The Neocon Washington Post has a sad over ending the Afghanistan war

Charles Pierce at Esquire today blasts one of his favorite targets, “Fred Hiatt’s Hiring Hall For Unemployables” aka The Washington Post (or as I call its opinion page, “wingnut welfare”).

The Washington Post employs a stable of Neocon war mongers who have never met a war they did not like (and I would include Bob “there’s an insider account book deal in this for me” Woodward in this group). No single media outlet and its employees is more responsible for “catapulting the propaganda,” as George W. Bush once observed, to sell the unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq to Americans based upon falsified intelligence and flat out lies to the American people. The Washington Post Admits Underplaying Stories Critical of White House Push for Iraq War.

The Washington Post has never apologized for its propaganda, and remains unchastened and unbowed. It continues to publish Neocon propaganda for American intervention and occupation of countries around the world in pursuit of the Neocon vision of American exceptionalism and a Pax Americana Empire to rival that of the British Empire in the 19th Century.

The Washington Post and its stable of Neocon war mongers are having a sad today after President Obama announced his plans for winding down America’s longest war in Afghanistan yesterday, and detailing America’s foreign policy going forward today at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Charles Pierce let’s the Post have it today in Fred Hiatt’s War:

[I] had a look this morning at the commentary unleashed on the topic of the president’s announcement that the U.S. (largely) would be disengaging from combat in Afghanistan that appears today on the editorial page of The Washington Post, which is the professional haunt of Fred Hiatt, a perpetual embarrassment to the craft, who never has met a war he couldn’t monger, someone else’s child that he wouldn’t ship into a kill zone, or an apologist for war crimes to whom he wouldn’t cut a check.

Before beginning, we should keep a few numbers in mind: 2232 Americans killed, 20,000 local civilians killed, $10.1 million dollars an hour. Those are the highlights of the butcher’s bill paid by the United States since it launched the war on Afghanistan in 2001. Keep those numbers in mind when you read things like this.

The Afghan decision would be understandable had Mr. Obama’s previous choices proved out. But what’s remarkable is that the results also have been consistent – consistently bad. Iraq has slid into something close to civil war, with al-Qaeda retaking territory that U.S. Marines once died to liberate. In Syria, al-Qaeda has carved out safe zones that senior U.S. officials warn will be used as staging grounds for attacks against Europe and the United States. Libya is falling apart, with Islamists, secularists, military and other factions battling for control.

Here we must note that there were people predicting that precisely what would happen in Iraq, and they were laughed into submission by a lot of the same geopolitical fantasts and think-tank cowboys who populate Fred Hiatt’s BlackBerry, not all of whom are named Kagan. As to the other places, exactly how much blood and treasure does Hiatt think we should spend to transform Syria, or stabilize Libya? More than 2232 lives? More than 20,000 civilians? More than $10 million an hour? Alas, he’s not saying.

We hope Afghanistan can avoid that fate. But the last time the United States cut and ran from there, after the Soviet Union withdrew, the result was the Taliban takeover, al-Qaeda’s safe havens and, eventually, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which everyone said, well, we won’t make that mistake again.

The Soviet Union withdrew because, with our help, the various warlords, opportunists, and fanatics in Afghanistan bled it dry. (On which side was it that Osama bin Laden journeyed to Afghanistan to fight? I seem to have forgotten.) That was the entire point of our involvement, to create for the Soviet Union its own Vietnam. That task was accomplished splendidly. Is Hiatt arguing here that, in 2014, we somehow should share the experience in perpetuity that we ourselves deliberately created for the Soviet Union? Alas, he’s not saying.

For years the United States promised to be a partner to a democratic Afghanistan, to help ensure that girls can keep going to school and to lock in the gains that have been won at such a high price by U.S. and other NATO troops. Mr. Obama’s implicit message Tuesday was: “Not so much.” If al-Qaeda can wait out the United States, it may get another chance. If Afghans have thrown their lot in with the Americans, they will be left on their own.

There is no “democratic Afghanistan.” There is a deeply corrupt central government. There are the Taliban and its allies. And there is an unruly gang of local warlords whom we have bought off or otherwise bribed to stay on our side. It has been 13 years. If, after 2232 dead and at a cost of $10 million an hour, there still is no “democratic Afghanistan” to be found, whose fault is that? What are the magic numbers? Thirty years? Four thousand dead? Fifty thousand civilians? Fifty million an hour? What is the size of the butcher’s bill that would force Fred Hiatt to abandon his imperial delusions and admit that, well, hell, we did our damndest? Alas, he’s not saying.

Why commit to the zero option now? An administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition that he not be named, said it’s “necessary for planning purposes . . . for everybody to have predictability.” Given the small number of troops involved, that’s not persuasive. It may be, a year from now, that reducing the troops by half or even withdrawing them all seems a wise and prudent option. But why not examine conditions then and make a decision based on facts? Instead, an administration that faulted its predecessor for being ideological seems to have substituted ideology for reality-based foreign policy.

What is unrealistic in deciding that 2232 lives, 20.000 civilians, and $10 million an hour for 13 years is enough? What is ideological in shaping policy to reflect those numbers? It is telling that Hiatt launched this editorial at a time in which the country is learning that officials in its underfunded and overwhelmed Department of Veterans Affairs may have committed criminal acts in an attempt to cope with the massive influx of wounded and broken soldiers from America’s two most recent wars, for which Fred Hiatt and many of his dinner companions continue to wave pom-poms from a safe distance. This is the wreckage they have brought upon this country, from a safe distance. How much more damage should the country be willing to sustain so as to promote Fred Hiatt’s neoconservative Wolkenkuckkucksheim? How many more traumatic brain injuries will it take? Alas, he’s not saying.

“Ending wars.” “Nation-building at home.” The “pivot to Asia.” These are popular and attractive slogans, and they make a lot of sense in the abstract. But they don’t necessarily bring peace to a dangerous world, and a president can’t always safely choose which dangers he would rather confront.

For Fred Hiatt, after 2232 American dead, and 20,000 civilian casualties, and $10 million an hour for 13 years, “ending wars” is a slogan, but ratcheting up the body count and the balance sheet in defense of an armed banality like “bringing peace to a dangerous world” is profound realpolitik. For Fred Hiatt, rebuilding this country is an abstraction, but turning Afghanistan into Vermont is firmly grounded in reality. Fred Hiatt is the quiet little monster that subverts the heart of the American spirit.

What the president did yesterday was to accept the reality that the people of this country have had enough of Afghanistan. Let us be honest. After the atrocities of September 11, 2001, any American president who didn’t attack the country that had given the terrorists their safe haven would have been run out of office on a rail. So it matters a great deal that now, 13 years, 2232 American dead, 20,000 civilians dead, and $10 million an hour later, a majority of Americans think that having launched the war in Afghanistan at all was a mistake. In a country in which 10 percent of its people are unemployed, and in which the basic infrastructure is crumbling almost by the hour, a country that is spectacularly ill-equipped even to admit to the existence of the actual national security threat that is climate change, let alone make actual plans to confront it, there is a deep and wholly righteous exhaustion with the attempts of Fred Hiatt and his cocktail-hour pals to turn the United States into an imperial power just because they look at themselves in the mirror and see Churchill, or, perhaps, Caesar Augustus. In 1821, John Quincy Adams famously cautioned that America…

….goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….

Implicit in that warning is the inescapable truth that those who encourage America to make war so as to tame the “monsters abroad” must be responsible for counting the cost, which is why it is important to ask Fred Hiatt this morning why 2232 American dead, 20,000 civilian dead, and $10 million an hour for 13 years isn’t, finally, enough. What more must his country sacrifice so that he will feel safe? How many more of his fellow citizens must be killed or be broken so that he can thump his chest and play counselor to the tiny emperors who have asked so much and given so little? How much blood must pool around his feet before he realizes that his country is bleeding?

Alas, he is not saying.

The infuriating part is that our sad small town newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, subscribes to the Washington Post’s syndicated columnists propagandists and will publish their Neocon sturm and drang against the Obama administration doing exactly what the American people elected Obama to do — end the wars. Since the Star rarely has an editorial opinion of its own, it is fair to suggest that it endorses the editorials and opinions that it publishes as its own (there is never any disclaimer). Silence is acquiescence.

The Star would better serve its readers by publishing the Charles Pierce post above than the lunatic ravings of Charles Krauthammer et al.