The Federalist: After Afghanistan, No More Moral Blackmail From Failed Global Interventionists

I don’t blame Joe Biden for the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Donald Trump negotiated the peace deal with the Taliban. The Taliban upheld their end of the agreement and refused to fire on American forces in Afghanistan. The Afghan puppet government and its fake army ultimately refused to fight to preserve its own existence without American support.

The seeds of this debacle were sown in the George W. Bush era when the United States committed itself to permanently occupying Afghanistan, nation building and exporting liberal democracy there. Afghanistan became a lucrative grift for the military-industrial complex. The Pentagon and the “intelligence community” refused to bow to the will of the people who have wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan since the Obama administration. The Pentagon and the Deep State bent both Obama and Trump to their will with their “intelligence assessments” and tried to do the same thing with Joe Biden.

Joe Biden was right that the Pentagon and Deep State and the “journalists” who are their mouthpieces were committed to staying there forever and that the Afghan government was incapable of sustaining itself. There was simply no way to pull out of Afghanistan without the fake puppet government there collapsing due to its own illegitimacy. The choice was always either packing up and leaving and cutting our losses and losing face when the Taliban inevitably returned to power or staying there forever to prop up the fake Afghan government. This is the final unwinding of George W. Bush’s legacy.

The Federalist:

“Days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was initially sold as a necessary pre-emptive effort to secure deadly weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein planned to use against the American people, National Review ran an op-ed by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum attacking everyone on the right who opposed the war as “unpatriotic conservatives.”

In the nearly two decades since it was published, the column has become something of a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the underlying motivations and mindset of the most ardent proponents of the idea that stable democracies can be imposed by military force from the top down. Like an insect captured in amber, Frum’s essay is a near-perfect specimen of the neoconservative id, equal parts delusion and sanctimony. …

In his State of the Union address in 2002, President George W. Bush all but claimed total military victory in Afghanistan.

“In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression,” Bush stated.

At that point, the military mission in Afghanistan should have concluded. But by 2004, the mission to destroy the terrorists responsible for 9/11 had morphed into a mission to export and establish Western-style liberal democracy not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq, too. …

“As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny, despair, and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. So America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East,” Bush told Congress in 2004. “We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government.”

The subtext of Bush’s address was no different than the overt charge leveled by Frum: if you opposed the bait-and-switch from defeating terrorists to nation-building all over the Middle East, either because you believed it be contrary to the purpose of the military or you believed it was futile and doomed to failure, you were racist and xenophobic. …”

We always knew it would end this way.

It always has ended this way for empires in Afghanistan.

Obama, Trump and Biden all inherited this albatross from George W. Bush.

Business Insider:

“More Americans blame former President George W. Bush for America’s failure in Afghanistan than any other president that succeeded him, according to a new Insider poll.

Around four-in-10 respondents said Bush is most responsible for the war’s outcome — the Taliban regained power despite the US’s nearly 20-years of involvement there — ranking him ahead of former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump as well as current commander-in-chief Joe Biden. …

Looking strictly at the four presidents in the survey, 38% of respondents ranked Bush as the president most responsible for the outcome, 27% Biden, 19% Trump and 12% Obama. …”