Watching President Joe Biden extract the West from a place it never should’ve implanted a lasting footprint into reminds of how my father’s generation would’ve solved a crap situation.
Like President Biden, a man who came a generation later than father, though like me imprinted by such men, father would’ve assessed our Afghanistan blunder in the same manner. Joe clearly recognized there was only sacrificing and squandering Americans in Afghanistan. However, there was no winning there. Like the aforementioned figures, Joe rightly declared, “Enough of this shit!”
Wasn’t that the mantra of combatants who won World War II?
After the failure Vietnam became, Dwight Eisenhower’s prescient words should’ve become the sort of guiding principle chiseled into minds, much less walls: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
Ike’s view, that posture, is why a majority of Americans gladly approve of our departure from Afghanistan. Our 20-year stay in the South Asian nation personified hubris itself. And American hubris is worse than other nations’ because, well, we’re so chocked full of virtue.
Don’t believe me? Just watch, listen, or read right-wingers who daily, hourly spume patent falsehoods and divisiveness across social media, over the ether and television airwaves.
Agreed. Our Afghan departure has been sloppy. That, and reactionary-bent reportage has been ahead of the facts. Really, though, is there any smooth way to straighten out a 52-Card Pick-Up?
Thousands of Americans have been safely evacuated from the beleaguered nation. Much of the military equipment left for what might have been the Afghan defense force had it fought is inoperable because Taliban know-how has more in common with Stone Age spearchuckers than 21st century warfare. Moreover, lurking behind the Taliban’s is ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and teh Levant). Unhinged Islamic radicals as both groups are, ISIL is on a even berserker path than Afghanistan’s presumed returned masters.
Yet let’s refer to who negotiated the terms of our bugging out. Donald Trump. Der Trump. The short-fingered vulgarian. The real estate fraud. The vile pig. And, finally as Bad Vlad and his Kremlin Krew laughingly refer to this American traitor, the illegitimate 45th President of the United States, Fat Puppy.
In settling the nebulous situation Afghanistan had become, the West has operated under terms agreed to by the least capable man ever to soil the Oval Office. That includes Presidents Pierce and Buchanan. Their drunkenness and indecisiveness, respectively, as well as utter lack of resolve only precipitated the division which threatened United States unity through civil war. Joe’s immediate predecessor would’ve delivered worse if he’d been able to steal the 2020 Election.
If Fat Puppy thought the deal lucrative enough for himself, he would’ve sold out the United States to the Russians. Not the Chinese because although money is green, the Chinese are Asians. The real estate fraud respects white men. He regards non-whites on a scale that slides lower. And despite the clear global advances the Chinese have achieved, the short-fingered vulgarian sees them as nothing other than restauranteurs and laundry owners.
Two professions that don’t threaten weak Anglos.
Our whole Levant, South Asian misadventures have been propelled by dumb, loud, belligerents. If it hadn’t been for Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and 9/11 be sure that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as well as the modern-day Daddy Warbucks clamoring for war – Anywhere! Against anybody! – would’ve invented some way to mire the West in the same tar we’ve sunk in for nearly two decades.
The 9/11 attacks provided the biggest, easiest invitation to express no-holds barred American righteousness since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Simpler as those Americans were in 1941, at least they had solid grasps of right and wrong. These days, almost half of all Americans are so stupid that though their eyes can distinguish red from blue, enough incessant persuasion from recognized liars and traitors can make drooling, mouth-breathing, knuckle-draggers see blue as red.
These days, they’re best known for hindering Covid containment and remedy. Cutting their own throats is the sheep drench mob’s choice. Incensed the sane among us refuse following them off cliffs, they declare smashing against the rocks below the true cure for the otherwise Covid hoax.
Okay. Let’s agree. For them it is the only cure to what afflicts them. Reasonable people should gladly step aside and let them self-medicate.
Until this month, like most Americans, I too have let our Iraq and Afghanistan involvements recede from attention. Face it, unless you have relatives, friends who’ve chosen to serve the United States, you’ve pretty much brushed off any news from wherever the hell it is.
I admit when my contemporaries who fulfilled commitments or made military careers finally aged out, my interest faded. Yet here we all are a generation later. Today, some of their sons and daughters, some of their grandchildren – grandchildren!? – are carrying the standard, bearing burdens born of mere profit-making/profit-taking caprice.
Although my apprehension regarding the safety of another generation of deployed personnel is nowhere near as intense as it was for their parents, my contemporaries, maybe even now their grandparents – grandparents!? – the years have not instilled the indifference of those who’ve sent strangers to possibly sacrifice themselves for, uh, what was it again? Revenge. Justice? (No. One may speak of justice, but used with the bunch who originally dispatched this nation’s troops under fabricated pretenses mentioning “justice” sullies the concept.) Glory? Honor? Fatten arms manufacturers’ profits until the bottom-line bloats?
That last suggestion bangs the right gong, no?
Those Americans upset Joe Biden is withdrawing our long-overstayed presence from Afghanistan are displeased for all the wrong reasons. They’ve been misled into believing American removal somehow diminishes United States prestige. They never question what number of needlessly injured and killed personnel yields what measure of intangible prestige. This audience has been lied to so steadily, so blatantly, they’ve accustomed themselves to swallowing all kinds of self-debilitating poison.
The short-fingered vulgarian negotiated this agreement. Both the West and the Taliban have abided by it to the letter. Although both sides kept their word, plenty of misguided Americans saw treachery in such adherence. Well, at least on our side. Left to them, they would’ve liked seeing this present administration treat the Taliban as 19th century ones did our portion of North America’s indigenous peoples insofar as treaties.
Then, if agreed-to conditions inconvenienced the Manifest Destiny pioneers the “Great White Fathers in Washington” ignored the terms. Authorities of that era exterminated the Indians who didn’t kowtow and shuffle along. By the way, that’s one solid historical fact to be learned through teaching critical race theory.
George Armstrong Custer is revered … until one discovers why he and his troops were dispatched into being rightfully slaughtered. American history is full of Custers. Nearly all of whom are esteemed for un-American reasons.
If reactionaries must find fault with our Afghanistan departure, blame Biden for reducing conditions that might’ve created new Custers.