One of my favorite websites for news review and reporting
Results of voter polls near elections. They post almost every day and have interesting question and answer posts. They say they are neutral but seem to lean D overall (how could you not from the last 4 years)
https://electoral-vote.com/
Today- snip:
The Blame Game Heats Up
John F. Kennedy once said: "Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan." With the Afghanistan fiasco, it is slightly different. In real time, only one person in Congress—Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) who represents Berkeley and Oakland—voted against invading Afghanistan, saying it was a bad idea. She was called a traitor. Now dozens, if not hundreds, of people are busy explaining why it was a bad idea and not their fault.
Let's start with Condoleezza Rice. It was very much her fault because she was George W. Bush's National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005 and the person he most trusted on foreign affairs, an area about which he knew nothing. To start with, she knew about the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief entitled: "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S." and didn't alert Bush to its importance or urge him to take action. After the 9/11 attacks, she was fully on board with invading Afghanistan. She now senses that maybe she is not going to come out of this smelling like roses, so she wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post explaining why the withdrawal was a bad idea. In it, she pointed out that the U.S. invaded Korea in June 1950. Fast forward 71 years, and the U.S. still has 28,000 troops there. In other words, if the U.S. had the guts, it would have kept troops in Afghanistan another 50 years and it would have become a stable democracy selling us smartphones and television sets and A-Pop music. These things take time.
Also chiming in is Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). She said: "This has been an epic failure across the board, one we're going to pay for years to come." She blamed Joe Biden and Donald Trump. She said nary a word about dad (Dick Cheney), one of the strongest voices in favor of invading Afghanistan in 2001. At the time he was the vice president and had Bush's ear all the time. If Rice and Cheney had told Bush: "No way we can win a war in that godforsaken backward medieval country," he would almost certainly not have invaded.
Now onto the present. Who screwed up? NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg put the blame on the Afghan government. he said: "Ultimately, the Afghan political leadership failed to stand up to the Taliban and achieve the peaceful solution that Afghans desperately wanted." That's true, but omits the fact that the trying to turn a country that was living in the 8th Century into a modern democracy was probably never going to work, especially not when led by a corrupt government propped up by the U.S. and unable to stand on its own two feet despite almost $150 billion in aid from the U.S.
Now let's take a look at folks who might actually have a better idea of what went wrong. Yesterday, we briefly mentioned the report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Earlier this month (but just before the collapse there had become total), IG John Sopko, issued a report entitled: "What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction." The report is not classified, so Congress and the American people can get the truth from an office that has been looking closely at the war for 20 years and which interviewed over 700 people in the country. SIGAR was created by Congress to investigate the entire Afghanistan mission. In 2014 it began working on its "lessons learned" program. Here are the main points in the report:
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