Charlotte, NC — As scenes of chaos in Afghanistan have emerged, the musical chairs blame game goes strong as the same talking heads and political hacks who are all responsible for the mess point the finger at someone else.
Instead of listening to them, maybe it’s time to hear from the troops Americans love to virtue signal that they support.
Take Dan McKnight, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and founder of BringOurTroopsHome. US. He certainly takes issues with Joe Biden’s blunders with the withdrawal and stupid statements, but ultimately this withdrawal was necessary.
“The reality is that we’re getting out just in the nick of time and if we were still engaged, you’d hear Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol saying that we need 50,000 more men deployed to fight their civil war,” McKnight said. “But instead, we’re leaving. We’re going to evacuate our diplomatic personnel out of harm’s way, and we’re going to bring our troops home from this seemingly endless and unnecessary and mad war that’s got nothing to do with us. God speed to the people of Afghanistan in their time of crises, but it’s not America’s crises and it’s not our responsibility to fix the world. It’s about time that we put America first.”
This is a debacle two decades in the making, and McKnight said “this is what comes from 20 years of lies.” Yes, Biden is a part of the problem, but so is the whole lot of the prevaricators from left to right who are now pointing the finger to someone else. It’s the politicians, the bureaucrats, military brass and the media propagandists who have done nothing but lie, lie, lie. And the Afghanistan Papers, released in 2019, showed that they knew they were lying all along. They’re all liars, as pointed out by journalist Glenn Greenwald.
“For 20 years America built a Potemkin village and called it Afghanistan,” wrote Daniel McCarthy. “Now this cardboard democracy has been trampled down in a matter of days by the Taliban. The speed and comprehensiveness of the rout cannot be explained by Joe Biden’s blunders. The war has drawn to a humiliating end not because of a weak president’s missteps in the final weeks but because the entire project was misconceived. Afghanistan was not ready for democracy and trillions of dollars in American aid could not even begin to change that fact.”
The Afghanistan War cost us, the taxpayers, over $2 trillion and thousands of Americans shedding their blood. And that price tag does not included interest payments on what was borrowed for the war in a nation already massively in debt.
And what did we gain from this adventurism? Just more debt and more chaos. The Taliban, vastly outnumbered and outspent by the U.S. funded and trained Afghan National Security Defense Forces, is taking back control with relative ease.
This was all warned and avoidable, but nobody listened to the few with principles, like former Congressman from Texas Ron Paul who wrote: “The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the ‘experts’ doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?”
Paul added: “The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.”
In 2011, Paul said on the floor of the House of Representatives that “if we don’t get out now, we’ll be there for another ten years.” As his son, Sen. Rand Paul, notes: “What’s clear today is that no one with the last name Cheney should even be speaking publicly right now. This origin of this debacle lies at their feet. What’s even clearer, is that unfortunately the warnings of a Republican congressman from Texas years ago now feel more prescient than ever.”
The people to blame are from what President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about, the military-industrial complex. Yes, Biden is included but so is every president since George W. Bush concerning Afghanistan as well as the Congress which refuses to do its job to declare war. War is the health of the state and a racket, as Major General Smedley Butler put it in 1933.
Our founding fathers warned us of just what we have now as they gave authority to declaring war to the Congress in the War Powers Act of the Constitution. War was always meant to be a defensive tool. We have no business being the policemen of the world. We have no right to try and democratize the world. And when we try to do that, we fail. If Congress had done its job, we could have demolished the terrorists and came home in less than a year and declared victory.
And while it was right to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan, Biden has already pledged fealty to perpetual war. Did you know, Biden’s administration is waging war on Somalia as we speak? And Afghanistan, he’s continuing that war as well. He’s waging a drone war, a favorite of his former boss Barack Obama.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”—James Madison, Political Observations, 1795.
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