Powerful video from Larry O’Donnell – every person in this country should see this.
h/t NotMax who posted in a thread and zhena sent it to me by email.
Final words in the video:
The people who own the American exit from the Afghanistan war are the people who advocated launching the war, and more importantly, the people who never learned – the people who never stopped advocating for continuing that war.
Amen.
JPL
And thank you Water Girl for front paging it.
zhena gogolia
Thanks, WaterGirl and NotMax. I hope everybody watches it.
NotMax
Thank you for highlighting this.
Percysowner
I can’t watch it right now, but generally I like Larry O’D. He’s been around a long time and sees things pretty clearly. IMHO.
Raoul Paste
Wow, he makes a good point
MazeDancer
Lawrence has been a rock all week. Most of his guests have been old enough to remember Vietnam. And have all been RU Kidding Me? about the rabid press attacks.
Apparently, no one studied Vietnam in school. Or had parents who graduated with armbands on their graduation gowns. Or served.
He has been, basically, the only host I could tolerate in the “Get Biden! Kill him! Kill him!” melee.
randy khan
One quibble – the U.S. didn’t lose the war. We chose to stop fighting it, recognizing that we could have had something like a standoff for as long as we were willing to fight, and that we weren’t going to commit the resources necessary to actually destroy the Taliban.
Ruckus
In all my decades I’ve never heard a better 12 minutes broadcast.
There have been a few good ones, but nothing as honest, as realistic, as truthful as this in my memory.
Lawrence O’Donnell – Bravo Sir.
WaterGirl
I added this up top, the final words from the video:
Cacti
Here’s what nobody’s saying about the non-government American “civilians” left behind there.
It’s a bunch of mercs and war profiteers.
They knew for months that the withdrawal was coming, but wanted to stay until the last possible moment, to extract every dirty, blood soaked dollar they could.
This wasn’t the Johnsons from Iowa City, who got stranded on their family vacation to Kabul.
WaterGirl
@randy khan: I think we did lose the war in Afghanistan, long long ago. We certainly did not win it, or accomplish anything that was the purpose of that war.
What was the phrase for Vietnam?
Something like Peace without dishonor?
Ruckus
@randy khan:
Sorry.
We lost the war. We are first loser.
We achieved none of our unstated or stated goals, other than we fought for all those years.
I served during our last lost war, this is not different. We did not win, therefore we lost. It’s not a draw, it’s not a win, it’s war, there are only winners and losers. 20 yrs, 2500 deaths on our side. We as a country did a stupid thing, we as a country lost. The country we attacked and tried to occupy won. That we would never win, that we should never have been there, these points do not change anything, we went, we died, we lost.
rp
The Bears are down 24-3. There’s a minute left in the 4th quarter. The coach, Moe Gliden, pulls the starters and puts in the third string QB. Moe has the QB take a knee and let the clock run out rather than risk injuries on a couple pointless hail marys.
“GOD DAMN IT GLIDEN! HOW CAN YOU THROW AWAY THE TEAM’S CREDIBILITY AND HONOR?!?!?!”
ETA: Of course, in this scenario, the team has gone through several head coaches during the game, and Gliden took over with 5 minutes left.
Cacti
@randy khan: We lost the war.
It wasn’t a stalemate. The Taliban is back in power and we’re leaving with our tail between our legs.
randy khan
@Ruckus:
I understand this perspective, but I will continue to disagree.
frosty
Seems to me that Iraq is when we started referring to mercenaries as contractors and completely blurring who they were and what they were doing. These guys weren’t running bulldozers to build roads.
Lyrebird
Wow.
The Moar You Know
@Ruckus: Thanks for that. It’s really important. Redefining “winning” just keeps motivating people to keep going to war. We fucking lost Vietnam, we lost Korea, we lost Afghanistan, and we’re about to formally lose Iraq.
Saying anything else just keeps the wars coming.
My father went to Vietnam. He left a happy-go-lucky guy, a proud parent. He came back a bitter, angry, hateful hardass. He didn’t get over that until his late sixties, after a couple of divorces and the complete alienation of his kids. War has casualties far beyond the combatants.
I don’t want anyone to suffer even the minor harms that us kids went through, so please – acknowledge when we lose a war.
FelonyGovt
Excellent. I’m old enough to have been an anti-Vietnam war protestor, and to remember the evacuation from Vietnam. He is absolutely, spot on, correct.
Yutsano
Wow. Cigarette. Need.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
That’s an excuse. Please do not make or repeat excuses. They are attempts to justify what was done, and nothing does.
I talk above about our losses, but what about their losses? Do we diminish their 20 yrs of lives lost? We really, really shouldn’t. Effectively we were bullies, a far richer, far better equipped military, ruined and wasted thousands of human lives. We have to stop doing that. War at some time may be required. This one wasn’t. The only thing we accomplished was an unnecessary loss of life. The justifications were bullshit. Please don’t diminish the lives lost on both sides. We all need to be honest about this 20 yr political exercise in futility and malfeasance, or we will, as a country, never learn. This is not the world of the white knight, swooping in to save the day. This was the effect of being pompous and arrogant about ourselves and others we share the world with.
Ken
Afghaniwhat? Why are you looking at yesterday’s shiny object when Mike Richards is out as the host of Jeopardy?
Wapiti
@frosty: Hessians, with all apologies to the people of Hesse.
Villago Delenda Est
The MIC has its billions and billions in profit. The gravy train, however, was just derailed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken:
Yeah, I know, priorities! LeVar for perma-host!
Fleeting Expletive
Re the mask discussion earlier, I saw a young child, maybe first grade, saying she likes her mask, it feels “cosy”, which seems perfect to me. Why wouldn’t it be comforting and reassuring in a child’s (or adult’s) mind? With the added feature that you can be a little anonymous, a little mysterious?
Is there any possibility that Twitter might roll back that annoying box? Relent, Twitter! I want to eavesdrop on tweeters I like, but I don’t want to sign up to do it!
Subsole
@frosty:
Funny enough, the old Italian word for mercenary back in Machiavelli’s day was- wait for it- condotierre. Literally, a contractor.
The more it changes…
@The Moar You Know: Minor quibble. We won Korea. We entered the war with the express purpose of preserving South Korean autonomy. We achieved that aim.
It’s kind of a crime we don’t study Korea more. Lots of useful lessons there. The war we actually had broad international support from our allies, clearly defined objectives and a plan for, we won.
Also, I just love the fact that that absolute loonbag Macarthur got his ass sacked for failing to grasp that he was NOT, in fact, the Grand Maximum Proconsul of the Pacific. But I’m petty like that.
Cacti
@Ruckus: And to be frank, our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was never for any noble motive. It was about revenge.
Hoodie
@randy khan: Please, this is the type of nonsense you heard after Viet Nam, e.g., “we would have won if they had let us fight without both hands tied behind our backs.” You have lost a war if you can’t achieve the objectives you used to justify it using a reasonable amount of national resources such that the cost doesn’t outweigh the benefits. That’s failure, i.e., you lost. The only distinction would be that the military doesn’t bear all or most of the blame for that, although military leadership bears its share.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cacti:
True dat. The nobility (nation building, freedom for Afghan women) was tacked on as cover for an ongoing profitpalooza by the MIC, after the deserting coward and Darth Cheney allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora, then forgot bin Laden existed. Too busy drooling over the prospect of seizing the Oil Ministry in Baghdad.
WaterGirl
@randy khan: What do you think we won?
Villago Delenda Est
@Subsole: WWII created a new standard for “winning”: the unconditional surrender of whoever it is we’re fighting. Too bad it would up being like Doha, our unconditional surrender to the Taliban.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: What am I excusing? I am not excusing anything. We lost. We are leaving. Just like in Vietnam.
WaterGirl
@Cacti: It was about $$$ in pockets and power and the oil pipeline that never happened.
Al Z.
There is a distinct parallelism between the way the mainstream media has covered both our entrance into and exit from Afghanistan. They’ll catch up to the dirty fucking hippies eventually. Good on LOD for showing the way
ETA: what Duncan said: https://www.eschatonblog.com/2021/08/asymmetries.html
wvng
@Cacti: You are only partially correct. There were/are plenty of ngos working in Afghanistan doing good things. My brother is retired from a big non profit based in DC that rebuilt the country’s educational systems starting shortly after our invasion. He has friends still there who are trying to get out.
Miss Bianca
Wow. I think I need to share this video on FB. Some of the people screeching about how big a failure Joe Biden is for not somehow managing our exit from Afghanistan BETTER, because REASONS, need to sit down, have a heaping helping of STFU, and watch this video, because I gotta hand it to Larry O’Donnell – he lays it out better than I could ever, ever hope to. (Maybe because he’s old enough to actually remember the fall of Saigon in all its gory unglory? Me, I was 11 years old at the time).
Elizabelle
Will watch this. Thank you. The WaPost seems to be returning to some sense, after their first days of the hysterical Biden is a failure (his “lagging response.”). I am concerned that new top editor Sally Buzbee (from the AP, “both sides” par excellence), might be a disaster hire. To see.
People were recommending the Rachel Maddow opening segment from Wednesday(??) night. If anyone has a link, I’d love to see that too. (Am not good at finding MSNBC broadcast stuff.). Thanks.
Ruckus
@randy khan:
Your right to do so.
But.
This refusal, to see whatever it is as not losing, does you no favors, nor does it do the world any favors. We went to war, you can call it whatever you want but it was a war. I’ve been alive for 3 major wars and many other “skirmishes” and only one accomplished anything at all. Vietnam was the major one and this was the longest. And walking/running away is not now and never has been anything but losing. If we don’t accept the actual truth of this, no matter how much admitting it hurts, we will never learn. Excuses, trying to justify what we spent 2 decades doing, what bullies always do, is wrong. We as a country have put ourselves in a bad place. We spend 39% of all the money around the world on the military and then we justify that by using it, finding excuses to use it. We are using death to justify changing the world and the last 75 yrs has proven that it doesn’t work. We as a nation need to do better. We need to do better at home, we need to do better with our own, we need to do better with our resources, we need to do better for our own citizens, and we need to stop trying to remake the world in our image because we are not close to perfect. We lie to our own, we lie to the rest of the world and we are powerful enough to sort of get away with that. But it hasn’t improved anywhere near the cost in money and especially in lives lost in all those 75+ yrs. No matter what we said we were doing, the major things we were doing was bullying. And dying. And we have very little to show for it. I’ve been around for all but a very few years of that and even participated, because this country gave little to no choice. Millions of us did the same, you might have been one of them, I don’t know one way or the other. But if we don’t see what we’ve been doing and how much we never achieved and how many lives were lost, we can never get or be better. Humans have been doing this to each other for most of our existence and it won’t change until we wake up and change it. The first step is admitting what we have done and at least make a damn attempt to realize what we’ve become, what we’ve done, and fix that.
We did not win this battle or war. And yes it was war. And as I’ve said here before there are only two sides to war, winning or losing. And we were not, are not, on the winning side.
WaterGirl
@Elizabelle: It seems like a bunch of people are pissed at Rachel Maddow for being on the blame it on Biden crowd?
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle:
You’re all growing tired of me posting “My nym, again and again” but a huge problem with this society is the for profit, fuck the truth MSM.
matt
Wow, that’s amazing stuff. I actually am surprised any US political media allowed that to air.
laura
From a business standpoint, the war was highly profitable for some and an epic disaster for most. We should not be in that business anymore/ever again, but the MIC who own the Sunday Shows will likely be itching to do some more peace and freedom through bombing and shooting, so I expect a coterie of soft palmed former military personages to return to the green rooms and broadcast to our living rooms shortly peddling fear and jingoism.
On a not-related note, CA recall candidate Larry Elders would like employers to question the wimmens about their “breeding plans.” I shit you not, we gentle ladies of CA are breeders who make trouble for our employers. Oh how I yearn to kick his entire nut sac into his upper abdominal area. Repeatedly. Till I can no longer lift my dainty leg.
KSinMA
@MazeDancer: You took the words right put of my mouth. O’Donnell is making so much sense, and he’s pretty nearly alone.
matt
@randy khan: If we didn’t lose the war, who did? Wars are zero sum games right?
Kay
They don’t even have a comparison. “Biden botched it” would lead a normal person to ask “compared to what?”
It’s not something you do every day, ending a 20 year war, so if they’re going to issue him a letter grade and the grade is “F” they have to point to what would be A or C work, but they can’t because no comparison exists so they have just invented their own scale with exactly ONE event on it.
It’s all just really bad thinking and it makes you start to understand how they ended up stuck in Afghanistan for two decades.
Eljai
Thank you, Watergirl, Notmax and zhena gogolia. I watched Lawrence O’Donnell last night and he was riveting. He’s been the exception in a sea of lazy reporting the past couple weeks. I’ve watched that clip several times. I was still in grade school when we got out of Vietnam (and not quite the news junkie I am today), but I remember a lot. Everybody knew someone who served in those days.
Fair Economist
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m not tired of it. This episode of “entire MSM mysteriously goes in for forever war” is even more egregious than with the Iraq War. This isn’t even shilling for clicks, because as many have pointed out, there’s been almost zero public interest or MSM reporting on Afghanistan for almost a decade. This time the MSM is going all out to benefit the military-industrial complex even when it doesn’t gain itself.
Something is rotten in the State of Denmark. VERY rotten.
Nicole
That was really good. Thanks to WG and the posters who made sure it didn’t slip through the cracks. I have faithfully avoided hearing any media personality opine on Afghanistan, but I am glad to have seen this.
sdhays
I was just reading the previous Aghanistan thread, and it struck me how the press it missing yet another lesson in how egregiously they fucked up:
They were very, very unfair to Donald Trump.
I’m serious. They never took Trump seriously. Never. They assumed his candidacy would go nowhere, but was “entertaining”. Then he got the nomination and assumed he couldn’t win. Then he won and they assumed that the “establishment Republicans” and civil service would make sure he didn’t do anything bad. In less than a month, his National Security Advisor is forced to resign and is eventually convicted of “let’s not call it treason”. Then he starts destroying the civil service, doesn’t bother appointing people to the State Department, his appointees are all corrupt AF, and he forces his KKK Grand Wizard of an Attorney General into such an awkward position that he has to appoint a Special Council within weeks of becoming President.
It goes on. They would report things, maybe, but even by 2020 when he was the third impeached President ever and was telling people to drink bleach, there wasn’t a sense from the national media that Dump was a national crisis. “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.” And it’s the same with Afghanistan. Dump signed this withdrawal agreement and they didn’t take it seriously. Did they doubt Dump’s resolve? Really? After he had shit on the Kurds, which no one was calling for and was much less clearly in the national interest? Or did they assume that Biden would win and just ignore it?
The time for the freakout was when Dump signed the withdrawal agreement (well, the time for the freakout was ongoing since the whole enterprise was hard-failing the entire time, but somehow that was always down-played). But I follow this shit at least more than most of America, and I wasn’t aware that an agreement had actually been signed. I remember Dump wanting to “close the deal” at Camp David, but actually having a deal escaped me. No one took it seriously then. Why, if withdrawing is such a horrible idea?
TL;DR
Maybe the media should start taking politicians at their word and actually consider the implications of their actions and desired actions when they say them rather than just pretending nothing matters until an acute crisis is ready for the cameras.
WaterGirl
Elizabelle: If you look at the Washington Post Politics page, it is filled with article after article with right-wing talking points related to Afghanistan and more.
Awful.
Miss Bianca
@Ruckus: Dang. I think I need to copy this out and keep it in full, just in case I ever need to pull out an actual vet’s words on why this was all fucked up and bullshit. Thank you, Ruckus – as always.
Which apparently I am feeling compelled to do. I got a little salty with some folks online the other day, who were all “Biden’s doin’ it RONG, the LOSER”, but you and L’OD are making the case for my position far more eloquently.
Another Scott
@Subsole: +1
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
waratah
Thank you WaterGirl for posting this.
StringOnAStick
@Villago Delenda Est: Can we make Facebook part of the village that needs to be destroyed?
I figured out that why our now ex-friends are advocating genocide for the homeless and tossing the term ‘”libtard” at us is because between now and the last time we spent any time with them about a year ago, they’ve been radicalized by Facebook. No great loss from our lives in retrospect, but it’s instructive to see it up close.
Subsole
@Villago Delenda Est:
That is a fair point. And a thoroughly disastrous development it turned out to be.
But realistically speaking, winning in the Age of Containment (and after) amounts to “did we achieve our strategic and operational aims?”.
The only one of those wars we won is the one that actually had a concrete, measurable end-state. “Expel these forces. Maintain this border. Negotiate a ceasefire.”
And even Korea, the best-case scenario, required over half a century of military investment.
It also required a South Korea that wanted to be SOUTH Korea.
In fact, we started getting our butts kicked when we decided to abandon those original objectives and started fantasizing about chasing the enemy “all the way across the Yalu”. We only managed to make the recovery after a very hard, miserable stalemate. And we had to kill A LOT of Chinese volunteers to do it.
Like I said. Lots of lessons in Korea. Pity we learned the wrong ones.
Tazj
Apparently the US halted evacuations for a while because Qatar said they were at capacity for refugees. Later it was reported that Bahrain would be the base for the next round of evacuations. But not before a freak out ensued even from some liberals on Twitter. What about Guam? I know you like Biden but he’s awful.
Do these people stop to think for a second? Even I know planes need to refuel and you’d like a base for drop off that was closer so you could evacuate more people in a shorter period of time.
However, there was no explanation from the reporters on why the planes weren’t going straight to Guam or Europe or the US and cue the pundits and Twitter warriors claiming we love Biden and don’t give a damn about people from Afghanistan.
Salt Creek
I’sorry but we did not lose a war, how can you lose a war that was never fought in the first place? We toppled a regime we did not conquer a nation. We never expended the resources nor built up our military sufficiently enough to accomplish the task. We were told to go shopping instead.
What meager resources we did expend were soon diverted to Bush’s meritless and immoral Iraq debacle.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked we went to war, we did not go to war in Afghanistan. The fault for that rests squarely on George W. Bush’s shoulders.
Ken
Depends on the payoff matrix. Complicating things further, 3 of the 4 cells are counterfactuals for any historical example. (That’s assuming both sides go with a basic “yes/no” strategy.)
Still, I can’t help but feel “no-no” will have a higher payoff than the other cells. For example, I can’t imagine any alternate history where the US would be better off if we’d been at war with Canada and Mexico for the past century.
J R in WV
@laura:
When I have a yearning to kick some dirt-bag like that, my intention is always to hire on contract a real pro to do the actual kicking.
Like a Pro-Bowl NFL kicker with years of experience and training, or Ms Rapinoe of the US Women’s Soccer team… someone like that, who really has the know-how and leg strength to do what needs to be done. And that way I don’t injure myself on the mission.
But I think our hearts are both in the same space!
Ruckus
@Fleeting Expletive:
I was suspended just a few days ago. I’ve resisted going through the reinstatement process. The longer I do the less I feel the need to.
They are a problem of their own success. I’d bet closing down to all but members will, in the long run, hurt them, because their openness was a part of the concept of twitter in the first place. But because there are so many humans in the world they can likely be a success without all access passes. I used to be on facebook and at the end of the day, I miss almost nothing not participating there. Likely twitter will be the same. Time will tell.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@Miss Bianca: Preach. I was four when Saigon fell. I had no idea that Ford’s evacuation got the same number of people total out of Vietnam that Biden’s got out of Afghanistan this week. Nor did I know that it wasn’t much of a 1976 campaign issue.
That’s what unity looks like. Disagree all you want but no monday morning quarterbacks. Have a better idea or STFU.
Eljai
@WaterGirl: Rachel Maddow has had on a couple guests who have been critical of our Afghanistan exit, but overall I haven’t seen her stridently blaming Biden. Andrea Mitchell has and I wish she would go away.
@Elizabelle: Rachel did an emotionally gripping story about a translator and his family being evacuated on Wednesday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdEwUPq7Ymw
Subsole
@Ruckus:
You are right. 100%
You are also competing with many Americans’ deep, paralyzing fear that this makes our Great, National Red-White-and-Blue Winkie look… small.
I guarantee you that’s what 70% of this anguished bullshit boils down to. Not the people on this thread, but the folks in newsrooms? I’d bet money on it.
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes. The fact is, the only reason Republicans get away with this shit is because the media helps them.
I don’t expect to win every hand, but I do expect fair dealing. For some reason, the media seems to have decided that every Democrat WILL be Jimmy Carter. Facts be damned.
Elizabelle
@Eljai: Thank you. That is exactly the segment. Will watch it. Later. Have heard it is tear-producing.
PJ
@Ruckus: Amen.
I would add that our involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were mostly, if not totally, driven by our domestic political concerns – for Democrats, either fear of being accused of being weak on Communism or terrorism by Republicans, or for Republicans, the desire to create a Pax Americana of laissez-faire corporate depredation. The improvement of the actual condition, socially, politically, economically, and morally, of the people of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan was only considered as an afterthought, and then, at best, half-heartedly. But it was the people of these countries who ultimately would have to run and govern them, and how they fared under our occupation would be the ultimate determinate of how these wars turned out. If, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, we couldn’t provide stability or security, and if we only encouraged corruption and abuse by local elites (not to mention all the torture and killing of civilians we did), our efforts were always going to be a failure.
Miss Bianca
@sdhays: I think you have a point here. Several of them, probably.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The other thing about Vietnam, they are begging us to come back. So, a better set of polices got us what we wanted. Blow Shit Up was the wrong solution to the problem and that’s what these Blob peckerheads don’t get.
Just Chuck
@The Moar You Know:
Arguably not so. We stopped the invasion … but we ultimately never won the peace. That’s a genuine stalemate.
Peale
@Kay: I think what they want is some kind of ceremonial handover, like they maybe had when Canda become independent. Bagpipes play while the US flag is lowered over Kabul and then the Afghan flag is raised. With General Petraeus there to exchange sabers with whomever and stiff upper lipped marching off to the end-credits music while the natives cheered and saluted their bravery. Something which never happened anywhere is the standard. Something which wouldn’t have made much sense in this or any other context.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Sorry.
Not the act, the words. You are clear on your stance about the act. I am trying to show that it really is so much a part of our culture that we often don’t recognize it, that the description matters. Not as much as the act, but it does matter. A lot.
It’s what we do, we make up words or phrases that sugar coat the act. We’ve been doing this before I was born, about our excursions especially. Trying to justify what we do.
I was trying to say that we have to call this what it is.
We have a word for it and it’s war.
We are a nation that tries to justify war and far more often than it’s actually justified. I’d like us all to recognize that and see it for what it brings, that we are so used to it that we often don’t recognize it.
Sorry I didn’t explain better because I believe you don’t like war any more than I do. Sorry I offended you, I wasn’t trying to.
Subsole
@Kay: I’m telling y’all: the majesty of the National Winkie is imperiled.
That’s why they cannot point to a standard. The standard is “does this make me vicariously feel like I just beat the Terminator to death with my enormously-potent genitalia? No? Then Biden botched it.”
It’s a bunch of assholes upset that they don’t get to put on their Big Boy Billie-Joe Badass flak vest and go riding in the Action War-Beat Go! helicopter. They don’t get to bask in the reflected valor and virility of the services by pushing bomb-cam footage and waxing maudlin about our brave boys and girls over there.
Once again, lowly Democratic voters took their toys away, and those heaux on the 100th floor are MAD…
Geminid
The sarcastic @Ragnarok Lobster this morning:
RaflW
Nov 2, 2001, Tom Friedman, the mustache of misunderstanding, said:
“A month into the war in Afghanistan, the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last. Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance.”
We gave it a chance. For 20 goddam years.
And now, now it’s Biden’s fault? I think fair minded people can critique Joe and his Admin on the withdrawal, mis-estimating the speed of the Afghan gov’t collapse, and logistical and security errors in the pull-out.
But absolutely not the failed war writ large. Tom of course is in his impenetrable NYT sinecure, unaccountable as always.
Just Chuck
@Salt Creek:
Yeah and Vietnam was a “Police Action”. When you’re shooting and dropping bombs every day, that’s a war, whether politicians have the guts to admit it or not. The only difference this time is we didn’t have a draft.
sdhays
@Miss Bianca: I try to not write long rants, but the spirit of (a very not witty) Tony Jay took me and for once, I let it take me. These people are happy to be cool kid cynics most of the time, but all of a suddenly “policies have drastic consequences for real people” hits them, and they still fuck that up by going all in on how Biden is wrong, WRONG, WRROOONNNGGG!!!
And they won’t learn a damn thing. They’ll be back to being cynically cool in a week or two.
arrieve
@The Moar You Know:
Are we related? That’s my father in a nutshell as well. I was too young when my parents split up to remember much about what he was like before, but I remember my mother once describing him as the kindest person she’d ever met, and I was shocked.
Subsole
@RaflW:
LOL @ “the moustache of understanding”
SpaceUnit
Just because the US lost this war doesn’t mean that it didn’t accomplish what it was designed to do. Those 2 trillion plus dollars didn’t just dissolve down into the Afghan dirt.
Miss Bianca
@sdhays: Yeah, the way that “policies have drastic actions for real people” does tend to find the media, for the most part, as wide-eyed and breathless as deer in the proverbial headlights does tend to resonate with me, as well. It’s one of my biggest frustrations as a local journalist – when I’m trying my damnedest to bring a sense of perspective and fact-checking to my articles about my local water district board, ffs, and then I see these jag-offs spouting their fact-free opinionatin’ and frivolous attitudes toward their subjects along with their stories and I think “Waaahh…how is it that these assholes are making SO MUCH MORE MONEY than I am at this gig? What am I doing wrong?”
Jager
@Bluegirlfromwyo:
I know a guy who was a Marine Embassy guard in Saigon. He was on the last helicopter to leave. He was 19 years old at the time. He told me he didn’t have the time to think about what was happening while the evacuation was going on. He just did his job. When he got on the ship, he had something to eat, went to his assigned bunk, went to sleep, and woke up, and started to cry. He wasn’t the only one.
Brantl
@randy khan: Destroy the Taliban; how? Level both Afghanistan AND Pakistan? Cause otherwise, they come right back out of P-stan, just like they’ve done before.
H.E.Wolf
“On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam” – Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/hayden-carruth/on-being-asked-to-write-a-poem-against-the-war-in-vietnam
stinger
@Villago Delenda Est:
Ulysses S. Grant would disagree that this is standard was “created” during WWII.
Ruckus
@Miss Bianca:
Thank you.
Yes I’m a vet. Yes I enlisted. No, I didn’t see warfare, no one shot at me. I’ve almost been shot 4 times, but none of them in the military. But I spent 2 months in a military hospital and saw the damage war does, the lives forever changed, and not for the better. I use the system I earned, the VA for my healthcare. I see the bits and pieces 5 decades later of what that war cost human beings and what other wars still have cost. Most of my friends did not serve but several did and most of those went to Vietnam or to other wars. I’ve sat with people of more than one generation that have gone to war and lost. Most people don’t see that or see the cost to those people. I’ve sat with men who have never been able to let go of what they saw, what they did, and at an immense cost to their lives and the lives around them. It didn’t kill them in an instant, it’s killing them day by day, over decades. War has a cost and it’s huge. It’s not the money, although that could/would make the world better if it was spent smarter. It’s like the old saying, Man has two brains, and the one in his pants often is the one in charge. We need to do better and we can’t do that if we refuse to recognize what we do, what we call it, what we think of it, it all matters. If it didn’t we wouldn’t try to justify it by not calling it what it is.
Subsole
@Just Chuck: A large part of the reason we started calling them police actions is because they were proxy wars with a major, thermonuclear world power.
If you start losing a WAR, then the awful might of the National Winkie may be questioned, and. Well. Can’t have les autres laughing at that. Steps Must Be Taken, if it comes to that.
But a Police Action? Why, that’s just a spat between neighbors, moderated by officer friendly. No need to fire our Nukes over a Police Action.
In theory, I actually aplaud the desire to moderate the language and cool off passions before all of our cities go up in pillars of fire.
In theory.
In practice, if you aren’t ready to turn Moscow, Berlin, London and New York to radioactive vapor to keep Saigon, maybe don’t go to effing Saigon.
ssdd
Damn. I need a whole carton of cigarettes after that. Bravo.
Jager
In Sebastien Junger’s book, “Restrepo” one young grunt summed up our entire experience in Afghanistan (I’m paraphrasing) “The Taliban give a young shepherd an old English Enfield and a pocketful of ammunition, they tell him to take a shot at our compound every day from across the valley. He never hits anything except sandbags. Every time he fires his daily round, we call in an airstrike. A jet shows up, dumps 3/4s of a million dollars worth of munitions trying to kill him, and never do.”
raven
Cool, I’m in the picture with Bella!
raven
@Jager: He’s called “Luke the Gook” in Dispatches.
Another Scott
Biden is starting.
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
@stinger: True, but the intervening formal wars (Spain, WWI) unconditional surrender was not pursued, and still they counted as “wins”
Elizabelle
Biden speaking now.
gene108
@Al Z.:
Something like 2/3’s of white men, nationally, vote Republican. By default white men are the Very Serious People in the room, no matter what.
The Democrats are a coalition of “others” – women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ, etc. – who have never been taken as serious people on weighty national issues, unlike white men.
NotMax
@H.E.Wolf
Now feel a need to dig out the well thumbed through copy of Where Is Vietnam? American Poets Respond: An Anthology of New Work by 87 Poets from, IIRC, 1967.
trollhattan
@RaflW:
Talk about your evergreen quotes. Inventor of the Friedman Unit squandered [checks notes] forty of those suckers pretending to be right.
Another Scott
Good speech.
The first part of the first question, from the AP, was as if he didn’t bother listening to the speech. Then it was “some say that the US cannot be relied on to keep its commitments”… Sad.
Biden’s answer is starting off strong. No time to listen to the rest, but he’s got this.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Subsole:
We also won Kuwait. That was another war where we went in with a clearly stated, achievable goal. Most importantly, we didn’t decide that achieving that goal had been so easy we should expand our goal to something we couldn’t do, like occupying Iraq. We did what we went there to do and stopped. The troops came home and got a ticker-tape parade.
WaterGirl
@Brantl: You left the L off of the end of your name, so your comment went into moderation. I just added the L and also set you free.
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
Fine. But show us a NFP media organization anywhere, at any time, that’s any better. I respectfully put it to you that you can’t.
Ruckus
The world is a complex place, full of people who speak different languages, who have different ideas about government, who feel they are entitled to monetary or positional privilege.
We will have disagreements, differences, pissing matches, hurt feelings. We will attempt to insert our opinions as if they are the most important things – we are after all, humans. But we have to see and respect that not everyone will agree with us on many things. We are a wealthy country over all. We are also a country that does not take care of all of our citizens, that expects others not in the privileged class, to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, which is pretty much the definition of oxymoron. We have had, in my lifetime presidents that wanted a tax system that was fair(er) to all. We have had presidents who wanted a tax system that was “fair” to the privileged and screw everyone else. We have racism, that is embraced by one of our political parties. We have poverty, we have homelessness, we have opulence galore. We talk about being better but often screw many citizens right into the ground. We have a broken healthcare system that costs more than anywhere else and does less than most. We go to war on an almost daily basis. And we’ve lost far more in the last 75 yrs than won. So we hide that with fancy words/descriptions and keep on doing more of the same. We’ve had, in the last year, our first overthrow attempt of the government. We had a civil war because we wanted to be less open about our racism. And yet in the last 50 yrs we’ve made more and better progress towards a better society that the no forward progress party has and is seemingly shitting itself. We are withdrawing out of a 20 yr war, we are fighting a pandemic and we have a large segment of our population that doesn’t want to do that, that seems to like the nature of win at any cost, someone else is paying for that.
Humans are baffling, can be selfish to the Nth degree – even against their own interests. As long as some can do better I say, let’s do that, let’s actually make life/living better.
catclub
@Ken:
Are you Ken jennings?
Jim Appleton
Deeply grateful for the quality and civility of this comment thread. Every bit as important as the clip, and echoes of the same from 1976 it highlights.
Thank you NotMax, zhena, and WaterGirl. And
topclimber
@randy khan:@WaterGirl: We actually did win the war against Al Qaeda, in that they could no longer use Afghanistan as a base. But that war was won like in year 2 or 3. Whether we lost the next 17 years of the war depends on how you define lose–in a strict military sense or in a more comprehensive one.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
Pro Publica.
DB11
@Ruckus: I concur with and appreciate the POV you’ve expressed in this thread.
Looking on at American politics from the outside, what strikes me is how strongly American Exceptionalism & militarism infests the unexamined mindset of most Americans — and even much of mainstream Democratic politics.
It’s hard for Americans to see themselves as primarily a bully and malevolent actor on the world stage — and since most are kept distracted from anything that would pierce their veil of belligerent ignorance of world affairs, that leaves a small percentage who actually grasp what’s been done in America’s name.
Of those left, on the non-layman’s side you have:
Of all these players, only the last group is capable of acting both in good faith and in the public interest — and as such, they are the only ones willing to challenge the underlying mythology and shibboleths that initiate and sustain forever war. (not all of them though, because some are acting — intentionally or otherwise — in the interest of the other groups mentioned)
The clear-eyed perspective of veterans — who have lived the full set of consequences, both on the ground and in the short and long-term aftermath, and see the futility, immorality and self-dealing of the choices that led to war and justified its continuation — is invaluable in waking up the citizenry to the reality that Americans have acceded to for far too long.
Thanks for expressing that perspective so well… and sorry for the length.
Citizen Alan
@SpaceUnit:
I am reminded of Orwell’s 1984 and specifically Goldstein’s theory of modern warfare: The true purpose of war is not to defeat an enemy nor even to conquer a foreign nation and claim their assets for oneself. Rather, the real purpose of all modern war is to deliberately squander the productive output of the nation in order to prevent it from being used to improve the lives of the citizens.
Salt Creek
@Just Chuck: You’re right it was a police action, it was not war. We lost as many meant in the first 20 minutes of D-Day as we did in 20 years of Afghanistan.
There was no draft, no war bonds no victory gardens.
We were told to go shopping.
Stephen
@burnspbesq:
I can. Australia’s ABC.