Wednesday
Here’s my understanding of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan: he believes American political leaders, military leaders, war hawks, foreign policy experts, military contractors, and others have been screwing up for 20 years and he didn’t want to follow their lead any longer. He called them on it in part because, as the father of a war vet himself, he didn’t want any more U.S. soldiers paying the price for the screw-up. He didn’t see any way to a clean withdrawal, which he regarded as a fairy tale in line with all the other fairy tales so-called experts have been touting about Afghanistan, and he preferred a messy withdrawal to no withdrawal at all.
In yesterday’s resolute speech, I almost expected him to quote the famous passage from The Great Gatsby:
It was all very careless and confused. 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. . . .
Applying this particular mess to the Afghan War, our foreign policy establishment have been Daisy and Tom. As Daisy, they have been mowing down Myrtle Wilsons in the name of nation building. Now, as Tom, they are trying to persuade us that Joe Biden is the real culprit. Tom hints to Myrtle’s distraught husband that Gatsby is actually the one responsible for his wife’s death, thereby prompting him to gun down Gatsby, who was no more than an innocent witness. After all, if Gatsby can be pinned with the crime—if our Toms can persuade the American public to blame the man in the White House—then the Buchanans get to escape all accountability.
In blaming Gatsby and affirming his own innocence, Tom sounds perfectly reasonable. Nick observes,
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.
When foreign policy experts tell you that Biden blew the withdrawal, don’t believe them until they have acknowledged the full complexity of the situation, including the fact that all those fighters that Trump released from imprisonment were prepared to start fighting Americans again if America didn’t withdraw from the country. Anything else is just Monday morning quarterbacking mixed with a fair amount of buck passing.
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him,” Nick says, “but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.”
Further thought: Washington Post liberal columnist Paul Waldman lists five self-serving fictions that Americans tell themselves about their military interventions, fictions that have are no more true that Tom Buchanan’s lie about Gatsby. There are:
–U.S. wars are just and noble, undertaken for all the right reasons
–People in other countries appreciate that our motives are good.
–Our anger is righteous and deserved; anyone else’s is not
–If we don’t demonstrate “strength” and “resolve” there will be more terrorism
–The tools we use to force other countries to bend to our will, including but not limited to military power, are effective