I am sure that people will make more political hay than is warranted out of the administration’s decision to extend authorization for carrying out combat operations in Afghanistan. The new orders really do little more than clarify what requirements need to be met before U.S. forces engage in combat, and the rules are pretty much what you would expect. They can still go after terrorist organizations; they can protect themselves, and they can come to the assistance of Afghan forces in need. Only the last condition has the real potential to keep our troops bogged down indefinitely, and the troop levels are still coming down to a low level.
So, even though I have been calling on us to take our troops out of Afghanistan for years and years now, I am not particularly troubled by the new rules of engagement.
What continues to bother me is something else. I keep comparing the cavalier attitude we had about making the commitment to go into Afghanistan with the agonizingly hard time we are having extracting ourselves from that country. I know that 9/11 was a hell of a provocation and that it made us scared and crazy, but we did not rise to the occasion. We made a momentous decision without any thought and we just keep paying and paying and paying for it.
What I’d really like is for us to all to internalize this mismatch between the ease of the decision and the difficulty of the consequences. Then, the next time we’re similarly provoked, maybe we’ll have a tool to keep us from repeating the same mistake.
Yeah, I know. It will never happen.
Are there US interests for whom those things weren’t ‘mistakes?’
In b4 ‘Bet on it.’
We didn’t decide to go in without any thought. We had a clear plan, momentum and the power and will to do it.
Then the traitorous war criminals who were running the country decided to focus back on the war they wanted, instead of the one we had thrust upon is.
Starting with the catastrophic stupidity of Tora Bora WE “lost” Afghanistan because those traitors in the White House wanted to have their war in Iraq, because they wanted “our” oil under “their” sand.
We had a clear plan, momentum and the power and will to do it.
Actually, no to the first. Probably you’ve forgotten that Dumsfeld and Cheney preferred the outsourcing model of war, so dropped some bombs and troops then relied on bribed warlords the Pentagon propaganda department anointed as the “Northern Alliance” to do the rest. Cheney/Dumsfeld did not want to allocate the half million troops the Pentagon wanted because they were saving them for Iraq, so figured they could do an occupation on the cheap through bribes and the “free market”.
There actually was a real plan for full invasion and occupation of Afghanistan delivered to Bush’s desk on September 10 (no I am not making this up – look it up – it was explained as just a “provisional” plan based on Taliban activities earlier that year) but ignored it to follow the outsource model.
In other words, as with everything else they did, it was a clusterfuck from day 1.
Do you have a link to the “war plan”? I’m drunk, so…
My recollection was that there was no viable plan that was actionable before winter set in, besides SFO and air attacks.
Air attacks on SFO? You ARE drunk. That said…I am sure Cheney would have approved.
Have to disagree with you on the anthrax attacks. There were five deaths and 17 reported non-fatal infections. (Don’t know if the number of infections include those at the Senate office building which may not have been disclosed.) I and many others doubt that the deceased Bruce Ivins was the culprit. wrt Bob Stevens — not likely that he was specifically targeted, but the National Enquirer was.
As an aside, it may interest you to know that the USPS has dismantled all its (very expensive) bio-detection equipment, although the prohibition on using compressed air for cleaning continues.
“…it was a clusterfuck from day
1.minus 233“FIFY.
9/11 was a hell of a provocation. I was deeply mistrustful of the administration when the US invaded Afghanistan, but I was also convinced that the Taliban was harboring bin Laden, who had claimed responsibility, which was basically a declaration of war. I’m not sure what other response would have been suitable for an attack resulting in 3,000 dead in the most populous city of a country, but I don’t think you can have a reasonable debate the the W administration handled the invasion poorly, and then doomed it to failure by truly cavalierly redirecting resources to the stupid and disastrous invasion of Iraq. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around how in the days following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld advocated invading Iraq instead because “there are no good targets in Afghanistan”. So the W administration decided, “well, why not just invade both?”.
This goes along with your previous post about fairness and balance. The worthless, attention deficit media can’t remember what happened yesterday let alone what happened a decade ago. And they see no problem with sensationalizing something today and then ignoring or burying the fact that yesterday’s sensational story was based on lies. So many people who clearly lied us into war are still treated with respect outside of Fox “News”. And Don Lemon…how does that MF still have a job?
Bill Cosby, the Westminster pedophile ring, the UVA culture of rape… today is one of the days that the magnitude of the failure and evilness of our elites hits me full in the face. I may need to unplug for awhile; it’s all just so awful.
but I was also convinced that the Taliban was harboring bin Laden, who had claimed responsibility, which was basically a declaration of war
Actually he hadn’t.
Sometime if I retire early I’d like to go back to news reports from 9/12 through December 2001 and remind people of what the fuck was going on at the time. I am sure it would shock most people, as most people have completely forgotten those details even if they lived through them.
First, Afghanistan’s nominal government, the Taliban, made offers to turn bin Laden over to a neutral third party for trial upon presentation of evidence of his probable guilt. These were of course ignored. Technically this was a normal response for an extradition request but of course the US was in no mood for such trivialities.
Second, bin Laden had zero official statement. NONE. There was an unsourced report from the end of September that claimed he said to a reporter in nearby Pakistan that he had nothing to do with it.
Third, the term “Al Qaeda” was never used by bin Laden prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Weird, huh? Turns out it was a term the CIA used to describe the loosely-knit organization he headed, as distinct from the small mercenary groups he’d been training in Afghanistan. However, the term became so well known due to publicity that it was readily adopted in bin Laden’s subsequent audio and video tapes.
Fourth, there was actually significant amount of doubt about whether Afghanistan was involved, to the point where Colin Powell promised to present evidence publicly, then withdrew that promise.
Fifth, just about everyone, including most lefties, now tend to use Taliban, Al Qaeda, and bin Laden as terms with little distinction from each other. At the time, however, the Taliban was providing safe harbor to bin Laden’s group due to common outlook but the two were distinct in terms of funding, operation, control, and objectives. And as noted above bin Laden’s local mercenary groups were distinct from the various disperse operations that he funded to one degree or another abroad. Subsequent to the US occupation the term “Al Qaeda” came to apply to any group who sympathized, including a group in Spain that did some bombings but whom almost certainly had zero relationship to the other groups except in spirit (although a bin Laden tape did claim allegiance).
The first evidence that bin Laden was behind 9/11 came from a video tape recovered by US soldiers that showed bin Laden talking to an ally and claiming responsibility. Later a number of bin Laden audio and then video tapes were released with various references to 9/11. Some people doubted whether bin Laden actually recorded these tapes himself, in part due to the fortuitous timing of many of them (usually helping Bush’s ratings, and the key one the weekend before the 2004 election) and in part due to the fact that the technology to fake such tapes has long been owned by the Pentagon:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm
Finally, in the midst of all the news stories of that time was a separate thread of scare stores involving anthrax. The general assumption at the time was that this was another bin Laden attack, but years later it was determined that this was sourced from US military contractors and the person deemed probably responsible to already have died. These attacks were mailed to various news people (all networks but Fox) and Democratic Congressional leaders, but the only person who actually died from them was the first letter, to the National Enquirer photo editor who had published the controversial photos of Bush’s daughters being falling down drunk.
There’s kind of a distinction without a difference at play here, even if everything you say is true.
Bin Laden and his organization were behind 9/11 (I seem to recall something at the time talking about him predicting it before it happened. Plus it was coordinated with the hit on Massoud.)
Bin Laden was behind 9/11. If the conclusion in September and October was based on circumstantial evidence, it was still right. And Bin Laden wasn’t a heroin smuggler looking for favorable extradition rights.
Afghanistan was the right war on the wrong country with the wrong plan and the wrong leaders. I don’t know if Afghanistan would have ever been anything but a shitstorm, but it was never given a chance to be anything but that when it was short shrifted for Iraq.
I’ve never really spent time looking at the anthrax attacks, but after reading this post, found this site.
http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/anthrax/anthraxtargets.shtml
Worth a read.
An important point, the anthrax in the Daschle and Leahy letters was a more refined grade than what was sent to the media. That’s why more Senate staffers were infected.
Gee, I wonder which radical political movement in the USA had the national/NY media and high-ranking Democrats in their sights in mid 2001.
It is a puzzlement.
Can we now say that non-state threats to the United States are better dealt with through smart law enforcement than through military action subcontracted to private corporations and corrupt foreign officials with and incentive for endless war?
Might it be possible to return very quickly to a law enforcement (and not the inflated contractor-ridden homeland security form of militarize law enforcement) strategy. Or has the United States lost its capacity to do reasoned national security?
Russia just signed a defense agreement with Pakistan; China already has a defense agreement with Pakistan. Might that weigh more for some in the national security establishment The Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs is Nisha Desai Biswal. The CENTCOM commander is Lloyd Austin, who already has been in that position longer than David Petraeus was in total.
The question is whether we have any better understanding of what we are doing now than we did previously. This looks like a recycle of the same failed strategy. And it seems to be dictated by the Congressional limits politically on the President than by some sense of how to practically deal with the situation.
IIRC, there was recently a publication with a breakdown of “how guerrilla/insurgency/terrorist conflicts end”
Military force accounted for 15-20%; most were ended by policing and political settlements.
There’s still a good chance that Obama will be handing off two wars that are long past the sell-by date to whoever wins the Presidency next. He cares too much about his legacy in the eyes of the Washington establishment and doesn’t want to be criticized as the one who lost Afghanistan to the Taliban and Iraq to the Islamic State.
The man is prone to getting rolled by the Generals and his foreign policy is now an abject failure in multiple areas, to include Syria, Libya and Yemen. It should trouble everyone that we’ve been stuck in Afghanistan for 13 years and still involved in propping up a corrupt government with our troops and our wealth. The problem isn’t that we made the decision in the first place. It’s that we see what the likely end-game is and yet we’re too proud to simply cut the cord and cut our losses. This is madness and I’m tired of making excuses for incompetence and mediocrity from our leaders.
The conclusion I’ve reached over the years is more or less in line with the bolded bit above, and while I realize you’re addressing how our national urge for revenge affected our decision to go to war, I’d like to connect it with how this has played out in our domestic politics:
It was inexpressibly disappointing for me when Obama chose not to prosecute the many crimes of the Bush administration. It was crushing, beyond demoralizing, as oppressive in its way as the weight of anger and shame I remember feeling on the cusp of the Iraq invasion.
Eventually I realized that obtaining justice wouldn’t have been so simple. While the blatant criminality of the Bush administration was more than sufficient to build an airtight case in a court of justice, at the same time it was guaranteed to be a disaster in the court of public opinion, because whatever the outcome, roughly half of the American public was going to be outraged at the result. One of those halves of the public in particular could not be counted on to conduct themselves like civilized humans and channel their rage into civic pursuits, in the event that their side lost. The other side could just as surely be relied upon to at least remain peaceful and continue to work within the system for redress. Maddening as it is to contemplate that the threat of childish behavior could be the deciding factor in such a weighty calculation, it’s not really all that difficult to see how President-Elect Obama could decide that the negatives were insurmountable. Considering how the right has behaved in the intervening years despite getting their way in this matter, one wonders what they might not have done in the face of a defeat in criminal court.
And that’s only what the case looked like if considered in a vacuum; there were other emergencies in need of immediate attention, memorable among them but by no means confined to the multifaceted economic disaster of late 2008. Yes, we’re supposed to be capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but in reality, our system of government makes it all too easy to sabotage even that minimal functional level. In hindsight I would say this has been one of the key lessons of the Obama Era. Our current dysfunction may eclipse what President Obama faced at the beginning of his first term, but sabotage was an inescapable feature of our politics long before 2009, and in all likelihood pursuing criminal prosecution for Bush era crimes would have consumed so much time, attention, and political will as to leave none for anything else. Even in a time of normal political unity, it would have been difficult to give the needed attention to so many pressing disasters and problems.
Political capital, in President Obama’s apparent view, is a zero-sum commodity, and he was faced with a choice of either prosecuting the past or confronting the dangers of the present. That may have been an erroneous calculation, and it may have been a false choice, but either way, there was a real risk that bringing the criminals of the Bush administration to justice would turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. The consequences of a failed prosecution, meanwhile, would be incalculably disastrous. So whether I support Obama’s choice or not, I can see how one could arrive there with sound logic and a decently functioning moral compass.
That there was a danger of prosecution in the first place, unfortunately, was due to a lack of civic responsibility on our part (and I apologize in advance for throwing “we” around a lot, I mean it only in its loosest collective sense). The rightful pursuit of justice was thwarted then as now by our own failings as a people, evident in more ways than any one of us is capable of pointing out:
A near-majority of our population can bandy about terms like “enhanced interrogation” as though that carries some sort of distinction, and in any case will tell you if pressed that torture is justified in the name of national security. Torture. A practice considered unthinkable, an-American, even inhuman throughout my life all the way through graduation from college, is now a legitimate subject of debate in our national discourse.
We believe that America has the exclusive right to project military power anywhere in the world to protect our interests because we have been singled out by God Himself as an “exceptional” nation. We used to pretend to ourselves that we had some moral justification when we did this, but that got boring and complicated so now we just do whatever we want because that’s what Patriots do and whose side are you on anyway.
We are dumb. We don’t even know–don’t particularly care–who was president when Katrina hit New Orleans, but are happy to blame Barack Obama not only for the failed response to that disaster, but for everything else that has gone wrong for as far back as our increasingly dim collective memory will take us. Never mind the Constitution and the Founding, we don’t even know the history that we actually lived through–and to make matters worse, we let religious fundamentalists in Texas decide much of the “history” to be taught in our schools, to spread our present madness and ignorance to the next generation.
And there’s so much more, so much insanity, an inexhaustible list of contradictions and cognitive WTF.
For a while I blamed the Bush administration, Frank Luntz, Fox News, Karl Rove, on and on, for the way they perverted and turned the minds of their supporters into something that would have horrified Democrats and Republicans alike a bare handful of decades ago. In my view, right up there among the greatest crimes committed by the Neocons was the callous and sanguine manner in which they turned our citizenry against itself to the point of damned near armed conflict (and by damned-near I mean the shooting has arguably already begun although mostly only one side has actual weapons), with not even a thought to the consequences, as if the future itself was merely an inconvenient complication that could be negotiated out of existence. As you (Booman) pointed out a day or two back, Fox News has made us a worse people. To my lights, that is undeniably true.
But ultimately, it is the American people who have failed. We didn’t measure up. We were in fact quite astonishingly easy to corrupt. We can point to any number of contributing factors for that, be it improper education, out-of-control capitalism, rapid social change accelerated by an ongoing explosion of technology–you name it, it’s a problem, it’s there, and none of us are in a position to do much of anything about it individually. But as a nation and as a people, we did not rise to the occasion.
Maybe that’s not entirely fair: when a person succumbs to disease and dies, it’s essentially because the immune system did not rise to the occasion, and no one’s moral character is implicated in pointing that out. We wouldn’t necessarily blame the victim for having arrived in a state of health compromised enough for the disease to win out, we would first consider all the particular circumstances. Similarly, maybe we’re to blame for the diseases of our body politic, and maybe not. At our current stage of illness, it kinda doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter because we as a nation are not going to internalize any of our recent painful experience into any useful lessons to carry us into a better and more humane era, because to do so would require the guilty among us to admit their wrongdoing and confront their personal failings honestly, unflinchingly, and in good faith.
As you’ve said, it won’t happen. They won’t do it, and we can’t make them. In a former era we might have had sufficient consensus to force a confrontation, but we’ve got nothing near it today.
There’s not going to be any national reckoning, no healing moment, no flash of light on the road to Damascus. We don’t learn from our mistakes. It’s not in our history, and it may not even be in our DNA. We’re certainly not going to start learning anytime soon. So since we can’t be taught not to injure ourselves, the best we can do is tend to our wounds and try to manage the bleeding until the madness is over. There may or may not be an America left standing when that day arrives, but we might as well make the effort because the existential crisis we face as a nation is by no means confined to our borders. In any event, cynicism and despair are not going to get us there.
Please pardon the pontificating. If it’s any consolation, it obliterated much more of my time to set down in writing than it could possibly have cost to read it.
I’d add I don’t think just 50% would have been upset with the result of a prosecution. I think 80% would have. Most rank and file dems are incredibly timid about stuff like that. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that when hanging out on these sorts of blogs.
I would certainly go along with that for elected Dems and party operatives. I’d have a much harder time guessing where the rank and file would fall if it had come down to real trials, but I think some dread and awe in such proceedings would be a healthy response. I would have probably reacted with equal parts horror and satisfaction myself in the actual event, now that I come to think of it. Anyway it’s all an academic exercise now.
wonderful writing and analysis, many thanks.
Learning from a mistake has as a prerequisite an acknowledgement that a “mistake” has in fact been made. As you say, those who advocated the most grotesque mistakes of the past 15 years do not accept the decisions/actions as mistakes, and certainly don’t acknowledge that THEY made a mistake in supporting/advocating for such actions. The above applies to upwards of a majority of the population. They can no longer recognize failure, and certainly wouldn’t take personal stock if they could. Objective analysis of a political decision is now impossible for most Americans.
Indeed, what could be the institutional vehicle for confronting and identifying a national “mistake” in such an environment? The professional journalists of the national media? Such an idea is now comic, indeed it’s hard to even write the phrase without chuckling. The political process? We have seen what an abject failure that is. We might be able to change our behavior going forward (such as stopping torture via electing a new prez) but we will not acknowledge we were wrong to torture, and indeed as you say many will insist we were right to torture–i.e no “mistake” was made.
So accountability for mistakes is out of the question, and military mistakes are even harder to address than domestic ones, it seems, because of the lost lives and limbs of the Imperial Sturmtruppen in whatever fiasco is up for discussion. The “troops must be supported!” even in hindsight…myths must be created.
I guess we might ask when was the last time the US DID “rise to the occasion”? I have to say the question is daunting. Watergate? At least there both parties seemed to understand that a response was needed to the “mistake”. The Church Commission hearings and legislation on the CIA’s multitudinous abuses and crimes? The Savings and Loan clean-up of the late 80s? Let’s just say it’s been a while, and whatever institutions existed to allow us to rise to those occasions are long gone. Our approach now is clearly to refuse to admit any mistakes have been made by us as a nation, which of course is a very dangerous way for a superpower to operate.
Your question about whether we as a people have been so debilitated that we can no longer rise to an occasion is a fascinating one, worthy of much more discussion as well. Perhaps we have become so braindead that no reformed institutions or leaders could revive us.
As to institutional vehicles for confronting our mistakes, honestly I can’t think of anything in the history of the modern nation-state that a country has ever imposed on itself. This to me calls for the kind of redress that a victor nation or international tribunal imposes on a rogue nation after it’s been defeated and disarmed. Even Watergate was weakened by Ford’s pardoning of Nixon. The S&L scandals are at least notable in that people actually went to jail for it, but none of those crimes seem terribly significant when compared to what we’ve done to the Iraqis. I don’t know if anything is to be done from the inside, because all our internal mechanisms for course correction and prosecuting high crimes require a degree of consensus that our fickle and easily manipulated population can’t produce. And that leaves us with correctives imposed from outside. I don’t have the skill set to even speculate on that.
A majority of the public weren’t on board with impeaching Nixon. The shift occurred when he resigned and a majority had to accept that the charges were true or conclude that Nixon was railroaded. Not until the impeachment of Clinton did I realize how many believed that he had been railroaded.
When I first heard Republicans screaming about payback for Nixon in the Clinton impeachment, I was totally perplexed. WTF did Nixon and Watergate have to do with Clinton? What I didn’t appreciate was that the “railroaded” contingent went silent after Nixon’s resignation. Those that accepted his guilt weren’t too vocal either other than to deny they had voted for the SOB or express a feeling of having been betrayed.
The S&L meltdown was quickly dismissed with by congressional action that made individual depositors whole even though their deposits exceeded, for some far exceeded, the FSLIC insurance guaranty. That’s why outrage among the general public disappeared and little attention was paid to the years of “clean up” and prosecutions. Thus, we can’t remember what we never actually knew. All the recent bank bailouts were similar but the hole was much larger.
This:
I’m not sure that’s true – we aren’t at war with Iran, after all. If the GOP were in charge, I’m not sure what would have happened there.
Well, there are a myriad of problems with aggressive militarism, but one big one is the logic of sunk costs. One cannot admit that an operation turned out to be a disaster, that someone has bungled, and that success is no longer obtainable, and perhaps never was. Thus good money must be poured after bad. Shame, honor, prestige, legacy, etc. all play their insidious part.
Of course, deifying the Imperial Sturmtruppen who carry out the (now rotting) mission, losing life, limb and livelihood, makes the sunk cost even larger, because as pious militarists like McCain and Lindsey G are quick to pontificate, “their sacrifice cannot have been in vain!” Digging the hole deeper is the only way to make the sacrifices all worthwhile and honorable, apparently.
Our military missions now all tend to turn into infected abscesses, with no good outcomes. The geniuses of our General Staff might do well to place more attention on the nation’s overall strategy and not myopically plan the next discrete operation against one ME nation and the next, hoping for a better outcome than the last. Wait until our McCainian militarists insist that China must be “confronted”….
One might have thought that a decade-plus of undeniable military morasses would induce some reflection by the nation, its leaders, its military, and even its elites, but no.
pious militarists like McCain and Lindsey G are quick to pontificate, “their sacrifice cannot have been in vain!” Digging the hole deeper is the only way to make the sacrifices all worthwhile and honorable, apparently.
Only if said pious militarists are shoved in the hole, just before it’s filled with quick-set concrete. Then there would be at least some small benefit to humanity, in spite of all the tragedy.
If only Barbara Tuchman had lived longer, so that she could add another chapter to The March of Folly.
Of course, the resulting despair probably would have killed her.