MSBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell continues his excellent commentary on the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan after the fall of the corrupt U.S. puppet government to the Taliban. O’Donnell’s historical context to the withdrawal of the U.S. from the corrupt U.S. puppet government of South Vietnam in 1975 should be required viewing, an object lesson for every cable jockey, talking head, and pundit not old enough to have actually lived through the Vietnam War, the fall of Saigon and its aftermath. They simply do not know what the hell they are talking about.
Lawrence O’Donnell again dares to speak the truth that several of his own colleagues fail to acknowledge: all wars end in chaos, and the American military does not know how to lose a war and to plan for the ensuing chaos.
Well, as of tonight, and this could change because things could take a dramatic turn for the worst at any moment. But as of tonight, President Joe Biden is managing the most successful American military evacuation from a war that America lost. As of tonight, the Biden administration and the American military have managed to evacuate 7,000 people from Afghanistan after the capitol city of Kabul came under the control of the people who won the war.
In Vietnam in 1975 after Saigon, then the capital city of south Vietnam fell under the complete control of the north Vietnamese army, Republican President Gerald Ford was able to get absolutely no one out of Vietnam, no one. In those final days before the last American helicopter left Saigon, leaving thousands of our allies behind, the Ford administration and the American military were able to evacuate a total of 7,000 people.
The Biden-run evacuation is well on its way to evacuating many more people than the American military was able to evacuate from Vietnam in the final days. In Vietnam, the Americans were being driven out of the country at gunpoint. In Afghanistan so far, the Taliban have not fired a shot at the American military. In both desperate last-minute evacuations, the military did its very best.
The final days in both are filled with stories of American heroism, but they are also demonstrations of the American`s continuing ability to invade a country, spend 20 years losing a war, and then evacuate in a way that meets with the approval of an American news media filled with people who think they know how to do what the American military has never been able to do. What you`re not hearing in any of the critical analysis of how the Biden administration and the American military have handled the evacuation of Afghanistan is the example of who has done this sort of thing better.
No one is telling you that the Russians did a much better job of invading Afghanistan, losing the war there, and then evacuating. No one is holding up the Russian evacuation of Afghanistan as the model. No one is holding up the evacuation of any defeated army from a foreign country as the model. And of course no one is holding up the American evacuation of Vietnam as the model of how to do this because the American evacuation of Vietnam was much, much worse in every way, by every measure.
Every war produces a limitless flow of tragic individual stories. The end of every war produces a similar flow of tragic, individual stories.
But no individual story can tell you what your war policy should be or should have been. If this is your first experience with watching people left behind in war, then use it to decide whether you will support the next American war.
But if you use it as an example of something you know how to do better than the American military, then you are making the mistake of believing that the madness of war can be managed. The American military does not know how to manage the madness of war.
Catch-22 is a phrase that has entered our daily vocabulary to describe impossible situations. Sixty years ago, Joseph Heller put that phrase in our vocabulary through the title of his war novel “Catch-22,” which captures the clumsy and inefficient processes of the American military, which he experienced first hand serving in World War II. Armies are not efficient machines. Armies are not run like automobile affects when the CEO of Ford became the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. That organizational master, Robert McNamara was lost in that job, as lost in that job as any of the other secretaries of defense during the Vietnam War.
The American military is a massive bureaucracy that does some things well. But the thing that it does not know how to do is the same thing that no military in the world knows how to do, and that is organize a dignified and honorable retreat and full evacuation from a war that we lost in a foreign country without leaving anyone behind. When someone tells you that the evacuation from Afghanistan could have been run better, ask them why that has never happened before in history. Ask them why this should be the very first time in history that a desperate, last-minute military evacuation from a lost war should not be chaotic and messy.
President Biden is now being criticized for saying he knew it would be chaotic. President Biden was a United States senator when he watched the chaotic exit from Vietnam. Of course, he knew this was going to be chaotic. And of course he could not say that publicly before the chaos developed because such a statement by the president would have immediately created the chaos.
The American news media is very good at telling you the tragic individual stories of war, and it is very good at forgetting those stories. So far, in all the tragic stories being presented to us about people struggling to get out of Afghanistan, people who deserve our full sympathy and support, there is no story quite like the story of two friends who were left behind in Vietnam.
Gorgeous, gorgeous blue eyes. Long eyelashes of which I was very envious. That`s how Darwin Judge`s sister remembered him. Darwin Judge was a 19- year-old lance corporal in the Marine Corps from Marshalltown, Iowa, who spent less than two months in Vietnam before he was killed. He did not die alone.
His 21-year-old marine corporal buddy, Charlie McMahon, from a suburb of Boston, was right besides him when they were both killed in a rocket attack. That was Charlie McMahon`s 11th day in Vietnam. Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge became the answer to John Kerry`s family question in his Senate testimony as a Vietnam veteran against the war, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
It turns out, there were two men, Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, hit by the same rocket attack. They were in Vietnam to help manage the final desperate exit. They were there to protect the people trying to get on those final helicopters. They might have been on that final helicopter on April 30th, 1975, if they had lived just one more day.
The day after Charlie McMahon and Darwin judge were killed in action, the last American helicopter left Saigon and left their bodies behind, in a hospital in Saigon. It was a mistake. It was the kind of mistake the American military can make in a situation like that.
The American military did not just leave behind friendly interpreters in Vietnam, they did not just leave behind interpreters who helped reporters in Vietnam. They did not just leave behind friendly allies who helped the military and worked on American military bases. They also left behind hundreds of babies and children who were fathered by American soldiers over the 18 years of the American military involvement in Vietnam. And they left behind the last two men to die for the mistake of the Vietnam War. They left Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge behind.
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy went to work for his constituents, the McMahon family, and a year later he managed to secure the return of the bodies of Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge. Senator Kennedy never criticized President Ford for leaving them behind. Senator Kennedy never said he had a better idea about how to manage the evacuation of American troops and American allies from a war that we lost.
The Democrats did not attack Republican President Gerald Ford for how he handled the exit from a war lost by Democratic and Republican presidents. The governor of Georgia, who was an Annapolis graduate and a navy veteran, was running for president on the day that the last American helicopter left Vietnam, and he did not criticize how Republican President Gerald Ford managed that evacuation, because Jimmy Carter knew there was no good version of an evacuation from a lost war.
No one was surprised by the chaos and the dishonor of the American final exit from Vietnam. The world was not surprised. Every day of the Vietnam War was chaos, including the final day.
Just a year after the evacuation from Vietnam, at the Democratic National Convention in his acceptance speech for his presidential nomination, Jimmy Carter said this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIMMY CARTER, FORMER PRESIDENT: I`ve never had more faith in America than I do today. We have an America that involved Dylan`s phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O`DONNELL: In that speech, Jimmy Carter did not criticize Gerald`s management of the evacuation from Vietnam. None of the anti-war protesters that demand a withdrawal from Vietnam attacked his management of the final withdrawal from Vietnam. No one in the anti-war movement, including the Vietnam veterans, believed that they had a better idea about how to evacuate a lost war or that the American military was capable of doing a better job of evacuating from a war that they lost.
The lesson of the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan, including the last days of those wars is not that we have to teach West Point classes of future generals how to safely and honorably evacuate from our lost wars without leaving anyone behind. The lesson for a country that has not won a war since 1945 is, stop launching wars of dubious legality and unclear moral purpose that we do not know how to win.
The people who own the American exit from the Afghanistan war are the people who advocated launching that war and, more importantly, the people who never learned, the people who never stopped advocating for continuing that war.
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Mr. AZ BlueMeanie you work a lot, thank you.
I think we did learn something from Bush’s/OBama’s/T4ump’s Afghanistan war.
We learned to invest in defense industry stocks, because those people have no morals and money likes that.
CNN and MSNBC are bending over backwards to trash Biden so Fox doesn’t call them partisan, but they know it’s BS.
Wagging the dog.
Meanwhile, climate change is causing loss of life, homes, and jobs from fires and floods and the numbers for COVID are going the wrong way fast, misinformation about the pandemic is becoming the leading cause of death in America, the right to choose is in the most danger since Roe, Republican governors are endangering their people, and oh, I don’t know, there’s a few million shelter dogs that need homes.
I really thought things would chill after the reality TV game show host left town, but it’s gotten weirder.
Pro Publica reports “What the US Didn’t Learn in Afghanistan, According to the Government’s Own Inspector General”, https://www.propublica.org/article/what-the-us-didnt-learn-in-afghanistan-according-to-the-governments-own-inspector-general#1105926
John Sopko, the special inspector general since 2012, has long chronicled the government’s miscalculations. In his latest lacerating assessment, he concluded that “the U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.” The U.S. effort was clumsy and ignorant, the report says, calling out the hubris of a superpower thinking it could reshape a country it didn’t understand by tossing gobs of money around.
The new report is a sweeping look back over America’s two decades in Afghanistan, which left 2,443 U.S. servicemembers and more than 114,000 Afghans dead. The watchdog agency has, for 13 years, consistently and accurately pointed out consequential flaws of the many reconstruction programs at play.
UPDATE: Aaron Rupar explains, “Cable news is dominated by the same Afghanistan hawks who created this situation”, https://www.vox.com/2021/8/19/22629559/afghanistan-hawks-fox-news-biden-blame
Four presidential administrations share, in varying degrees, the blame for the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan — a development that brought the United States’ 20-year war in the country to an ignominious conclusion.
But watch cable news and you’d think some of the retired officials who helped orchestrate and continue the war had learned nothing.
Fox News watchers particularly have been inundated with the message this week that it’s all President Joe Biden’s fault — a message coming from veterans of the George W. Bush administration.
[B]ut Fox News hasn’t been alone in giving people a platform to opine on US failures in Afghanistan who could benefit from some introspection. A similar dynamic played out on MSNBC[.]
[P]rint articles about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan also privileged the voices of those with an interest in seeing US troops stay.
[W]hile it’s true that 20 years of US troop presence in Afghanistan did prevent the country from becoming a haven for those planning attacks on the US homeland and did result in significant gains for Afghan women, the rapid collapse of the US-backed government suggests those gains weren’t sustainable without the indefinite presence of US troops in the country. But instead of acknowledging that perspective, the discussion of Afghanistan on cable news this week has been chock full of ex-officials looking to justify the minority view that troops should stay longer.
[I]f anybody should think carefully about joining conversations about who is to blame for the current awful situation in Afghanistan, it should be alums of the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations.
Bush, of course, not only made the decision to invade Afghanistan in 2001 but failed to capture or take out bin Laden. And Trump struck a deal with the Taliban last year that put them in a position to rapidly take over the country as soon as US troops began to leave.
And that’s why Fox News’s decision to platform the likes of Thiessen and Perino during its Afghanistan discussions is so egregious. Both worked in the Bush administration, as a speechwriter [Thiessen was Bush’s Minister of War Propaganda] and press secretary, respectively. So they have self-interested reasons for playing the blame game, even while their own failures when it came to Afghanistan aren’t acknowledged.
Fox News has been by far the worst offender in this regard. Pundits brought on Fox this week to bash Biden for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan also included Karl Rove, a top aide to George W. Bush; Mike Pompeo, who as secretary of state during the Trump administration oversaw the [surrender] deal with the Taliban that put them in a position to quickly overrun Afghan forces as US troops withdraw; and Kayleigh McEnany, a former Trump press secretary.
What’s more, Thiessen, Perino, Pompeo, Rove, and McEnany are all currently paid by Fox News, with Perino and McEnany working as hosts and the other three joining various programs as paid contributors. Another contributor, Lara Trump, daughter-in-law to former President Trump, also went on Fox News on Monday to attack Biden.
[P]rominent voices among the relatively small minority favoring keeping troops there are the ones being amplified by elite media. There’s a role for military and government sources to comment on situations like these. But the American failure in Afghanistan should lead to some rethinking about which voices dominate the conversation — and so far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
UPDATE: Paul Waldman explains “Why the debate on Afghanistan is so distorted”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/20/why-debate-afghanistan-is-so-distorted/
As we have watched the rapid dissolution of the Afghan government, the takeover of the country by the Taliban and the desperate effort of so many Afghans to flee, the U.S. media have asked themselves a question: What do the people who were wrong about Afghanistan all along have to say about all this?
That’s not literally what TV bookers and journalists have said, of course. But if you’ve been watching the debate, it almost seems that way.
The number of Afghanistan/Iraq hawks — the ones who brought us those twin disasters in the first place — who have been called on by major media organizations to offer their sage assessment of the current situation is truly remarkable.
Whether it’s retired generals who now earn money in the weapons industry, former officials from the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations who in many cases are directly responsible for the mistakes of the past two decades, or war enthusiast pundits with an unblemished record of wrongness, we’re now hearing from the same people who two decades ago told us how great these wars would be, then spent years telling us victory was right around the corner, and are now explaining how somebody else is to blame for Afghanistan.
[T]his isn’t something new. In fact, it has characterized the debate over the entirety of this period.
Back in the early 2000s, the term “Very Serious People” was coined to refer to those who were wrong about Iraq but nevertheless were treated with great deference and respect because they were mouthing conventional wisdom and taking a position that the media and the broader Washington culture treated as hardheaded and rational.
In contrast, the people who were right about Iraq — who said there was no real evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, or was about to attack the United States — were treated as silly, unserious and not worth listening to.
Then as now, the supposedly unserious people continued to be sidelined and ignored even after events proved them right.
Reminder: “[N]o one was prosecuted for the torture policy of the Bush administration, and no one was punished for the Iraq debacle. Instead, those most responsible for America’s worst moral and practical foreign policy failures are treated as though they are the possessors of great wisdom and insight to which we all should attend.”