"an unserious country mired in the most masturbatory hysterics over bullshit dramas waged war against an insurgency of religious zealots fired by a 7th-century morality, and utterly and totally lost."
A quick read of Jacob Siegel's article confirms that while he makes broad accusations that will resonate with his readers, his evidence is thin to the point of non-existent. It's easy to attack motives, and the tactic is proven to get likes and reshares on social media. It's not much of an intellectual argument, though.
Sorry, Arnold. It doesn't matter what your FITs (including Hanania) have been saying about the past 20 years. From now on the U.S. intervention will be judged by what your senile President has done and is still doing to exiting Afghanistan. Biden's exit was not a consequence of the 20-year intervention but the actions of his incompetent and evil handlers --the ones I call barbarians because they want to destroy your country and you prefer to ignore. I think the average hitting of all your FITs in Afghanistan still is very close to zero, and some look like will never make contact with the ball. I'm sure you know some couples that long ago went through difficult divorces and can tell you how today their views are conditioned not by the happy days of their marriages but by the horrible days of their exit. Have a good day.
There would have been more success had the USA pushed for "tribal cantons", and limited local gov't, rather than attempting to centralize AND nation-build AND modernize. Post WW-II Germany & Japan were both already built nations, already centralized, and already modernized - so it was merely the elites which had to be mostly "rehabilitated".
In all of: Yugoslavia, South Africa, Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan (& now S. Sudan), the world would be better off looking for Swiss style small local tribal cantons, of people who speak the same language, rather than large central states merely because it's more convenient for aid donors.
The USA democracy was founded by white, male, property owning responsible Christians. It quickly evolved to allow non-property owners to vote. Only after Civil War did it allow Negro men to vote. While there was a longer women's rights movement, it wasn't until after WW I men allowed women to vote nationally.
It should surprise none who know history that many men want to culturally, as well as physically, dominate others - and are naturally physically dominant over their wives. This seems especially true in Islamic countries for the last few decades.
Politics is downstream of culture, which is downstream of religion.
Lee Smith in Tablet writes that lazy, luxury living US elites have lost their belief - so are doomed against a foe driven by belief.
"Staying forever" - when did the USA stop the occupation of Germany? (we're STILL there).
How about S. Korea, after the Korean war started in 1950? See the answer:
Trump clearly states there are conditions the Taliban has to meet, which they did NOT do - but after Nov, 2020, non-fighting winter there, and by Feb. 2021, the entire status was handed over to Biden and his senile (?) hands.
In 1975, I'd argue that continuing to support S. Vietnam at the full $1.3 billion rather than $700 million level, and especially allowing Pres. Ford to use US air power immediately upon the N. Viet violations of their 1973 signed Paris Peace Accords, would have allowed the S. Viet corrupt regime to survive like S. Korea.
In both cases, when the people who live there understand the foreign conquerors are leaving, and thus have lost to local rebels, none of the locals want to be the "last man to die" for the foreigners who've left.
I think it is interesting that the number one alternative to stay "forever" of serious people on Twitter seems to be we should have decapitated the Taliban and told their replacements we would keep doing that unless they behaved. That doesn't seem remotely credible to me. We'd be blamed for the government-less anarchy that followed and then we'd be so scared by that experience that we'd never have done it again except for cruise missiles and drone strikes, and the deterrence would have been far lower. And then we'd wake up one day to face another big terrorist event and the architects of that strategy would have been pilloried.
I'm not saying that we know 5he Afghanistan war passed a cost benefit test, all evidence suggests otherwise, but the incentives that led us to the strategy we took seem obvious, unfixed, not addressed by the proposed alternative.
We certainly should have both a goal and a plan before attacking any country; otherwise we are just wasting lives and money, both ours and theirs.
This goes double for all of the Near and Middle East, a region so full of groups with grudges that I'm tempted to say no power can ever stabilize it except by wiping out everybody there and starting from scratch. (Not advocating this, unless it becomes the only way to achieve peace anywhere -- which may happen.)
The lesson we should have learned from Viet Nam, and again now is that "the domino effect" (the reason for going into Viet Nam that I heard most at the time) either doesn't apply or doesn't matter when you're talking about a country that is (1) tyrannical before you begin and (2) so poor that communism can't do much to hurt people there short-term, and might even conceivably help. If we had simply let Russia or China take over Viet Nam without a fight, it would not have helped them in further conquests. It would have been a burden to the extent that they actually tried to turn it into good PR by sending aid there. And it would have relieved us of that cost as well as the war.
This makes sense, especially in 1956 when the USA (Ike! I like...) refused to allow Vietnam to democratically elect Ho Chi Minh, the successful anti-imperialist communist general who led the Viet fighters against imperialist France. (Itself allowed by the US to "recolonize" after WW II in order to induce them into NATO). Letting them take over after losing the tactical battles of Tet in early '68 becomes different.
The USA is NOT "fighting for democracy" when it vetos the desires of the people.
Perhaps not on the intellectual team, but three more takes:
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/we-are-no-longer-a-serious-people
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/farce-is-more-fatal-than-tragedy
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-government-lied-for-two-decades
"an unserious country mired in the most masturbatory hysterics over bullshit dramas waged war against an insurgency of religious zealots fired by a 7th-century morality, and utterly and totally lost."
One more: https://unherd.com/2021/08/can-the-taliban-bring-peace/
A quick read of Jacob Siegel's article confirms that while he makes broad accusations that will resonate with his readers, his evidence is thin to the point of non-existent. It's easy to attack motives, and the tactic is proven to get likes and reshares on social media. It's not much of an intellectual argument, though.
Sorry, Arnold. It doesn't matter what your FITs (including Hanania) have been saying about the past 20 years. From now on the U.S. intervention will be judged by what your senile President has done and is still doing to exiting Afghanistan. Biden's exit was not a consequence of the 20-year intervention but the actions of his incompetent and evil handlers --the ones I call barbarians because they want to destroy your country and you prefer to ignore. I think the average hitting of all your FITs in Afghanistan still is very close to zero, and some look like will never make contact with the ball. I'm sure you know some couples that long ago went through difficult divorces and can tell you how today their views are conditioned not by the happy days of their marriages but by the horrible days of their exit. Have a good day.
There would have been more success had the USA pushed for "tribal cantons", and limited local gov't, rather than attempting to centralize AND nation-build AND modernize. Post WW-II Germany & Japan were both already built nations, already centralized, and already modernized - so it was merely the elites which had to be mostly "rehabilitated".
In all of: Yugoslavia, South Africa, Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan (& now S. Sudan), the world would be better off looking for Swiss style small local tribal cantons, of people who speak the same language, rather than large central states merely because it's more convenient for aid donors.
The USA democracy was founded by white, male, property owning responsible Christians. It quickly evolved to allow non-property owners to vote. Only after Civil War did it allow Negro men to vote. While there was a longer women's rights movement, it wasn't until after WW I men allowed women to vote nationally.
It should surprise none who know history that many men want to culturally, as well as physically, dominate others - and are naturally physically dominant over their wives. This seems especially true in Islamic countries for the last few decades.
Politics is downstream of culture, which is downstream of religion.
Lee Smith in Tablet writes that lazy, luxury living US elites have lost their belief - so are doomed against a foe driven by belief.
"Staying forever" - when did the USA stop the occupation of Germany? (we're STILL there).
How about S. Korea, after the Korean war started in 1950? See the answer:
https://www.heritage.org/asia/report/withdrawal-us-ground-forces-korea
This very rapid fall was, perhaps, partially Trump's fault, for his Feb. 2020 deal with the Taliban and the drawdown in US & allied forces.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/01/trump-peace-agreement-taliban-afghan-war/
Trump clearly states there are conditions the Taliban has to meet, which they did NOT do - but after Nov, 2020, non-fighting winter there, and by Feb. 2021, the entire status was handed over to Biden and his senile (?) hands.
In 1975, I'd argue that continuing to support S. Vietnam at the full $1.3 billion rather than $700 million level, and especially allowing Pres. Ford to use US air power immediately upon the N. Viet violations of their 1973 signed Paris Peace Accords, would have allowed the S. Viet corrupt regime to survive like S. Korea.
In both cases, when the people who live there understand the foreign conquerors are leaving, and thus have lost to local rebels, none of the locals want to be the "last man to die" for the foreigners who've left.
I think it is interesting that the number one alternative to stay "forever" of serious people on Twitter seems to be we should have decapitated the Taliban and told their replacements we would keep doing that unless they behaved. That doesn't seem remotely credible to me. We'd be blamed for the government-less anarchy that followed and then we'd be so scared by that experience that we'd never have done it again except for cruise missiles and drone strikes, and the deterrence would have been far lower. And then we'd wake up one day to face another big terrorist event and the architects of that strategy would have been pilloried.
I'm not saying that we know 5he Afghanistan war passed a cost benefit test, all evidence suggests otherwise, but the incentives that led us to the strategy we took seem obvious, unfixed, not addressed by the proposed alternative.
We certainly should have both a goal and a plan before attacking any country; otherwise we are just wasting lives and money, both ours and theirs.
This goes double for all of the Near and Middle East, a region so full of groups with grudges that I'm tempted to say no power can ever stabilize it except by wiping out everybody there and starting from scratch. (Not advocating this, unless it becomes the only way to achieve peace anywhere -- which may happen.)
The lesson we should have learned from Viet Nam, and again now is that "the domino effect" (the reason for going into Viet Nam that I heard most at the time) either doesn't apply or doesn't matter when you're talking about a country that is (1) tyrannical before you begin and (2) so poor that communism can't do much to hurt people there short-term, and might even conceivably help. If we had simply let Russia or China take over Viet Nam without a fight, it would not have helped them in further conquests. It would have been a burden to the extent that they actually tried to turn it into good PR by sending aid there. And it would have relieved us of that cost as well as the war.
This makes sense, especially in 1956 when the USA (Ike! I like...) refused to allow Vietnam to democratically elect Ho Chi Minh, the successful anti-imperialist communist general who led the Viet fighters against imperialist France. (Itself allowed by the US to "recolonize" after WW II in order to induce them into NATO). Letting them take over after losing the tactical battles of Tet in early '68 becomes different.
The USA is NOT "fighting for democracy" when it vetos the desires of the people.