I may well have missed it but I have never seen W offer a thorough, introspective reckoning on how all the many, many professional blowhards he installed with their many, many, absolute junk intelligence reports reasoned him into war, and I’d be much more interested in that https://t.co/mDhr4hecZS
— kilgore trout, terminal hiccups patient (@KT_So_It_Goes) July 14, 2021
Smarmy sumbitch is gleefully hoping he and his cronies will live long enough to blame the past eighteen years’ forpol disasters on the Democrats now. I’m hoping I live long enough to piss on his grave — although the slurpy dishonest eulogies spawned by his physical demise would probably cause me to stroke out before I get the chance.
"Clear moral voice" from the guy who opened a global torture regime, let Bin Laden escape Tora Bora, and let NATO bear the brunt of a resurgent Taliban as he started a war with lies. All things that butchered our credibility in AFG long before Biden or Trump or Obama took office. https://t.co/hSvQfldFiJ
— zeddy (@Zeddary) July 14, 2021
If my administration had steered our focus away from Afghanistan to a disastrous war of choice that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, I would simply not opine about my successors' decisions in that area.
— Aaron van Dorn (@aaronvandorn) July 14, 2021
"Bad things will happen if you end the war. Take it from me, the genius who started the forever war."
— Andrew Nick (@theandrewnick) July 14, 2021
I’ve seen him offer shrugging “welp I hadta do what I thought was right to protect the uunited states” takes, and I’ve seen him hedge around the issue, but I’ve never seen him say holy shit did we fuck up. so I’m not very interested in his current FP assessments.
— kilgore trout, terminal hiccups patient (@KT_So_It_Goes) July 14, 2021
Oh, by the way, take a wild guess how the Taliban got to be so proficient at road ambushes, IEDs and suicide bombings around, oh, 2005 or so?
They learned it, directly and indirectly, from Iraqi insurgents. W didn't just lose the Iraq War he taught everyone else how to beat us.
— zeddy (@Zeddary) July 14, 2021
Baud
Everyone recognizes it’s going to be bad for a lot of Afghanis. There’s no insight there. There’s also no solution that doesn’t involve making Afghanistan our 51st state.
Is Bush urging his party to open up immigration laws so people can come here? I doubt it.
NotMax
As good an analyst as he was a president.
stinger
No love for Bush Jr., much less for his VP or for the wars they got us into, but I am seriously concerned for the young girls who will never learn to read, for the women who will not be able to leave their homes without being covered head to foot and accompanied by a male of their family. I wish someone would propose SOMETHING to help women and girls existing under the Taliban. Hillary Clinton would have been strong on this topic.
ETA: I’m a Baudette from way back, but “a lot of Afghanis” sounds to me like “all lives matter”.
Van Buren
Let me get this straight- someone started a war in Asia, fucked it up, and is now criticizing the people who ended the war? Man, History does rhyme.
Cacti
I miss the days when Dubya was a pariah.
Fuck him and his merry band of war criminals sideways.
Baud
@stinger:
I don’t see how you make that connection. I agree that the women and girls will suffer terribly and disproportionately.
ETA is: and my point stands that Bush isn’t offering any insight on that point.
JustRuss
Aside from “occupy forever”, I’m not sure what POTUS Clinton could do.
dr. bloor
@stinger:
With all the impact of Demi Moore objecting strenuously in A Few Good Men.
It’s a shitty situation where Biden is going for the least really shitty option among a bouquet of even shittier choices. No one thinks this isn’t horrible.
NotMax
@Baud
The people are Afghans.
The currency is Afghanis.
.
Baud
@NotMax:
Thanks.
stinger
@Baud: Per the Alex Thompson tweet — I haven’t looked beyond that, as I really dislike W — W’s concern about leaving Afghanistan is specifically because of the women and girls. It is mine as well. “A lot of Afghanis will suffer” is true, but doesn’t have the same emphasis.
Bex
@Cacti:  Amen. Who does he think is? Even Cheney hasn’t run his mouth about this…yet. If he does, they can both go to hell.
stinger
@NotMax: I use “Afghani” so as not to confuse people with crocheted sofa throws. I’d have expected BJ’s key punster to be all over that!
Baud
@stinger:
Fine. But that has nothing to do with All Lives Matter, which is designed as a slogan to supercede Black Lives Matter. It’s that racist purpose that makes All Lives Matter a bad thing. The slogan itself is accurate.
stinger
Hillary Clinton spent her entire professional life, from a young lawyer to Secretary of State, to working on behalf of women and children. I don’t know what possible solutions there might be. Were she now in her fifth year as President, she might have some ideas.
I believe Biden is making the best choice he can from his perceived options. He may even have consulted her. But I’m so sad for the women and girls.
Procopius
It’s going to take a little while, but the Afghans are going to go back to the status quo ante — before we jumped into their civil war. They are going to go back to working out for themselves how they are going to live their lives, including whether or not their daughters learn to read and write. Maybe they will go back to ending poppy growing. They had completely eradicated heroin manufacturing in 2001. Since the majority are Sunni I expect Saudi Arabia will send a lot more Wahhabist missionaries and money to build madrassas. The best thing is the U.S. Air Force will stop bombing them and the U.S. Army will stop raiding their homes in the middle of the night, kidnapping the men and shooting women and children. And we can hope the drone bombings of funerals and wedding parties will slow down some. The MSM for some reason stopped reporting about it under Trump, but there have been a couple of mentions that he greatly increased the program, which Obama greatly increased over W’s efforts.
Steeplejack
Roger Moore
@stinger:
I would love to hear a solution, but none seems to be forthcoming. It’s not like we were doing a bang-up job of protecting those women and girls while we were there.
Cermet
@Baud: Do any of you know that the young boys will be converted to temporary young ‘girls’ to service the men? That is one of the truly great aspects of Islam/s – assigning two or more woman to each rich man means woman are not available for dating/marriage for the majority of the male population so young boys are used instead. Yes, young girls will be forced into marriages and woman converted into slaves but for young boys, their world is about to crash as well.
VOR
You know, he’s not wrong. Afghan women and girls will be harmed when the Taliban takes over. So what’s his solution?
Maybe if someone hadn’t diverted resources from Afghanistan in 2001-03 into a war of choice in Iraq, maybe things would have gone better in Afghanistan.
Baud
Morzer
So the man who inverted the usual fascist career path by going from lying torturing wannabe-tyrant to failed painter now has opinions?
dww44
@dr. bloor: To further augment the no-win situation that Biden is in re Afghanistan, I heard Fareed Zakaria opining on Blitzer’s show yesterday that because Trump had reduced our troop presence there to such a small level that rendered them ineffective, Biden had 2 choices: increase/surge the troops into Afghanistan or withdraw. Zakaria says that Biden made a reasonable choice here.
Now, if there is sufficiencent urgency and planning and logistics to expeditiously get the Afghans out who visibly rendered aid to us there, then I think Biden et al will be able to leave with honor.
While I too am saddened for how women and girls and families in general will likely suffer under the Taliban, there is a reason that we’ve not been able to create a stable democratic government there after almost 20 years. At some point, the Afghans have to figure this out. As Zakaria also pointed out, we’ve spent 2 trillion dollars there, along with all the lives lost and damaged. Sometime you do have to end things.
Just Some Fuckhead
Nice to hear the neocon argument about how one can change political hearts and minds by simply killing the right people from people who should know better.
Wapiti
I’m guessing that outside of Kabul and whatever small radius around our outposts, life has been sucking for the average Afghan women and girls for at least the last 20 years.
If GW Bush had a plan for Afghanistan other than abandoning the effort, I’d love to hear it.
Kent
No Hillary would not have been better. She would likely have been worse if she had dragged out the withdrawal longer. Some problems (most actually) are not solvable by military force. This is one of them.
And honestly, Americans really don’t give a shit about young girls getting an education anyway. Not even liberal ones like Hillary Clinton. I just got back from visiting relatives in Central Pennsylvania in the Amish heartland. The Amish and other ultra-fundamentalist groups like the Hasidic Jews in New York are basically Taliban without guns. You think an Amish girl or a Hasidic Jewish girl has any better chance of going to school, getting an education, and becoming a doctor than a Pashtun girl in Afghanistan? You would be wrong. Amish girls are educated with fundamentalist religious tracts in one-room schoolhouses taught by slightly older girls until about age 14 then sent off to work. I don’t see us sending the 101st Airborne into PA Amish-land to make sure those girls get an education and get to live fulfilling lives out from under the thumb of authoritarian fundamentalist men.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: What about the dogs?
Patricia Kayden
Morzer
@Cermet: I think you may be confusing behaviors specific to Afghan tradition with Islamic tradition as a whole.
Mary G
I already despised the Shrub, and this adds to a long, long list. Kind of proud of Biden for admitting that we can’t fix it and getting the fuck out. The generals have been lying about what great leaps are being made and just a few thousand more troops and a couple more years, we’ll win this thing.
Reluctant, very very reluctant admiration for this woman:
I would pay her to smack Jim Jordan again.
Baud
The neocons will attempt to use the coming tragedies and horrors to undermine and discredit Biden. It’s critical we have his back after demanding for years for Dems to end these wars.
Gin & Tonic
@Mary G: BJ After Dark already?
Morzer
@Mary G:
We might want to consider a GoFundHer, provided she commits to using maximum force and a baseball bat.
Morzer
@Baud: It’s grimly amusing to note how “conservatives” have gone from kicking ass for freedom fries to Trump the Apostle of Peace to not enough war under Biden.
Geminid
@stinger: I too am worried about Afghan women and girls. I worry also about the several million Hazara citizens. They are a mostly Shi’ite ethnic group based in the central mountains, and have been the focus of Taliban cruelty for decades. The Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, in the Hazara heartland, was notorious. But the Taliban did far worse to Hazara men, women and children.
I’m still not sure the Taliban will be able to control the country, even if they take Kabul. There will be a violent and bloody struggle, though, and if the Talian wins out, the bloodshed will have only begun.
Roger Moore
@Mary G:
Jordan is lucky she didn’t have a shotgun, or he would have gotten the Cheney family recipe.
Steeplejack
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Hello, nym I’ve never seen before! Are you a troll? ?
Baud
@Morzer:
I’m not sure the Trumpers are opposed to withdrawal yet. Maybe they’ll adopt that position once we are safely out.
Spanky
@Wapiti:
You’re short a couple of zeros there. It’s been at least 2000 years, and probably more.
raven
@dww44: That’s what kills me, like 2000 troops were going to do shit.
Morzer
@Baud: I am sure they’ll get around to denouncing Biden soon enough. Right now they’re busily following the prophecies of FormerGuyAdamus and his glorious return to the White House on a date TBD.
MagdaInBlack
@Mary G: I’d pay to watch.
Spanky
@Morzer:
Traditionalist though I may be, I’d be OK with her using an aluminum one.
Spanky
@Steeplejack: Yeah! And how’s Mrs. Fuckhead doin’?
Roger Moore
@Spanky:
Carbon fiber, all the way.
Freemark
@Kent: That is true but many(about 20%) do leave the sect. They are also not hunted down and killed for doing so.
Doctor Fungus
@VOR: Probably not, but “someone” nevertheless screwed the pooch.
Roger Moore
@Freemark:
And the Amish, Hasidim, etc. here in the US also don’t try to enforce their views on education outside their own communities. That’s the thing about the Taliban that’s really destructive. They aren’t content to keep their own daughters ignorant; they want everyone else to follow their rules.
Morzer
@Spanky: With rusty spikes or without rusty spikes?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Freemark: It’s not easy to leave a fundamentalist cult because that is the breadth of your entire world. It is possible, however, as my wife and I did it. And now we are that beacon of refuge for any extended family members who choose to do so.
The fact is that most choose not to leave it because they agree with it.
Geminid
@Mary G: I don’t much like Liz Cheney’s politics, but I’m glad Lynn and Dick Cheney did not raise their daughter up to be another Lindsey Graham.
Another Scott
@Cermet: When I was in college in the late 1970s, I remember a very earnest Spartacus Youth League member telling me that the USSR was right to invade Afghanistan because the women there were suffering from tuberculosis as a result of having to wear veils and so forth under the backwards regime. That it was immoral not to support bringing the country into the 20th Century and protecting the women.
I wasn’t persuaded then.
I’m not persuaded now.
What are Afghanistan’s neighbors doing? Are they doing anything to help the (truly) suffering women and children? If so, maybe we can help along side them. If not, how will any intervention on our part make things better for them for the long term?
Life is complicated. The world is complicated. Bumper stickers are not realistic foreign policy. We can help make things better, but we cannot do so by ourselves, and especially not when a large fraction of the population is dead-set against our help.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike in NC
Rumsfeld recently shuffled off to hell. Cheney and Bush can’t join him fast enough.
Republican voters quickly flushed 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, and Hurricane Katrina down the old memory hole.
The Moar You Know
Totally true. And would have been totally true whether we stay there for the next thousand years or had stayed there one day. The only mistake made was thinking that anything we did there would have made any difference at all. Does no one read history? Everyone who’s ever tried to do anything there has come home with their heads arranged on platters and an excuse for why it would be different next time.
stinger
@Baud: Thank you.
raven
@Another Scott: Oh yea, at the University of Illinois they were marching in a circle with “Hail the Red Army, Smash Muslim Extremism in Afghanistan”!
Ruckus
@dr. bloor:
This.
debbie
@NotMax:
Remember Cheney’s “Pakis” statement? ?
I still think he was the puppet master and he was the one who engineered the wars.
Ohio Mom
Just Some Fuckhead @49:
I did not know that about you and your wife. I’m impressed.
Kent
So it’s OK if 10 year old girls are abused and denied an education as long as they keep it all “in house” and don’t use guns to try to force their lifestyle on others?
Amir Khalid
@VOR:
I’m not so sure about this. Those resources were military, or almost entirely so, and wouldn’t have been very helpful in the kind of from-the-ground-up societal re-engineering needed to make Afghanistan a reasonably functional nation that wasn’t going to consume itself in internecine strife.
I really doubt the US — or anyone — could have got the kind of broad national buy-in needed to make such a big project work. I do know W never gave any thought to even trying.
Ohio Mom
To be fair, American Hasids don’t educate their boys either.
Well, they get a religious education but nothing secular like science, math, English language arts, history, or anything else.
gene108
I truly would love to know what Bush, Jr. was thinking when he sent the troops into Iraq.
It wasn’t to prevent Saddam from getting WMD’s, because UN inspectors were looking where we told them we thought Saddam had WMD facilities for six months.
Edit: Bush, Jr. is the only person who truly knows why we invaded Iraq. Sending in the troops was solely his decision
Just Some Fuckhead
That’s a good one. If we ever perfect that machine, can we use it on Appalachia?
Just Some Fuckhead
One-upping daddy.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: And our reply will be that Biden is honoring the word of the last US president, Trump, who negotiated our withdrawal. Trump backed Biden into a corner on this.
dww44
@Morzer: Absoluting effing agree. One can get whiplash from figuring out the direction in which their wind is blowing.
Barbara
There are places where women are treated just or nearly as bad as Afghani women. Some of these places are our allies. And yet GWB couldn’t give two shits about those women. Women in this context are just there to be used as an excuse to shut up people who oppose war. This objection is like a nervous tic at this point. American troops are not going to lighten the load of Afghani women.
Kent
Afghanistan is 50% larger than the state of California. And tremendously more mountainous and remote. 2,000 troops isn’t even enough to defend one small city much less a country that immense.
Mike in NC
@debbie: Republican friends at DOD and CIA readily admitted that Cheney cooked the books to generate bogus intel.
Kent
It’s actually one of the few correct things that Trump did. Instead of kicking the can down the road like most other presidents would have done.
Ruckus
@gene108:
You are giving him way, way too much credit – thinking – really?
Wapiti
@gene108: What Bush was thinking: “If I am a War President I’ll have a better chance of winning a second term. I hope one of these fabricated justifications for invading Iraq gains traction soon ’cause the first five or so stories have not convinced people.”
Roger Moore
@dr. bloor:
I would also point out that protecting women and girls from Muslim oppression wasn’t our reason for going there. Neither was bringing democracy. We did it to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for terrorists determined to attack the US. All that other stuff was mission creep used to justify staying there indefinitely.
gene108
@Amir Khalid:
Given the way L. Paul Bremmer ran Iraq, you are probably right.
I do believe not having to try and concurrently get a new government going in Iraq would have helped the current situation in Afghanistan. Seeing how the Iraqi insurgents were able to frustrate our forces probably breathed new life into the Taliban.
Ruckus
@Kent:
I’d bet he did it for all the wrong reasons.
I wonder if
vladsomeone told him it would make dems look bad…..Just Some Fuckhead
Just in case anyone missed it.
raven
@Kent: roger that
Kent
@gene108: They drove out the Soviets with whom they shared a land border. The same exact army that steamrolled over the Wehrmacht during the last two years of WW2. I don’t think they needed to learn all that much from Iraqi insurgents. They have been doing this for a VERY long time.
debbie
@Mike in NC:
Yep. I think this was why he nominated himself as VP.
Geminid
James Michener did his typically good research job when he set his novel Caravans in 1950’s Afghanistan. There is a lot in what he described that is still relevant to present day Afghanistan.
I like all of Michener’s work, but I thought this story was particularly good. It is somewhat of a sad read though, knowing what the people have been through these last 45 years.
mrmoshpotato
I whole-heartedly endorse this post’s title. Maybe he should stuff himself into that flight suit again and jump into Kabul to help.
Fuck W and his entire cabal of criminals.
Mary G
This is so corny it’s cute – 18yo popular singer going to help get her fans vaxxed, and Uncle Joe gave her a pair of aviators.
gene108
@stinger:
The Taliban, even in 2001, never conquered all of Afghanistan. They were still fighting Northern Alliance forces, though the Taliban was winning.
The politics of Afghanistan are too much based on regions and ethnic identity, from what I have read, for me to begin to try and explain what will happen, because the number of players actually involved is a lot more than just the Taliban and the current government in Kabul.
japa21
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Just like push put Obama in a corner by negotiating our withdrawal from Iraq. Which Obama, to his credit, did try to renegotiate but couldn’t without actually leaving our service men and women in danger from Iraqi courts.
Of course, Obama still gets blamed for ISIS.
burnspbesq
@Kent:
Ever heard of the First Amendment? If a religious sect chooses to operate schools that you sanctimoniously describe as inadequate, and parents choose to send their children there, as a matter of law you get to fuck right off. So spare us.
Ruckus
What can one actually call the republican party now?
Given their choices over the last 52 years, I’d say theft ring.
Anyone got anything better?
A Ghost to Most
It is interesting to hear from an underling in the Cheney Regency.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
They weren’t “the same exact army” that did those things any more than the US army that invaded Iraq in 2001 was the same exact one that pulled out of Vietnam. 30+ years does a lot to change an army, for the better or worse. More importantly, the reason the Soviets left is more or less the same reason we’re leaving. It wasn’t that they got their asses kicked. They just realized Afghanistan isn’t worth the effort. It’s a poor country of no strategic importance.
Kent
My point exactly. If it isn’t our business to worry about how Amish kids are being educated in our own country. Then how the fuck is it our business to worry about how Afghan kids are being educated (or not) in an entirely different country half way across the world.
I was being facetious.
geg6
@Barbara:
Exactly right. I feel for Afghan women and children, but I feel for a lot of women and children all across the world. Keeping American troops in very small numbers another 20 years in Afghanistan is not going to keep them from suffering. They just suffer differently from the war we wage around them. Biden did the best he could with the losing proposition he was handed. He is correct in his decision, sadly.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
Possibly not. But we had a lot of international goodwill after 9/11 that Bush squandered by going into Iraq. Could we have done something positive for Afghanistan with that goodwill? Who knows?
stevecrickmore
What would Obama have done? “It’s in our national interest – after all the blood and treasure we have invested – that we give our Afghan partners the support to succeed,” said Obama in a July 6, 2016 statement. Barack Obama delayed his planned troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, meaning there would be 8,400 US forces in the country when he left office in January, 2017. It no longer seems in the national interest of the US, and the Biden administration, (ditto for the Trump administration), that the Afghan government succeed, at least, not enough to spare or invest circa five thousand troops, admittedly in a dangerous situation, but we have thirty five thousnd troops posted in Germany, as a legacy of WW2.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
Afghanistan as a unified nation has long been more a concept than an actuality. That said, unstable and rife with intrigue as it was, the monarchy holding sway through a good part of the 20th century did substantively attempt to unify and modernize the society. Had the U.S. not put the kibosh on the former king’s offer to return to authority and he’d withheld his subsequent deferment to the U.S.’s choice of Karzai there well might have been an interim of placidity – a cooling off period – resulting in a very different path than that which ensued.
Geminid
@Kent: trump did it the wrong way, though. If trump wanted to pull 5,000 troops out of Afghanistan, he could have just done it. He did not have to sign a bogus “peace” agreement with the Taliban, and promise to leave by May 1st. They correctly judged that trump just cared about trump, so they shined him on.
Gin & Tonic
This would be a good thread for some SP&T stories.
Baud
@Geminid:
He desperately wanted a Nobel.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
You have to give Dubya credit, he’s a good painter. He can paint an entire apartment in one afternoon — TWO COATS!
Gin & Tonic
@Gin & Tonic: Sorry, I meant dancing in your bones. Apologies.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
On the contrary – although the infrastructure to exploit the reserves is (to put it mildly) sorely lacking, Afghanistan contains significant deposits of rare earth metals, vital to components of modern technology.
gene108
@stinger:
Progress for women and girls has varied throughout the country, with some parts of Afghanistan being more forward thinking than others.
The attitude of locals has influence on Taliban’s treatment of women and girls, currently, in areas it occupies/administers from what I have read.
My point being, the attitude about the importance of educating girls is not uniform throughout the country. Some areas have not done much to promote educating girls in the last twenty years. Their entrenched traditional beliefs on what the role of girls/women should be, and the limited number of schools, has them prioritizing boys education.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic: I miss her.
debbie
@Baud:
Seconded.
Geminid
@gene108: Now that the U.S. is leaving, maybe neighbors like Iran, India, and China will be active. Russia may be separated from Iran by border countries like Uzbekistan, but I don’t think that will be a bar to their influence. I could see a defacto partition, with a new Northern Alliance controlling the north with Russian and Indian sponsorship, and maybe a warlord based in the West, around Herat, carving out a region with Iranian support. Pakistan, of course is already in the game, and the Taliban is their team.
Elizabelle
History will not be kind to Dubya. And even less to the next GOP “president.”
WaPost breaking: Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power
This is why I do not believe the punditocracy that wants to think these midterms will follow the same course as previous ones. No.
Stories like Milley’s will keep rolling out, as will the 1/6 Select Committee investigation and the criminal investigations into Trump/NYC and NYS, now underway.
These are not normal times. We need smarter “pundits.” And voter protection. We really need that.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: I’d like to believe that story, but an entire book based on anonymous sources is a heavy lift for me. Who’s to say the source for that story isn’t Milley himself, who doesn’t want to look bad? Like MagHab’s “sources close to Javanka” who were as close as their underwear.
Martin
@Elizabelle: I agree. Sure, 2022 might turn out like previous midterm elections, but the conditions leading into 2022 are unlike anything in my lifetime. I don’t know how you extrapolate any of that data in any meaningful way.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: I know. The Maggs sources are laughable. At other media outlets, too. You read the story and think: is this Ivanka or Jared? It’s one of them speaking …
Another Scott
@Roger Moore:
That was the W / Cheney / GQP talking point to justify turning them into Wartime Leaders / How Dare You Question Us / Only We Can Protect You From The Monsters So You Must Vote For Us / etc., but it was bogus.
19 middle class guys, a few of whom went to pilot school for a few weeks, and who had probably never been to Afghanistan “Training Camps”, caused the destruction on 9/11. The guys who blew up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania didn’t need to go to Afghanistan, either. Just about everyone who knew the history and wasn’t part of the W Cabal knew that there was no “winning” a war of occupation in Afghanistan.
(Adam has written on a possible alternative history here before, IIRC.) Yes, the Taliban gave bin Laden and al Qaeda support and kinda free rein, and they needed to be severely punished for what they did. But after the Taliban was overthrown, we should have gotten out and watched over the horizon, giving limited support to our favored side(s). Yes, there would have been chaos for a time, but we would have made our point and not been the focus of factions trying to figure out who would next rule – people inside the country would figure it out.
tl;dr – Turning bin Laden and al Qaeda into 10-feet tall monsters that were going to kill us all in our beds unless W and Cheney got whatever they wanted should have been fought by the people. We’re still living with the consequences.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Elizabelle:
I want to know why none of these concerned people spoke out. I sure as hell would have.
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: You could always read the book critically, and judge for yourself.
Elizabelle
Anyone who served near the Trump maladministration is going to have a book out to distance themselves. The upcoming months are going to be disastrous for the GQP, at least I think.
That last anecdote. Michelle or Milley??
More WaPost:
JPL
All one had to do is watch the insurrection on the 6th of January, to know there was an attempted coup.
It didn’t take a book to tell me that.
gene108
@Kent:
There’s a lot to of time between 1945 and 1979 for military readiness to change. The U.S. military readiness between August 1945 to June 1950 had dropped considerably, for example.
The Taliban were essentially young male Afghan refugees, in Pakistan, organized and supported by Pakistan to retake Afghanistan, and thus allow Pakistan to resettle its large Afghan refugee population.
Most of the Taliban forces had not been fighting the Soviets. They were a paramilitary force supported by Pakistan to fight it out with the other groups vying for control of Afghanistan, in the mid-1990’s.
They lost to the Northern Alliance forces, when U.S. Special Forces started providing support. The Taliban changed their tactics after 2003.
Jeffro
@Elizabelle:
Yup. It’s going to keep going. And while the dumbest of trumpov’s hard-core base will stick with him…well, we already beat him (and them) in 2020. That was the high-water mark of what they’re able to do in terms of supporters/voters, and it will only decline from her.
Protect our own voters, turn them out, and 2022 & 2024 are very do-able, Dems.
Elizabelle
@debbie: I have a real problem with John Kelly, who had already been fired or resigned; whichever.
Milley was constrained, but it is believable he was resisting behind the scenes.
But Kelly? What a POS. Per The Guardian:
The Hitler anecdotes needed to come out before the election, “polarized” as many voters are. Could have made a difference in some states, and possibly with downballot elections. John Kelly is a coward. A disgrace to the US Marine Corps. You do not sit on information like that.
Jeffro
Ooo…”Nazis“! So impolitic! I can hear the Tucker-rants for the next several weeks (and it’s making me LOL)
NotMax
@Martin
But on the ground work on infrastructure won’t ramp up until spring, summer and fall of 2022, so Americans with the attention span of a doped-up guppy, irate about being stuck in traffic snarls due to construction will punish Ds for that at the polls.
//
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: But that’s an awful lot like work. Posting snide comments pseudonymously on a blog is a lot easier.
Kattails
Sorry, Ike read the whole thread. I’m still stuck on when anyone in the Republican Party ever actually gave a rat’s ass about women and girls beyond the fetal stage. What they suffered, how badly they were mistreated. Most especially if their skin tone wasn’t fish-belly white.
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: It’s a nerdy job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Kattails
@Kattails: I’ve not Ike
Geminid
@Jeffro: Milley seems to have gotten under Carlson’s skin already. That frat boy’s riding for a fall.
OT: have you gotten on the water yet this summer? My friend Debbie and I plan to do some fishin’ over at Elkton Saturday. Her wife Diana might make it too. They say the fish in the Shenandoah’s South Fork are quite mercurial.
dexwood
My third wish? W gone from history. The world proceeds.
Jeffro
@Geminid: so far, the most time I’ve spent kayaking was our week up at Dewey Beach! But I have been down the Rivanna and out at Beaver Creek Reservoir recently, and I’m trying to figure out a good day to do the Elkton->Shenandoah run with the family like we did last year.
(would be nice if we had some rain, obvs…)
You meant ‘mercurial’ in the ‘elusive’ sense, I hope? =)
NotMax
@Geminid
Tucky will start wearing larger and larger brown bow ties to signal his loyalties.
//
catclub
@debbie:
 
The ONLY think I respect Shrub for is that he told Cheney to fuck off when Cheney wanted him to invade/bomb Iran around 2007
debbie
WTF?
catclub
Yeah, but which direction? Help or harm? These are (mostly) white americans you’re talking about.
Mary G
@NotMax: Parents getting checks in the mail for kids starts this week.
NotMax
@debbie
It’s never been illegal to buy them as a gift for 18 to 21-year-olds. This just cuts out the middleman.
//
NotMax
@Mary G
“Yeehaw! Let the coitus begin!”
:)
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: I meant reading these books is a nerdy job, and was not casting aspersions on your comments, snide or otherwise.
James E Powell
I may well have missed it, but I have never seen W offer a thorough, introspective reckoning of anything. He was always shallow, uncurious, and scornful of knowledge.
jl
The time for W to worry about the women and children (and men and boys, for that matter) was right after we invaded their country. I remember that there was supposed to be a big economic reconstruction and grass roots democracy program. But then….
Condi Rice later almost bragged that we just paid off, and in some cases armed and installed, warlords. The the W administration let crooks steal all the school and health clinic and community center money and they were all half-finished ruins in record time.
The farms that were supposed to be replanted ended up as half dug dry ditches, and the agricultural marketing system that was to be rebuilt after the Soviet invasion devastated the country was a just an empty bank account.
So, OK, now W is worried about the women and children after twenty years of mess created by the incompetence and corruption that followed the invasion. Weird how that works.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
W deserves credit for more than that. The two big ones I always think of were PEPFAR and declaring the marine National Monuments in the Pacific. PEPFAR is a fantastic program that has saved countless lives*, and it’s an example of him putting some substance behind his “compassionate conservatism”. The marine national monuments were great idea, and they were also the first time since Hoover a Republican president had used the Antiquities Act to protect a natural area.
*I think Bush deserves credit for this, but it in no way cancels out the lives he ended with his warmongering.
James E Powell
@Baud:
Agreed. And that precise point was argued by many of us who opposed the Iraq invasion. We were called objectively pro-terrorist appeasers and many other things.
James E Powell
@Gin & Tonic:
What does SP&T mean?
NotMax
@Mary G
One thing which is a continuing disappointment is not hearing so much as a hint of a whisper of a commitment to fully funding Head Start for the first time ever.
SFAW
Is Josh Kraushaar trying to steal Chris Cilizza’s “King of Moronic Takes” crown? “Clear, moral voice”? WTF?
SFAW
@James E Powell:
Sarah Plain (Proud?) & Tall, I expect.
Geminid
@Jeffro: I was joking about the mercury contamination from the Waynesboro Dupont plant. There has been an advisory out for some time now, telling people to limit consumption of fish from the South Fork of the Shenandoah to two meals a week, and none for children and pregnant women.
There is a good put-in at Island Ford, 4-5 miles upstream from Elkton, that might make for a nice float. Water is low everywhere, though.
debbie
The ISS just flew by!
jl
@James E Powell: Way back in the day, the US-Soviet competition for Afghanistan took the form of rival programs for economic development, schools, health clinics, etc. Not enough, Afghanistan was still a very poor country, but it did have a growing agricultural export market that was good enough to displace a lot of the heroin poppies. People’s lives were gradually getting a little better.
I forget the details, but things got complicated and Soviets invaded and blew stuff up and killed a bunch of people for no good reason. And we said, “Aren’t those Soviets awful evil people? Not like us at all, we are great and kind and good.”
But then we sure showed the world about that after 9/11, right? We’re so much better!
NotMax
@James E Powell
The Satcheson, Poteka & Tanta Fe?
:)
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: Understood, no sweat.
jl
@Roger Moore: W also initiated a very progressive modernization program for electronic health care records, more efficient medical logistics. Our health care system is still a disaster, but I suppose it would be a worse disaster without the W initiative. Also, W actually did read books, and he read one on future pandemics, and he initiated the program that produced the famous Pandemic Playbook that Obama finalized. I read that W was super eager to take Obama through it and they had a grand time talking pandemic preparedness.
Edit: also interesting that W was reading respectable non-fiction book while his PR flacks were putting out asinine obviously fake W the presidenter book reading lists. Probably W was afraid to let his base know he actually read books.
Also, W initiated the investigation into right wing domestic terrorism that was completed during Obama’s term, and the right wing blamed on Obama and used it for racist hate mongering.
So, W wasn’t as stupid ignorant and malicious as Trump, but then, how many people on earth could be? It’d be like one in a hundred million. OTOH, I also read that Laura Bush, a librarian, endlessly pestered W that there were important things to get done besides political BS, I think one item was the marine sancturaries. So, not sure how much credit should to to L rather than W.
Gin & Tonic
@James E Powell: SFAW got it right, but it was my brain fart, as I had somehow confused her and the commenter “dancing around in your bones,” who had fascinating stories about her time in Afghanistan back in the 1970’s, IIRC. Neither commenter has been around in quite some time, sadly.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Kent: IIRC, the last invader to actually successfully control the country was Alexander the Great. Yeah, they’ve been doing this a long time.
Steve in the ATL
@Gin & Tonic:
And yet Baud is here every damn day. God help us!
Geminid
@debbie: this one may end up like the recent 9th Circuit assault weapons case: overruled by an en banc decision of the whole Circuit Court. I think it was Mr. Omnibus who called that one correctly.
The Supreme Court has taken on one gun rights case this term, regarding firearms carry privileges in New York state. I don’t think they’ve heard it yet. It may give a snapshot of where the Court is heading in this area.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve in the ATL: Inorite?
James E Powell
@SFAW:
Oh man! Totally forgot. How. long has it been since this place has been graced by her presence?
jl
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): But, IIRC, conquering Afghanistan so exhausted Alexander’s troops that they refused to go on and do India. Which made poor Alex weep.
So, it’s always been a hard place.
Scamp Dog
@Gin & Tonic: I’d love to have Sarah Proud and Tall come back, her stories were great and hilarious. I remember Dance Around in your bones, too, but not much about her comments, beyond the fact that I enjoyed them.
Jeffro
@Geminid: I always wondered about those advisories and would find it hard to enjoy a meal even just shy of the limit…but then again, I don’t fish.
The Island Ford put-in is one we were looking at to make the trip longer. Will probably pack a lunch and make a day of it – thanks!
Jeffro
@debbie: I saw it! Got the alert earlier and it was a beaut – a 7 min flyover!
My dog is like, “why are we stopping during our walk all the time tonight?” =)
I try to catch it every time I can.
debbie
@Jeffro:
First time in years the sky has been clear and the orbit was above all the very old trees around here. Remember Hale Bopp!
debbie
@Geminid:
I sure hope so.
Geminid
@Jeffro: The advisories creep me out some too. But at the rate I’m catching fish, I’ll be lucky to eat two meals this decade.
Coors has a big brewery near Elkton, a few hundred yards from the South Fork. It produces Coors Light, and they probably get their water from an artesian well. But I have to smile when I see them advertise the “Silver Bullet.”
Ruckus
@debbie:
Not disagreeing with you about guns – but.
18 is now the law of consent or whatever it’s called and while that might suggest that the drinking age should be 18 as well, I don’t see that. IOW I can see the court’s point, even as I disagree with it, the age for a gun possession should be 121 and drinking likely higher than 21. But I’m the oddball on age of consent/voting/drinking/guns because I think voting age should be 18. I see no reason there can not be differing ages for differing reasons.
debbie
@Ruckus:
Our prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed until the mid-20s. I have nothing against drinking, but the youngs don’t have the executive function needed to make wise decisions.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: I what now?
@debbie: What about voting? Criminal responsibility? Ability to sign contracts?
Geminid
@Ruckus: That Heller gun rights decision is really interesting. It’s pretty much the controlling authority for now, and it was written by Antonin Scalia, who was called many things, but never a “squish.” Scalia affirmed an individual right to possess firearms, but said that this right was subject to “reasonable regulation” by government. Scalia referenced the long history of firearms regulation by federal and state authorities.
Since Heller, states like Connecticut have passed assault weapons bans, and California has tightened its already strict firearms laws. My own state, Virginia, put through a package of six firearms safety laws in early 2020.
Is the current Supreme Court is ready to modify Heller? They almost have to blow it up if they want to strike down these state laws. If they strike one down, a couple hundred laws in dozens of states will be at risk. I wonder if Roberts and Gorsuch are ready to go that far. When it comes to voting rights or corporate interests, I would not put anything past them. But when it comes to firearms regulation, judges have skin in the game, because they themselves are targets. Just today, Ms. Rikrah linked to a report of a heavily armed man arrested in your area, apparently ready to shoot up a courthouse.
So I’ll be watching the New York case that the Supreme Court will hear this term. Depending on what the various Circuit Courts do, the Court may well be hearing more 2nd Amendment cases next term.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: I was referring to a recent 9th Circuit ruling overturning an assault weapons ban, with a nutty opinion by a semi-retired judge. You correctly predicted that an en banc decision would reverse the three judge panel.
SFAW
@Scamp Dog:
You do know “she” was really a DougJ sockpuppet, right?
No, not really*, but Doug has been blamed (so to speak) for any number of trollish comments here over the years, and various nyms/noms were allegedly his handiwork, so I thought I’d try.
But I do miss Sarah’s stories.
ETA:
* “She” was actually a Freddie deBoer sockpuppet**
** Nah, I’m BS’ing again. But I can’t be the only one who’s noticed SockPuppeT
phdesmond
@Kattails:
this may be a case in point. in her daily newsletter, Heather Cox Richardson gleans news. in the midst of describing the attack on vaccination in Tennessee, she writes,
On Monday, Tennessee’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones sent an email to staff saying there should be “no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines” and “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV vaccine.” The HPV vaccine protects against a common sexually transmitted infection that causes cervical cancer, among other cancers.
phdesmond
@phdesmond:
where the second paragraph is the quoted text.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Elizabelle: john kelly is a white nationalist oafkeeper who should have stuck to sticking it to kirstjen nielsen.
Kattails
@phdesmond: I was doing stuff and just happened to catch this on my way to bed, and just–JHC. That’s monstrous. Thanks for the note.
phdesmond
@Kattails: you’re welcome.
Ruckus
@debbie:
Seemingly neither do a rather large number of adults.
Morzer
@jl:
Alexander conquered a chunk of the Punjab, although he let the defeated king continue ruling the area as his governor, which doesn’t suggest an overwhelming victory.
The story that he wept when he realized there were no more worlds to conquer is a 19th century fiction. The version from the ancient world is that he was listening to a lecture by a sophist who claimed there were infinitely many worlds and Alexander wept because he and his armies had not even conquered a single world completely.
lowtechcyclist
This shit reminds me that we still need a full investigation of Bush/Cheney’s war and torture policies. “Look forward, not back” let them off the hook, and reinforced the notion (already in place, thanks to Bush Sr.’s Christmas 1992 pardons of the entire Iran-Contra crew) that Republican movers and shakers would never pay a price for anything, even in the court of public opinion.
That full accounting still can be done. Rumsfeld may have gone to his reward, but most of the principals are still here. Right now, of course, it’s more urgent to have a full accounting of TFG’s maladministration, but once that’s done, it really needs to be time to look back a bit further.
HeartlandLiberal
I love me some Anne Laurie in the morning.
evodevo
@Just Some Fuckhead: Eggzackly…have a lot of experience with collateral relatives from there, and the situation is a LOT like a fundie cult…except that the entire population belongs to the cult. The few members who make it in the outer world are endlessly mocked. I’ll never forget one of them trash-talking about a female cousin who went to college at UK as a pre-med major, and how “she was gettin’ above her raisin’ ” Talk about a misogynistic patriarchy…a lot like today’s talibangelicals…
Feckless
Inevitable tragedy that that bastard W laments now is exactly why the mother f***** should be in jail.
He is a war criminal. Period
But Nancy and Obama wanted to move on.
They let Nixon get away with it and then they let Reagan get away with it and then they let W get away with it and now they’re letting tRump get away with it. This country can’t survive any more democratic spinelessness.