THE MEDIA CERTAINLY HAS SUCKERED the American People into believing that the military could solve all of our problems. Heroic war movies and TV shows, generally filled with people who never were in the military and fewer who actually were in fighting, have trained the American People to sending other peoples' children and family members into harms way to try to accomplish any purpose that the governing elite or the elite in the media want to do that for. It was certainly done in the tabloid media fueled Spanish American War a hundred-twenty years ago, in numerous smaller incursions, in Vietnam, in Iraq during Bush I and again in Bush II, with the most dubious of justifications - and lest anyone forget, in Bush I by his ambassador to Iraq giving tacit permission for him to invade Kuwait.
The cases of the war in Afghanistan and American involvement in WWII were different, both of those started with a foreign attack on the U. S. We certainly know that the response to the 9-11 attack was unwise in the extreme and extremely so. The 20 years of people being killed, maimed and bereaved, Afghani, those among our allies who we asked to invade with us, Americans, ignored the knowledge of those who warned that Afghanistan was bound to lead to a long, futile war which was hardly likely to change anything. That "country" is a disaster that is one of the better examples of why anarchism and power exerted to that extent on a local level will, in fact, lead to rule by gangsters. That was the experience of the most powerful militarires in the world when they were sent by their rulers to change the place, America just takes its place in the list of great powers which were diminished and damaged by doing that first resort of the powerful without skin on the line, children on the line, figure you are going to change people who don't want to be changed for the most part.
The media, more than any other entity in the United States is what sold us this disaster twenty years ago, just as it had peddled the originally unpopular Bush I Gulf War if its own making. And no part of the media was more influential in that than the 24-7 cabloid networks - the tabloid smut king Murdoch's, but also and in no way insignificantly, CNN and the MSNBC of the day*.
Now, as always, in American politics, it seems that it is left for a Democratic President to take the blame for the inevitable disaster that was wrought by Bush II and Dick Cheney - a war which, like all disastrous American wars is a hell of a lot harder to get out of than to bluster into. And it wasn't even Biden's decision to end America propping up the crooks and gangsters who were the "Afghan government", that was ended with Trump's negotiation WITH THE TALIBAN,
It was Trump and his team led by Pompeo who set the actual end for not during his term but that of his successor.
The next years in Afghanistan will be a humanitarian, political, regional and world disaster. And the groundwork of it was laid long, long ago because Afghanistan is not really a country, it is an ungoverned region where The People are at the mercy of war-lords, fanatics and anyone who can kill and terrorize themselves to rule a petty piece of turf. If those who believe they are going to use the Taliban to control the place would rightly join the long list of other, foreign powers may be something to consider. I would imagine there are oil kingdoms involved in that. I remember an Afghani American at the time of the invasion pointing out that the 9-11 attack came from Saudis and most of the attackers were Saudi so if anyone should be invaded it was that country. Such billionarires and multimillionaires as rule over that country almost certainly use such forces as the Taliban and other terror gangsters to assert their economic and, so, political and military objectives just as the American and others use our military, in no small part through the media they also control.
There are few people who come out of this with their integrity intact, Congresswoman Barbara Lee more than most, the sole vote in the Congress against authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. And she is too moral and too substantial a person to treat this horrific disaster as anything to derive personal vindication from.
I think one of the things that this shows is having American policy in the hands of racists who are predisposed to believe that brown skinned people are too stupid, too unwilling to fight back, unable to decide how they want to live - clearly a majority of those with the ability to struggle against the war-lords and the Taliban have not chosen to do so, those who wanted change are a small minority. I think Cheney, who was the one who was really in charge of the Bush II regime, got us into two disastrous wars based on his own racism and his skint understanding of either place.
American racism has not only cost its victims huge numbers of deaths and lives destroyed and an enormous material cost, it has extracted an enormous price from those in the military, especially those who actually do the fighting, as well. I read that the cost of care of Americans who fought in Afghanistan will be well over a trillion dollars before the last of them and their survivors die. The head stones will always be there. They will teach us no more than those of the other wars, the totally unjustified and those which should have not happened as other means of addressing real wrongs were put into practice. Joe Biden has stated it is his intention to use those other means in dealing with any terror threats that come from Afghanistan.
Of course, the Women of Afghanistan, the Children, LGBTQ, minorities, religious minorities will die and be oppressed by the people Trump, or, rather his people negotiated back into power. That isn't in any way a surprise, his administration didn't care about those groups in the United States, they ran a campaign that tapped America's closest domestic version of the same benighted religiosity to win power, as it tried to use terror to stay in power and as it corrupts American elections and so destroy democracy.
I think we have to accept that there is little that we can do to help those the Taliban will kill, oppress, terrorize and enslave. All of the efforts to change Afghanistan by educating girls and other such things have, in the end, only set them up to be targets. I remember in the early weeks of the American invasion of Afghanistan saying that about the only thing I thought that might do some good would be to arm the women and train them how to slaughter their oppressors. Though that would have had to have had the willingness of a large enough number of those who wanted their freedom that much. I doubt that was ever going to happen anymore than American women have, in a majority, demanded the Equal Rights Amendment and an end to the eternal, on an average of four a day lynching murders of American Women. That kind of change doesn't take two decades, it takes generations and, even then, it is not going to be totally effective.
Americans got talked into the kind of idiotic academic, think-tank fantasy of nation building in a country half way around the world in the most unlikely and historically unsuccessful populations for doing that. I think that just as we have paid a huge price for the racism of those we get in power, we have also paid a huge amount for the idiocy of such people. Our last disaster of a war was, as well, in a large percentage based on such academic wonks wet dreams.
This is a total mess. It is going to be a terrible humanitarian catastrophe. It will probably have disastrous consequences no one is thinking about. I could have as easily put the location for the start of this death march of folly in the Reagan years when Reagan supported what would become the terrorists of 9-11 to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and if not there, why not in Moscow with the decision to invade in the first place? Or I could have put it in Saudi Arabia with the deal between the ruling family of gangsters with the malignant fundamentalist crack pots way back before then. Or in however that non-country, Afghanistan, came to be considered a coherent and totally incoherent entity.
Or I could put it in the five Republican-fascist justices of the Supreme Court who gave us Bush II- Cheney and their incompetent ignoring of the warnings that 9-11 was coming. Not that any of the figures in that have ever been held to account for it.
We don't know enough and if the American media can manage it, we won't for the next one they drag us into, either.
* I believe it was during the period of alleged TV genius Rick Kaplan's leadership of MSNBC that Phil Donohue's program was cancelled because it was too critical of the war and insufficiently militaristic. I don't believe they cancelled programs hosted by Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan or the Swanson Dinner bastard of American fascist propaganda, Tucker Carlson.
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