This not talking shit is hard! Yesterday, I couldn’t/wouldn’t keep silent about some year-old bullshit from David Ignatius. Well, today it’s the National Review’s Rich Lowry, opining about General Trump’s plans to reignite the war in Afghanistan:
“At the end of the day, this is Trump concluding that he doesn’t want to lose a war on his watch, and if that means jettisoning some of his presuppositions, he’s willing to do it. If only President Obama had handled the question of whether or not to pull out of Iraq the same way.”
What really set me off was Rich’s two-for-one hypocrisies in this vicious little paragraph. The National Review is often known around town as the “Home of the Chest Thumpers”, so it’s not surprising that Rich takes it for granted that losing a war is the worst thing that can happen. Surprisingly enough, though, it isn’t. Great Britain benefited from losing the American colonies, trading profitably with us rather than spending millions of pounds on an occupation army and creating a continent of malcontents, an “Ireland across the sea,” as it were.
Skipping ahead several centuries, France benefited from losing both their Vietnam War and the War in Algeria. Shockingly enough, the U.S. benefited from losing our Vietnam War as well. “Winning” would have cost us tens of billions of dollars to prop up clumsy, corrupt, pro-American governments. Instead, the Soviet Union spent hundreds of billions of rubles propping up the People’s Republic of Vietnam’s staggeringly oppressive and inefficient regime. According to Serhii Plokhy, in his study of Soviet decline The Last Empire, subsidizing a united, “peaceful” Vietnam cost the Soviets 40 billion rubles a year and was an appreciable factor in the overall collapse of communism.
Of course, that’s only one hypocrisy. The other is Rich’s sly, snide dig at President Obama for “losing” the war in Iraq. Sorry, Rich, you fucking asshole.1 George Bush lost the war in Iraq, not Barack Obama. It was George Bush who signed the agreement—signed it because he had to—requiring the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Georgie was smart enough to postpone the withdrawal until after his “watch”, but it was his name on the dotted line. But, in a larger sense, Georgie lost the war the moment he began it, because he stupidly, willfully, and wishfully believed, along with his myriad of co-conspirators/enablers, including one Rich fucking Lowry, that “freeing” Iraq would automatically turn the country into a docile and obedient ally/servant of the U.S., an idea that proved to be news, and unwelcome news at that, to the Iraqis themselves. It was George Bush, in his vanity and his ignorance and deceit, who started an entirely unnecessary war that could only end in defeat, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, a war that continues to make life worse for millions of Middle Eastern Muslims, who surprisingly enough are likely to think even worse of America than before.
Afterwords
Hopefully, no one will say something so egregiously stupid/malignant in the next ten days (except for Donald Trump).
Bonus Link
At the American Conservative, Daniel Larison identifies most of the most egregious flaws in Trump’s “thinking” re Afghanistan.2
