It has been well over 7 weeks since I have had the will to put my hand to keyboard and write anything of significance. Sure, I’ve been attacking the usual idiots on Twitter and also been observing the closet fascists from my alma mater trying to wreak their havoc, but on the whole, watching the events of the last seven weeks unfold has been personally and emotionally painful for me – and it is more than I can really bear anymore.
Watching your country slowly commit national suicide is a painful experience.
And let’s be clear – that pain has nothing to do with the recent events in Afghanistan, which- while indeed tragic – was something we finally had to do. I’m with those who have acknowledged that there was never any easy way to rip this bandage off, but it needed to be done.
To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.
“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,”
Today’s tragic loss of our Marines and Afghans has not made me change my mind on the soundness of leaving this terrible spot on our planet. If anything, it reinforces why I was right some 8 years ago when I was arguing with the cheerleaders for these adventures, expressing exactly how pointless the whole thing was. I was terrified something like this would happen; I was hoping it would not, and we could get the evacuation completed and move on.
Unfortunately, the writing is already on the wall as to the field day of demagoguery that US politicians are going to have in the coming months:
The Republicans are going to barbecue the facts and fillet history to score points out of pure mendacity. The Democrats are going to have just enough ambivalence in their ranks that they won’t be able to respond in kind, and the elite political press will waver between I Told You So and Biden Doomed. The president, I hope, sticks to his guns, not simply because millions of Americans agree with what he’s doing, but also because of those people waiting out at the airport and the troops guarding them. Their courage demands a coherent plan of action, and not some ill-considered blathering from retired brass hats in the peanut gallery. Lord, we seriously need a new national-security establishment.
Of course, they will be wrong – as they always are, but it is impossible to tell them that.
At my work, I keep this picture above my desk for inspiration:
Recently I stumbled onto a letter written by Russell to Oswald Mosley ( he of British Nazi fame) before World War II. I think it is the only correct response to the “pro-war” line of thinking and, more broadly, the thinking of our failed MAGA citizenry on just about everything.
Come Monday; this is going up over my desk as well:
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
There will be no reasoning with these people, and I have to remind myself of that every day.