“Truth is treason in the empire of lies” – Congressman Ron Paul.
As a child I was shocked, humiliated, and ashamed seeing our South Vietnamese allies desperately cling to U.S. planes as we abandoned them to communist butchers in 1975. Now when I see another bungled, panicked American exit from yet another mess we helped make — this time resigning Afghans who helped us to torture and death, and their daughters to sex slavery — I’m filled with anger.
I’m livid at the selfish, incompetent, and lying U.S. government leaders, bureaucrats, and military brass — of both parties — who caused this. It’s infuriating that none of these scoundrels — not one — will take responsibility for this human rights catastrophe or ever be fired for it. Instead, they will spin this shameful and completely avoidable disgrace to their own professional advantage. Most of the many politicians who orchestrated this mess will loudly blame others and easily win re-election, and most of the government apparatchiks who incompetently administered this nightmare will continue to be promoted up the ranks of the civilian and military establishments. Then they will retire to lucrative consulting jobs in the private sector wing of our vast military-industrial complex.
Once again, America’s best — our heroic military warriors in the field — have been ruthlessly exploited and callously sacrificed as collateral damage in the service of historically obtuse leaders and government elites. I recall all the outstanding young veterans of the Afghan War I was blessed to teach. Some are physically and emotionally scarred for life. All are magnificent citizens and proven patriots who are modest to a fault – and every one of them is light years’ better than the utterly selfish, inept, and dissembling elites who sent them into battle.
And how many hundreds and hundreds of billions of our tax dollars were squandered over the last 20 years in Afghanistan? The fanatically murderous Muslim Taliban terrorists are sure thrilled to have all that state-of-the-art U.S. military equipment we left behind.
Ned Ryun is right. Our bipartisan ruling class constitutes “a credentialed idiocracy.” That these architects of anarchy still have the chutzpah to go on TV and lie with straight faces that nothing we’re seeing in Kabul in 2021 resembles what we saw in Saigon in 1975 puts a new face on Orwellian doublespeak.
Once again, politicians and political generals like Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley have thrown away the hard-fought military victory our great American soldiers won on the battlefield. Perhaps they should have been more awake to all the obvious signs of an imminent Afghan military collapse and less fixated on making our armed forces uber woke to critical race studies and radical gender theory.
If any good comes out of this Afghan debacle, hopefully it will be to convince more Americans how dangerously naive we are to try to impose a 21st century Western culture onto one firmly anchored to the seventh century. Did you know the University of Kabul even launched a gender studies program in 2015? Perhaps Americans will hesitate more the next time political elites insist we “must” send troops – but almost never their own sons — to somehow remake in our image Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, or whoever’s their unfortunate latest flavored country of the year.
Better yet, perhaps voters will think twice the next time politicians promise how the federal government can make any aspect of our lives so much better if we just give them still more power and tax dollars.
As a metaphor for our terribly corrupt, morally bankrupt political class, recall this observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald about Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a pair of dedicated decadent narcissists in The Great Gatsby:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Why should the South Vietnamese, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, and now Afghanis not think the same of Americans?
Dr. Douglas Young is a retired political science professor at the University of North Georgia.