Is Satan breaking out his ice skates? He damn well ought to be, because David “Never Met a War I Didn’t Want Someone Else to Fight” Ignatius is—wait for it—admitting that he was—wait for it, goddamn it, wait for it!—wrong about U.S. intervention in Afghanistan!
The structure of the Kabul government has been rotting from within for all 20 years of the United States’ war. And every U.S. commander knew its weakness. They worried about the corruption and incompetence of the government, devised elaborate strategies to fix it, kept convincing themselves they were making progress. Hope is not a strategy, as every commander knows. In this case, it was.
Too often, the generals brought the media along with them in this exercise of self-delusion. Looking back over a dozen years of my own reporting from Afghanistan, that’s one painful recognition. These columns often expressed skepticism about the larger enterprise, but they kept recording, year after year, the generals’ ambitions for success. It wasn’t a big lie so much as a series of little bubbles of false optimism.
Okay, we can grant Davy a little bit of slack—I mean, “little bubbles of false optimism”, my ass! No, Davy, over the years you fed us quite a few whoppers, as I have recorded in some detail. Still, I’ll take my repentant hawks where I can find them. The more the merrier!
Speaking of repentant hawks, I have to give the palm to Jennifer Rubin, once so knee-jerk an interventionist that I swore off making fun of her—“Picking on Jennie gets boring, because she’s so predictable. My readers deserve new jokes, and Jennie’s such an old one!”
Well, as I say, that was then. Now Jennie’s hitting on all eight cylinders, as in her recent post Biden refused to fall for two decades of military dissembling demonstrates, though I’d me more than remiss in not remarking that for the most of those two decades, Jennie, along with Wash Post stalwarts David Ignatius, the late Charles Krauthammer, and, most of all, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt all furiously amplified all of that military dissembling as gospel. Of course, it would be too much to ask for to expect the debacle in Afghanistan to “destroy” the case for compulsive interventionism. After all, hope is not a strategy. But America’s intervention in Afghanistan—20 years’ effort vanishing in a matter of days—is painful for a lot of people to behold. Let’s hope that the Biden administration’s dismayingly unplanned exit doesn’t obliterate that moral.
