For Want of a War without End or Consequences

Mainstream rightwing smegma smears have been in an uproar about Biden’s ordered troop evacuation from Afghanistan since it began. Even figures of the false left have been bitching. Their impassioned denunciations usually begin by criticizing the poor planning of the withdrawal. Considering what a clusterfuck the withdrawal has been, all the Afghans that were killed along with some US troops, the fact that so many people are desperately scrambling to leave the country and are unable, and that our departure handed the country over to the Taliban along with billions in advanced weaponry, they’ve got a point.

But the commentators and politicians who most effusively decry the poor planning and execution, and who insult Biden for the twenty-year failure are rarely able to offer a better solution, what they would have done to avoid more chaos and horror. They’re happy to call Biden a moron, but are tight-lipped when it comes to their own brilliant ideas for leaving Afghanistan with all our people and property whole, and leaving a peaceful, Taliban-free country behind for the Afghan people to enjoy. Most of them, when they talk about how the withdrawal should have been done differently, really mean that they would not have withdrawn at all. Rightwing and Left, much of the political and pundit class would have had the US occupation prolonged indefinitely, either because of personal investment in the military industry, their jingoistic belief in US superiority and the right to enforce our will through violence anywhere in the world, or because this outcome was almost inevitable.

This was always, almost certainly, going to be a clusterfuck. Biden may be a conservative, bigoted, demented asshole, but he and his team knew that this outcome was a possibility. They may have been surprised at how quickly the worst case scenario came to pass, but they knew it could, and they followed through anyway. If any of the three assholes who preceded him in office had had the gonads to rip the bandaid off, they’d probably have been yoked with the same or a similarly horrible outcome as Biden has been. In that sense, it was actually a brave thing to do. As brave an action for a man whose decisions and the backlash they may bring are purely political can be. Knowing that leaving Afghanistan would be interpreted as weak by many, and would punctuate the war with a tacit admission of loss, and that it would all be used as political ammunition against him, Biden did it anyway, and that deserves some credit.

The war was always pointless and wrong and it was lost long ago. All that’s happened in recent weeks has been that the US president has finally (almost) admitted it. No respect or attention should be given to those who got us into the war and would have kept us embroiled in it forever. Most despicable are those who cheered us on the way to war, bitch about Biden finally ending it, and act as though they are personally blameless, that the US is blameless, and that we don’t owe the Afghan people anything.

Soulless bigots like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Stephen Miller have been whipping up xenophobic hysteria since before the withdrawal began. Though of course they were less vocal about the stupidity about a speedy US withdrawal from Afghanistan when it was Trump’s idea. If Turd were presiding over the current clusterfuck, they’d be defending it, likely praising it, but they would be digging their heels as deeply into their anti-brown-refugee stance as they are today. They’ve been using their bully pulpits to stoke fears about the people whose lives have been ruined and upended, insisting that they shouldn’t be allowed a home in any American neighborhood, that we owe them nothing but our contempt. It is because of people like them that hundreds of thousands of people died, and that those who lived through that horror have now had the rug pulled from under them. It’s because of people like them that there will be more wars, and that this will all happen again.

Scum like Carlson, Inghraham, and Miller should have to personally welcome Afghan refugees into their homes. All those who supported the war, decried its end, and fight against the right of refugees to seek sanctuary in the US should have their homes and fortunes expropriated and turned over for refugee housing and services. And the five weapons manufacturers who were paid trillions of dollars in the name of this scam war should be required to facilitate the process.