimed at reassuring world powers and a fearful population."
I guess we will find out if they mean it. I'm willing to allow people to change.
New day, footage now of the ever so reasonable Taliban opening fire and killing people at the airport. Didn’t take long.
As seen on right-wing shitbag theater.
I mean we could be jaundiced and cynical. Or we could be jaundiced and cynical. Giving young guys AK-47s and allowing them to do what they will without repercussions is not a recipe for peace anywhere.
I think it’s horrifying. I don’t think America is the guilty party though. Also, I’m not into indulging my own or others’ selection bias. 9/11 doesn’t happen and Afghanistan is just as bad, except you don’t even think about it, just like you don’t think about Eritrea right now.
Objectively? We dumped a lot of money and goods into the country, but waged a war and a proxy war via Afghans we armed, destroyed a lot of crops, disrupted lifestyles....maybe it would have been better without us. Maybe worse. Can't replay history.
"The Taliban just rescued Afghanistan from a regime that forces people to cover their faces, topples statues, and endorses genital mutilation."
I had to post this joke because the irony was startling and did make me pause.
KILL SHOT
Amazing
Ha! Good stuff!
Certainly worthy of a facepalm. I suppose if you are into lame, unsophisticated humour you might find this funny.
It's the IRONY that's humorous. Your response reads to me like you need to work on your sense of humor...you and so so many Americans.
To be fair, we haven’t yet heard what Squirrel thinks of the joke.
LOL! I get it. I'll bet most here do not.
You all shall be hanged by the neck until you cheer up.
Guessing Moose is a Prog. They don’t do irony. It seems to be actually lacking in their DNA.
@Dave's not here
Clearly unlike yourself, of course, whose online "handle" is a *now very tired, and thus *very unoriginal, line from a once hysterical Cheech and Chong routine. Anyone who DOES have a sense of humor DEMONSTRATES IT. They do not just sit around browbeating 330 million people in their own narcissistic and self-deluded conceit that they have ANY, much less the ONLY, sense of humor in the entire U.S. Get over yourself, "Giggles".
You are hilarious!! You should be on Conan!!
I'm dead.
I'm even more cynical than Matt. I prefer the theory that at least some of our foreign policy elites in Washington knew very well what was going down, and their "surprise" is nothing but theater, meant to conceal from the public how utterly conceited and mercenary they are.
The reason they hated Donald Trump so much was because he not only tried to make decisions that they didn't approve of (like pulling the US military out of Syria and Afghanistan), but he exposed them every time they resisted him. This also underlines the reason so many Americans voted for him: They were sick and tired of the way the DC 'shadow government' has been running foreign policy for the last few decades. If open borders, immoral wars, and unfair trade agreements are not in the interest of the great majority of Americans, then whose interests are these so-called 'experts' representing?
I'll one-up you on the cynicism. I think we're seeing a deliberately, purposefully manufactured crisis.
The same media that still covers for Hunter Biden is suddenly vociferously critical of his dad?? Yep, we're watching a script play out. Only question is what's the end goal.
The end goal seems to be the erosion of individual rights, the destruction of the American working class, followed by the middle class, and confiscation of as much wealth as the ruling class thinks it can get away with -- not necessarily in that order.
A face saving way to get Biden Sr,. out of the way? Saying he leaves cause not competent begs the question why not get rid of him sooner?
Maybe so. The Dems are in a bit of a pickle. Kamala is not well-liked, and the more she opens her mouth, the more unpopular she'll be. Perhaps it's inevitable that the GOP will retake the White House in 2024, and it's just a matter of getting a Deep State approved candidate into place and finding a way to keep Trump out.
On the other hand, this could be a prelude to "justifying" more military adventures over there.
Or maybe a little of both?
Kamala is not only not well liked, she's shown even less competence than Joe has. So they both somehow get 86'd - President Pelosi? Better a weekend at Bernie's Joe than either of those two.
Pelosi would usher in the golden age of booster shot nation.
If that's all she would do, i'd be backing her right now.
And note, they took Cuomo out last week... so Hillary?
They sacrificed Cuomo to keep the rabble in their cheap seats.There's too much going on outside the arena right now that they don't want unwashed catching on to.
I suspect that some would want to try it. Somehow I don't think the public would swallow it though. The Dems already tried her twice, and the proles seemed to resent he being shoved down our throats so much the second time they went for Trump. Can't imagine third time would be the charm.
I suspect she has serious health issues.
Biden’s insurance is that he has a screw-up for VP.
More likely a reason to go back in. Again.
25th Amendment removal?
You are SPOT-ON, Danno, especially the reasons you described for hating President Trump. He wouldn't play their dirty game.
Same goes with the CIA being 'shawckt, shawkt, I tell you,' about the 'being blindsided' by the collapse of the USSR. What a joke on too many unthinking Americans. The CIA was on the inside of the USSR manipulating events before, during, and after the fall of the Soviets. They paved the way for the Chicago Boys, being their actual Wall Street advance guard, facilitating the divvying of resources among the world's already-wealthiest; which forms the central thesis of the CIA mission statement: "Make More Money for the Owners."... Lol, it might as well be "Do No Evil," insofar as what they have always done versus what they piously project.
Why I enjoy my truly perverse albeit well-founded cynicism observing their 'woke' recruitment efforts as of late; i.e. NOBODY---but especially the CIA or FBI---could be that transparently and panderingly patronizing and expect to get away with it w/o an innate institutional conceit and hubris so far gone they too believe "We create our own reality." Unfortunately they have plenty of adherents and acolytes singing along with them. So they may be right after all.
Good analysis, and good writing! I'd be interested in hearing your take on the pandemic, and the worldwide response. Maybe publish something. Seriously.
Trump was not seen as someone who could reliably run the MIC and Wall Street so that it profited the usual suspects. That's what freaked out the establishment, and is why we got 4 years of Russigate, etc. Hillary? Absolutely. She already had blood all over herself. Perfect candidate.
Complete and utter failure of leadership.
But they all still have their jobs, their mansions, their pensions, and their healthcare.
Stunning how well incompetence pays, as long as you go with the flow. We are surrounded and governed by too many "yes men".
You'd love Thomas Sowell. He's been pointing this bs out for years. The bureaucrats who make these horrific policies and decisions are *never* held accountable for them. Maybe an odd low level scapegoat now and then. But the big boys just party on.
Thomas Sowell is the smartest man than many otherwise smart people seem to have never bothered to read.
He is a honest man who speaks the plain truth. Most people don't like the truth.
Sowell is that you?? :-)
I hope so! Would love to see him here.
Thomas Sowell is an AMERICAN TREASURE. The study of his writings should be required curriculum in every high school in America...and they should be not only read but DISCUSSED. He would also make an excellent role model for young men everywhere--his life story would teach them a lot.
When I taught high school, I used chapters from Sowell's Basic Economics when doing my capitalism vs socialism debate (this was 2013-2018). Many of my students were uncomfortable because they'd only ever known a spendthrift government. They were also shocked that Sowell was black. And this was an extremely diverse group of kids, not just black and white.
It's interesting (but not surprising) that it would not occur to most people that a wise, brilliant, and articulate author is a Black man. I'd ask why he hasn't been highlighted on the MSM media, but I know the answer: (1) he's currently a conservative thinker and (2) he doesn't fit the narrative of a person who shouldn't be expected to be able to obtain a voter ID.
I'll bet you were a wonderful teacher who asked his student to actually think--critically--about issues.
Thanks. I tried. It’s a mentally exhausting profession. I think they were surprised at his race because they assumed conservative economics was only for white people and was somehow racist. Pretty crazy.
I know what you mean. I taught middle school math for 7 years. It was the most rewarding job and the most exhausting job I've ever had.
I read one of his early books which has stood the test of time Knowledge & Decisions and virtually all he has written since then. His interests are legion and his works regarding world cultures are most enlightening. I once wrote him to point out that he was the heir to Frederick Hayek.
I love that book. Let’s get Matt to review “The Vision of the Anointed!”
It would better serve the Black community and humanity in general, if it were Thomas Sowell's portrait painted on walls of buildings rather than that of drug dealers like George Floyd. Why would a community make a criminal an icon for their youth to look up to and try to emulate? (Wow, if I become a criminal I can be famous, too!) In Baltimore, a youth center has been named after drug dealer Freddie Gray. It should have been named after someone like Thomas Sowell. Again, same question to the community.
Yeah, your minds are all fucked up in that way you see from so many conservatives today. I can tell there's a madman just below the surface. Just use the word "nigger." You will feel better. Them dog whistles making me deaf.
Yikes! I actually like reading Sowell, but that's one of the uglier combinations of "well he was no angle" and "black people are the real racists" I have run into here on Substack. I suddenly feel like I landed on one of those secret police social media sites.
"Have your read Taibbi's: I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street?"
If your a Taibbi fan, and I assume you are, it might give you a different viewpoint on police brutality.
Sowell will always be correct as long as we treat whistle blowers as criminals. Snowden did all of us a favor by showing us we are all being spied in all the time.
Sowell is black, so conservatives rush to him as if he were The Saviour himself. They do this with other black conservatives too. This is probably because they bought into an idea told them on daddy's knee that all blacks are Democrats. So suddenly, eureka! We've got one of our own now! If the liberals get down us, we will flash our Magical Conservative Negro and get out of any disagreement for free.
He's a simpleton and what dumb people think a smart person looks like. Read Chris Hedges instead.
Have you actually read his works? Apparently not, because even if you disagreed with his conclusions, you would never call the man a simpleton. You sound like someone who is relying on other people's opinions of him rather than primary sources.
I take it you haven't read much of Sowell's work. And, just for the record, liberals are worshipping George Floyd (felon, drug dealer, and more), so maybe you shouldn't go there.
I read enough to know he has nothing to say and is probably a con man.
I couldn't agree more.
What's worse than a failed war of choice is the vast suffering imposed on innocent people. Pure evil.
There was a choice and it could not have been clearer; moreover, American voters saw that choice and made it in favor of a certain Donald Trump, the incumbent. Then it was defrauded in a process which lacks for nothing in outrageous infamy of the just observed disgrace in Afghanistan.
We suffer from unlearned lessons until we learn them.
Until people wake up and take it away from them.
Not if we are all seriously struggling from various vaccine induced autoimmune conditions. I've seen what it does to people. Once it takes hold, interacts and attacts the weakest link in any particular human being's genetic makeup, the unique conditions that manifest per individual are so debilitating, it's all a person can do to make it through the day.
This article isn't about COVID. Do you have COVID Derangement Syndrome?
Says the guy who goes off on tangent after tangent to showcase his “brilliance.”
Yes, I have a broad education, and it's reflected in what and how I write. I don't copy and paste from Tucker Carlson. I know, though, Americans don't trust people who can write with anything like style. It's a git 'er done society. Make a point. Follow the argument. What a grim bunch. I've only talked about things related to the US military's fiascoes. Sometimes I joke.
You brought up COVID and every white man's favorite House Nigger, Thomas Sowell. Maybe you want to talk too about how the election was stolen from Trump. Anyway, I unsubscribed. Fuck you and the rest of the human garbage in this comment section, which is fucking torture. I'll leave it to you and those who can barely write a coherent sentence or reason anything out for themselves.
Pretty blanket statement-- "all" . Which can be treated, but not with a magic pill-- it takes reliance and responsibility for your health. Ready to sign up?
Wait- are you actually saying to induce an autoimmune reaction via vaccine so that you can practice good health to manage it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Treat your body well so your immune system is strong and you don’t need an experimental drug that creates an autoimmune reaction?
Ah no-- not saying that-- YIKES--saying take responsibility for your health. Yes treat your body well, get off the meds, reduce your sugar and caffeine, sleep, don't drink tons, deal with your emotional stress, your family baggage, get into nature, find your light your purpose, don't sell out for money -- the "joy" doesn't last-- right Mr. Bezos.
I’m sorry? Isn’t the hell or high water goal to have 100% of the people shot up with an experiment?
SSDD. over and over and over.. ad nauseum. Stand up a boogey man, pimp endless propaganda, enroll the plebians, invade, secure the resources sought by oligarchs, prop up a "western friendly" puppet regime, bail. and the let the rent flow to the oligarchs, bought with the plebeians blood. so "patriotic", so "proud". rich man's games. as if any R or D ever gave a fu&k.
I remember right after 9-11, scratching my head and thinking, "Afghanistan?! Really?!" Here's one of the poorest nations on Earth, with almost inhuman geography, composed of small tribal cultures, with an economy based on opium, and the military superpower of the world attacks this country? What the hell, over?
Interesting. My thought even as the 2nd plane hit was "Thirty Years War" starting now.
This is the formula outlined in L. Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team". An eye-opening book on the history of US covert operations, even in its abridged (government-approved) edition.
Always good to see a shout-out to Col Prouty, a most significant but overlooked VIP in American history.
As a poster on another blog recently noted:
"The United States did an excellent job of installing a government in Afghanistan that's a mirror image of our own: brazenly corrupt, abjectly incompetent, overrun by psychofascist religious fanatics, and on the brink of collapse."
brilliant
Near the top of the long list of things that both saddens and sickens me about the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan is that a lot of people got very, very rich by keeping the "war" going for 20 years.
So what are you going to do about it? How about make some noise, boycott firms that made that money (and yes they do make civilian things), put your money and voice behind it.
can we be perfectly clear? who "won"? Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, and lets not forget their "shareholders" (70%+ of "shareholders" are just wall st scumbags, btw). trying paint this as a d or r thing, or any celebrity political inbred, exposes a deficit of critical thinking in any reader or poster. THIS is what murica does best. destroy everything based on lies, for a the profit of a few inbreds.
They were going to win regardless, even in peacetime. The real organizations that profited were smaller subs, who were brought into existence only to facilitate this 'endless' war. Little organizations that started with nothing and ended up with 500 or 1000 employees based on no merit but just that they were body shops that had contacts within the agencies responsible for procurement. A lot of these places are going out of business or already have done so, and good riddance.
There are a lot of set-asides in government contracting for small subs, "women-owned small businesses", minority owned businesses, etc. The large primes you call out have to search out such organizations to provide most of their work force.
Woke contracting.
It's more 'woke in name' than anything. An owner will list his wife as the owner, and poof, "woman-owned small business".
And wait 'til you see that his wife was born in Johannesburg...
I’ve seen that several times. Just another good old American loophole.
Yep. I sold in to government entities. There were set asides for small business and women and minority owned. The government was under GSA contract so pricing was lower for them. The small business , minority owned were charged full and they in turn sold to the government at a markup.
*full price
Speaker: What in your mind is the best reason for the U.S. to enter World War I?
John Reed: Profits.
As I recall, J.P. Morgan had loaned a ton of money to the English, so we had to make sure they were on the winning side. U.S. didn't need to enter WWI.
It's something to realize that you've lived through two decades of the steady collapse of the legitimacy of America's elite to rule over its people. The argument in a liberal democracy is that we are to be ruled (via elections) by honest and capable people, and in the modern liberal democratic context, a knowledgeable class of the best and brightest experts.
Well, that legitimacy has been shot to pieces so many times across all sectors of American society, from politics to education/higher education, culture, religion/faith, finance, corporate, you name it. There is a rottenness at the heart of America's ruling class and that rottenness has been made worse by the increasingly blatant realization that America's ruling classes really doesn't, deep inside, care about America or even think America as a force is special or unique.
I hate to bring up Donald Trump, given how polarizing his name is, but one can trace the visceral hatred and reaction the American establishment had to Trump was that he effectively called out them for what they were, shallow and contemptuous, morally bankrupt and not governing for the best of America but for special interest groups, often sharply aligned to their own financial and personal interests. In what previous generation could a prominent politician call wide swathes of American people names like deplorables and with all the implications that they were not fellow countrymen but a different species they not only didn't really understand, but didn't really want to be bothered with?
I am going off on a tangent somewhat from the fall of Afghanistan, but that the speed apparently caught the American intelligence and political leaders completely off guard and clearly without serious plans for the long term safe evacuation of people and supporters before any handover, is only yet another exhibit in the long term collapse of the capabilities and moral authority of America's ruling classes, both elected and non-elected. So that is why I am hardly surprised. I wasn't surprised because I knew it would end in this quagmire, 20 years ago, when Bush II first launched the invasion of Afghanistan. How or why would he succeed when the Russians and British had failed? I watched for 20 years as trillions were poured into the country ostensibly to rebuild its infrastructure, all by people and designed by people who fully believed that it was only a matter of time before the Taliban returned. It was always a lie, it was a lie everyone understood for a long time, but that we persisted with this lie for so long is only a testament to the failures of America's ruling classes. Yet again.
Yes, it's stunning to realize we're being ruled by a class of people who are this incompetent.
More corrupt than incompetent, but incompetent non-the-less.
never ascribe to conspiracy when simple incompetency will do
Close call, but I’m going with incompetent.
Yes, they are incompetent, but the supposedly most sophisticated military and administration in the history of the world having NO exit plan at all reeks of an agenda.
Stunning yes, surprising no. Sons of icons, sons of business icons, sons of politicians. You know what they say -- dont worry about taxing the subsequent generations of wealthy people, by the third generation they have squandered it all
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. The past 40 years demonstrate how the laws of plutocratic gravitation cause everything to bend around the interests of the wealthiest. They have armies of flunkies to invent ways for this to happen, e.g. framing estate taxes as 'death taxes'. It's the flunkies who spin stories purely about the plight of hard-working family farmers who can't leave the spread to their young'uns, when the estate taxes actually touch hardly anyone below an eight-figure net worth. The plutes themselves hardly have to lift a finger, much less the winners of the sperm lottery their trophy wives give birth to.
Stranger yet, that group is sharply divided in some respects, but neither of the prevailing leaders and majority factions on either side has shown any capability to forthrightly address the biggest problems we face.
And they never will because they aren't the least bit interested in addressing them. The only problems they will address are the ones that guarantee them voters (those dependent on the state or mesmerized by the CNN/MSNBC narrative readers) or money in their pockets (lobby interests).
Our bloated-beyond-recognition government is corrupt all the way up and down the ladder (those in power, not the minions), has no comprehension of what it's like to live in the real world, and has a collective subpar work ethic.
Can you imagine how long any of us would last in the business world if we worked at the pace of the government, didn't meet deadlines, didn't bother to even read documents that we distributed in the name of the company, made illogical or harmful decisions, looked the other way when informed of corruption, or expected to get paid back wages if we were furloughed because the company was bankrupt?
They ALL (every branch, every agency, every contractor) need to be sent home so that we could re-create the government that the founders envisioned--a government that does only those things that the states cannot do. It would suffice to have a small executive branch, a scaled-down justice department, and a legislative branch--ALL with only the benefits and privileges that the masses have.
All laws and regs should apply to everyone equally, including the government folks. We can throw out the thousands (or millions) of unneeded laws and regs, and keep the handful that serve the public interest per the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The only agencies needed are (1) a treasury department (receipts and payments at the federal level), (2) an internal affairs department (interstate roads, interstate transportation, essential infrastructure, food production, public aid, etc., and (3) an external affairs department (military, defense, diplomacy, international trade, passports, federal land, our borders, etc.). The states can handle everything else quite well.
Once the government is re-created, the laid-off employees could apply for a job and compete with other applicants based on merit. If they don't perform well on the job, they get laid off.
There you go...a bird's-eye view of how to begin to fix our broken country. Yeah, I know, just a bit (LOL) simplistic and unrealistic, but I can dream, can't I?
It's not a problem to them - only an opportunity.
"I hate to bring up Donald Trump, given how polarizing his name is, but one can trace the visceral hatred and reaction the American establishment had to Trump was that he effectively called out them for what they were, shallow and contemptuous, morally bankrupt and not governing for the best of America but for special interest groups, often sharply aligned to their own financial and personal interests."
One of the BEST explanations of the reasons I've ever seen! Great post, Thomas. Would you mind if I "steal" that explanation to post elsewhere?
Feel free. I'm not the first nor the last to make this observation.
Great comments-- it is always about protecting the elite. Period.
"that the speed apparently caught the American intelligence and political leaders completely off guard"
Well... the "intelligence and political leaders" who called this one correctly got fired, quit, and/or moved off to other jobs.
I think it's worthwhile to question why exactly policy moves in lockstep with ideology ("we must continue to occupy Afghanistan because we have always occupied Afghanistan") when the professionals -- military and intel -- on the ground keep telling the people in charge it's a loser and we need to get the fuck out.
The speed with which the buck was passed caught me off guard.
I have taken heat for this -- and I can lay plenty of other shit on Biden, deservedly -- but I don't think this one is on him. He wanted to GTFO as early as the "surge" year of 2010.
W. Bush and Obama are to blame for this. The peace deal was in the cooker for years; only Trump had the stones to pull the trigger on it.
The long-term strategic blunder is not on Biden — the short-term tactical blunder is however.
he doesn't have wits to think long term for a long term strategic blunder. He can only digest the next 75 seconds or so.
True, but Joe has to take the responsibility for the botched operation. I suggest he commit seppuku.
Joe should have committed seppuku like 40 years ago, according to me. While we're at it, can we get a citizenship waiver for Takashi Miike and elect him POTUS?
What I found interesting about Biden's speech yesterday, for anyone willing to listen, is that he addressed all the complaints we are seeing here today. He does not argue things went perfectly, but he does explain the decision making that led to the evacuation mess we see today, such as the request by the Afghan government to not withdraw all soft targets on day one to prevent a panic of government confidence. Obviously that was a bad call if you magically knew the entire country would collapse in 72 hours, but as he pointed out, that only confirmed the rightness of the decision to leave.
He said it best. What we are seeing is what we would have seen 5 years ago, and would have seen 5, 10, or 20 years from now.
Enjoy this everyone. I suspect it may be the last time I have anything good to say about President Biden.
@Areslent
Well, to be fair, "nobody" really *expected much out of Biden, save that he would serve as a "placeholder", and simply function as the "Un-Trump". So, for an old duffer we have been watching in elected office for 100 years, he really *has not been doing *that badly.
But this horse pucky with the "evacuation" came off like it *HAD been "honcho-ed" by Trump. Excuses be damned. If this whole mess is being "led" by a committee of incompetents, then let's admit *that. It could not have been more poorly handled if it had been run by a sleepy platoon of distracted kindergarteners.
Areslent
just now
In many ways Bill Clinton and Bush Sr. were responsible for this as well. They used the post cold war peace dividend to build military bases across the world, to include a base in Saudi Arabia to harass post Gulf War I Iraq.
In the end it all just an ongoing scam against the American people. They are all guilty, including Biden who used his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to get a Democratic majority Senate to Support the original 2002 resolution that sent us to Afghanistan.
Same "got fired, quit or moved on" and even worse is happening to anyone that dares question the forced vax right now
Spot on. Like I say, we need better elites. It seems our best and brightest are now siphoned off, after attending Groton and Harvard, to become financial capital whores. Quickest way to repay any school debt.
There used to be the idea that a moral wealthy man or woman, at a certain age, would go into public service. Many did. They were giving back to the system (capitalism) that made their wealth possible. Most of the so-called "wise men" of the US in the early 20th century were of this type:
Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under President Harry S Truman
Charles E. Bohlen, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the Philippines, and France
W. Averell Harriman, Special Envoy for President Franklin Roosevelt
George F. Kennan, Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, State Dept. Director of Policy Planning
Robert A. Lovett, Truman's Secretary of Defense
John J. McCloy, a War Department official and later U.S. High Commissioner for Germany.
There doesn't seem to be a system of noblesse oblige anymore--Jeff Bezos flies into space-- and I bet most people don't know that liberalism in the Democratic Party once served a healthy purpose in the capitalist system. Both these systems provided a safety valve. The poorer classes were given an extra scrap so that they wouldn't rise up and burn down the White House. It's a continuing process of what FDR really did: save capitalism in the U.S. The New Deal was a vaccine against socialism.
This is all obviously one guy's fault. And the identity of that one guy depends on your party affiliation.
This is everyone's fault. G.W. Bush & the neocon crowd got us into this pointless invasion, then we voted them back into office for a 2nd term. We voted Obama in, who doubled down on this nonsense, then we gave him a 2nd term. Trump tried to ramp this crap down a bit, so we ran him out of office post haste & installed the current Catastrophe in Chief. Now we have the inevitable denouement, which was guaranteed from the start. Our leaders are responsible for this. I'm responsible for this. You're responsible for this. Etc, etc, ad nauseum
You can blame W all you like -- where was Congress all of that time (and during the subsequent two administrations)?
And I agreed with Charlie Rangel on this, we should have had a draft. Would have stopped this adventurism cold, which was his point.
Congress was supporting the effort because war is always popular until the casualties start hitting home. With a draft in Vietnam, it hit everyone, with this war, it was focused on certain communities - blacks, Southern whites - who do not have much representation in the media.
This is another thing that has been true since time immemorial. Most countries use their most declasse individuals to fight their wars. The dregs of English society who populated Wellington's army at Waterloo was well-recorded. Ditto the Russian forces in the Napoleonic wars, the Roman armies at the end of the Republic and afterward, etc. Earlier Roman armies like the one Scipio Africanus led were composed of Roman farmers with wealthier cavalry, but that changed over time.
What you're saying about Vietnam is historically incorrect. During the draft, and before college deferments were canceled, the draft hit... blacks and poor whites. So no, it didn't hit everyone. Once college deferments were canceled and the draft did for a short time hit everyone - lo and behold, the Vietnam War immediately began to be wound down. A few years later the draft was canceled as well. Anything to prevent middle class white boys from being sent abroad to fight in unnecessary wars.
What inaccuracy is there? It's just what I said. The deferment system was an irrelevancy to the main point, that a widely distributed draft destroyed public support for the war, same as the draft during Korea did.
@shallowfocus
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that the U.S. *has no draft. Many people do, completely in error. The fact is that the U.S. presently has no ACTIVE draft. But ask any male turning 18 whether or not SSS (Selective Service System) LAW requires him, under penalty of full felony, to *register for with the SSS right up to this very day.
The U.S., therefore, has a presently "inactive" draft. However, let us not fool ourselves, if the "need arose" we are prepared to go from inactive draft to *active draft in less than 48 Hours. Now that women are making "inroads" into the Military Services, there have also been Legislative attempts to make *them susceptible to the draft as well. So far, without, success, but it is not an illogical position.
I'm not positive everyone registers for Selective Service, but I know when I went for a security clearance (~2001), it was like the third question on the list, and if I hadn't registered, I would have been denied until I did.
That's a distinction without a difference. There's de facto no draft in the US, and there isn't going to be:
"The effort to enforce Selective Service registration law was abandoned in 1986. Since then, no attempt to reinstate conscription has been able to attract much support in the legislature or among the public."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States
The war wasn't stopped to keep Sen. Dipshit's son safe. It was stopped because it had little political support in the US. Yes, it was when the coffins came home to the small towns that opinions changed.
Exactly. In the college deferment era, there was actually more support for the war among the boomer generation (then in their teens and twenties) than among their parents. The moment college deferments no longer existed, and middle class white boys were finally expected to fight and die in Vietnam, support for the war magically evaporated.
The Russians were serfs I wouldn't call them dregs,
From the Tsar's point of view?
They didn't have a choice.
Some of us were yelling at everybody to pay attention to Ron Paul, who was telling you exactly how it was going to go down........
"Paul voted with the majority for the original Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists in Afghanistan."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul
That was the AUMF being sold simultaneously as both a quick in and out raid and an open-ended justification to do everything else Anti-Terrorist, forever.
I think only one Congressperson read the fine print.
To get Bin Laden because he attacked us. Once that was done we had no business there, and had no business nation building at any time. He also voted against the other War on Terror bills.
Once that was done? The wars started in 2011. Bin Laden was killed in 2011. So you're saying that Paul supported the wars "only" for a full decade? Amazing.
You can and you should. This mess is in that administration's hands. Afghanistan was the wrong country; bin Laden wasn't even there. There is also significant blame to lay on Reagan's CIA who created and trained the Taliban.
GEN Tommy Franks wanted the Army to have the glory of killing OBL and that was how OBL escaped Tora Bora. Even still, that's not the reason we ended up sticking around and trying to nation-build.
The Afghanistan mission was presented by various media talking heads and official spokespeople by turns- as a fast snatch-and-grab of Osama, or as long-term nation-building. And the American audience was invited to pick whichever rationale they preferred.
"the American audience was invited to pick whichever rationale they preferred"
...to the extent to which they paid attention, which wasn't vastly.
Thank you for your service! Would you like to know more?
It's all their fault, ANYONE in government, elected or hired. We never wanted this but when does it matter what the citizens want.
You can't vote against the perpetual war and expect success. Try it and see.
Somehow the pacifist Trump voters are the saddest of all to me. I don't mean "pathetic" in a derogatory sense at all -- I think that they are well-meaning people who expected him to deliver on campaign promises he clearly did not deliver on. The Pentagon is a tough nut to crack -- in the bon mot of the people who work there, "a self-licking ice-cream cone."
Donald Trump tried...and tried...and tried to deliver on his campaign promises but the entire deep state hated his guts for trying and threw everything they could think of or fabricate against him to thwart his efforts. The man has my deepest respect and admiration for standing tall and continuing to fight for the America and American people he loved.
Trump had it in his power to cashier any General (or appointee) that thwarted him; he had plenty to choose from. What he lacked was the spine (or balls) to follow through.
It would have been better if he had no loved ones for the cabal to target and destroy if he had. Fine line to walk there, for sure.
So the cabal was going to target and destroy Trump's loved ones? Interesting. Which loved ones? Destroy how? When did this all happen? And why didn't it happen? Is there any tangible proof for any of this? Do we know whether the cabal threatened previous presidents and their loved ones? Or even Biden and his loved ones? Also, if Trump was aware of the cabal before the 2016 election, why did he even run in the first place? And if he was brave enough not to be intimidated by the cabal, why did he do so little while in office?
Really? Look what happened with Comey
The permanent government is made up of the financiers like Goldman Sachs, and big business, including the military industrial complex, and the intelligence services. The rest of it is just playing musical chairs with Congress, the president, etc.
The people we elect serve the permanent government, or are quickly shown they will have no career without doing so. We only choose the people who have almost no power to change anything. The permanent government is not elected, of course. It is there, term after term.
What the establishment wants in politicians is simply people who will act as courtiers to those members of the permanent government, and keep the money flowing in the right direction. Trump was deemed too erratic to do this. He was an unknown, un-vetted by the keepers of the orthodoxy of the elite. That's why the horror at his election.
Funny how the deep state didn't put up a fight when Trump passed things that Republicans want (like tax cuts) but fought him tooth and nail when he tried to pass things that Democrats want (infrastructure, better health care). It's almost as if this deep state is a pro-Republican and anti-Democrat deep state.
Your name says it all.
Hey, I think it/she/he has had some good things to say. I'm not the master genius of all time and I don't run things around here, but a rule of thumb that has served me well is that when you engage in ad hominem, you're losing.
This comment section would be incredibly boring if we ran all dissenters out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered. First of all, we would be suffering a deficit of tar and feathers.
I"m no fan of Trump, but the intelligence services, in coordination with the Democratic Party, undermined him from Day 1. As if that isn't horror enough (think about it: the CIA trying to run the U.S. like it was El Salvador), the Democrats then convinced millions he was a Russian agent. Instead of, you know, trying to figure out why they lost.
Again, you're assuming that this "horror" somehow only existed during the Trump presidency. If the deep state magically appeared on the day Trump was elected, how did it ever burrow, uh, deep enough to become the deep state? It makes zero sense. So either the deep state has always existed and has always run the US like it was El Salvador *and is still running the US like it was El Salvador* - or the deep state is just a silly fairytale that conspiracy theorists tell their grandchildren. Take your pick.
Or maybe this deep state has certain values that are antithetical to the postures Democrats make.
Polls show the current rank and file of Democrats love the deep state, while the GOP are against them. This is a complete flip from the 1960s. I think the Democrats know who their friends are.
So the deep state's are antithetical to the Democrats' values but align perfectly with the Republicans' values? Well yes, that's exactly what I tried to say. The deep state is deeply Republican.
True facts right here. Ron Paul was anti-war and labeled a crazy. Tusli Gabbard is anti-war and is called a RUSSIAN ASSET!
Ron Paul voted for the war in 2001, just like everyone else. The only one who voted against it was Barbara Lee.
The war on terror was a lot more than authorization to get Bin Laden.
This withdrawal/collapse was created by Trump. Absent him, we'd still be expending corpses in Afghanistan with no end in sight.
Oh, bullshit.
Who signed the agreement? Who set the date for May? Who extended the date and now looks like an asshole?
Who canceled the Keystone pipeline immediately upon assuming office? Who canceled the boarder wall ASAP as well? And Biden somehow couldn’t take a different action on a FP decision as every other President has done when they didn’t alike their predecessors deals and plans? Now who looks like an asshole? Your TDS is no longer covering your behind here.
I don't understand what you mean here. Trump kissed the ass of Kim Jong-Un, Putin, Erdogan, the Taliban, basically everyone that the security state would have fought gladly. No one thinks ass-kissing is good, but I got my vote's worth out of him. He ended the Afghan war, finally. True, he didn't do it in a triumphalist way, but he did do it in a way that was really hard to undo. In the end, Biden blinked.
And oh by the way, I give Biden credit for blinking in the end. He could have sent brigades in and fought it out, but he said 'fuck no' to that, I presume.
Actually it's exactly what the citizens want. Remember the 2004 election? It was the only election in the last few decades when the Republican president won the popular vote. And why? Because the voters overwhelmingly supported Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In early 2002, public support for invading Afghanistan and going to war with Iraq was over 80%. It was nauseating how people lined up behind the MSM to support it. (Much like a current soon to be catastrophic situation that we are in, only this time the sheep have actually offered themselves and their children up to the sacrificial, “experimental” altar.) I guess next, the American people will be pouring gasoline over themselves and lighting a match. Cult USA.
You are spot-on, Candis.
It is horrifying how QUICKLY, WILLINGLY, and EAGERLY millions of people will UNQUESTIONINGLY do what a person identified as an "expert" tells them to do.
In an era when people are neither educated to think for themselves nor encouraged to do their own research, people have become intellectually lazy; hence, "experts," media news readers, and bureaucrats become demigods to be unquestioningly believed and followed obediently.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised...Hitler demonstrated that phenomenon in 1930s Germany. During the economically difficult times in Germany, it took a very short time to create the mass hysteria and Hitler worship that swept over Germany with devastating results.
(NO, I'm NOT comparing today's situation to the Holocaust--I'm comparing how easy it has been to whip up mass hysteria and obedience.)
LOL, you people
I said it above but people in general always support war until the casualties start biting. It's the patriotic thing to do, after all. If they think the war has a point, the casualties won't be as much of a deterrent, but this thing never had much point.
@HBI
Which is why the American public was prevented from seeing the coffins coming back from W's Iraq war.
I personally found the most heartbreaking thing was seeing the effect being a CAO had on the NCOs I knew.
In other words, you can't hide it from everyone.
Except, there are plenty of Americans who thought they would (and wanted to) see a Hiroshima ending, not the copout that played out.
You mean, like, the XBox version of Hiroshima of American adolescent video gamer fantasies. You know, gather all of those Talibans into a five square mile area, and then- NUKE!
A-bombs would be just the ticket for the limestone geography and underground aquifer of Afghanistan, no doubt. As long as you don't live on the same planet.
You're probably right that a lot of Americans would prefer that outcome to "the copout".
@publius_x
That is because *far too many people are ignorant of the fact that a "Hiroshima" ending is no longer possible. We don't *make nukes that small anymore. With micro-circuitry, a bomb equal in power to that used in Hiroshima could be made the size of a baseball and left on any park bench. The Hiroshima bomb was a small H Bomb.
We don't have anything that "restricted" in power in the era of A-Bombs.
We didn't even know about what our own nukes would do that had very little to do with size and power. It was not until the 1990s that Carl Sagan introduced us to "Nuclear Winter". The concept that even during an exchange using *small (at that time) nuclear weapons, the detritus *alone kicked up by such weapons would BLOCK OUT THE SUN for at least 30 days. Imagine what world *crops would look like after 30 days without the Sun. Recognize, also that weather circumnavigates the Globe. We cannot A-bomb one place, without having that radiation carried by the weather, blowing right back around into our *own faces ! This is what Sagan called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Even Reagan got on board with that idea. I worked with these weapons during the Vietnam War, and I can tell you that when I got out in 1971, the U.S. had no CLUE about the scientific "points" Sagan made about the insanity of these weapons in the Nineties.
The point is, they don’t think. They let the ‘Wizards’ do their thinking for them.
@Candis
Yes. The combination of first being *woefully uniformed, and the active state of NOT thinking on top of THAT, is the reason that we don't want people who cannot comprehend nuclear weapons (like Trump, who wanted to know, since we put so much money into nukes, why don't we *use them more often) to have access to the nuclear release codes.
Our citizens are so dumbed down and conditioned to unquestioningly believe anything the corporate media or elites tell them, that most of them are voting for only a familiar name or a "pretty" face and nothing else.
Most citizens get their news from FaceBook. God help us.
And so do you, probably. If you have to actually say "Independent Thinker," it's most likely not true. But you can aspire to it.
"Because the voters overwhelmingly supported Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Don't forget the voter support for state-sanctioned torture. Ooooohh yeah. Fun country.
I'm not here to defend John Kerry's entire political record, but the trashing of a guy who actually went to Vietnam as opposed to a guy who couldn't show up for his ANG duties was pretty wild. It worked.
Kerry was kind of a douchebag who hurt himself more than anyone else did. If he'd been a little more circumspect about the things he said coming back to the US after his time in Vietnam, he would have had less trouble later. He had to know that whatever he said or did, the Vietnam thing was going to follow its own trajectory. At least, he should have known.
@HBI
Kerry, as a Skipper of a River Patrol boat, was doing one of the *MOST dangerous jobs *open to a Naval Officer in Vietnam, present day armchair generals aside. What he did and said coming back from Vietnam took more *STONES than the Establishment could handle,
but it all HAD to be said.
Ending the Vietnam War was not *about "go along to get along" with the Establishment.
The only place Kerry ever failed, was when he did *not produce his Naval Combat War Record as a silent rebuttal to the "Swift Boat" hyenas coming after his military service. But, apparently, he was just too much a patrician to get down in the "mud, the blood and the beer" with the "Swift Boaters". Pity that. Don't run for the office if you can't maneuver with the opposition.
Far from being a "douchebag", Kerry was an *officer willing to tell the *Establishment where they could "put it". With 58,000 American *dead to represent, the Establishment needed to HEAR what Kerry had to say, whether they were willing to "applaud it" or not !
He comes off as a douchebag. This isn't about anything in particular he said, it's about his general demeanor.
Apparently he rubbed his fellows in the Navy the wrong way or they wouldn't have stood up and shat all over him during 2004.
Do you really think Kerry shortened the war with what he said and did? I doubt it. The war wasn't going to end until Nixon found a way to do it that protected him politically.
That, and the windsurfing video, and the flying private on Ms. Ketchup's dime... lots of stuff not to like.
He also played hockey at the time. An image of him playing hockey, a non-homosexual sport for regular guys, may have improved his "image." There was no hockey picture.
My respect for Kerry has actually grown some over the years.
I'm aware of his many shortcomings and understand why he is disliked, but I don't think he gets enough credit for things like looking into the the connection between the CIA and selling crack in LA during the 1980's (his senate investigation was in 1986). His hearing landed like a thud. No one in the media wanted to pick it up. I think it scarred him and he gave up investigating 3 letter agencies after that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Committee_report
Findings
The Kerry Committee report found that "the Contra drug links included... Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."[5]
"My respect for Kerry has actually grown some over the years."
Same. He's in the system, of course, and is not going to defy its boundaries.
I thought he was a far better Secretary of State than HRC -- not that that's a high bar.
Ya, Hillary had all the foreign intervention courage of a diplomat who had never been shot at. For all his other failures, Kerry did not suffer from that.
Yup you elect who mirrors you-- are you swayed by tax cuts -- then there is a man, are you swayed by patriotism--then there is a man. Its a reflection of the people. Everywhere this is the case-- just really obvious in the US
On polling-day---unless, of course, the electoral processes are defrauded, in which case it doesn't matter even on election-days.
"A republic, madam---if you can keep it." (attributed to Benj. Franklin, delegate)
As long as we have Citizens United citizens will have no voice. Only corporations will get what they want.
Well, yes. This is a feature of American "democracy", not a bug.
Obviously not. There is a lot of blame to go around. The Biden administration biggest error was in execution. They should have secured our people and our material (weapons)
Yeah, well..I’m certain they had their reasons for not lifting a finger to do the most OBVIOUS thing in the world.
They were hoping against hope that someone would find an excuse to keep fighting there. That's why the date extension and such. Figured they could extend it indefinitely, but they didn't count on the Taliban being so...effective.
not true. Bush and Cheney are two guys.
And Obama and Biden are two more guys.
And Susan Rice and Samantha Power are two gals.
Rice and Power in a foxhole together would make for a riotous sitcom on the order of M*A*S*H. I want Armando Iannucci directing it. "Oh, shit, a grenade! what do we DO with it?!"
Except Susan would deny it was a grenade, and claim it was a video.
Don't forget: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle make a third and fourth gal.
And Caitlyn Jenner makes a... wait a minute.. is this the Newsom Recall thread?
Dunno how much Michelle actually has to do with any of it. But i've been naive before.
At least because of VJ I can sleep peacefully at night knowing Iran stopped developing nukes.
As someone who lived through the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, almost 20 years ago I told my uber-patriotic 'we are the United States of America, we can do whatever the hell we want' friends, this what it would end up like. One thing I was wrong about - I thought it would happen much sooner than 20 years.
Afghanistan - the place that empires go to die.
I can only hope this one collapses. Maybe whatever rises from the ashes will be better.
it will not be pretty either...
It's not pretty right now.
Indeed. THe koshmar is deep, but not at the bottom yet.
I'm a benthic feeder. The bottom is my whole world.
You made me look up a word. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
C'mon man! Who would you rather be crushed to death under Air Force transport plane tires, Afghans, or "Our Boys?"
Are you talking about the US?
yes, of course.
Yes
Not only _will_ it not be pretty, it has already started not being pretty. One is reminded of the proverb about being careful what you wish for.
Every day, WB Yeats' words feel more prophetic.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
Ending wars is always a lot tougher than starting them. As bad as we are at ending them, one would think we would try harder to avoid them.
Why it is one of your major industries-- HUGE money maker? and if you can get some oil or other resource from the country you are invading even better.
Hey, the Canadians were in on this one for a long-ass time. Kanadahar! Bruce Cockburn even paid a visit.
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2020/09/21/dont-try-to-give-bruce-cockburn-a-rocket-launcher-its-been-tried-three-times.html
Oh I know! My plumber was in Kandahar. The stories I heard and the PTSD I see in him. Just another example of our federal govt ass kissing the US-- we get a few contracts thrown our way-- so disgusting. All so their buddies get more money and my plumber Dario gets a broken marriage, nightmares and on meds the rest of his life-- and he got off easy!
To your point... at least he ain't in Kandahar any more.
@Koshmarov
First guy: "Hey ! Why are you pounding on your hand with that
hammer ?
Second guy: "Because it feels *so good when I QUIT !
Clearly, the damage done to the man in Kandahar has been carried home with him for life.
He's not the only one.
1. Our Foreign Policy Establishment needs to be gutted and filled with people who have common sense, humility and some sense of honor.
2. Our Intel Community needs to be gutted and better regulated and kept on a tight leash. Everything they say needs to be taken with a very serious grain of salt. They are better at spying on us than gaining intel from across the globe.
3. We need to really really rein in the military industrial complex and its influence on our politicians.
4. Our civilian leaders need to be more like Lincoln and challenge our military leaders. Congress needs to stop cozzying up to generals and colonels and start demanding honest answers and then they need to listen to those honest answers.
5. We need to find some way of cutting off the rotating of intel and defense personnel from government service to corporations and then back again.
You need to realize none of this will ever happen. Government is a mechanism for consolidating power and wealth among an elite few. Too many people don't understand what the government/state is and isn't. This will help:
https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state
The problem with getting rid of the state is that many people seem to want governments and the state and the other entities it creates to continue. Thus far, outside of a few anarchocommunists living in the woods, there are not a whole lot of alternative examples for them to see. Of course, there are lots of theories, but ideas are cheap.
Getting rid of the state isn't the solution. It's diving the state into say - oh I don't know - let's say 50 of them. This preserves the nation as a whole when one or more of them inevitably go tyrannical or financially bust. Meanwhile the citizens always have an alternative to which they can escape to without much trouble. I really don't understand why Federalism isn't championed more.
Federalism got a bad name when the southern States abused the principle to keep black people on the plantation, following Reconstruction.
Beyond that, the "Federalism" of the US is not like anyone else's federalism; our 50 states range in size from Delaware to Alaska, and vary in population from Wyoming (.581 million) to California (39.6 million).
I'd welcome a constitutional convention that re-mapped polities more rationally. But it isn't anything to be done under the current circumstances- which, I fear, are showing up the gross deficiencies in the American educational system, and the anti-intellectual character of the US as a society.
actually Rhode Island, not Delaware...but my point can be easily seen on a map.
Less easily seen in on most maps: the reality that Alaska is the size of Texas and California combined.
For Federalism to work, Americans would need to allow some people to make choices they may not agree with. We have built an entire police state with the largest prison system in the world to ensure that never happens.
Another source for this, and a very good and entertaining writer, is Bill Bonner’s Daily Diary. A “degenerate empire” is how he describes the USA. For a while, that bothered me. Unfortunately I’ve come to see the truth in it. Too many termites in the governmental structure.
PS. Today’s topic-“The Trash-heap Of Empires
Emphasis on humility.
"Our Intel Community needs to be gutted and better regulated and kept on a tight leash."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625738.Fixing_Intelligence
Former NSA director. Good dude. Good book. He's dead.
Except the structure they all work within in corrupt and held together by tape. Time for the regional models .
Last week, for no particular reason, I google mapped A Shau valley, the site of my last operation in Vietnam in late summer 1968 with the 101st, called "Summerset Plain."
We were on a firebase on the east rim of the valley at least two weeks before the ground assault began, one company of infantry, one battery of artillery and me as the artillery spotter. There were nearly daily B-52 runs, fire from 16" guns off the coast of Hue, Puff the Magic Dragon paid nightly visits and the whole valley floor was basically bomb crater inside bomb crater, and while we did get artillery fire from the NVA and occasional ground probes, it was obvious they saw what was coming and were leaving for the time being, being content to fuck with us as they felt like it, dawn revealing their favorite trick; our claymores turned 180, now facing us.
It was their country, and eventually, they knew we would leave.
So, looking at the valley today, the first thing I said out loud, was, "That's not the A Shau", because what I saw was roads, villages, and restaurants, hotels, markets, etc. all with reviews, and even a tourist site for Hamburger Hill, another pointless battle fought a couple years after I left, and not a single sign of the destruction we had brought to it.
How could this be, I thought, it must be wrong, and then I backed out of the valley, going east and sure enough, there was the ocean, there was Hue, and my dumb American brain finally saw the truth; that was the A Shau, the illusion was us there 52 years ago, the Vietnamese were the reality, just as surely as we are our own reality in this country, a place we should stay and tend to its many serious problems.
Anyone who was in real combat in Vietnam and was honest about what they experienced, knew this would happen; we would eventually lose because the government we were backing was corrupt and had no real support, that trying to defeat a force composed of people who live there and who have some level of support greater than that of the government, and who would fight us where and when and even if they wanted, could not lose, because at some time, either now or 5 years or 500, we would leave and they would remain, and when that happened, the advocates of the war would rush in and blame everyone but themselves for it, and be given endless air time by our worthless media. Once again, the lives of US military, and especially of the people in those countries we invaded, would become political footballs, useful only for scoring points.
We have been done in by our own hubris and lack of accountability. After Gulf War I, the US loudly proclaimed we had discovered the secret to winning wars lickety split; the combination of high technology, maximum firepower effectively concentrated and rapid speed was the answer, we were told, but the reality was we had met an enemy stupid enough to be positioned in open desert, in static positions, with no air cover. To find such an enemy a second time is beyond being lucky, as the last 19 1/2 years of utter futility have shown.
It's too bad Donald Rumsfeld didn't live to see this, but it's comforting to know those two Vietnam draft dodgers, one of them now a hero to the establishment Dems, who started these wars and the rest of the D.C. elite are still alive to do so. My hope is the Taliban erects a Mission Accomplished banner in Kabul; that would be a fitting end to these last nearly 20 years of utter stupidity and venality.
How fitting that all this can be traced to our 1980's attempt to give the USSR its own Vietnam in Afghanistan and did so, only to culminate in giving us our second.
Can we please throw all the bums out and start voting for parties that do not give us one catastrophe after another?
It's sad to say, but I don't think it matters. It's the entrenched elite that dictate. Anyone that makes it to higher levels of politics is immediately ensconced by them, and those former peons now feel special to be a member of that crowd, and be rubbing elbows with billionaires. They see a great future in it, and they don't want to lose it. I think it's a human thing, and it's unavoidable. However, they don't want to betray their principles so they justify.
An example would be a politician speaking out about climate change and at the same time taking money from Exxon. They will say things like, "Yes, I took money from them, but Exxon cannot tell me what to do with that money. I will do great things with that money." But the bottom line is that unless the Pol does Exxon's bidding, they won't get any more money. The Pol knows this, but it's unspoken, so they can deceive themselves into believing their own BS.
Is there really a way to fix that system? I don't see it, and frankly, with Court decisions like Citizens United, it gets further and further out of reach.
There's a reason many people didn't give money to Ron Paul. He would spend it on whatever he wanted and then tell them to fuck off. ;)
@SimulationCommander
Now that's what *I call a "representative" ! ;-D
@michael t nola
Isn't it amazing how quickly jungles can cover over all sins and indiscretions of humans so quickly as to appear that they never happened at all ?
I apologize for the digression, but this reminds me of some lines from David Mamet's movie SPARTAN (2004):
In the city, always a reflection.
In the woods, always a sound.
What about the desert?
You don't want to go in the desert.
When I was there in 1968(it was 53 years ago, not 52: I'm an old man and sometimes forget what year I'm in!), it wasn't just the natural environment that was so different, it was the total lack of any sign of previous human habitation, other than an abandoned Special Forces camp, triangular shaped, that was directly below us in the valley floor. This place was way out in the boonies, very near Laos, and to my arrogant American eyes, I just couldn't conceive of anyone ever living there, so to see what the Vietnamese had done to it just wasn't within what I could grasp.
Simply put, it was a free fire zone; if something moved it was going to draw our fire.
Yes, you're right; our efforts in this world, the good and in this case, bad, are, for all their horror, insignificant to this living planet. As much damage as we do to it, it will eventually far outlive us. This reality is hard for people to accept, especially for those running this country, one they consider exceptional, which in their minds, is really just in reference to themselves.
My strongest wish is that we learn from all these attempts to remake the world in our image, to accept other peoples' right to live as they please, to accept some humility and realize we have neither the right or even capability to control a planet that yearly grows less inclined to be reshaped as we see fit.