August 2021 Archives

Dear America,

Now that all American forces have left Afghanistan, we are at peace as a nation, at least in the formal sense.  It is time for our government, and for that matter our historian establishment to harvest the lessons of the last seventy years so as to avoid the catastrophic errors we have made as a function of the conceit that we know what is best for the world.

The first thing to reconsider is the overarching notion of "American exceptionalism."  Ironically, coining the phrase is usually attributed to Joseph Stalin as a function of a schism between Russian communism and the brand of communism that existed here in the United States at that time in 1929, the American branch of the doctrine claiming that American communism was an exception to some of Marx's original doctrine.  It was a term intended to derogate the subscribers to that notion as well as the notion itself, at least as it applied to the claims of Americans that they could not be constrained by strict adherence to dogma.  It was not a complimentary phrase then, and to most of the rest of the world, it is just as uncomplimentary in the context of the past seventy years of American history as it was in 1929 when Stalin first used it.

Second, we should consider the results our philosophical imperialism has achieved.  Starting with Korea, we have habitually traveled to the other side of the world to find morasses in which to involve ourselves, which might be excusable but for this: what we leave behind is always a festering mess.  Korea cost us billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, not to mention the Korean lives lost, all in the name of interdicting communism's proliferation.  What we left behind was an institutionalization of China's commitment to communist expansionism in the form of a new nation, North Korea.  True, South Korea remained a capitalist bulwark on the Korean peninsula, but North Korea is and will continue to be a communist nation itself intent on expansion, continually menacing South Korea and thus requiring the uninterrupted presence of American troops as a putatively neutral insurer of the endurance of the "demilitarized zone" between the two countries.  Thereafter came Vietnam, which is where impoverished people now make much of our clothing after repelling the American effort to prevent a second "domino" from falling, this time in southeast Asia.  And then of course came the pursuit of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and shortly thereafter overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  Now here we are twenty years after the inception of our latest Asian adventures with a result similar to all of its predecessors: institutionalization of what we went to extinguish in the first place: a perpetual conflict between Sunni and Shiite Islam with rabid fundamentalism being the character of the latter. Afghanistan has reverted to Taliban control, which is where it all started in that country, and Iraq is seemingly ineluctably gravitating toward orbit around Iran with no Saddam Hussein, corrupt and brutal as he was, to prevent it.

The ultimate observation that seems to me to be inescapable is that whenever we go to proselytize for our political ethos we wind up insuring that what we went to oppose will prevail.  How and why that happens...the actual mechanism that leads to the failure of American exceptionalism abroad...is not clear, and may not be unitary.  I suppose that in each of these cases, history may reveal mistakes specific to each of the particular campaigns we waged rather than an overarching hubris that galvanizes our oppositions.  And analysis by those who claim expertise in such things might reveal a remedy for our tendency to make those mistakes such as to enable us to persist in our superiority beliefs and succeed when we go out into the world to have our way with it, but I doubt it.

What I think historical analysis will yield is the wisdom to perfect Americanism, not American exceptionalism.  I believe that the perspective of time, if we can swear off interventions abroad when we see something we don't like, will inform us that we should first clean our own house before we presume to clean others'.  In time, America may become the beacon of human virtue that others will themselves seek to emulate, and that will result in an America at peace with itself; an America at peace with the world, with "liberty and justice for all."

Our version of capitalism is as dogmatically flawed as Stalin perceived American communism to be in 1929.  We have allowed greed, prejudice and feigned rectitude to pollute the doctrine so as to allow acquisitiveness beyond conscience or even any practical justification with regard to the common weal.  During this period of "pax Americana," we should use the time to closely examine where we have been, and more importantly, decide where we want to go.

Your friend,

Mike  

Dear America,

As usual, the Republican crocodile tears are flowing in torrents.  Republicans, conservatives especially, are castigating the Biden administration over how the evacuation from Afghanistan is being executed, albeit not without good reason, without ever mentioning how we got into our misbegotten war there.  They seem to have forgotten that the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) that led to our invasion of Afghanistan in the first place was passed ostensibly for the sole purpose of apprehending those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, specifically Osama bin Ladin who was then believed to be hiding out in the caves at Tora Bora.  The resolution hit the floor just three days after the attacks, and despite some moderate expressions of reservation it was passed less than a week later, almost unanimously, thanks in part to the jingoism and putative patriotism of the likes of Ann Coulter, who if my memory serves, blathered that any Democrat who voted against it should be prosecuted (I believe she actually said shot) as a traitor.   Our Republican president, enjoying a majority in both houses of congress that gave the AUMF bill juggernaut momentum, had no problem getting it passed.  He signed it immediately and only a matter of a couple of months later initiated the invasion of Afghanistan for the explicit and solitary purpose allowed by the law: apprehension of those responsible in any way for the 9/11 attacks.  That mission, which had palpably failed within months of its inception because bin Ladin was nowhere to be found and al-Qaeda was so dispersed as to be impossible to assail with anything approaching precision, morphed into the war against the Taliban intended to reform the nation into what the United States thought it should be.

Now, after twenty years of what quickly became nothing more than a military adventure in the name of "American Exceptionalism," we are faced with the daunting task of removing the dross left behind from that witch's brew of imperialism and chauvinism, and it is going badly.  Americans who are in Afghanistan for dubious reasons are complaining that they are in jeopardy and can't reach the sanctuary of Kabul airport, conveniently ignoring the fact that they've had close to a year since Trump agreed with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. troops by May 1, 2021, to get themselves out of harm's way.  And our diplomatic apparatus, egregiously pared down in terms of personnel under the Trump administration with the complicity of Republicans in congress, is unable to handle the crush of applications from Afghanis who have a legitimate fear of retaliation from the Taliban in consequence of the aid and comfort they gave our forces during the war.  Meanwhile, the Republicans offer no constructive suggestions, preferring to take political coup ala Donald Trump.  There is no refuting that the situation in Afghanistan is a deplorable mess, but it is time that someone pulled the Republicans up short and forced them to take some responsibility for the fact that we find ourselves mired down in a third world country in which we have no business being in the first place...largely thanks to them.  And they still seem to be arguing that we shouldn't leave the country in the first place, clinging to the delusion that only we know what's best for Afghanistan.  The fact is that foreigners have been trying to subdue Afghanistan for a couple of thousand years and while some have succeeded for a century or so, no one has succeeded long-term.  And most who have adventured there have paid mightily for their miscalculations as to how feasible it would be to create their own dominion over what seems to be not much more than a human primordial soup.  Just ask the Russians.

So, here we are, having obdurately refused to learn the lessons of a couple of millennia of woe and decimation suffered by those who would do what we attempted to do.  We find ourselves engaged in an ungainly effort to extricate ourselves from what was a fool's errand from the start, having spent twenty years, countless billions of dollars that could have fed people instead of killing them, and burying over four thousand young Americans not to mention countless thousands of Afghans.  And the Republicans, instead of taking the lesson from the enterprise, try to make political hay out of it.  Their constituents might want to ask themselves why before they cast votes for them in the future, but what else is new.

Your friend,

Mike