Who actually started the Afghan war -- and who'd like you to forget it
The neoconservatives who launched the war in Afghanistan would very much like you to know the wars ignominious ending is someone else's fault.
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote a piece titled, Afghanistan Is Your Fault, saying the loss of the war should be blamed on American voters. Former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum said we could have won the war in Afghanistan with this one little trick (namely killing Osama bin Laden in December 2001 instead of May 2011). Eliot A. Cohen a founder of the infamous neoconservative group Project for the New American Century said now was a time for for meticulous soul-searching that is without recrimination.
But very few people in American history are as due for recriminations as the neoconservative cabal in then-President George W. Bush's administration who drove us heedlessly into decades-long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sober analysts at the time made clear that remaking Iraq and the graveyard of empires into Western-friendly, capitalist, liberal democracies was a fools errand.
As we evaluate the failures of those efforts today, we must recognize the problem was not in the execution of the wars, or the withdrawals, but in the very idea of committing American lives and wealth to forcibly rebuilding nations across the globe to fit neoconservatives' vision of society. Their hubris and greed cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and did more to diminish American power than our stated adversaries ever could.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/afghanistan-war-neocons-george-w-bush-would-you-know-isn-ncna1277267
raging moderate
(4,280 posts)Last edited Tue Sep 7, 2021, 05:16 PM - Edit history (1)
I remember one West Wing episode about policy decisions after a fictitious attack by a fictitious mideast terrorist group. Somebody suggests large-scale invasions of several mideast countries, but the West Wing President points out how counterproductive and potentially tragic that would be, especially in the case of countries that did not send any of the attackers.
SheltieLover
(57,073 posts)Me.
(35,454 posts)NoMoreRepugs
(9,257 posts)in profits generated for the USWar Industry will help fund the RePutinicans for decades.
marble falls
(56,357 posts)is getting us out.