I feel deeply pained for the women and girls of Afghanistan, at risk of much harm from the soldiers of the Taliban army and its misogyny. The agony of my powerlessness in the face of such oppression and death leaves me stunned.
AND, Biden is doing the right thing. The USA needs to get out of its decades long meddling and warring in other countries to no better end than enriching the military-industrial complex. Our 'volunteer' armies of the poor, POC, and immigrants don't need to be put at risk for no apparent relevant rationale. The USA appears to have serious deficits in 'nation-building.'
Let us build peace. Here. At home. Let us bankrupt the war-makers. Let us re-purpose our bright youngers to civic service and enriching this nation.
The war is within. We need to know its roots and the forces behind autocracy; the bank funding it; the people steering, funding and profiting from it: Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch McConnell -- who else; which business 'leaders' and economic theorists? The anti regulations, anti-government, anti-taxes movements motivating the aggrieved and what don't we know? We must put together our own bank of knowledge to identify and root out the enemies of Democracy, addressing Climate Change, equality, economic opportunity, the free press, gun violence, free public education and the truth. We require much more organization and direction.
War makers include, of course, manufacturers of war machines of all stripes. Dare we say, "`They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. ' (Isaiah 2:4)." I hope humanity is in the process of not learning war anymore but rather peace. I like to think Pres. Biden and his advisors are guided by this ideal. Who isn't, except those who stand to profit monetarily. Shame, shame. They need to be held in check or shut down.
The beginning of the 2nd chapter of Isaiah which leads into the excerpt from the 4th verse Mary quotes above is regarding the last days when the nations will supposedly be judged by "the God of Jacob". Here's the full verse (King James, my dad's bible):
'And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
I don't think we should wait for judgement day or intervening from "the God of Jacob". There's a lot of nonsense in the bible - later in Isaiah (4:1), we can also read, "And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach." ????
This is not meant as a criticism of the reasonable sentiments in your post, Mary - it's just me striking out against my fundamentalist upbringing that twisted me in knots trying to figure out which "wise" words in the bible to live by, since the ones I preferred seemed to be ignored by most Christians I knew, and also since there was a lot of depressed or ecstatic or incoherent rambling in the bible. I believe we need to find our own way without that compilation of confused and confusing thoughts by an uncoordinated group of writers and thinkers strung out across centuries.
The most important thing I learned from reading the (KJV) bible as a kid was the ability to comprehend Shakespeare.
Lanita Grace…. Not sure if you will see this because next day post is already published. I just never have heard anyone express that which you said in your last paragraph. What an interesting comparison …reading the KJV to comprehension of Shakespeare.
I’ll not forget that soon. As a teacher that always taught children to link their readings….fascinating.
Lanita, not sure you will see this either but just wanted to acknowledge your reply. I agree completely -- it's impossible to sort through that "compilation" of "confused and confusing thought." Imo, all people of goodwill (and God too) want peace, and that's what I seek. It has become the guiding principle of my life in the last few years.
Morning kimceann. Yeah, it’s all about corporation/business building, not nation building. Bring the troops home. And the corporations. We need them for infrastructure here. The terrorist war is on our soil now.
I have to wonder, considering that in some cultures (likely long ago) the women were the more aggressive warriers - perhaps the Afghani women & girls who have experienced more freedom the past couple decades, might just rise up themselves? They have become so much stronger & better educated - many young ones have never been under the Taliban's thumb. I know there are some women in the Army there, but got the impression not many. Possibility?
Thank You Roland, though itvis just so sad and tragic.
"She said there were a few dozen women learning to use guns with her, and despite their inexperience they would have one advantage over men if they faced the Taliban. “They are frightened of being killed by us, they consider it shameful.”
Thanks Roland - I hope these women dont wait until they are "allowed" to do this. Love the comment from one of the Taliban - that the women are too fearful & wont be allowed (!) to fight! That kind of rhetoric might just push more women forward!
That one comment by the Taliban could come from any Muslim nation in the world. That is not exclusive to Muslim Afghanistan by any means. The sexism holdover from the Middle Ages in some of those countries is just severe, severely anachronistic and severely damaging. Maybe the only benefit of 20 years in Afghanistan is showing a better way. Maybe that trillion dollars bought a little bit of education. Even in a complete fiasco, an utter disaster like America’s occupation war, it helps to look at the silver lining, the perhaps hidden benefits. That’s why I like The Guardian, and why I hate most news, they try to be hyperbolic and sensationalist instead of showing reality. Too many male white voices, not enough female voices.
Maggie, imagine a world where are your husband, your brothers, your father, and even your sons have to give permission for you to go out. You are not allowed to drive you can only be driven. They decide to approve what you do. You are not a full human being with full rights. If they veto something you want to do, and you do it anyway, you expose yourself to great risk. At their hands. That’s only a part of what the Taliban represents. Severe restrictions on women, and severe reprisals if any woman dares breaks the rules or defy the men around them. Picture slavery, or 19th C. life for women in America.
Roland, see my reply to your earlier comment. Having been under someone's control - in a manner of speaking - thru my marriage - I dont have to go too far to imagine asking permission. Fortunately, for me, that was a lifetime ago.
Given schmiven. In the USA, we are privileged. We are given. In most nations, you have to take. Those women are putting their lives on the line, make no mistake about it, they are choosing between women’s equality and the very distinct possibility of death and permanent injury. Acid in the face. “Honor killings” which is euphemism for male a$$hole killing woman, usually his own child, who doesn’t follow the sexist cultural rules and decides to exercise her own freedom. Death, rape, acid attack, etc. for breaking the cultural taboos. Think Malala. Owning and being willing to use a weapon is the only protection against a male a$$hole in a culture like that.
NO you misunderstood me - or I just didnt make it clear. I was talking about being given the GUNS & WEAPONS they needed. Believe me, I get what they have been thru and what the threat to them is if they stand up for themselves. And yes we are beyond privileged - I doubt anyone in this country has much concept of what it would take to put yourself out in the front of this kind of threat. I have heard Malala speak & read what she has written. It does strike me as really really weird that the people (mostly white men) who appear to be so threatened by any kind of gun control and, it would seem, even masks, then we look at Afghani women who have so little control other than what they have gained the past few years & THEY may be scared but determined to protect themselves and their lives and their families against really big odds against them. Who is the braver of the two?
Like you, I fear a slaughter of women, or at least severe repression. What is happening in the world with this horrible rise...from sex trafficking and domestic murders and disappearances in northern nations to wanton killing of women in the more southern regions?
I acutely remember our departure from Vietnam. Combat operations ceased in 1973, and over the next year we repatriated our soldiers back to the United States, leaving mounds of equipment and matériel in the hands of the South Vietnamese, who promptly abandoned it on the battlefield with North Vietnam. We got our prisoners of war back, some of whom had been in captivity for going on nine years.
In March 1975, North Vietnam launched a ground offensive against South Vietnam. By the middle of April, it was clear that Saigon was about to fall, and there was pressure on Congress to revisit its decision to not support any further military action in South Vietnam. We all know what followed afterward.
I also recall Henry Kissinger's stated objective to achieve what he referred to as "a decent interval" before Saigon actually fell. How decent that interval was is a matter of conjecture and/or personal opinion. It was clear, however, that as military objectives go, the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Whether the United States achieve its political objectives by staying the course by bolstering the Saigon government between 1958 and 1975 is also a matter of conjecture. Maybe there a secret archives that will see the light of day sometime 50 years from now that will reveal what political objectives were actually being sought, above and beyond delaying the inevitable. If the war in Vietnam was supposed to be the place where the United States would lay down a marker about 'thus far and no further', that was a bad place to do it.
Worse yet, the American military establishment was still being run by the generals who would come of age during World War II, and who were apparently intoxicated by America's victory over Japan in the war that lasted just under four years, while utterly destroying Japan as a military power. Vietnam was not Tarawa or Guadalcanal, or the Marianas Islands. These are men who are used to getting their way, who mistook technology for national purpose. Politically, the war was the price of surrender of the American government to the so-called China Lobby, political allies within the Republican Party of the Chinese nationalist government that had been ousted from mainland China in 1949, and then seeking refuge on Taiwan.
American foreign policy towards China, and by extension, to China's neighbors in Southeast Asia was heavily influenced by American General Claire Lee Chennault, the military officer who had organized the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed 'The Flying Tigers', a group of American military pilots assembled by General Chennault to engage Japanese forces over China in 1941, the year before the United States officially entered World War II. General Chennault's second wife, known as Anna Chennault (born Chan Sheng Mai, in China, in 1923) had been a war correspondent; and following the death in 1946 of Chennault's wife Nell (Thompson) to whom he had been married since 1911, he married Anna and brought her back to Washington DC, where together, there were staunch advocates for the Nationalist Chinese government. General Chennault died in 1958, and Anna Chennault continued her involvement in Republican politics, and policies which were grounded on the idea that at some future point in time Nationalist China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, would return to Beijing in triumph, supported by the United States. To them the communist victory in 1949 was utterly unacceptable. It was also Anna Chennault who tipped off the Diem government in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson was about to conclude a negotiated peace with North Vietnam, allowing the South Vietnamese to sabotage the nascent negotiations. Chennault was also overheard negotiating with then-candidate Richard Nixon looking to oppose Lyndon Johnson's request for a second term of office in the 1968 presidential election. This was overheard on a CIA wiretap; but presidential advisor Clark Clifford persuaded Johnson not to make an issue of it, treasonous as it was, because that would have exposed the nature of the wiretap, and the fact that it was being used against a member of the Washington political establishment. You can see how domestic partisan politics and political agendas can have worldwide consequences. Viewed in hindsight, Lyndon Johnson should have pursued the matter; he ended up withdrawing from the presidential race, and allowing Richard Nixon to continue to wage war for another five years until the 1973 cease-fire. But Johnson's ego got in the way, and his advisor, Clark Clifford, did him no favors. He would have done better, as John Kennedy did, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, by admitting his mistakes and moving on.
The other thread of the story has to do with supporting French ambitions to return to Vietnam and to restore its colony there in 1946. Again, the issue was communist-led opposition to French rule. Thus it happened that American arms provided to France between 1946 and 1954, when the French army at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded and destroyed by the Viet Minh, the North Vietnamese Revolutionary Army in May 1954. American President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, and following a series of negotiations, what was then French Indochina was divided into a North Vietnam, based in Hanoi, and a South Vietnam, headquartered in Saigon. The United States had initially agreed to a plebiscite at which all Vietnamese would get to decide which country they wanted to remain with. United States reneged on the deal and began arming the South Vietnamese; much of this military buildup was due to congressional pressure by the Republican Party, envisioning a much more robust American response to the French defeat. In this, Anna Chennault was the go-to connection between the Republican Party and the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. First it was Kennedy, and afterward it was LBJ, but the pattern was set, and the wheels were set in motion. After 1960, and through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, whether we were consciously aware of it or not, we were on a collision course in Southeast Asia, because our previous decision-making was a one-size-fits-all pattern of opposition to communist regimes, emotionally driven, and with the egos of the actors very much in evidence.
Many of us of a certain age know or things ended up, very much like what we saw over the past 20 years in Afghanistan. We took sides in a war of national liberation against a European colonial power, France, as much because of our cultural affinity with France, and the American government's obsession with communism. That was the opposite tack that we took during World War II when we supported Great Britain against Germany, but as to the British Empire, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to support Winston Churchill's imperial ambitions. Before he died, President Roosevelt was overheard saying that he was not going to let the French back into Indochina after the war. The president who succeeded Roosevelt, Harry Truman, was unschooled in international politics, and so he let the re-militarization of Vietnam by the French government to slip by unchallenged. Following that we allowed our cultural affinity with France and the debt that we owe them historically by supporting George Washington's army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1783, to cloud our judgment. Like Iraq, and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war of choice; and, as with the other two, a war we lost
Given the history that I have laid out above, I have to view with a great deal of skepticism the argument that the United States is living Afghanistan 'too soon'. As President Biden said in his comments today, something to the effect of 'when is enough, enough'. The president noted that we had been in Afghanistan 20 years, and that the children of soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago were now doing tours of combat where their parents had fought. This is a perfect paradigm of the 'sunk cost' fallacy, throwing good money after bad, hoping to recoup your losses. There is also the 'Gambler's Fallacy', which is basically if you lose a long string of bets, your luck is bound to change. As the song says, and ain't necessarily so.
It has been said, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I look at historical parallels to see patterns of behavior that seem to repeat themselves in somewhere other, because that is the way people behave. We got into Afghanistan, because George W. Bush got us into Iraq on false pretenses. Bad karma happens when you lie to yourself; but the problem is that you cannot lie about yourself. If we keep following the same old patterns that Republican administrations have foisted on us, were going to get the same bad results that we have now. Today, we have the right President, and at the right time. In the time that we have Joe Biden, let him heal us, and then maybe we can heal ourselves.
How little “we the people” actually know of the games our politicians play for the sake of their own enrichment and power… and with devastating consequences to “we the people”. Thank you for this history lesson of the conflict in Viet Nam which took the lives of so many of my classmates and neighbors. I protested the war but never understood why we were ever there. Today, HCR writes “our primary danger from terrorism is homegrown and comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” For me, our primary danger is the Republican Party and what it is doing to our democracy with its new voting laws. For me, that danger is being allowed by Democrats in the Senate who are not standing strong to prevent this and by a SCOTUS who is giving them a pass. Some days I’m optimistic the grassroots efforts of Stacy Abrams and all of us who write post cards and try to spread the truth will get us through this assault on our democracy… but my rose colored glasses are beginning to fail me. Reading Heather’s posts and listening to her talks usually take me off the wall of despondency and give me hope but something needs to give before the 2022 election.
How little “we the people” actually know of the games our politicians play for the sake of their own enrichment and power… and with devastating consequences to “we the people”.
Welcome to the modern Republican Party Sharon. Owned and operated by the likes of big oil, pharmaceutical companies, and Vladimir Putin.
Not to mention, the Mercers, the Koch family, Murdoch, and other dark money multi billionaires whose tentacles extend not only into big oil and big pharma, but other giant corporations as well. I have a suspicion that one huge source of that dark money comes into the US in the form of heroin and various other drugs.
Less we NOT forget the elite and corporate funding through back channels towards white nationalist terror organizations right here at home on American soil. Building a military style presence right in your living rooms and kitchen tables. This is The birth canal of authoritarianism AND this is our reality constructed over the last twenty years.
As much as I abhor the cult that worships dopey don, LBJ bought the lies of Defense Sec McNamara. Or perhaps, Mac was telling the strong minded LBJ what he wanted to hear!
I think the GOP has the benefit of a more singular focus giving them the laser like focus someone talked about around 9-11. The Dems are inundated with actual problems needing fixing, people needing help, etc. along with fighting the GOPs effective campaign to win their way. The Dems could benefit from laser like focus but on what issue (of so many) would they focus it?
“that danger is being allowed by the Democrats in the Senate who are not standing strong…”
I actually am flummoxed how anyone can say this. That danger is not being “allowed”. The agenda that is accepted, publicized nationally by the Republican Party (50% of the Senate) that is being promoted and used in every way possible occupies the majority of interest in this country, like it or not. And in plain words, opposition is their agenda and is treasonous in many ways. Until a great deal of attention to it is lessened, it is in our faces daily. I have to look to find a political article favorable to my views in my local paper. Here is what the Democrats are standing strong about…voting rights, a vaccination for every American, infrastructure—-physical and social, and much more already signed or passed through executive order. Organizing the entire Executive Branch after it was left in dark chaos because there was NO peaceful transfer of power. And Biden-Harris were inaugurated less than 6 mos ago. And they do have an agenda. A strong one. And it is a slower process. It must be done carefully and the barriers put up by a few Democrats are difficult, but possible ones to overcome. Every effort to reach across the aisle, and there have been many and I am sure hundreds of action behind the scenes have been met with obstinate refusal.
I certainly respect your opinion, Sharon, but i just don’t believe we should take the Republican bait dangling before the noses of every Democrat or NPA in this country. And that bait is be mad, be frustrated, think that Republicans are a greater force, Democrats are weak, Biden is old, we are taking the House in ‘22, the media loves us, we own more states, the popular vote doesn’t matter, and on and on and on. I don’t care about their bait because their fishing pole is a raggedy stick.
I do not pretend to be smarter or know more than Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or any of them. But I’m putting my trust in the Dems and Independents like Bernie Sanders. I’m going to exhibit patience as much as I can and refuse Trump bait. And most of all, I will not speak of any outcome that has not happened. Words are powerful. They can be a blessed weapon or a curse.
Christine, I didn’t mean to imply that Biden-Harris or the majority of the Democrats in Congress are weak or not accomplishing amazing things for “ we the people”. My concern is that our 50- 50( plus 1 ) majority is stymied by a few Democrats who will not reform the filibuster which, in my humble opinion, gives the Republicans the power. I’m sorry if I struck a nerve. I’m on your side. I’ve always been complacent about our democracy… just knew it would always be there. When trump was elected I felt like I walked into a wall, and when I came to, I realized I had neglected my own responsibility to keeping our democracy intact. I’m a bit out of my league with most of you who are much more informed. You, obviously, were not complacent. I am so happy to have found this group because I’m constantly being schooled and I welcome it. Thank you for the smack down !
Ahhhhh. Thank you, Sharon. The smack down wasn’t for you. It was for all of us, including me. It is SO difficult being in the frame of mind of trusting the legislators to make things right. To see the Republican oppositional no-agenda and try to find less media fascinated by its audacity. To even spend a minute of our day feeling beaten down by these rogues is too long. Pessimism is easy. Optimism is a struggle. Fear is easier than love because love requires vigilance to our greater selves.
As weird or trite as this sounds, I try each day to keep a symbol in my mind during meditation or contemplation or just taking a deep breath for a minute. Lately it’s been the Statue of Liberty.
I want all the brave beautiful strong soulful Afghan women and children to come here and find shelter, the peace room, and a path. Let the men play their war games.
Although my natural bent is to 100% agree that war is a game played by men to the detriment of women and children, I think that isn't completely true. Women have aided and abetted the going to war of men throughout history. And men have objected to being sent to war throughout history, too. Look at how many women were among the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.
My current thought on this (and it has been evolving and changing throught my 66 years) is that the responsibility of childbearing and rearing has been what kept most women out of the military and positions of power in the past. Modern birth control, nutrition, education, and physical education have all done their part to make today's women capable soldiers and leaders - whether or not they choose to bear children. So we have ended up not just with Nancy Pelosi, AOC and the Squad, Stacey Abrams and more; we have also ended up with Lynndie Rana England (Abu Ghraib war criminal), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Liz Cheney (we love her now because she admits Jan 6 was an insurrection, but she's also a hawk and right-wing Republican).
If we are bringing Afghan women and children here for shelter, we should not shut out the Afghan men who will be targets for aiding U.S. and NATO troops and advocating for education for girls.
I think you and I are the ONLY ones that mentioned Liz Cheney today although there was plenty of comments about Daddy Dick. Mine in a rather audacious comment later. I used to call him president Vice dick Cheney.
Yes. You are right. Unjust have always believed that women as true warriors are fierce and cunning but still think and plan better towards peace yet realize that comes with a fight sometimes.
And of course I want the Afghan men coming here also that are fleeing towards peace.
Having a symbol in your mind is not trite at all during meditation. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could open our arms to all those people (Afghani and other oppressed people) who want to thrive in a peaceful democracy…let’s continue the work (even if it is a struggle) with holding fast to our optimism and love so that we remain a peaceful democracy.
Thank you Roland. I am pretty hot about the pessimism by so many people about Dems and the slow progress of Biden’s agenda. What the Republicans are trying to do, their psychological warfare, is working and getting a lot of fearful reaction instead of mere disdain. It is straining my civilized comportment. Not sure about commenting anymore.
It is hard not to be drawn in to pessimism, isn't it, Christine? I practice detachment by sneering at headlines or YouTube caption/titles that feature the anti-democracy faction - and then I quite often pass by without reading or viewing. Yes, it's sometimes hard to find any positive news to focus on - at which point, I abandon news and go back to solitaire, fiction, cleaning house, playing with cats. We don't need to engage in every political moment - we need to take care of ourselves, not only in order to have the strength and focus to fight where we can have an effect, but also to just have a life worth living. The world will probably not become the just one we dream of within our lifetimes - so we do what we can when we can, and in between, we live and get some pleasure out of our short span.
Come back to commenting when you feel good about it. You contribute a lot here.
Great read. Thank you for the time you took to share your informative recollections. This is a marvelously well informed and generous group. I gratefully learn every day, and not only from our Professor HCR!
Thank you. What a wonderful history lesson. We should all look around and see who we (the USofA) is setting up to be the next 'adventure. Central Africa is looking very appetizing. /snark
" 'The West wants to stage World War III from South Asia,' said Rehman Malik, and it has found a tool in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi." from The Week, Confidential Intelligence Briefing. Complimentary copy, 877-245-8151
In 1973, I was a sophomore in high school. In the fall of 1975, Henry Kissinger came to the University of Wyoming to speak, and attendance was required by the instructor of my (required) political science 101 course. I completely lost the thread of his talk within about two minutes, and sat through the rest of it in total incomprehension. I chalked it up to being a freshman, with too little knowledge of history and politics.
Weirdly, Kissinger posted an editorial in some national magazine a few years back, and as I read through it, I found it just as obtuse as his speech back in 1975. Frankly, one of the things that frightened me most about Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she considered Kissinger her mentor in international politics. I did not understand Kissinger's words, but I did understand two things about him: he was one of the architects of the Vietnam War, which loomed over me in junior high as the probable ending of my life, and he talked like a babbling madman.
My take exactly on Kissinger. Call me paranoid, but his German accent always made him sound to me like a sinister whack job straight out of Dr. Strangelove. This from the guy who’s always surrounded by German accents, he was born and raised with them.
Actually it was Dick Cheney and his deep-seated, ironclad Wyoming loyalty to Halliburton and big oil that got us into Iraq. He sold Bush on the idea because Bush’s dad despised Saddam Hussein, so Cheney knew what buttons to push there. Then he managed to sell the American people, and most of Congress, gullible schmucks that we are.
I love it, voice-to-text printed the words “a wreck“ instead of “Iraq.“ A Freudian slip by the magic of technology?
You’ve heard the old joke, I’m sure, from the early 2000s:
"In walks Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, carrying a map of Iraq which he proceeds to put down on the table in the “Situation Room.” O’Neill described the map as having been divided into sections like you might slice a pie, and in each section was the name of a U.S. oil company. The first subject address by Bush’s national security team was not “whether to attack Iraq, but how do we go about attacking Iraq.”
So before there were any reports of threats of terrorism by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, before the attack on 9-11 on the Twin Towers in New York and Pentagon in Washington, they had made up their minds to attack Iraq militarily. They were going to divide up its oil reserves and as Trump would later criticize them for having failed to do, they were going to take the oil.
After the attack by al Qaeda on 9-11, they quickly dispatched the Taliban from Afghanistan (temporarily, that is) and went looking for an excuse to attack Iraq. There was no “actionable” intelligence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9-11. The CIA didn’t have any. The FBI didn’t find any during its investigation of the attackers. The Pentagon didn’t have any through its intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency. So Donald Rumsfeld set up something called “The Office of Special Plans” within the Pentagon to which he assigned the two “architects” of the eventual war in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Their job was to find a reason to attack Iraq. They came up with two main reasons: that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
So for a while after 9/11/2001, I was sucked into what is now called the "conspiracy" view of the incident, i.e. that there was "inside" help. I eventually concluded that the insiders, if there were any, would never face any accountability, so there was little point in wasting energy on what would always be an "unproven conspiracy theory."
What has always been clear to me, however, is that the official story of 9/11 is utter crap. It makes no sense. Every time I flew through Denver and saw the "condition orange" advisories Scotch-taped to the doors and brown-curling in the sun -- or the rusting "condition orange" sign at the airport in LA -- I was reminded of how little sense it made. I personally needed a better story.
The Cheney/Oil connection provides one such story. I wrote an article on this back in 2010, and then a repost and corrections in 2014.
I'm not at all convinced this is the real story. For one thing, Jan 6 is a clear indication that conspiracies built around nothing more than malign megalomania and spite have a lot more carrying-power than I ever believed.
I am annoyed by, but don't summarily discount the comments of, those who pronounce Beijing as though the 'j' sounds like the 's' in 'leisure' rather than the 'j' in 'jingle' (which also isn't completely accurate, but is a lot closer to the correct Mandarin). Sometimes we have to let our own sense of linguistic correctness relax a bit if we want to have any kind of peaceful dialog with one another.
Agreed! Little Bush was unfit to be commander in chief based on his missing Army Reserve records, which the press gave him ‘a pass on’! Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11! Saudi Arabia was the home of 17 of the 19 terrorist hijackers! But, Saudi $$$$ was being managed by very influential financial groups in the US!
Saddam kept Iran in check! Another Saudi avowed enemy!
I put a comment on another forum today about my opinion about the Repubs ousting Liz Cheney from their vaulted ranks. In my opinion, Trump wanted her demoted and for her to shut up like it’s a family feud. I imagine he’s always had penis envy of Daddy Dick of Halliburton.
And you can darn tootin’ believe that Liz is just bustin’ her “daddy’s proud of me buttons” for getting on the committee to bust Donald for his bad insurrection behavior.
I argued at the time that it was the wrong thing to do. My take was, "It's Junior showing Daddy how it's done because Dick Cheney told him he needed to do it."
I have long thought that conventional warfare—the ultra-expensive, equipment-heavy, killer-machinery of our military is obsolete and pathetic. When will we learn that lesson? Also, it seems to me that the Republican party has long been entangled with the military-industrial complex, and continues to do what it pleases no matter the party of the president. It has a habit of electing a not-very-intelligent president who has star power enough to entertain the masses (think Reagan and Trump) while the rest continue on their merry way of world manipulation, including the humiliation of Democratic administrations.
Yes MaryPat, but (apparently) only in one of his drafts of the "farewell address." The speech he gave on television omitted "Congressional," undoubtedly out of political considerations.
OH! "As the U.S. destroyed the underpinnings of how it innovated in World War II and the immediate post-Cold War period, the U.S. is now faced with – as John McCain would often describe it – a military-industrial-congressional complex that is simply unable or agile enough to effectively compete against China. Ike was right to warn against collusion, but he didn’t target the real problem." Thank You Tom, for this article. I think. So depressing.
Leave us not forget that "history" is not necessarily "factual". It is always subjective because we humans are not actually capable of objectivity (though most of us think we are). We generally seek out those interpretations of history that suit an already established mindset - I hate to admit it, but I know that my own 100% certainty that preparing for war causes war is my subjective view - I've always held it, I will always hold it, and I know that other people are able to argue many reasons to have a military and sophisticated weaponry, but that I will never agree. Therefore, when I read the article for which you kindly posted a link, Tom, my reaction was, "Does it really matter how this all came about when the premise from which it began millenia ago when the first troupe of proto-humans decided to wipe out their neighbors over a bit of swamp or a mammoth carcase was FUBAR?" (My father's politer spelling out of that acronyn was " 'fouled' up beyond all recall".)
Thank you for pointing out the role the Chennaults played in getting us mired in Vietnam. Their power games in cahoots with Chiang Kai-shek/Jiang Jieshi also made us abandon the opportunity to have a relationship with the People's Republic of China. Another military officer, one who does not receive much credit (in the U.S.) for his advocacy against aligning ourselves with the KMT (Guomindang), is Gen. Josesph Stilwell (although he is honored in China at a museum in Chongqing). Stilwell was appalled at the way Chiang stockpiled munitions and supplies during WWII, refusing to cooperate with the efforts to fight the Japanese because Chiang was waiting for the opportunity to engage the Communists (who actually did fight the Japanese) in civil war. Had we followed the advice of Stilwell and others who understood the Chinese situation better, so many things would be different today. We wouldn't have got involved in Vietnam and quite possibly Mao would not have reacted to isolation from the rest of the world by going down the twisted, mad road that led China to a population explosion in the 1950s followed by widespread famine and starvation, multiple purges of intellectuals and dissidents, the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in which a generation of Chinese students spent their primary and secondary school years tearing down the "four olds" (the remnants of traditional Chinese culture), the one-child policy that caused families who viewed sons as their only safety net in old age to resort to female infanticide in unknown numbers, and container ships smuggling and abandoning to horrible deaths desperate Chinese workers seeking economic opportunities in North America.
Oh, yes, America is truly great - at causing problems and then walking away in places we should either have never entered, or should have had better hands and minds and hearts in charge. Although I have as much faith as I can have in President Biden without knowing him personally, I know he isn't a superhero with powers humans only fantasize about in comic book world. I want to hope, but I've read and lived through an awful lot of history. I can only try to keep doing my own little part to keep us moving toward a world that I know we don't all agree on as a goal. It's us (humanity as a whole) I don't trust. Too many of us are not good at taking care of this world and as a species we don't deserve its bounty. What terrifies me the most are those who believe that the beauties, the bounty of this planet are here only for humanity to exploit. That includes not just the mega-trillionaires with bottomless wells of dark money, but also the evangelicals who think "God" gave mankind this planet and that it's ours to do with each of our only little plots of it exactly what we please.
Tragically, some of our past leaders severely underestimated cultures which existed centuries before we did!
Regarding WWII collaborators with the Allies in Asia, I believe Ho Chi Min was one of them!! Ignoring his service, US political and military, still ‘wet behind the ears’, believed they new best ! Tragic!
American aid to China during World War II is a long a long and complicated story, too lengthy to retell here. It involved three years (1942 - 1945) of nonstop cargo flights involving thousands of round trip cargo flights over the Himalayas connecting India with southern China, and the construction of the Ledo and Burma Roads, the combined length of which stretched 1,044 miles over rugged mountains and trackless jungle terrain. Any contact or assistance to Mao Tse Tung's army would have been out of the question. There was zero chance of that happening.
There is a lot of stuff out there if you care to look for it. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are inextricably linked. You want them to be studied in a binary way. One history that I have is Fiasco The American military adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006). The same coterie of Bush Administration, comic opera masterminds who cobbled up the Iraq disaster did pretty much the same thing in Afghanistan. We will be paying dearly for their insouciant joyriding for decades to come. Beyond that, historians are going to have decades-worth of official records and private narratives to plow through in order to pull together an historical narrative that covers all the bases, puts them into some sort of cohesive timeline, and gives analysis and perspective to the story. My guess would be that will see something like that may be five to ten years from now.
Five to ten years? If those "official records and private narratives" survive and If the Democrats hang on to Congress and the White House in 2022 and 2024, maybe in twenty to thirty years. If they don't, two or three generations from now, when we all are gone, is more like it.
There are no secrets anymore The reality is much closer to what I described. Everyone involved having a story to tell will be falling all over themselves to see it in print. Crosschecking multiple sources is made easier by social networking. The real risk is in getting the story into print before all the boxes are checked.
The "Doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different result". I'm sure that isnt the exact phrase, but close enough. Our government & its human "entities" seem to be stuck on that one, dont they? It appears to be the case in so many instances.
Artsilen, thank you so much for this. I wondered for years about how we became entangled with some of these wars, but had no clear picture. Your clear, concise summation is a great education to those of us who had only the government's rationale (i.e., The Domino Theory, which I knew intuitively was trash) and our driving fear that the Communists would take over the world. Coincidentally, it is yet another reason that the Republicans need to be defeated.
PBS did an excellent documentary about Anna Chenault's treachery and its results.
Right now, we have a moral obligation to save those Afghans who allied themselves with us. We took in thousands of Vietnamese boat people (many of them living here in California) and they've enriched our lives immensely, an we have blended their culture with ours. Parenthetically, this is why California succeeds. We can do that for Afghans who risked everything to help us. This is really how we win hearts and minds. Trump Republicans don't get that. We go from strength to strength, and the Republicans stew in their resentments.The numbers don't lie.
I met a lot of young Vietnamese young men who the Archdiocese of New Orleans put in vacant dormitories of an old boys institution where I worked. It was ironic to hear French again being spoken in Cafe du Monde by Asian waiters.
Shortly after our pulling out of VN, I had a Vietnamese co-worker with whom I tried to speak my community college French. Turned out, he'd been a South Vietnamese soldier (not a well-educated officer) and didn't speak a word of French (or possibly didn't recognize what I was saying as French?) Too bad I didn't take the opportunity to learn a bit of Vietnamese from him.
It's extremely difficult for a person with narcissistic personality traits to think and care for others, and that empathy and caring is what it takes to actually make our government work for all people. Just think how awesome our nation could be if all the energy and effort put into the GOP propaganda and undermining our nation was put into helping all citizens be successful.
Agree completely. And it’s not just any old narcissism, it’s a narcissism born of rigid adherence to old social structures, to the status quo of having whites and men and straights come first, giving them all the power and privilege ahead of others. Republican attachment to racist white and sexist male and genderist straight dominance has to be obliterated. I’m sorry, it’s a black-and-white choice: much as we love gray, the black hats have to be beaten and won over. Period. There is no other alternative.
Unless those racist, sexist, genderist white men (and women) get busy in the bedroom making a passel of mini-me's, they will eventually be outnumbered. After all, even the British royal family has a Black princess now and she is busy improving that bloodline.
It's hard to wait it out though - our generation will be long gone before the idea of "whiteness" is thoroughly obliterated - and humans may destroy the planet first, but the day is coming when the wide range of skin color, hair texture, facial feature is homogenized into something new and beautiful. Maybe. I can dream, can't I? Because I'm having a lot of feelings about being labeled "white" - not trying to get out of acknowledging the advantages I have had by being born with this particular look - but I never wanted to be pale, blonde, and green-eyed. I wanted to have black hair and dark skin because that was what looked beautiful to me when I was a child. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd be pretty sure I was East Asian or South Asian or West Asian in a former life.
I hear what you’re dreaming of and know that at 71 years I certainly will not see it come to pass. Oh,and for the record, I hope we don’t actually look homogenized…too many lovely colors out there to have us all looking beige!
Oh. I’m QUITE sure that is true. “…a passel of mini-me’s…Hahahahahahaha That won’t happen. Too busy dicking around playing war and playing daddy bucks.
It infuriates me when Americans say the there isn't a system in place to admit Afghans, as I heard on NPR today. America has a moral obligation to help Afghans who put their lives at risk. Just get them out of Afghanistan without a system, because that is the right thing to do. That is our obligation.
Even though visas might take some time because of vetting (they were thoroughly vetted before they ever were in contact with our troops), they can be taken to Guam and have safe haven for themselves and their families until the visas come in. From what I heard last night, many are not currently in Kabul, and it will take some time to make their way there, since the Taliban is patrolling the roads, so that makes it all the more urgent! Biden has said they'd be able to come here, but words are not enough - action, transport planes, ships are needed NOW!
I've written my senators weeks ago, asking that they make the rescue of Afghan translators a priority. MSNBC has been interviewing politicians about the status of the rescue plans, and they have indicated that Biden is implementing the rescue, although time is running out. Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed the governor of Guam, who indicated Guam's preparations to receive the Afghans, but apparently the plans are still fluid and uncertain. Frightening, as Afghan pilots are already being murdered by the Taliban to level the field. With everything on his plate, Biden needs to fast track this urgent matter. All of these endangered people who've been so important to us in the past would be important contributors to our culture. As you pointed out, Trump Republicans, as well as other Republicans, care not a whit about anything but control and enrichment. After the last five years, we need to win back the hearts and minds we've lost.
When I read Artsilen's excellent post and the story about Anna's treachery, I was immediately reminded of a certain woman, who might be a clone - that woman being the wife of Moscow Mitch.
Treacherous women come in all colors and from all cultures. I don't particularly like the woman or her husband either, but it is because of her behavior, not her ancestry.
I agree. What reminded me of her though was her family connections and all the wheeling and dealing she has done via her husband...maybe not illegal, but perhaps close enough.
We have yet to face up to the choice we eventually will have to make in regard to the extent of our support for independent Taiwan, the "Republic of China," which mainland China, the "People's Repubic of China," insists should rightfully be part of their country. The day has long passed when Taiwan posed a challenge to the People's Republic for control of the mainland, if it ever did, or even a viable alternative. Sooner or later we will have to deal with that, learning from our experiences in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Or maybe we need to butt out? Dealing with things that are not our business is our go-to move, and our government is usually able to get support of the masses by lying about what the aims are in going to other countries to tell them how to be. If diplomacy or acting as intermediary (only if we are asked to) does not settle the standoff between Taiwan and the PRC, it is not appropriate for us to interfere, again, in hopes of straightening out a situation we were largely responsible for creating - because we are not the ones who will have to live with the results - the peoples of Taiwan and China are and it is up to them to work it out.
Thank you for history refresher! W. Bush had a plausible reason to go after Bin Laden and his terrorist organization. However, the Cheney led Neo—Con zeal to invade Iraq left the work in Afghanistan incomplete! Bush-Cheney ignored, underestimated or were completely schooled by Pakistan leaders in their attempt to get Bin Laden!
As to your VietNam references, a recent article by a person who served as an advisor to our military command in Afghanistan stated ‘Afghani police and military fight for $$$, the Taliban fight for their right to survive!” Tragically, the military brass has not learned the lesson taught by the Viet Cong who, like the Taliban, were fighting to survive’!
It has been said that Little Bush went into Iraq to show he was tougher than his father! Indeed, Papa Bush was a decorated WWII fighter pilot, while little Bush’s Army Reserve records are ‘missing’! As Biden witnessed, Obama did not want to appear weak thus he followed the generals advise to ramp up the war!
A leader needs to know when to declare ‘Basta’ , enough! Biden is that leader!
Additionally, from what I've read, HW declined to attack Baghdad, because he knew that it would set off exactly what W's venture caused - total chaos. He understood that the Sunni leadership was a minority in Iraq, and the Shiite majority would take advantage and cause civil war. W's response, when a reporter asked if he had consulted his father in regard to the invasion was to look heavenward, and say that he consulted with his (other) father. Maybe he'd have benefitted by discussing it with Dad.
Biden knows that he has plenty of "nation building" to do right here at home.
Second, the South Vietnamese president in 1968 was Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. He already had no desire for the Paris talks to be successful and needed very little encouragement from anybody to put up multiple conditions that he knew the North would reject.
Seems odd that Catholic clergy would be so virulently anti-communist. I suspect the atheism canard has a lot to do with it, but probably general paranoia seeps in everywhere, regardless of idology.
True, but I don’t think it was the brutal oppression that prompted the vehemence. The Catholic clergy didn’t go on a tear against oh, say, Batista in Cuba. That SOB probably got communion right to the end and the last rites to boot.
Thank you, Rex! I don't think our actions as a country have ever been as completely humanitarian. It's always been about economic benefit and regional hegemony.
List of those who have tried and failed in Afghanistan:
The Babylonian Empire
The Persian Empire
The Greek Empire
The Roman Empire
The Sassanid Empire
The Mongols
The Russian Empire
The British Empire
The Russian empire
The British Empire
The Soviet Union
The United States
I had a friend who was there in Kandahar Province. He told me about an ancient watchtower that was outside their base. It was said to be thousands of years old, and was considered unsafe to go inside, but he went inside anyway. On the steps to the top, on the walls, were inscriptions in Greek, Arabic, Russian. "I realized it was unlikely we were going to have a different outcome."
There is a reason why Afghanistan has been named the Graveyard of Empires. Perhaps Ashoka, the 2nd-c. BCE emperor who followed the Hellenistic Empire's retreat from South Asia, who converted to Buddhism, had the most positive (for a usurping dictator) influence on the region, but between him and the re-emergence of the Persians, the region broke up into multiple small states. There was a time when Afghanistan was one of the centers of enlightenment, and they did also embrace the secularism of Ataturk for a time. If you see pictures of Kabul in the 1980s--before the Soviets screwed it up--it was a different place.
For everyone who is doing the warmongering faux "woe is me": the outcome--the Taliban overtaking the region because they have massive backing from the likes of Pakistan, the other "Stans" to the north, and Russia (whom they fought for 2 decades)--would have been the same had we left in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, or 2030. They are a bunch of radical patriarchal misogynistic arseholes with a dream of a penis paradise and a total fear of what the world could become if they are no longer a threat. It is the ultimate cynical move, especially the fact that they force Afghanis to grow and harvest opium in order to keep their enemies complacent and their coffers full. Because, y'know, the strictures in Islamic law against alcohol and other mind-altering substances doesn't mean they can't use it to their own ends.
The USA utterly ignored Afghanistan, including when the Taliban destroyed millennia old statues of the Buddha, because it suited their purposes while the USSR was bogged down there. Shrubbie Bush "discovered" that they were being mean to women and girls miraculously after 9/11 and claimed it as an excuse for invasion in one of his most baldfacedly hypocritical moves.
I took a break from being in my house (with Missouri in a spike, although KC is in pretty good shape, I am still having to avoid crowds) and went to the wonderful Nelson Atkins museum, where the Asian Art collection is superb. Trying to avoid crowds (it was heaving! Weird for a Thursday afternoon!) I spent most of my time there revisiting old favorites. I love Ghandaran Buddhist sculpture and spent a lot of time thinking about Ghandara, Kushan, and Gupta-era culture in the regions to the north of the Indus River. Culturally, artistically, and intellectually brilliant, these cultures were destroyed by their encounters with the West, which laid them open to Mongol conquest. Hmmmmm.
Just as a point of reference, encounters between Alexander the Great's soldiers and Buddhist monks in the southern Afghanistan/northern Pakistan region led to the development, by Epicurus (one of Alexander's tagalongs), of Epicureanism, which is a philosophy that follows the Eightfold Path of Buddhism very closely. The word has changed in meaning over the centuries, but originally it was a compelling philosophy that acted as an alternative to the Stoicism of Zeno (another Hellenistic philosopher--and another process of definitional evolution in which the meaning of the word has changed radically).
I laughed when I read this: "They are a bunch of radical patriarchal misogynistic arseholes with a dream of a penis paradise and a total fear of what the world could become if they are no longer a threat. " You could very well have been describing the white supremacist GTP of today!
Love this! Just like with HCR, knowing historical precedents enlightens me. I also have an interest in Buddhist history. Perhaps you could have your own substack to tell us more?
The nice thing about substack is, you can nuke the trolls into their component electrons, since you're in full control (they can't just come waltzing along, unlike at FleeceBlock), and I very seriously doubt you would have only 3 followers. I can tell you for a fact the people who are here are fully capable of subscribing to more than one substack blog. :-)
Thanks for this Linda. The multi-directional flow of ideas in the various Alexandrian successor kingdoms proved to be the seedbed for many later "Western" developments. One unplanned but highly fortunate thread is that the efforts of the Seleucid rulers to Hellenize the cultures under their rule brought Greek texts to Baghdad (from which they ruled for some time). After the dissolution of their empire and subsequent defeats of Roman rule, these texts--philosophical, scientific, medical, etc.--were preserved, translated, commented on, and added to by Arabic scholars. Centuries later their "discovery" and re-translations were foundational for the European Renaissance.
Indeed, Tom—but mostly coming from the Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria, which the Umayyads looted and burned. They then moved a lot of texts to Damascus, their capital, which became the intellectual center of both the Umayyad and the Abbasid rulers. When the Ottomans (after the Mongol invasions killed the last Abbasid emperor in the 13th century) took over they did shift the center of the Islamic world northward into Anatolia, but the Persian influence that had retained an exquisite cultural efflorescence for centuries, persisted. The ancient texts that Jewish multi-lingual translators translated from Arabic and Greek in al-Andalus came mostly from Iberia and North Africa, as well as Damascus, which had been an ally of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem for much of the 12th century, mostly because of the Seljuk invasions.
The Umayyids didn't loot and burn the Alexandria Library. The Christians, led by Clement of Alexandria (future Pope Clement I), one of the many charismatic "christian" con artists of history, did the burning, to get rid of "pagan knowledge." Another fine moment for Christian moron stupidity and another on the very long list of Crimes Against Humanity committed by the Institutional Catholic Church.
Whatever the Umayyids might have burned was a shadow of what was destroyed by old Clement and his followers in their preview of what the Xtian fuckwits would like to do here, given the chance, as we see every day in the news.
Well and let’s not forget the horrific murder of Hypatia by the “monastic” mob followers of Cyril of Alexandria (aka St. Cyril). She was one of the most important late antique mathematicians and astronomers ever. These are all real “What’s Jerusalem to do with Athens?” (With no apologies to Tertullian—another piece of work) moments.
Yes, the murder of Hypatia and destruction of the original library (Clement was burning the remains) is considered the inflection point of what became the Dark Ages. It certainly marked the moment when the misogyny of St. Paul became The Rule in the Catholic Church.
And the Russians get first prize for having tried and failed 3 times with the Brits a close second. Time to learn from experience perhaps....of ourselves as much as that of others. A little history might go a long way to inculcate a lot more common sense.
Oh they pay attention, they just learn the wrong lessons. Our experience in the Korean War and Vietnam War is an excellent example.
The US got its ass kicked by the Chinese when they intervened in November 1950 after we invaded North Korea despite their warnings. Secretary of State at the time Dean Acheson called it "the greatest defeat of American arms since the Second Battle of Bull Run." British historian Sir Martin Gilbert wrote of it being "the greatest defeat of a previously-victorious army in history." US soldiers who were there called it "The Big Bug-out". It's the longest retreat in US Army history and serious consideration was given at the time to using nuclear weapons to stop the Chinese.
The small gargoyles who went through that wrenching experience learned one lesson: Do Not Fuck With China. So, when they were big gargoyles 10 years later when Vietnam came along, throughout the war they were constantly worried that the next step of escalation would bring Chinese intervention. What they didn't learn was the history of Asia: China and Korea have been good friends and allies going back as far as the records go back. China and Vietnam have been enemies ever since the Vietnamese were driven out of their ancestral home in southeast China by the expansion of the Han Empire 2,500 years ago. So, they applied the wrong lesson to the wrong situation and - as they say - "two wrongs don't make a right."
Interestingly enough, before the 42 years of 'troubles," it was a nice place. One of my oldest friends told me how she and her husband hitchhiked through the country in 1975. When they got to wherever at the end of a day's travel, someone would invite them for a meal and let them sleep there, there was never any fear of being robbed or worse. They ended up taking a bus from Kabul to Paris - she's always been one of the most adventuresome people I've known.
Yes, I was in Afghanistan in 1975, and it was multicultural and unlike the oppressive Islamic theocracy of Iran.
From my travel memories:
On Nov 3, 1975 we arrived in Afghanistan and were relieved to find ourselves casually walking the tree lined streets of Herat, the first town we stayed at. The hostel we stayed at was an old European style residence, broken into rooms. We thot it had an English appearance as did the crumbling tho elegant neighborhood it was in. As we walked to the center of town, the ppl we met were genuinely friendly. This quaint little town was such a relaxing experience, so different from the harshness of Iran.
The ppl were also different, a mixture of Caucasian and Asian features, with attire ranging from the Arabic turbans to the more colorful Asian tribal garb. In Herat a street waif sold me a small cast bronze Buddha for the equivalent of 50¢. I assumed it was recently cast and not that old so I cleaned off the green patina - but now wonder if it could actually be an antique. There was a sense of historic merging here, evidence of Buddhist and Eastern culture, even tho Afghanistan was dominated by Islam. We were also allowed to remove our shoes, wash our feet and enter the mosque as visitors.
This relaxed and friendly feeling lasted thru-out the two weeks that we traversed Afghanistan, which made it a pleasant stay despite suffering dysentery in Kabul, (I was told every Westerner gets dysentery in Kabul). Afghanistan is where I had my 31st Birthday. We noticed that tourism may have been a sizeable income for this otherwise struggling economy, Afghanistan being the only country that charged for a tourist visa ($7).
We saw quite a few young Europeans staying at hostels such as ours. These too were economy class tourists able to ruf it and enjoy the simple pleasures of this exotic country. Such as, the Asian style restaurant with low tables and cushion seating, arranged around the walls, where small local bands would entertain in the center. Hashish was often on the menu, available and cheap; a gram costing about as much as a Coca Cola. This may have been illegal but tolerated, for the proprietor came in one evening to tell everyone to remove their hash from the table. He then came back with two official looking men in Western style suits who looked around, were satisfied and left. At the time, being unaware of any political upheavals, we thot only of narcotics inspections but we never knew who the men were or why they were checking the Westerners in the hostel.
We stayed a few days in Kabul while I got my stomach in order, eating imported Quaker oatmeal as a comfort food. The hostel bedroom we stayed at had a dirt floor and two wooden frame cots. The toilet was across the patio and the water heater burned wood. We were in the Third World now. Kabul, for being the capital was not that impressive. I do recall in our walks going past the Soviet Embassy. In November 1975,. Afghanistan seemed to be just a haven for young ppl from Europe getting away from the industrialized world to enjoy the cheap economy of this exotic and charming little country. Who knew then that there would be an invasion of this place by the Soviet Union in just four years.
Twenty years ago we went to war with the largest opium producing Authoritarian regime to fight terrorism. Now we have an Opiod epidemic, voter suppression laws on the books, one party is adamantly leaning Authoritarian, and domestic terrorist attack the procedures of democracy, and is growing threat.
While Afghanistan supplies most of the rest if the world's opium it is not the primary source of opioids consumed in the US. Opium from Afghanistan's opium production finances terrorist activity but it is not the at root of the US opioid crisis. We need to understand that and tackle the US opioid crisis at its root - China for fentanyl, Mexico for poppy production and as a through transit country for fentanyl.
"Most of the heroin coming into the United States is cultivated on poppy farms in Mexico, with six major cartels controlling production and operating distribution hubs in major U.S. cities. "
"Chinese companies produce the vast majority of fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, and fentanyl precursors, but Mexico is becoming a major transit and production point for the drug and its analogues as well, and Mexican traffickers appear to be playing a role in its distribution in the United States."
"The US Drug Enforcement Agency claims as little as one per cent of US supply is from Afghanistan. It says virtually all the heroin used in America comes from Mexico and South American countries"
Daria, you are spot on here. And you can add to the list of suppliers, big pharma. I was happy to know that Several states (mine included) have reached agreements with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that will allow settlements of suits against the company and it's ongoing distribution of Oxycontin. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/08/purdue-sackler-bankruptcy-settlement/ This is big in the world of addictions. Now we need to eliminate the stigma attached to addictions and address helping those addicted.
Pam, yeah... I know but I elected to not throw in big pharma because the subject was opioids from Afghanistan. Frankly, I think the Sacklers are far worse than the drug cartels. That they are walking free is a horror.
Yes, but they also have to dissolve or sell the company that made their billions. And given the lust for money these days, only a "few billion" is not enough!
A terrible miscarriage of justice IMO.The havoc and destruction they foisted on the American public should leave them personally responsible beyond the company liability. One more white crime that pays in the end. Reportedly they have billions secreted away.
There is such a simple solution to ending the drug cartels and actually fighting the drug problem. LEGALIZE ALL DRUGS! Yes, that means heroin, cocaine and all drugs, with the same controls as ALCOHOL. Then with no drug busts or police investigations wasting time & money, concentrate on treating addictions, the same as ALCOHOLISM.
I emfasize alcohol because of the Great Experiment (prohibition) that failed miserably and gave us organized crime in the 1920s. You cannot make a popular drug illegal. And Alcohol is a drug - causing more deaths than Heroin.
Unfortunately, the same ppl who put us into "wars with no end" also try the same failed experiments over & over again expecting different results. In other words, INSANITY.
Yes of course. Legalization is the solution. It also begins the process of eliminating the drug cartels in Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America. Those cartels can turn into legal enterprises. Then maybe Mexico can stop being another Colombia.
Perhaps someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe drug use is not illegal in Mexico - it is our making most non-prescription drugs illegal here that has created the space for the cartels to develop. Yep, turning them into legal enterprises and taxing the drugs as heavily as alcohol and tobacco are taxed (and marijuana in the states where it has been legalized) would not only provide funding for treatment, it would also make life a lot safer for Central and South Americans - and perhaps even alleviate pressures at our southern border to some extent (setting climate change aside for one moment).
Stuart, I’d say many Afghanis won in terms of gaining more expertise and supplies to defend themselves. The women and girls certainly received a large dose of confidence. The corrupt government received over a trillion bucks. Many winners and yet the beat goes on. The generals and many other people will continue to whine about Biden’s brave and clear decision.
Unfortunately for the "women and girls" the benefits risk being short-lived. The recent program of assassination of women judges and journalists gives a good indication of the Taliban's current attitude towards them
Yes Stuart current and eternal attitude. Maybe the Afghanis have more skills now to protect their women. I’m not without sympathy but it’s an impossible situation and doesn’t mean more of our troops should die to change it.
Had the US military stayed in-country for another hundred years, the results would have been the same.
Other random, gloomy rainy day thoughts;
What will the Afghanistan War Memorial, a war everyone wants to forget, look like?
Where will the next dirty little very profitable war be? (Erase Afghanistan/Taliban and insert Vietnam/Viet Cong.)
A trillion dollars would have bought a lot of infrastructure. How can we replace war profiteers with infrastructure profiteers? C'mon, Kellogg Root & Brown, show us something!
What do we do with the prisoners in Guantanamo? Finally give them a trial? How about we re-patriate them and replace them with those accused of Jan. 6th crimes and hold them incognito for a couple of decades.
Republicans insist that we only teach smiley-face American history to our children.
It's another rainy day in Connecticut. Sorry, western states. If I could, I would send it all to you.
Thanks for remembering GITMO detainees. What's happened there is despicable. TORTURE folks! Our government tortured people in ways that would nauseate the strongest among us. We need to deal with what we have wrought there.
Good morning, Ralph! Your infrastructure comment and KRB reference gave me Halliburton and Cheney flashback. Business and politics. EeeGads as Mary Pat would say.
Your thought must have been strong. Eugene got .01" of rain OFFICIALLY on Wednesday (and here I thought it was low level marine air that made 11 tiny pinprick drops of moisture on my windshield that dried within two blocks.)
Hey Ralph, can I trade you? A few of your rainy days in exchange for our triple digit weeks? if you’re feeling gloomy, I can promise you a quick trip to California will dispel any clouds, actual or metaphoric.
A few nights ago I would have been glad to send you some of our rain. Have had a couple really nasty thunder & lightning storms. Read that 16,000 customers of NYSEG lost power! Whatever would we do if the entire grid went down? Now that could bear just a bit of research, couldnt it? I dont see too much written & spoken about that - infrastructure doesnt appear to be an urgent issue, does it?
Let's imagine how Republicans will excoriate President Biden if (more likely when) the Taliban takes over Afghanistan. It will be as if their cult leader hadn't cut a deal with the Taliban, putting the Afghanistan government at a grave disadvantage by excluding it from negotiations. Predictably, John Bolton wasted no time criticizing Biden after today's announcement.
Biden made the tough decision that he needed to make.
John Bolton is a sorry excuse for a thinking person. He appears to consider his own opinion quite highly. When I think of him, I see the a$$ of a walrus.
I agree with this characterization; however, whenever Bolton comes to mind, I immediately think of Fiona Hill and how we need more like her in government!
Such a fun wormhole, Kimceann. Who would have thought I’d be reminded of Kim Kardashian so early in the day? (See Celebes crested macaque butt in above link)
It’s already started. I spent my last social moment with a so-called friend the other day and she started bashing Biden about this withdrawal. I just sat there and looked at her in amazement, told her I needed to go home, got up and vowed never to be in her company again. Done and done
Myself & others for a long time have characterized the Republican Party as our Taliban because of the similar religious conservative punitive gun carrying behavior of both. However, Trump capitalized on the Republican direction and took it farther until seeking help from Russia, favoring dictators like Putin, thr Big Lie, the January 6th Capitol attack, occupations of state capitols, and now Republican state laws to suppress voting, censure books and teaching of American history is looking even more Taliban than ever.
Whether or not right wing extremism is linked throughout the world, their objectives for domination, single party rule, their thinking, tactics, sympathies and public statements follow the same patterns, and often use each others words. Social media, news media and entertainment media are mixing the pot and making this easier. Where the US used to be called the "melting pot" for our inclusion, perhaps the melting pot is now a homogenization of right wing radical ideas and actions, playing to the worst natures of mankind is attacking our multicultural democratic modern world. Much like covid19, an infection with no purpose other that to infect and live off its hosts until they are dead.
Trump might be our Osama Bin Laden. Our Al Qaeda encouraging our Taliban. Osama Bin Laden too thought he could get away with murder. Promoting his power and invulnerability.
Such a shame it is that the greatest threat to our security now comes from our fellow Americans. This is a sad commentary on our nation’s state of affairs.
Realists knew even back in the Bush days that this was how things would end. We'd seen it before in several parts of the world when colonialism ended. After the colonial forces leave, a bloodbath inevitably follows. History rarely mentions those, but for example, the killings that followed after Great Britain granted India its independance were horrific, and led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state. Was Britain right to leave?
Yes. Leaving was long overdue.
If there ever was a clear example of our leaders ignoring history and proceeding to war without a defined mission and overt success criteria, this Afghan period will be one of the most overt. In the reaction that led us into this quagmire, "We" stopped listening. We didn't listen to history, we didn't listen to our own military leaders, we didn't listen to a large part of our government, our advisors, or our electorate. THIS TIME things would be different! And yet - somehow they weren't.
It took a lot of moral and political courage to bite the bullet and call a halt to this, and President Biden deserves a lot of credit for doing so.
The British left India in part because of their impotence. They couldn't stop the religious massacres. They started well beforehand.....and are still going on under Modi.
Or the British in Africa and in Australia! Canada? Still there, I guess! Then there are the religious "boarding schools" in Canada & here - to force children to forget their cultures & way of life. Reading lots about Canada right now. Where are the stories of our own boarding schools?
In Africa, the Brits had no wish, and made no effort, to stop Africans being African. local education was not always the name of the game. The Brits working in the "empire" sent their kids to school in England...boarding of course but not the same regime!
And the school in S.Dakota is STILL open! Even after many abuse charges and charges regarding their use of "student's stories" as fund raising ploys. But not under the Catholic Church.
And Australia and Canada? Sure makes clear what wonderful human beings white Europeans were and are! Not something to be proud of. To be honest, the mindset hasnt really been altered that much.
Thanks, Stuart - truly nothing that I wasnt already aware of but looking at the period of time that went on - and no one felt strongly enough to stop it.
Given the mess he was handed as an incoming president after an inept and corrupt administration, President Biden has mapped out a reasonable way forward from a situation that no president should have to deal with. Will he and his successor, since this will be a years long process, have a Congress of helpmates or obstructionists?
“He also seemed to acknowledge the extraordinary danger facing Afghan women and girls under the rule of the Taliban as it continues to sweep through the country.” That women and girls suffer under a repressive and brutal regime is a standout hardship of this defeat.
Afghanistan has been ruled by the tribes since the beginning of time and will until the end. The idea of a unified country is a Western concoction for which they hate and kill us.
Time to lick our wounds, pack our tents and head home.
Hopefully, hopefully, we have learned a lesson. Hopefully.
Most of the discussion of all this fails to note that it's beyond the ability of the US to dictate the future of Afghanistan. This was as obvious twenty years ago as it is now. Biden, whether or not he says so publicly, is simply recognizing reality.
While I feel bad for the Afghani people, I am not sorry we have withdrawn our troops. Biden’s question of whether you would send your child there is a valid one. Unless you have sent a child off to the Middle East to fight a war that cannot be won, you probably can’t answer that question. We have. The young man who went there came back a very different man with mental as well as physical injury. But we were fortunate, he came home. Biden’s approach to try to cut off the money also seems wiser.
Mary Beth, as you and Ally so poignantly remarked, we owe so much to our veterans, their basic well-being and beyond! While the VA is far from perfect, there are some good, deeply-caring folks there, trying to heal unfathomable wounds. A dearest PHD friend works with vets who have traumatic brain injuries. She and others have made it a career mission to help these fine, courageous folks.
I feel deeply pained for the women and girls of Afghanistan, at risk of much harm from the soldiers of the Taliban army and its misogyny. The agony of my powerlessness in the face of such oppression and death leaves me stunned.
AND, Biden is doing the right thing. The USA needs to get out of its decades long meddling and warring in other countries to no better end than enriching the military-industrial complex. Our 'volunteer' armies of the poor, POC, and immigrants don't need to be put at risk for no apparent relevant rationale. The USA appears to have serious deficits in 'nation-building.'
Let us build peace. Here. At home. Let us bankrupt the war-makers. Let us re-purpose our bright youngers to civic service and enriching this nation.
The war is within. We need to know its roots and the forces behind autocracy; the bank funding it; the people steering, funding and profiting from it: Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch McConnell -- who else; which business 'leaders' and economic theorists? The anti regulations, anti-government, anti-taxes movements motivating the aggrieved and what don't we know? We must put together our own bank of knowledge to identify and root out the enemies of Democracy, addressing Climate Change, equality, economic opportunity, the free press, gun violence, free public education and the truth. We require much more organization and direction.
War makers include, of course, manufacturers of war machines of all stripes. Dare we say, "`They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. ' (Isaiah 2:4)." I hope humanity is in the process of not learning war anymore but rather peace. I like to think Pres. Biden and his advisors are guided by this ideal. Who isn't, except those who stand to profit monetarily. Shame, shame. They need to be held in check or shut down.
Lanita Grice (WA, the state)just now
The beginning of the 2nd chapter of Isaiah which leads into the excerpt from the 4th verse Mary quotes above is regarding the last days when the nations will supposedly be judged by "the God of Jacob". Here's the full verse (King James, my dad's bible):
'And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
I don't think we should wait for judgement day or intervening from "the God of Jacob". There's a lot of nonsense in the bible - later in Isaiah (4:1), we can also read, "And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach." ????
This is not meant as a criticism of the reasonable sentiments in your post, Mary - it's just me striking out against my fundamentalist upbringing that twisted me in knots trying to figure out which "wise" words in the bible to live by, since the ones I preferred seemed to be ignored by most Christians I knew, and also since there was a lot of depressed or ecstatic or incoherent rambling in the bible. I believe we need to find our own way without that compilation of confused and confusing thoughts by an uncoordinated group of writers and thinkers strung out across centuries.
The most important thing I learned from reading the (KJV) bible as a kid was the ability to comprehend Shakespeare.
Lanita Grace…. Not sure if you will see this because next day post is already published. I just never have heard anyone express that which you said in your last paragraph. What an interesting comparison …reading the KJV to comprehension of Shakespeare.
I’ll not forget that soon. As a teacher that always taught children to link their readings….fascinating.
Lanita, not sure you will see this either but just wanted to acknowledge your reply. I agree completely -- it's impossible to sort through that "compilation" of "confused and confusing thought." Imo, all people of goodwill (and God too) want peace, and that's what I seek. It has become the guiding principle of my life in the last few years.
Now there is an effort I could sign on for.
Thank you Fern.
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Morning kimceann. Yeah, it’s all about corporation/business building, not nation building. Bring the troops home. And the corporations. We need them for infrastructure here. The terrorist war is on our soil now.
To me, it's like Vietnam all over again. When will we learn?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone to graveyards, every one. In Flanders Fields.
I cannot tell you how many times that song has played in my head since I first heard it as a child in the early 1960s.
And on my guitar, gently weeping...
That one and Blow'in in the Wind
When will they ever learn? When will they eh-eh-ver learn?
You know, Judith, there are just some songs that define life and for me that is one of them.
I have to wonder, considering that in some cultures (likely long ago) the women were the more aggressive warriers - perhaps the Afghani women & girls who have experienced more freedom the past couple decades, might just rise up themselves? They have become so much stronger & better educated - many young ones have never been under the Taliban's thumb. I know there are some women in the Army there, but got the impression not many. Possibility?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/armed-afghan-women-take-to-streets-in-show-of-defiance-against-taliban
Thank You Roland, though itvis just so sad and tragic.
"She said there were a few dozen women learning to use guns with her, and despite their inexperience they would have one advantage over men if they faced the Taliban. “They are frightened of being killed by us, they consider it shameful.”
Thanks Roland - I hope these women dont wait until they are "allowed" to do this. Love the comment from one of the Taliban - that the women are too fearful & wont be allowed (!) to fight! That kind of rhetoric might just push more women forward!
That one comment by the Taliban could come from any Muslim nation in the world. That is not exclusive to Muslim Afghanistan by any means. The sexism holdover from the Middle Ages in some of those countries is just severe, severely anachronistic and severely damaging. Maybe the only benefit of 20 years in Afghanistan is showing a better way. Maybe that trillion dollars bought a little bit of education. Even in a complete fiasco, an utter disaster like America’s occupation war, it helps to look at the silver lining, the perhaps hidden benefits. That’s why I like The Guardian, and why I hate most news, they try to be hyperbolic and sensationalist instead of showing reality. Too many male white voices, not enough female voices.
See Roland’s reference below. Those women are on it.
Yes I did read that - and youre right. I just hope they are given what they need to do this.
Maggie, imagine a world where are your husband, your brothers, your father, and even your sons have to give permission for you to go out. You are not allowed to drive you can only be driven. They decide to approve what you do. You are not a full human being with full rights. If they veto something you want to do, and you do it anyway, you expose yourself to great risk. At their hands. That’s only a part of what the Taliban represents. Severe restrictions on women, and severe reprisals if any woman dares breaks the rules or defy the men around them. Picture slavery, or 19th C. life for women in America.
Roland, see my reply to your earlier comment. Having been under someone's control - in a manner of speaking - thru my marriage - I dont have to go too far to imagine asking permission. Fortunately, for me, that was a lifetime ago.
Given schmiven. In the USA, we are privileged. We are given. In most nations, you have to take. Those women are putting their lives on the line, make no mistake about it, they are choosing between women’s equality and the very distinct possibility of death and permanent injury. Acid in the face. “Honor killings” which is euphemism for male a$$hole killing woman, usually his own child, who doesn’t follow the sexist cultural rules and decides to exercise her own freedom. Death, rape, acid attack, etc. for breaking the cultural taboos. Think Malala. Owning and being willing to use a weapon is the only protection against a male a$$hole in a culture like that.
NO you misunderstood me - or I just didnt make it clear. I was talking about being given the GUNS & WEAPONS they needed. Believe me, I get what they have been thru and what the threat to them is if they stand up for themselves. And yes we are beyond privileged - I doubt anyone in this country has much concept of what it would take to put yourself out in the front of this kind of threat. I have heard Malala speak & read what she has written. It does strike me as really really weird that the people (mostly white men) who appear to be so threatened by any kind of gun control and, it would seem, even masks, then we look at Afghani women who have so little control other than what they have gained the past few years & THEY may be scared but determined to protect themselves and their lives and their families against really big odds against them. Who is the braver of the two?
Lord knows where they get the weapons they need. That’s a very good question. Sorry for my misunderstanding.
🙏🙏
Roland, there you are dude. I've missed your commentary. Hope all is well with you.
Long story, too much to tell, not pertinent here on Heather’s channel. All is well, it’s just been a little crazy.
Like you, I fear a slaughter of women, or at least severe repression. What is happening in the world with this horrible rise...from sex trafficking and domestic murders and disappearances in northern nations to wanton killing of women in the more southern regions?
I acutely remember our departure from Vietnam. Combat operations ceased in 1973, and over the next year we repatriated our soldiers back to the United States, leaving mounds of equipment and matériel in the hands of the South Vietnamese, who promptly abandoned it on the battlefield with North Vietnam. We got our prisoners of war back, some of whom had been in captivity for going on nine years.
In March 1975, North Vietnam launched a ground offensive against South Vietnam. By the middle of April, it was clear that Saigon was about to fall, and there was pressure on Congress to revisit its decision to not support any further military action in South Vietnam. We all know what followed afterward.
I also recall Henry Kissinger's stated objective to achieve what he referred to as "a decent interval" before Saigon actually fell. How decent that interval was is a matter of conjecture and/or personal opinion. It was clear, however, that as military objectives go, the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Whether the United States achieve its political objectives by staying the course by bolstering the Saigon government between 1958 and 1975 is also a matter of conjecture. Maybe there a secret archives that will see the light of day sometime 50 years from now that will reveal what political objectives were actually being sought, above and beyond delaying the inevitable. If the war in Vietnam was supposed to be the place where the United States would lay down a marker about 'thus far and no further', that was a bad place to do it.
Worse yet, the American military establishment was still being run by the generals who would come of age during World War II, and who were apparently intoxicated by America's victory over Japan in the war that lasted just under four years, while utterly destroying Japan as a military power. Vietnam was not Tarawa or Guadalcanal, or the Marianas Islands. These are men who are used to getting their way, who mistook technology for national purpose. Politically, the war was the price of surrender of the American government to the so-called China Lobby, political allies within the Republican Party of the Chinese nationalist government that had been ousted from mainland China in 1949, and then seeking refuge on Taiwan.
American foreign policy towards China, and by extension, to China's neighbors in Southeast Asia was heavily influenced by American General Claire Lee Chennault, the military officer who had organized the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed 'The Flying Tigers', a group of American military pilots assembled by General Chennault to engage Japanese forces over China in 1941, the year before the United States officially entered World War II. General Chennault's second wife, known as Anna Chennault (born Chan Sheng Mai, in China, in 1923) had been a war correspondent; and following the death in 1946 of Chennault's wife Nell (Thompson) to whom he had been married since 1911, he married Anna and brought her back to Washington DC, where together, there were staunch advocates for the Nationalist Chinese government. General Chennault died in 1958, and Anna Chennault continued her involvement in Republican politics, and policies which were grounded on the idea that at some future point in time Nationalist China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, would return to Beijing in triumph, supported by the United States. To them the communist victory in 1949 was utterly unacceptable. It was also Anna Chennault who tipped off the Diem government in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson was about to conclude a negotiated peace with North Vietnam, allowing the South Vietnamese to sabotage the nascent negotiations. Chennault was also overheard negotiating with then-candidate Richard Nixon looking to oppose Lyndon Johnson's request for a second term of office in the 1968 presidential election. This was overheard on a CIA wiretap; but presidential advisor Clark Clifford persuaded Johnson not to make an issue of it, treasonous as it was, because that would have exposed the nature of the wiretap, and the fact that it was being used against a member of the Washington political establishment. You can see how domestic partisan politics and political agendas can have worldwide consequences. Viewed in hindsight, Lyndon Johnson should have pursued the matter; he ended up withdrawing from the presidential race, and allowing Richard Nixon to continue to wage war for another five years until the 1973 cease-fire. But Johnson's ego got in the way, and his advisor, Clark Clifford, did him no favors. He would have done better, as John Kennedy did, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, by admitting his mistakes and moving on.
The other thread of the story has to do with supporting French ambitions to return to Vietnam and to restore its colony there in 1946. Again, the issue was communist-led opposition to French rule. Thus it happened that American arms provided to France between 1946 and 1954, when the French army at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded and destroyed by the Viet Minh, the North Vietnamese Revolutionary Army in May 1954. American President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, and following a series of negotiations, what was then French Indochina was divided into a North Vietnam, based in Hanoi, and a South Vietnam, headquartered in Saigon. The United States had initially agreed to a plebiscite at which all Vietnamese would get to decide which country they wanted to remain with. United States reneged on the deal and began arming the South Vietnamese; much of this military buildup was due to congressional pressure by the Republican Party, envisioning a much more robust American response to the French defeat. In this, Anna Chennault was the go-to connection between the Republican Party and the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. First it was Kennedy, and afterward it was LBJ, but the pattern was set, and the wheels were set in motion. After 1960, and through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, whether we were consciously aware of it or not, we were on a collision course in Southeast Asia, because our previous decision-making was a one-size-fits-all pattern of opposition to communist regimes, emotionally driven, and with the egos of the actors very much in evidence.
Many of us of a certain age know or things ended up, very much like what we saw over the past 20 years in Afghanistan. We took sides in a war of national liberation against a European colonial power, France, as much because of our cultural affinity with France, and the American government's obsession with communism. That was the opposite tack that we took during World War II when we supported Great Britain against Germany, but as to the British Empire, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to support Winston Churchill's imperial ambitions. Before he died, President Roosevelt was overheard saying that he was not going to let the French back into Indochina after the war. The president who succeeded Roosevelt, Harry Truman, was unschooled in international politics, and so he let the re-militarization of Vietnam by the French government to slip by unchallenged. Following that we allowed our cultural affinity with France and the debt that we owe them historically by supporting George Washington's army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1783, to cloud our judgment. Like Iraq, and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war of choice; and, as with the other two, a war we lost
Given the history that I have laid out above, I have to view with a great deal of skepticism the argument that the United States is living Afghanistan 'too soon'. As President Biden said in his comments today, something to the effect of 'when is enough, enough'. The president noted that we had been in Afghanistan 20 years, and that the children of soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago were now doing tours of combat where their parents had fought. This is a perfect paradigm of the 'sunk cost' fallacy, throwing good money after bad, hoping to recoup your losses. There is also the 'Gambler's Fallacy', which is basically if you lose a long string of bets, your luck is bound to change. As the song says, and ain't necessarily so.
It has been said, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I look at historical parallels to see patterns of behavior that seem to repeat themselves in somewhere other, because that is the way people behave. We got into Afghanistan, because George W. Bush got us into Iraq on false pretenses. Bad karma happens when you lie to yourself; but the problem is that you cannot lie about yourself. If we keep following the same old patterns that Republican administrations have foisted on us, were going to get the same bad results that we have now. Today, we have the right President, and at the right time. In the time that we have Joe Biden, let him heal us, and then maybe we can heal ourselves.
How little “we the people” actually know of the games our politicians play for the sake of their own enrichment and power… and with devastating consequences to “we the people”. Thank you for this history lesson of the conflict in Viet Nam which took the lives of so many of my classmates and neighbors. I protested the war but never understood why we were ever there. Today, HCR writes “our primary danger from terrorism is homegrown and comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” For me, our primary danger is the Republican Party and what it is doing to our democracy with its new voting laws. For me, that danger is being allowed by Democrats in the Senate who are not standing strong to prevent this and by a SCOTUS who is giving them a pass. Some days I’m optimistic the grassroots efforts of Stacy Abrams and all of us who write post cards and try to spread the truth will get us through this assault on our democracy… but my rose colored glasses are beginning to fail me. Reading Heather’s posts and listening to her talks usually take me off the wall of despondency and give me hope but something needs to give before the 2022 election.
How little “we the people” actually know of the games our politicians play for the sake of their own enrichment and power… and with devastating consequences to “we the people”.
Welcome to the modern Republican Party Sharon. Owned and operated by the likes of big oil, pharmaceutical companies, and Vladimir Putin.
Not to mention, the Mercers, the Koch family, Murdoch, and other dark money multi billionaires whose tentacles extend not only into big oil and big pharma, but other giant corporations as well. I have a suspicion that one huge source of that dark money comes into the US in the form of heroin and various other drugs.
Very likely. And then there’s the contributions from Chinese and Russian oligarchs/kleptocrats/plutocrats.
Less we NOT forget the elite and corporate funding through back channels towards white nationalist terror organizations right here at home on American soil. Building a military style presence right in your living rooms and kitchen tables. This is The birth canal of authoritarianism AND this is our reality constructed over the last twenty years.
As much as I abhor the cult that worships dopey don, LBJ bought the lies of Defense Sec McNamara. Or perhaps, Mac was telling the strong minded LBJ what he wanted to hear!
I think the GOP has the benefit of a more singular focus giving them the laser like focus someone talked about around 9-11. The Dems are inundated with actual problems needing fixing, people needing help, etc. along with fighting the GOPs effective campaign to win their way. The Dems could benefit from laser like focus but on what issue (of so many) would they focus it?
WE THE PEOPLE! How about that one!!!!
Brava, Christine!
“that danger is being allowed by the Democrats in the Senate who are not standing strong…”
I actually am flummoxed how anyone can say this. That danger is not being “allowed”. The agenda that is accepted, publicized nationally by the Republican Party (50% of the Senate) that is being promoted and used in every way possible occupies the majority of interest in this country, like it or not. And in plain words, opposition is their agenda and is treasonous in many ways. Until a great deal of attention to it is lessened, it is in our faces daily. I have to look to find a political article favorable to my views in my local paper. Here is what the Democrats are standing strong about…voting rights, a vaccination for every American, infrastructure—-physical and social, and much more already signed or passed through executive order. Organizing the entire Executive Branch after it was left in dark chaos because there was NO peaceful transfer of power. And Biden-Harris were inaugurated less than 6 mos ago. And they do have an agenda. A strong one. And it is a slower process. It must be done carefully and the barriers put up by a few Democrats are difficult, but possible ones to overcome. Every effort to reach across the aisle, and there have been many and I am sure hundreds of action behind the scenes have been met with obstinate refusal.
I certainly respect your opinion, Sharon, but i just don’t believe we should take the Republican bait dangling before the noses of every Democrat or NPA in this country. And that bait is be mad, be frustrated, think that Republicans are a greater force, Democrats are weak, Biden is old, we are taking the House in ‘22, the media loves us, we own more states, the popular vote doesn’t matter, and on and on and on. I don’t care about their bait because their fishing pole is a raggedy stick.
I do not pretend to be smarter or know more than Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or any of them. But I’m putting my trust in the Dems and Independents like Bernie Sanders. I’m going to exhibit patience as much as I can and refuse Trump bait. And most of all, I will not speak of any outcome that has not happened. Words are powerful. They can be a blessed weapon or a curse.
Christine, I didn’t mean to imply that Biden-Harris or the majority of the Democrats in Congress are weak or not accomplishing amazing things for “ we the people”. My concern is that our 50- 50( plus 1 ) majority is stymied by a few Democrats who will not reform the filibuster which, in my humble opinion, gives the Republicans the power. I’m sorry if I struck a nerve. I’m on your side. I’ve always been complacent about our democracy… just knew it would always be there. When trump was elected I felt like I walked into a wall, and when I came to, I realized I had neglected my own responsibility to keeping our democracy intact. I’m a bit out of my league with most of you who are much more informed. You, obviously, were not complacent. I am so happy to have found this group because I’m constantly being schooled and I welcome it. Thank you for the smack down !
Ahhhhh. Thank you, Sharon. The smack down wasn’t for you. It was for all of us, including me. It is SO difficult being in the frame of mind of trusting the legislators to make things right. To see the Republican oppositional no-agenda and try to find less media fascinated by its audacity. To even spend a minute of our day feeling beaten down by these rogues is too long. Pessimism is easy. Optimism is a struggle. Fear is easier than love because love requires vigilance to our greater selves.
As weird or trite as this sounds, I try each day to keep a symbol in my mind during meditation or contemplation or just taking a deep breath for a minute. Lately it’s been the Statue of Liberty.
I want all the brave beautiful strong soulful Afghan women and children to come here and find shelter, the peace room, and a path. Let the men play their war games.
Although my natural bent is to 100% agree that war is a game played by men to the detriment of women and children, I think that isn't completely true. Women have aided and abetted the going to war of men throughout history. And men have objected to being sent to war throughout history, too. Look at how many women were among the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.
My current thought on this (and it has been evolving and changing throught my 66 years) is that the responsibility of childbearing and rearing has been what kept most women out of the military and positions of power in the past. Modern birth control, nutrition, education, and physical education have all done their part to make today's women capable soldiers and leaders - whether or not they choose to bear children. So we have ended up not just with Nancy Pelosi, AOC and the Squad, Stacey Abrams and more; we have also ended up with Lynndie Rana England (Abu Ghraib war criminal), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Liz Cheney (we love her now because she admits Jan 6 was an insurrection, but she's also a hawk and right-wing Republican).
If we are bringing Afghan women and children here for shelter, we should not shut out the Afghan men who will be targets for aiding U.S. and NATO troops and advocating for education for girls.
I think you and I are the ONLY ones that mentioned Liz Cheney today although there was plenty of comments about Daddy Dick. Mine in a rather audacious comment later. I used to call him president Vice dick Cheney.
Yes. You are right. Unjust have always believed that women as true warriors are fierce and cunning but still think and plan better towards peace yet realize that comes with a fight sometimes.
And of course I want the Afghan men coming here also that are fleeing towards peace.
Agreed.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...........I lift my lamp beside the golden door".
Let's each be a lamp!
Having a symbol in your mind is not trite at all during meditation. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could open our arms to all those people (Afghani and other oppressed people) who want to thrive in a peaceful democracy…let’s continue the work (even if it is a struggle) with holding fast to our optimism and love so that we remain a peaceful democracy.
Taking my rose colored glasses back out of the drawer today!
Amen sister
Well said, ma'am.
"Politics is the means used by those without scruple to govern a people without memory" Voltaire.
Which is why none of us will ever forget January 6. F—k the Republicans trying to bury it.
Thank you Roland. I am pretty hot about the pessimism by so many people about Dems and the slow progress of Biden’s agenda. What the Republicans are trying to do, their psychological warfare, is working and getting a lot of fearful reaction instead of mere disdain. It is straining my civilized comportment. Not sure about commenting anymore.
It is hard not to be drawn in to pessimism, isn't it, Christine? I practice detachment by sneering at headlines or YouTube caption/titles that feature the anti-democracy faction - and then I quite often pass by without reading or viewing. Yes, it's sometimes hard to find any positive news to focus on - at which point, I abandon news and go back to solitaire, fiction, cleaning house, playing with cats. We don't need to engage in every political moment - we need to take care of ourselves, not only in order to have the strength and focus to fight where we can have an effect, but also to just have a life worth living. The world will probably not become the just one we dream of within our lifetimes - so we do what we can when we can, and in between, we live and get some pleasure out of our short span.
Come back to commenting when you feel good about it. You contribute a lot here.
You must continue to comment! I depend on you.
Great read. Thank you for the time you took to share your informative recollections. This is a marvelously well informed and generous group. I gratefully learn every day, and not only from our Professor HCR!
Thank you. What a wonderful history lesson. We should all look around and see who we (the USofA) is setting up to be the next 'adventure. Central Africa is looking very appetizing. /snark
" 'The West wants to stage World War III from South Asia,' said Rehman Malik, and it has found a tool in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi." from The Week, Confidential Intelligence Briefing. Complimentary copy, 877-245-8151
Thank You artsilen, for putting all the ugly pieces together. I lived it but didn't know it.
My thoughts exactly.
Thank you for this.
In 1973, I was a sophomore in high school. In the fall of 1975, Henry Kissinger came to the University of Wyoming to speak, and attendance was required by the instructor of my (required) political science 101 course. I completely lost the thread of his talk within about two minutes, and sat through the rest of it in total incomprehension. I chalked it up to being a freshman, with too little knowledge of history and politics.
Weirdly, Kissinger posted an editorial in some national magazine a few years back, and as I read through it, I found it just as obtuse as his speech back in 1975. Frankly, one of the things that frightened me most about Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she considered Kissinger her mentor in international politics. I did not understand Kissinger's words, but I did understand two things about him: he was one of the architects of the Vietnam War, which loomed over me in junior high as the probable ending of my life, and he talked like a babbling madman.
My take exactly on Kissinger. Call me paranoid, but his German accent always made him sound to me like a sinister whack job straight out of Dr. Strangelove. This from the guy who’s always surrounded by German accents, he was born and raised with them.
Actually it was Dick Cheney and his deep-seated, ironclad Wyoming loyalty to Halliburton and big oil that got us into Iraq. He sold Bush on the idea because Bush’s dad despised Saddam Hussein, so Cheney knew what buttons to push there. Then he managed to sell the American people, and most of Congress, gullible schmucks that we are.
I love it, voice-to-text printed the words “a wreck“ instead of “Iraq.“ A Freudian slip by the magic of technology?
You’ve heard the old joke, I’m sure, from the early 2000s:
What happens if Dick Cheney dies?
George Bush becomes president.
Lucian Truscott 7-7-21 Substack:
"In walks Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, carrying a map of Iraq which he proceeds to put down on the table in the “Situation Room.” O’Neill described the map as having been divided into sections like you might slice a pie, and in each section was the name of a U.S. oil company. The first subject address by Bush’s national security team was not “whether to attack Iraq, but how do we go about attacking Iraq.”
So before there were any reports of threats of terrorism by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, before the attack on 9-11 on the Twin Towers in New York and Pentagon in Washington, they had made up their minds to attack Iraq militarily. They were going to divide up its oil reserves and as Trump would later criticize them for having failed to do, they were going to take the oil.
After the attack by al Qaeda on 9-11, they quickly dispatched the Taliban from Afghanistan (temporarily, that is) and went looking for an excuse to attack Iraq. There was no “actionable” intelligence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9-11. The CIA didn’t have any. The FBI didn’t find any during its investigation of the attackers. The Pentagon didn’t have any through its intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency. So Donald Rumsfeld set up something called “The Office of Special Plans” within the Pentagon to which he assigned the two “architects” of the eventual war in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Their job was to find a reason to attack Iraq. They came up with two main reasons: that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
So for a while after 9/11/2001, I was sucked into what is now called the "conspiracy" view of the incident, i.e. that there was "inside" help. I eventually concluded that the insiders, if there were any, would never face any accountability, so there was little point in wasting energy on what would always be an "unproven conspiracy theory."
What has always been clear to me, however, is that the official story of 9/11 is utter crap. It makes no sense. Every time I flew through Denver and saw the "condition orange" advisories Scotch-taped to the doors and brown-curling in the sun -- or the rusting "condition orange" sign at the airport in LA -- I was reminded of how little sense it made. I personally needed a better story.
The Cheney/Oil connection provides one such story. I wrote an article on this back in 2010, and then a repost and corrections in 2014.
I'm not at all convinced this is the real story. For one thing, Jan 6 is a clear indication that conspiracies built around nothing more than malign megalomania and spite have a lot more carrying-power than I ever believed.
FWIW: https://themonthebard.org/2014/09/10/looking-back-on-911/
I've always ignored comments by those who pronounce the names of those countries as "Eye-rack" and "Eye-ran."
Agreed. Correct pronunciation (in every European language except American English) is EE-rahhn and EE-rahhk.
Or as my mother would say it, Eye-Rack is the past tense of I run.
I love your mother.
[I assume she said “Eye-Ran is the past tense of I run.”]
I am annoyed by, but don't summarily discount the comments of, those who pronounce Beijing as though the 'j' sounds like the 's' in 'leisure' rather than the 'j' in 'jingle' (which also isn't completely accurate, but is a lot closer to the correct Mandarin). Sometimes we have to let our own sense of linguistic correctness relax a bit if we want to have any kind of peaceful dialog with one another.
My stepfather, according to some of my family, was Eye Italian. Sigh
He never sold me, and I argued with friends over it at the time - most of them Republicans.
Agreed! Little Bush was unfit to be commander in chief based on his missing Army Reserve records, which the press gave him ‘a pass on’! Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11! Saudi Arabia was the home of 17 of the 19 terrorist hijackers! But, Saudi $$$$ was being managed by very influential financial groups in the US!
Saddam kept Iran in check! Another Saudi avowed enemy!
Exactly! I tried to tell my Republican (ex) friends that very thing, but we all know how they are . . . .
You, Nancy my dear, are a very intelligent woman. Certainly more intelligent than I was 20 years ago. I have matured. Gullible schmuck no longer.
Thank you, Roland, but gullible schmuck you never were, I'm sure.
In the years since then, I've always referred to that president as "the Bush-Cheney."
I put a comment on another forum today about my opinion about the Repubs ousting Liz Cheney from their vaulted ranks. In my opinion, Trump wanted her demoted and for her to shut up like it’s a family feud. I imagine he’s always had penis envy of Daddy Dick of Halliburton.
And you can darn tootin’ believe that Liz is just bustin’ her “daddy’s proud of me buttons” for getting on the committee to bust Donald for his bad insurrection behavior.
Dick wants it to be President Cheney next time around. The irony is that it is his daughter who sits with the Dems…for now.
Bush was the 'lovable idiot', Cheney was Sauron.
I don’t know about lovable, but I agree with your premise.
He has a certain down-home, aw-shucks charm when he talks about his painting. Lovable might be pushing it though.
It would be a funny joke if it wasn’t true.
I argued at the time that it was the wrong thing to do. My take was, "It's Junior showing Daddy how it's done because Dick Cheney told him he needed to do it."
Agree 100%.
I have long thought that conventional warfare—the ultra-expensive, equipment-heavy, killer-machinery of our military is obsolete and pathetic. When will we learn that lesson? Also, it seems to me that the Republican party has long been entangled with the military-industrial complex, and continues to do what it pleases no matter the party of the president. It has a habit of electing a not-very-intelligent president who has star power enough to entertain the masses (think Reagan and Trump) while the rest continue on their merry way of world manipulation, including the humiliation of Democratic administrations.
As Eisenhower called it, the Military Industrial CONGRESSIONAL Complex. He warned us.
Yes MaryPat, but (apparently) only in one of his drafts of the "farewell address." The speech he gave on television omitted "Congressional," undoubtedly out of political considerations.
One interesting recent interpretation of the long life of the phrase is at https://breakingdefense.com/2021/01/ike-was-wrong-the-military-industrial-congressional-complex-turns-60/
OH! "As the U.S. destroyed the underpinnings of how it innovated in World War II and the immediate post-Cold War period, the U.S. is now faced with – as John McCain would often describe it – a military-industrial-congressional complex that is simply unable or agile enough to effectively compete against China. Ike was right to warn against collusion, but he didn’t target the real problem." Thank You Tom, for this article. I think. So depressing.
Yeah, studying history can be like that--informative but generally depressing.
Leave us not forget that "history" is not necessarily "factual". It is always subjective because we humans are not actually capable of objectivity (though most of us think we are). We generally seek out those interpretations of history that suit an already established mindset - I hate to admit it, but I know that my own 100% certainty that preparing for war causes war is my subjective view - I've always held it, I will always hold it, and I know that other people are able to argue many reasons to have a military and sophisticated weaponry, but that I will never agree. Therefore, when I read the article for which you kindly posted a link, Tom, my reaction was, "Does it really matter how this all came about when the premise from which it began millenia ago when the first troupe of proto-humans decided to wipe out their neighbors over a bit of swamp or a mammoth carcase was FUBAR?" (My father's politer spelling out of that acronyn was " 'fouled' up beyond all recall".)
War is good for the economy. A maxim from the 1960s still holding sway. Sad.
"War's good business so give your son
But I'd rather have my country die for me"
Thank you for pointing out the role the Chennaults played in getting us mired in Vietnam. Their power games in cahoots with Chiang Kai-shek/Jiang Jieshi also made us abandon the opportunity to have a relationship with the People's Republic of China. Another military officer, one who does not receive much credit (in the U.S.) for his advocacy against aligning ourselves with the KMT (Guomindang), is Gen. Josesph Stilwell (although he is honored in China at a museum in Chongqing). Stilwell was appalled at the way Chiang stockpiled munitions and supplies during WWII, refusing to cooperate with the efforts to fight the Japanese because Chiang was waiting for the opportunity to engage the Communists (who actually did fight the Japanese) in civil war. Had we followed the advice of Stilwell and others who understood the Chinese situation better, so many things would be different today. We wouldn't have got involved in Vietnam and quite possibly Mao would not have reacted to isolation from the rest of the world by going down the twisted, mad road that led China to a population explosion in the 1950s followed by widespread famine and starvation, multiple purges of intellectuals and dissidents, the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in which a generation of Chinese students spent their primary and secondary school years tearing down the "four olds" (the remnants of traditional Chinese culture), the one-child policy that caused families who viewed sons as their only safety net in old age to resort to female infanticide in unknown numbers, and container ships smuggling and abandoning to horrible deaths desperate Chinese workers seeking economic opportunities in North America.
Oh, yes, America is truly great - at causing problems and then walking away in places we should either have never entered, or should have had better hands and minds and hearts in charge. Although I have as much faith as I can have in President Biden without knowing him personally, I know he isn't a superhero with powers humans only fantasize about in comic book world. I want to hope, but I've read and lived through an awful lot of history. I can only try to keep doing my own little part to keep us moving toward a world that I know we don't all agree on as a goal. It's us (humanity as a whole) I don't trust. Too many of us are not good at taking care of this world and as a species we don't deserve its bounty. What terrifies me the most are those who believe that the beauties, the bounty of this planet are here only for humanity to exploit. That includes not just the mega-trillionaires with bottomless wells of dark money, but also the evangelicals who think "God" gave mankind this planet and that it's ours to do with each of our only little plots of it exactly what we please.
Tragically, some of our past leaders severely underestimated cultures which existed centuries before we did!
Regarding WWII collaborators with the Allies in Asia, I believe Ho Chi Min was one of them!! Ignoring his service, US political and military, still ‘wet behind the ears’, believed they new best ! Tragic!
I think we share quite similar lives and experiences learned from
American aid to China during World War II is a long a long and complicated story, too lengthy to retell here. It involved three years (1942 - 1945) of nonstop cargo flights involving thousands of round trip cargo flights over the Himalayas connecting India with southern China, and the construction of the Ledo and Burma Roads, the combined length of which stretched 1,044 miles over rugged mountains and trackless jungle terrain. Any contact or assistance to Mao Tse Tung's army would have been out of the question. There was zero chance of that happening.
I wonder if there is as fascinating a "back story" to our misadventures in Afghanistan as there was regarding Vietnam..
You can bet your sweet bippy on that.
Veerrrry interesting. What a blast from the past.
But schtupid!
Well described, artsilen.
I highly recommend Ken Burns' documentary series "Vietnam" to fill in the tapestry artsilen so well outlined. Swept me back to my adolescence.
There is a lot of stuff out there if you care to look for it. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are inextricably linked. You want them to be studied in a binary way. One history that I have is Fiasco The American military adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006). The same coterie of Bush Administration, comic opera masterminds who cobbled up the Iraq disaster did pretty much the same thing in Afghanistan. We will be paying dearly for their insouciant joyriding for decades to come. Beyond that, historians are going to have decades-worth of official records and private narratives to plow through in order to pull together an historical narrative that covers all the bases, puts them into some sort of cohesive timeline, and gives analysis and perspective to the story. My guess would be that will see something like that may be five to ten years from now.
Five to ten years? If those "official records and private narratives" survive and If the Democrats hang on to Congress and the White House in 2022 and 2024, maybe in twenty to thirty years. If they don't, two or three generations from now, when we all are gone, is more like it.
There are no secrets anymore The reality is much closer to what I described. Everyone involved having a story to tell will be falling all over themselves to see it in print. Crosschecking multiple sources is made easier by social networking. The real risk is in getting the story into print before all the boxes are checked.
The "Doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different result". I'm sure that isnt the exact phrase, but close enough. Our government & its human "entities" seem to be stuck on that one, dont they? It appears to be the case in so many instances.
... is said to be one definition of insanity.
YES! couldnt remember the rest of that! True. Thanks Jack
Artsilen, thank you so much for this. I wondered for years about how we became entangled with some of these wars, but had no clear picture. Your clear, concise summation is a great education to those of us who had only the government's rationale (i.e., The Domino Theory, which I knew intuitively was trash) and our driving fear that the Communists would take over the world. Coincidentally, it is yet another reason that the Republicans need to be defeated.
PBS did an excellent documentary about Anna Chenault's treachery and its results.
Right now, we have a moral obligation to save those Afghans who allied themselves with us. We took in thousands of Vietnamese boat people (many of them living here in California) and they've enriched our lives immensely, an we have blended their culture with ours. Parenthetically, this is why California succeeds. We can do that for Afghans who risked everything to help us. This is really how we win hearts and minds. Trump Republicans don't get that. We go from strength to strength, and the Republicans stew in their resentments.The numbers don't lie.
I met a lot of young Vietnamese young men who the Archdiocese of New Orleans put in vacant dormitories of an old boys institution where I worked. It was ironic to hear French again being spoken in Cafe du Monde by Asian waiters.
Shortly after our pulling out of VN, I had a Vietnamese co-worker with whom I tried to speak my community college French. Turned out, he'd been a South Vietnamese soldier (not a well-educated officer) and didn't speak a word of French (or possibly didn't recognize what I was saying as French?) Too bad I didn't take the opportunity to learn a bit of Vietnamese from him.
It's extremely difficult for a person with narcissistic personality traits to think and care for others, and that empathy and caring is what it takes to actually make our government work for all people. Just think how awesome our nation could be if all the energy and effort put into the GOP propaganda and undermining our nation was put into helping all citizens be successful.
Agree completely. And it’s not just any old narcissism, it’s a narcissism born of rigid adherence to old social structures, to the status quo of having whites and men and straights come first, giving them all the power and privilege ahead of others. Republican attachment to racist white and sexist male and genderist straight dominance has to be obliterated. I’m sorry, it’s a black-and-white choice: much as we love gray, the black hats have to be beaten and won over. Period. There is no other alternative.
Unless those racist, sexist, genderist white men (and women) get busy in the bedroom making a passel of mini-me's, they will eventually be outnumbered. After all, even the British royal family has a Black princess now and she is busy improving that bloodline.
It's hard to wait it out though - our generation will be long gone before the idea of "whiteness" is thoroughly obliterated - and humans may destroy the planet first, but the day is coming when the wide range of skin color, hair texture, facial feature is homogenized into something new and beautiful. Maybe. I can dream, can't I? Because I'm having a lot of feelings about being labeled "white" - not trying to get out of acknowledging the advantages I have had by being born with this particular look - but I never wanted to be pale, blonde, and green-eyed. I wanted to have black hair and dark skin because that was what looked beautiful to me when I was a child. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd be pretty sure I was East Asian or South Asian or West Asian in a former life.
I hear what you’re dreaming of and know that at 71 years I certainly will not see it come to pass. Oh,and for the record, I hope we don’t actually look homogenized…too many lovely colors out there to have us all looking beige!
Oh. I’m QUITE sure that is true. “…a passel of mini-me’s…Hahahahahahaha That won’t happen. Too busy dicking around playing war and playing daddy bucks.
It infuriates me when Americans say the there isn't a system in place to admit Afghans, as I heard on NPR today. America has a moral obligation to help Afghans who put their lives at risk. Just get them out of Afghanistan without a system, because that is the right thing to do. That is our obligation.
Even though visas might take some time because of vetting (they were thoroughly vetted before they ever were in contact with our troops), they can be taken to Guam and have safe haven for themselves and their families until the visas come in. From what I heard last night, many are not currently in Kabul, and it will take some time to make their way there, since the Taliban is patrolling the roads, so that makes it all the more urgent! Biden has said they'd be able to come here, but words are not enough - action, transport planes, ships are needed NOW!
I've written my senators weeks ago, asking that they make the rescue of Afghan translators a priority. MSNBC has been interviewing politicians about the status of the rescue plans, and they have indicated that Biden is implementing the rescue, although time is running out. Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed the governor of Guam, who indicated Guam's preparations to receive the Afghans, but apparently the plans are still fluid and uncertain. Frightening, as Afghan pilots are already being murdered by the Taliban to level the field. With everything on his plate, Biden needs to fast track this urgent matter. All of these endangered people who've been so important to us in the past would be important contributors to our culture. As you pointed out, Trump Republicans, as well as other Republicans, care not a whit about anything but control and enrichment. After the last five years, we need to win back the hearts and minds we've lost.
I wish that women at risk would be among them.
Yes.
When I read Artsilen's excellent post and the story about Anna's treachery, I was immediately reminded of a certain woman, who might be a clone - that woman being the wife of Moscow Mitch.
and daughter of tfg.
Treacherous women come in all colors and from all cultures. I don't particularly like the woman or her husband either, but it is because of her behavior, not her ancestry.
I agree. What reminded me of her though was her family connections and all the wheeling and dealing she has done via her husband...maybe not illegal, but perhaps close enough.
Ah, Yes...
We have yet to face up to the choice we eventually will have to make in regard to the extent of our support for independent Taiwan, the "Republic of China," which mainland China, the "People's Repubic of China," insists should rightfully be part of their country. The day has long passed when Taiwan posed a challenge to the People's Republic for control of the mainland, if it ever did, or even a viable alternative. Sooner or later we will have to deal with that, learning from our experiences in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Or maybe we need to butt out? Dealing with things that are not our business is our go-to move, and our government is usually able to get support of the masses by lying about what the aims are in going to other countries to tell them how to be. If diplomacy or acting as intermediary (only if we are asked to) does not settle the standoff between Taiwan and the PRC, it is not appropriate for us to interfere, again, in hopes of straightening out a situation we were largely responsible for creating - because we are not the ones who will have to live with the results - the peoples of Taiwan and China are and it is up to them to work it out.
Thank you for history refresher! W. Bush had a plausible reason to go after Bin Laden and his terrorist organization. However, the Cheney led Neo—Con zeal to invade Iraq left the work in Afghanistan incomplete! Bush-Cheney ignored, underestimated or were completely schooled by Pakistan leaders in their attempt to get Bin Laden!
As to your VietNam references, a recent article by a person who served as an advisor to our military command in Afghanistan stated ‘Afghani police and military fight for $$$, the Taliban fight for their right to survive!” Tragically, the military brass has not learned the lesson taught by the Viet Cong who, like the Taliban, were fighting to survive’!
It has been said that Little Bush went into Iraq to show he was tougher than his father! Indeed, Papa Bush was a decorated WWII fighter pilot, while little Bush’s Army Reserve records are ‘missing’! As Biden witnessed, Obama did not want to appear weak thus he followed the generals advise to ramp up the war!
A leader needs to know when to declare ‘Basta’ , enough! Biden is that leader!
Additionally, from what I've read, HW declined to attack Baghdad, because he knew that it would set off exactly what W's venture caused - total chaos. He understood that the Sunni leadership was a minority in Iraq, and the Shiite majority would take advantage and cause civil war. W's response, when a reporter asked if he had consulted his father in regard to the invasion was to look heavenward, and say that he consulted with his (other) father. Maybe he'd have benefitted by discussing it with Dad.
Biden knows that he has plenty of "nation building" to do right here at home.
Two quibbles. First, Gen. Chennault divorced his wife Nell in 1946. She lived until 1977.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/16387676/nell-chennault
Second, the South Vietnamese president in 1968 was Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. He already had no desire for the Paris talks to be successful and needed very little encouragement from anybody to put up multiple conditions that he knew the North would reject.
Eisenhower was circumspect, early on, about Vietnam, but later succumbed to the domino theory, a paranoid delusion propagated by the Dulles brothers, who managed to infect 90% of the WWII generation with the disease (including Truman, Eisenhower, and JFK but not FDR or LBJ), who then passed it on to 70% of their children. According to Michael Maclear’s report (10,000 Days War, ©1981, Ch 4, p58), Eisenhower advised Kennedy to send US troops to Vietnam and promised to support JFK publicly if he did so. This led to the US take-over of the colonial war in Vietnam after the French collapsed. JFK’s failure to withdraw trapped LBJ, who knew that backing out of Vietnam would doom his domestic program, which was his primary interest. LBJ hoped to limit commitments in Vietnam but got sucked into escalation by duplicitous military brass and other nefarious actors. He would have been a great president if he had managed to avoid being bamboozled by the military-industrial complex, who take cynical advantage of the bellicose temperament of the American electorate. Most Americans find prosecuting wars to be a delightfully exciting pastime, and American businessmen love nothing better than easy, wartime money.
The nuns also seared the domino theory into our 7th grade brains. The commies were coming...
Seems odd that Catholic clergy would be so virulently anti-communist. I suspect the atheism canard has a lot to do with it, but probably general paranoia seeps in everywhere, regardless of idology.
I think if you, or your family, lived under soviet communism, you would be virulently anti-communist, as well. It was no picnic.
True, but I don’t think it was the brutal oppression that prompted the vehemence. The Catholic clergy didn’t go on a tear against oh, say, Batista in Cuba. That SOB probably got communion right to the end and the last rites to boot.
Thank you, Rex! I don't think our actions as a country have ever been as completely humanitarian. It's always been about economic benefit and regional hegemony.
Please remember that the Roman Catholic Church is a huge capitalist corporation.
Yup.
God-less commies are coming.
Thanks, MaryPat, I'll have to go Youtube to watch "The Russians Are Coming" again.
List of those who have tried and failed in Afghanistan:
The Babylonian Empire
The Persian Empire
The Greek Empire
The Roman Empire
The Sassanid Empire
The Mongols
The Russian Empire
The British Empire
The Russian empire
The British Empire
The Soviet Union
The United States
I had a friend who was there in Kandahar Province. He told me about an ancient watchtower that was outside their base. It was said to be thousands of years old, and was considered unsafe to go inside, but he went inside anyway. On the steps to the top, on the walls, were inscriptions in Greek, Arabic, Russian. "I realized it was unlikely we were going to have a different outcome."
There is a reason why Afghanistan has been named the Graveyard of Empires. Perhaps Ashoka, the 2nd-c. BCE emperor who followed the Hellenistic Empire's retreat from South Asia, who converted to Buddhism, had the most positive (for a usurping dictator) influence on the region, but between him and the re-emergence of the Persians, the region broke up into multiple small states. There was a time when Afghanistan was one of the centers of enlightenment, and they did also embrace the secularism of Ataturk for a time. If you see pictures of Kabul in the 1980s--before the Soviets screwed it up--it was a different place.
For everyone who is doing the warmongering faux "woe is me": the outcome--the Taliban overtaking the region because they have massive backing from the likes of Pakistan, the other "Stans" to the north, and Russia (whom they fought for 2 decades)--would have been the same had we left in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, or 2030. They are a bunch of radical patriarchal misogynistic arseholes with a dream of a penis paradise and a total fear of what the world could become if they are no longer a threat. It is the ultimate cynical move, especially the fact that they force Afghanis to grow and harvest opium in order to keep their enemies complacent and their coffers full. Because, y'know, the strictures in Islamic law against alcohol and other mind-altering substances doesn't mean they can't use it to their own ends.
The USA utterly ignored Afghanistan, including when the Taliban destroyed millennia old statues of the Buddha, because it suited their purposes while the USSR was bogged down there. Shrubbie Bush "discovered" that they were being mean to women and girls miraculously after 9/11 and claimed it as an excuse for invasion in one of his most baldfacedly hypocritical moves.
I took a break from being in my house (with Missouri in a spike, although KC is in pretty good shape, I am still having to avoid crowds) and went to the wonderful Nelson Atkins museum, where the Asian Art collection is superb. Trying to avoid crowds (it was heaving! Weird for a Thursday afternoon!) I spent most of my time there revisiting old favorites. I love Ghandaran Buddhist sculpture and spent a lot of time thinking about Ghandara, Kushan, and Gupta-era culture in the regions to the north of the Indus River. Culturally, artistically, and intellectually brilliant, these cultures were destroyed by their encounters with the West, which laid them open to Mongol conquest. Hmmmmm.
Just as a point of reference, encounters between Alexander the Great's soldiers and Buddhist monks in the southern Afghanistan/northern Pakistan region led to the development, by Epicurus (one of Alexander's tagalongs), of Epicureanism, which is a philosophy that follows the Eightfold Path of Buddhism very closely. The word has changed in meaning over the centuries, but originally it was a compelling philosophy that acted as an alternative to the Stoicism of Zeno (another Hellenistic philosopher--and another process of definitional evolution in which the meaning of the word has changed radically).
Hey, thanks for this! Another reason to love this site - there's so much opportunity for education, to learn something new. Great post.
I laughed when I read this: "They are a bunch of radical patriarchal misogynistic arseholes with a dream of a penis paradise and a total fear of what the world could become if they are no longer a threat. " You could very well have been describing the white supremacist GTP of today!
Proving once again that Some. Things. Never. Change.
Love this! Just like with HCR, knowing historical precedents enlightens me. I also have an interest in Buddhist history. Perhaps you could have your own substack to tell us more?
Oy. No: I would have 3 followers and dozens of trolls. Can’t keep my mouth shut! 🤪
The nice thing about substack is, you can nuke the trolls into their component electrons, since you're in full control (they can't just come waltzing along, unlike at FleeceBlock), and I very seriously doubt you would have only 3 followers. I can tell you for a fact the people who are here are fully capable of subscribing to more than one substack blog. :-)
Hahaha! FleeceBlock!
You are amazing Linda
You are spot on, Linda. Thanks.
Geez,Linda. That was a fascinating read. I’ve had to go over it a few times. Thank you for the lesson.
Just nerding out on ancient and medieval history . . . But you're welcome!
Thank you! I know nothing about all this! Fascinating.
Thanks for this Linda. The multi-directional flow of ideas in the various Alexandrian successor kingdoms proved to be the seedbed for many later "Western" developments. One unplanned but highly fortunate thread is that the efforts of the Seleucid rulers to Hellenize the cultures under their rule brought Greek texts to Baghdad (from which they ruled for some time). After the dissolution of their empire and subsequent defeats of Roman rule, these texts--philosophical, scientific, medical, etc.--were preserved, translated, commented on, and added to by Arabic scholars. Centuries later their "discovery" and re-translations were foundational for the European Renaissance.
Indeed, Tom—but mostly coming from the Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria, which the Umayyads looted and burned. They then moved a lot of texts to Damascus, their capital, which became the intellectual center of both the Umayyad and the Abbasid rulers. When the Ottomans (after the Mongol invasions killed the last Abbasid emperor in the 13th century) took over they did shift the center of the Islamic world northward into Anatolia, but the Persian influence that had retained an exquisite cultural efflorescence for centuries, persisted. The ancient texts that Jewish multi-lingual translators translated from Arabic and Greek in al-Andalus came mostly from Iberia and North Africa, as well as Damascus, which had been an ally of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem for much of the 12th century, mostly because of the Seljuk invasions.
The Umayyids didn't loot and burn the Alexandria Library. The Christians, led by Clement of Alexandria (future Pope Clement I), one of the many charismatic "christian" con artists of history, did the burning, to get rid of "pagan knowledge." Another fine moment for Christian moron stupidity and another on the very long list of Crimes Against Humanity committed by the Institutional Catholic Church.
Whatever the Umayyids might have burned was a shadow of what was destroyed by old Clement and his followers in their preview of what the Xtian fuckwits would like to do here, given the chance, as we see every day in the news.
Well and let’s not forget the horrific murder of Hypatia by the “monastic” mob followers of Cyril of Alexandria (aka St. Cyril). She was one of the most important late antique mathematicians and astronomers ever. These are all real “What’s Jerusalem to do with Athens?” (With no apologies to Tertullian—another piece of work) moments.
Yes, the murder of Hypatia and destruction of the original library (Clement was burning the remains) is considered the inflection point of what became the Dark Ages. It certainly marked the moment when the misogyny of St. Paul became The Rule in the Catholic Church.
And the Russians get first prize for having tried and failed 3 times with the Brits a close second. Time to learn from experience perhaps....of ourselves as much as that of others. A little history might go a long way to inculcate a lot more common sense.
I've heard it referred to as "the graveyard of empires."
Oh Stuart answered my question. The Russians were in there three times holy cow.
TC are the Russian Empire and British Empire accidental repeats? Or did they each try and fail twice?
They were particular hardheads. It took the British thrice and the Russians three times, and they are STILL messing around there.
The term The Great Game was invented for th British adventures in Afghanistan. Golly they were dumb.
Still pursuing Empires no doubt!
Given Putin sees himself as inheritor of the Czars, yes indeed.
Wow. And I thought we were stupid. We are in good company.
Wouldn’t call it good but definitely company.
What do they say about history repeating itself? Nobody ever pays attention to history if they’re working in government leadership.
Oh they pay attention, they just learn the wrong lessons. Our experience in the Korean War and Vietnam War is an excellent example.
The US got its ass kicked by the Chinese when they intervened in November 1950 after we invaded North Korea despite their warnings. Secretary of State at the time Dean Acheson called it "the greatest defeat of American arms since the Second Battle of Bull Run." British historian Sir Martin Gilbert wrote of it being "the greatest defeat of a previously-victorious army in history." US soldiers who were there called it "The Big Bug-out". It's the longest retreat in US Army history and serious consideration was given at the time to using nuclear weapons to stop the Chinese.
The small gargoyles who went through that wrenching experience learned one lesson: Do Not Fuck With China. So, when they were big gargoyles 10 years later when Vietnam came along, throughout the war they were constantly worried that the next step of escalation would bring Chinese intervention. What they didn't learn was the history of Asia: China and Korea have been good friends and allies going back as far as the records go back. China and Vietnam have been enemies ever since the Vietnamese were driven out of their ancestral home in southeast China by the expansion of the Han Empire 2,500 years ago. So, they applied the wrong lesson to the wrong situation and - as they say - "two wrongs don't make a right."
Seems to be the psecure bastion of an Eight Century mankind. Rocks, religious dogma, tribes, armed man, goats, woman as property.
Interestingly enough, before the 42 years of 'troubles," it was a nice place. One of my oldest friends told me how she and her husband hitchhiked through the country in 1975. When they got to wherever at the end of a day's travel, someone would invite them for a meal and let them sleep there, there was never any fear of being robbed or worse. They ended up taking a bus from Kabul to Paris - she's always been one of the most adventuresome people I've known.
Yes, I was in Afghanistan in 1975, and it was multicultural and unlike the oppressive Islamic theocracy of Iran.
From my travel memories:
On Nov 3, 1975 we arrived in Afghanistan and were relieved to find ourselves casually walking the tree lined streets of Herat, the first town we stayed at. The hostel we stayed at was an old European style residence, broken into rooms. We thot it had an English appearance as did the crumbling tho elegant neighborhood it was in. As we walked to the center of town, the ppl we met were genuinely friendly. This quaint little town was such a relaxing experience, so different from the harshness of Iran.
The ppl were also different, a mixture of Caucasian and Asian features, with attire ranging from the Arabic turbans to the more colorful Asian tribal garb. In Herat a street waif sold me a small cast bronze Buddha for the equivalent of 50¢. I assumed it was recently cast and not that old so I cleaned off the green patina - but now wonder if it could actually be an antique. There was a sense of historic merging here, evidence of Buddhist and Eastern culture, even tho Afghanistan was dominated by Islam. We were also allowed to remove our shoes, wash our feet and enter the mosque as visitors.
This relaxed and friendly feeling lasted thru-out the two weeks that we traversed Afghanistan, which made it a pleasant stay despite suffering dysentery in Kabul, (I was told every Westerner gets dysentery in Kabul). Afghanistan is where I had my 31st Birthday. We noticed that tourism may have been a sizeable income for this otherwise struggling economy, Afghanistan being the only country that charged for a tourist visa ($7).
We saw quite a few young Europeans staying at hostels such as ours. These too were economy class tourists able to ruf it and enjoy the simple pleasures of this exotic country. Such as, the Asian style restaurant with low tables and cushion seating, arranged around the walls, where small local bands would entertain in the center. Hashish was often on the menu, available and cheap; a gram costing about as much as a Coca Cola. This may have been illegal but tolerated, for the proprietor came in one evening to tell everyone to remove their hash from the table. He then came back with two official looking men in Western style suits who looked around, were satisfied and left. At the time, being unaware of any political upheavals, we thot only of narcotics inspections but we never knew who the men were or why they were checking the Westerners in the hostel.
We stayed a few days in Kabul while I got my stomach in order, eating imported Quaker oatmeal as a comfort food. The hostel bedroom we stayed at had a dirt floor and two wooden frame cots. The toilet was across the patio and the water heater burned wood. We were in the Third World now. Kabul, for being the capital was not that impressive. I do recall in our walks going past the Soviet Embassy. In November 1975,. Afghanistan seemed to be just a haven for young ppl from Europe getting away from the industrialized world to enjoy the cheap economy of this exotic and charming little country. Who knew then that there would be an invasion of this place by the Soviet Union in just four years.
Twenty years ago we went to war with the largest opium producing Authoritarian regime to fight terrorism. Now we have an Opiod epidemic, voter suppression laws on the books, one party is adamantly leaning Authoritarian, and domestic terrorist attack the procedures of democracy, and is growing threat.
Hmmm. “Houston, we have a problem.”
While Afghanistan supplies most of the rest if the world's opium it is not the primary source of opioids consumed in the US. Opium from Afghanistan's opium production finances terrorist activity but it is not the at root of the US opioid crisis. We need to understand that and tackle the US opioid crisis at its root - China for fentanyl, Mexico for poppy production and as a through transit country for fentanyl.
"Most of the heroin coming into the United States is cultivated on poppy farms in Mexico, with six major cartels controlling production and operating distribution hubs in major U.S. cities. "
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-opioid-epidemic
"Chinese companies produce the vast majority of fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, and fentanyl precursors, but Mexico is becoming a major transit and production point for the drug and its analogues as well, and Mexican traffickers appear to be playing a role in its distribution in the United States."
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/mexicos-role-the-deadly-rise-fentanyl
"The US Drug Enforcement Agency claims as little as one per cent of US supply is from Afghanistan. It says virtually all the heroin used in America comes from Mexico and South American countries"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444
Daria, you are spot on here. And you can add to the list of suppliers, big pharma. I was happy to know that Several states (mine included) have reached agreements with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that will allow settlements of suits against the company and it's ongoing distribution of Oxycontin. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/08/purdue-sackler-bankruptcy-settlement/ This is big in the world of addictions. Now we need to eliminate the stigma attached to addictions and address helping those addicted.
Pam, yeah... I know but I elected to not throw in big pharma because the subject was opioids from Afghanistan. Frankly, I think the Sacklers are far worse than the drug cartels. That they are walking free is a horror.
The English Sackler family is getting out of it largely intact nonetheless. They are still keeping a few Billion!
Yes, but they also have to dissolve or sell the company that made their billions. And given the lust for money these days, only a "few billion" is not enough!
It breaks my heart! They have also become pariahs in "English Society" ...donations returned, name removed from sight on public buildings etc.
Purdue now has judicial permission to file for bankruptcy.
A terrible miscarriage of justice IMO.The havoc and destruction they foisted on the American public should leave them personally responsible beyond the company liability. One more white crime that pays in the end. Reportedly they have billions secreted away.
Yes, but there are conditions to that filing....fortunately.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2019/10/04/the-sacklers-made-12-to-13-billion-in-profit-from-oxycontin-maker-purdue-pharma-new-report-says/?sh=439b4981477d
There is such a simple solution to ending the drug cartels and actually fighting the drug problem. LEGALIZE ALL DRUGS! Yes, that means heroin, cocaine and all drugs, with the same controls as ALCOHOL. Then with no drug busts or police investigations wasting time & money, concentrate on treating addictions, the same as ALCOHOLISM.
I emfasize alcohol because of the Great Experiment (prohibition) that failed miserably and gave us organized crime in the 1920s. You cannot make a popular drug illegal. And Alcohol is a drug - causing more deaths than Heroin.
Unfortunately, the same ppl who put us into "wars with no end" also try the same failed experiments over & over again expecting different results. In other words, INSANITY.
Yes of course. Legalization is the solution. It also begins the process of eliminating the drug cartels in Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America. Those cartels can turn into legal enterprises. Then maybe Mexico can stop being another Colombia.
Perhaps someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe drug use is not illegal in Mexico - it is our making most non-prescription drugs illegal here that has created the space for the cartels to develop. Yep, turning them into legal enterprises and taxing the drugs as heavily as alcohol and tobacco are taxed (and marijuana in the states where it has been legalized) would not only provide funding for treatment, it would also make life a lot safer for Central and South Americans - and perhaps even alleviate pressures at our southern border to some extent (setting climate change aside for one moment).
Ugh. Sorry about the typo/scrambled words. Too late/early to be writing on my tablet in the dark. Sleep well, all.
Just as long as the demand exists the "market" will find a way to supply!
Oh! I did not realize that. Thank You, Daria
We have met the enemy and
he is us.
One might ask the pertinent question...."Who won?"
Stuart, I’d say many Afghanis won in terms of gaining more expertise and supplies to defend themselves. The women and girls certainly received a large dose of confidence. The corrupt government received over a trillion bucks. Many winners and yet the beat goes on. The generals and many other people will continue to whine about Biden’s brave and clear decision.
Unfortunately for the "women and girls" the benefits risk being short-lived. The recent program of assassination of women judges and journalists gives a good indication of the Taliban's current attitude towards them
Yes Stuart current and eternal attitude. Maybe the Afghanis have more skills now to protect their women. I’m not without sympathy but it’s an impossible situation and doesn’t mean more of our troops should die to change it.
Or possibly NOW the women will protect themselves! Judging from the articles in the Guardian.
Maybe I sure hope so! They’re so used to being downtrodden but so have many of us American women— it’s all relative.
Well, like other wars and conflicts the US has been involved in, I wonder.
The corporations backing the war won.
Yep. Eisenhower warned us, we didn't listen. It's always about (pardon the pun) the bottom line.
Yes, he did.
And alot of independent mercenaries who were trained in our military.
Precisely.
Yes.
Oh, the irony! We become that which we abhor.
“ I have foresworn myself. I have broken every law I have sworn to uphold, I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right!”
Eliot Ness going after Al Capone? I had to look that one up!
Had the US military stayed in-country for another hundred years, the results would have been the same.
Other random, gloomy rainy day thoughts;
What will the Afghanistan War Memorial, a war everyone wants to forget, look like?
Where will the next dirty little very profitable war be? (Erase Afghanistan/Taliban and insert Vietnam/Viet Cong.)
A trillion dollars would have bought a lot of infrastructure. How can we replace war profiteers with infrastructure profiteers? C'mon, Kellogg Root & Brown, show us something!
What do we do with the prisoners in Guantanamo? Finally give them a trial? How about we re-patriate them and replace them with those accused of Jan. 6th crimes and hold them incognito for a couple of decades.
Republicans insist that we only teach smiley-face American history to our children.
It's another rainy day in Connecticut. Sorry, western states. If I could, I would send it all to you.
Thanks for remembering GITMO detainees. What's happened there is despicable. TORTURE folks! Our government tortured people in ways that would nauseate the strongest among us. We need to deal with what we have wrought there.
Thank you, Dick Cheney administration with a big assist from de facto VP and kindergartner Bush Jr. from Texas by way of Saudi Arabia.
Biden Legal Team Divided on Scope of Rights of Guantánamo Detainees https://nyti.ms/3qY7B4r
Good morning, Ralph! Your infrastructure comment and KRB reference gave me Halliburton and Cheney flashback. Business and politics. EeeGads as Mary Pat would say.
Your thought must have been strong. Eugene got .01" of rain OFFICIALLY on Wednesday (and here I thought it was low level marine air that made 11 tiny pinprick drops of moisture on my windshield that dried within two blocks.)
We received a few drops here in Seattle. Temps have dropped and we're getting normal summer heat/not-heat now.
Hey Ralph, can I trade you? A few of your rainy days in exchange for our triple digit weeks? if you’re feeling gloomy, I can promise you a quick trip to California will dispel any clouds, actual or metaphoric.
I went to San Francisco to visit in ‘72. I stayed 30+ yrs. It’s not my town any more.
Not surprised to hear that. OK you don’t have to come visit, but can we have some of your rain? I’m sure you don’t need it. Pretty please . . .
A few nights ago I would have been glad to send you some of our rain. Have had a couple really nasty thunder & lightning storms. Read that 16,000 customers of NYSEG lost power! Whatever would we do if the entire grid went down? Now that could bear just a bit of research, couldnt it? I dont see too much written & spoken about that - infrastructure doesnt appear to be an urgent issue, does it?
Especially when the power grid is taken down by hackers instead of storms.
Let's imagine how Republicans will excoriate President Biden if (more likely when) the Taliban takes over Afghanistan. It will be as if their cult leader hadn't cut a deal with the Taliban, putting the Afghanistan government at a grave disadvantage by excluding it from negotiations. Predictably, John Bolton wasted no time criticizing Biden after today's announcement.
Biden made the tough decision that he needed to make.
John Bolton is a sorry excuse for a thinking person. He appears to consider his own opinion quite highly. When I think of him, I see the a$$ of a walrus.
I agree with this characterization; however, whenever Bolton comes to mind, I immediately think of Fiona Hill and how we need more like her in government!
I’m not sure I can ever look at a pic of him ever again without thinking of your comment, kimceann. 😂
You are too kind Kim
What does the a$$ of a walrus look like? i would compare him to a swollen, red a$$ baboon. Must be pretty gross, regardless!
thanks for askin
walrus tail:
https://pixabay.com/photos/hagenbeck-hamburg-zoo-play-5269329/
That was rich and I totally see the similarity 👍😎
Okay, but that look is quite charming - on the walrus.
♥️♥️♥️♥️😂😂😂😂
sent through a wormhole with this question, Rowshan. Had SO much fun!
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/best-colored-monkey-butts-and-why-they-look-so-colorful/
Such a fun wormhole, Kimceann. Who would have thought I’d be reminded of Kim Kardashian so early in the day? (See Celebes crested macaque butt in above link)
Now if Ms. Kardashian would only paint her butt red and blue so we would know when to stay away from her...
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Oh, Gawd!
😂😂😂😂
It’s already started. I spent my last social moment with a so-called friend the other day and she started bashing Biden about this withdrawal. I just sat there and looked at her in amazement, told her I needed to go home, got up and vowed never to be in her company again. Done and done
Hear, hear, Elaine!!
Good for you, Elaine. I've done the same in similar situations.
Myself & others for a long time have characterized the Republican Party as our Taliban because of the similar religious conservative punitive gun carrying behavior of both. However, Trump capitalized on the Republican direction and took it farther until seeking help from Russia, favoring dictators like Putin, thr Big Lie, the January 6th Capitol attack, occupations of state capitols, and now Republican state laws to suppress voting, censure books and teaching of American history is looking even more Taliban than ever.
Whether or not right wing extremism is linked throughout the world, their objectives for domination, single party rule, their thinking, tactics, sympathies and public statements follow the same patterns, and often use each others words. Social media, news media and entertainment media are mixing the pot and making this easier. Where the US used to be called the "melting pot" for our inclusion, perhaps the melting pot is now a homogenization of right wing radical ideas and actions, playing to the worst natures of mankind is attacking our multicultural democratic modern world. Much like covid19, an infection with no purpose other that to infect and live off its hosts until they are dead.
The Republican party as our Taliban has a nice ring to it.
Allow me to say that their fundamentalist "Christian" views about women sound an awful lot like the Sharia Law that they profess to hate so much.
Got that right. Cue the caveman metaphor. "Me Ogg, you Jane"
Damn right Charlie, it rings like a bell 🔔
What a cute little Taliban you got there. Does it bite?
laughing. out. loud.
Well said, but don't overlook the thread of misogyny that runs through all, or at least the intention to control women and procreation.
Hope, this is true for the Taliban, Republicans and it seems through most or all conservative extremists. Does "conservative" even apply?
Trump might be our Osama Bin Laden. Our Al Qaeda encouraging our Taliban. Osama Bin Laden too thought he could get away with murder. Promoting his power and invulnerability.
Jerry Falwell Sr. is our Osama Bin Laden.
Such a shame it is that the greatest threat to our security now comes from our fellow Americans. This is a sad commentary on our nation’s state of affairs.
No kidding Herb!
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling
OMG.
Realists knew even back in the Bush days that this was how things would end. We'd seen it before in several parts of the world when colonialism ended. After the colonial forces leave, a bloodbath inevitably follows. History rarely mentions those, but for example, the killings that followed after Great Britain granted India its independance were horrific, and led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state. Was Britain right to leave?
Yes. Leaving was long overdue.
If there ever was a clear example of our leaders ignoring history and proceeding to war without a defined mission and overt success criteria, this Afghan period will be one of the most overt. In the reaction that led us into this quagmire, "We" stopped listening. We didn't listen to history, we didn't listen to our own military leaders, we didn't listen to a large part of our government, our advisors, or our electorate. THIS TIME things would be different! And yet - somehow they weren't.
It took a lot of moral and political courage to bite the bullet and call a halt to this, and President Biden deserves a lot of credit for doing so.
The British left India in part because of their impotence. They couldn't stop the religious massacres. They started well beforehand.....and are still going on under Modi.
Or the British in Africa and in Australia! Canada? Still there, I guess! Then there are the religious "boarding schools" in Canada & here - to force children to forget their cultures & way of life. Reading lots about Canada right now. Where are the stories of our own boarding schools?
A place to start for the US....with further reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_Indian_schools
For Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
And for Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system#:~:text=In%20Canada%2C%20the%20Indian%20residential,last%20one%20closed%20in%201997.
In Africa, the Brits had no wish, and made no effort, to stop Africans being African. local education was not always the name of the game. The Brits working in the "empire" sent their kids to school in England...boarding of course but not the same regime!
Thanks, Stuart - will read those. But in Africa - apartheid? Have to assume that the Brits were fine with that.
Apartheid dates from 1948 after South Africa's independence when the white Boer National Party took power.
So cant blame the British? Just white men, I guess.
And the school in S.Dakota is STILL open! Even after many abuse charges and charges regarding their use of "student's stories" as fund raising ploys. But not under the Catholic Church.
And Australia and Canada? Sure makes clear what wonderful human beings white Europeans were and are! Not something to be proud of. To be honest, the mindset hasnt really been altered that much.
Thanks, Stuart - truly nothing that I wasnt already aware of but looking at the period of time that went on - and no one felt strongly enough to stop it.
Given the mess he was handed as an incoming president after an inept and corrupt administration, President Biden has mapped out a reasonable way forward from a situation that no president should have to deal with. Will he and his successor, since this will be a years long process, have a Congress of helpmates or obstructionists?
I think the answer is on display every single day with the minority leaders of congress.
"Those who cannot remember the past..." Here we are 50 years after the Vietnam War, repeating ourselves.
“He also seemed to acknowledge the extraordinary danger facing Afghan women and girls under the rule of the Taliban as it continues to sweep through the country.” That women and girls suffer under a repressive and brutal regime is a standout hardship of this defeat.
20+ years
Four presidents
Dozens of diplomats
Countless generals
Billions of dollars
Thousands of deaths
And here we sit with no workable solution
Biden made the only rational decision.
Afghanistan has been ruled by the tribes since the beginning of time and will until the end. The idea of a unified country is a Western concoction for which they hate and kill us.
Time to lick our wounds, pack our tents and head home.
Hopefully, hopefully, we have learned a lesson. Hopefully.
"Hopefully, hopefully, we have learned a lesson. Hopefully."
We have not learned anything.
Maybe our children and grandchildren have learned the lesson though.
That hits like a punch in the gut.
Amen.
We must have.
Most of the discussion of all this fails to note that it's beyond the ability of the US to dictate the future of Afghanistan. This was as obvious twenty years ago as it is now. Biden, whether or not he says so publicly, is simply recognizing reality.
While I feel bad for the Afghani people, I am not sorry we have withdrawn our troops. Biden’s question of whether you would send your child there is a valid one. Unless you have sent a child off to the Middle East to fight a war that cannot be won, you probably can’t answer that question. We have. The young man who went there came back a very different man with mental as well as physical injury. But we were fortunate, he came home. Biden’s approach to try to cut off the money also seems wiser.
Mary Beth, as you and Ally so poignantly remarked, we owe so much to our veterans, their basic well-being and beyond! While the VA is far from perfect, there are some good, deeply-caring folks there, trying to heal unfathomable wounds. A dearest PHD friend works with vets who have traumatic brain injuries. She and others have made it a career mission to help these fine, courageous folks.