Posted on 12/16/2019 3:36:54 PM PST by rintintin
Now we know, thanks to The Afghanistan Papers published in The Washington Post this past week, that U.S. policymakers doubted almost from the start that the two-decade-long Afghanistan war could ever succeed. Officials didn’t know who the enemy was and had little sense of what an achievable “victory” might look like. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” said Douglas Lute, the Army three-star general who oversaw the conflict from the White House during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
And yet the war ground on, as if on autopilot. Obama inherited a conflict of which Bush had grown weary, and victory drew no closer after Obama’s troop “surge” than when Bush pursued a small-footprint conflict. But while the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 during the Vietnam War, led a generation to appreciate the perils of warmaking, a new generation may squander this opportunity to set things right. There is a reason the quagmire in Afghanistan, despite costing thousands of lives and $2 trillion, has failed to shock Americans into action: The United States for decades has made peace look unimaginable or unobtainable. We have normalized war.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Money. More conflict provides more political advertisement revenues for the media.
Dear fedgov,
you’re fired
President Eisenhower warned us of the Military industrial complex. It has grown into large charges for weapons, big banks, politicians amassing great wealth. Deep state is the current military industrial complex.
But the problem of no longer being willing to go to 'total war' goes back to just after WWII. Nation building is not our job, and we are not good at it outside of western culture.
The non-western cultures only understand brutal force and only respect strength.
Not to mention all the money that disappears and likely ends up in the coffers of corrupt politicians.
I guess I should have been a policy maker. I doubted it could succeed from day one and knew it was a bad idea. Little Georgy lead us down a bad path.
It was all a lie
We have always been at war with East Asia.
Eisenhower tried to warn us........
Obama said that Afghanistan was the good war, that we needed to be focused there and had no business in Iraq (even though Saddam had repeatedly broken the peace agreement of the first Gulf War).
We don’t have leaders...we have representatives ...
Because war consumes our alpha males while enriching the elite.
Washington Post used to run a bogus “Bush’s fault war dead” list. It included someone who died crossing a highway in the midwest.
When Obama became president they didn’t run a daily ‘body count’ list.
Is the Washington Post anti-war again?
Chris Matthews asks : Why are so many Democrats war hawks?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/chris-matthews-asks-gabbard-why-are-so-many-democrats-war-hawks
In no small part it’s because of propaganda organs like WaPo.
No one has ever tamed Afghanistan and no one ever will.
We should never have set one foot in the country.
Bounce the rubble for 30 days of B-52 raids and call it a day was all that was called for.
“To be fair, we didn’t fire the first shot on 9/11. We couldn’t just sit back and not respond.”
But Afghanistan had not attacked us. Saudis did. But the answer to the question is that war has become profitable.
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