Replies to post #202852 on Just Politics

[hap0206]

so, a great victory by the taliban over the great satan -- much cheering in the streets and their new allies -- Pakistan and China -- how long, do you think it will be before a nuke goes off in NY harbor

just asking

hap

[blackhawks]

Not to make light of a dire, tragic, situation but rather to direct ridicule and sarcasm where it belongs.

I was on the phone with a friend earlier today. He paraphrased the line from Full Metal Jacket: 'Got a good deal for you on Afghan Army assault rifles, never fired and only dropped once.'

I countered with an old Dennis Miller line, putting it in the mouth of Biden: General, if I understand you correctly, the Afghan Army is folding faster than Superman on laundry day'.

[janice shell]

“We didn’t need to be in this position; we didn’t need to be seeing these scenes at Kabul airport with our Afghan friends climbing a C-17,” said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan. “We should have started this evacuation months ago.”

Seriously? We could have evacuated tens of thousands of people and no one would have noticed? The Taliban wouldn't have thought: "Now's our chance to take over"??

Christ on a crutch! Breaking up is hard to do, and it's nearly aways messy. Especially when you're ending a 20-year relationship. Biden has always wanted to get out of Afghanistan; if he could have done it in 2009, he would have. And he's right: this would have happened whenever we left.

So far, what has happened? Has the Taliban begun torturing and killing people? Not yet, anyhow.

People are making comparisons to Vietnam. And they're very much to the point. When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1968, he campaigned on getting out of the war. How? He'd declare it ended, and we'd just have left. What would the result of that have been? A lot of bloodshed, a lot of chaos. The North Vietnamese army would have won, with the help of the Viet Kong.

Which is exactly what happened eight years later, when we finally did leave. Except that a lot more people on both sides died in the meanwhile. Unnecessarily. Fast forward 40 years: a unified Vietnam is a nice country with a good economy. U.S. soldiers who served there like to go back for vacations.

That may not happen with Afghanistan; it never has in the course of its troubled past. But to be trite, time marches on. Things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. We're not in charge of history.

I have the feeling that most of the people protesting what Biden did just don't like the embarrassment. That's too bad. Should we protect the people who helped us there? Sure, and we'll do our best to do that.

But I think Biden did the right thing. I also think he didn't have a lot of choice, unless he wanted to escalate this mess. And try to continue to deal with a corrupt government and corrupt military brass. In my view, that would have been pointless.

I don't think history will treat him unkindly for this. What remains to be seen is whether voters will be displeased enough to vote for Republicans in 2022. I hope that doesn't happen.