AAPL stock: Click Here |
|
Tips and Deals ---- For Sale & Free Items ---- 'Friendly' Political Ranting |
Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: numbered
Date: September 01, 2021 11:08AM
|
Quote
....Most Monday-morning quarterbacking of the ‘failure of execution’ school doesn’t posit that the government would have survived, only that it might have lasted months or maybe a year longer, thus allowing the US to pass off the messiness on someone else. In other words, the failure of execution was largely a matter of optics. Extend the country’s civil war for a few more months or years – certainly at the cost of thousands of lives – to allow the US and the authors of the war to avoid the reputational splatter when the end came. That is an understandable but certainly ignoble aspiration.
This is the ‘decent interval‘ that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger engineered for the fall of South Vietnam – basically an effort to game the 1972 election with ‘peace with honor’ and leave others to pick up the peaces.
.....
Let us remember that two weekends ago a crush of prominent commentators and reporters were reporting as fact that the White House had been caught flatfooted and abandoned everyone who had worked for the US during its war in Afghanistan. They declared the evacuation a catastrophic failure and shameful betrayal when it was actually only starting and then in many cases took credit for the evacuation after it happened, on the premise that it was only their cries of betrayal that made it happen. This is a bracingly self-serving and sloppy logic. One of the worst offenders on this front, ABC’s Martha Raddatz, was forced to move the goalposts yet again yesterday: now judging the evacuation a ‘success’, she claimed Biden was “conflating the withdrawal with the evacuation … they did not realize the Taliban would take over so quickly.”
And there you have it. The problem was the withdrawal itself. That is by definition not a problem of execution but one of policy. Raddatz’s argument appears to be that the US should have known the government would fall in a matter of days and that if it knew this it should have stayed long to ensure it would last at least weeks or months if not years. This is arguing what amounts to a distinction without a difference verging on the logic of perpetual war and occupation which is what kept the US in Afghanistan for twenty years in the first place. It’s the final redoubt of a bad and for many deeply dishonest argument. Raddatz is like a desperate evacuee clinging to the skids of a departing helicopter as her preferred storyline collapses around her. Messy, indeed.
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: pdq
Date: September 01, 2021 11:23AM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: Kraniac
Date: September 01, 2021 12:19PM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: deckeda
Date: September 01, 2021 12:20PM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: numbered
Date: September 01, 2021 01:36PM
|
Quote
Kraniac
it should have been heavy handed and it would have been a simple task to keep the Taliban out of Kabul in meaningful numbers.. and a few other key locations in order to execute this thing methodically..intelligence should have seen immediately what was happening with regard to the sweep of the country by the Taliban..they should have kept the Afghan Military propped up best they could and put a seriously heavy hand on this aspect of the mission..if you or anyone else didn't see that this was thrown together..you're not seeing properly..or perhaps, objectively.
Quote
From the point of view of many Afghans, Americans might as well have been extraterrestrials, descending out of the black sky every few weeks, looking and acting alien, and always bringing disruption, if not outright ruin. We failed to understand what made sense for Afghans time and time again. No wonder the Taliban maintained such sway over the past 20 years.
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: Steve G.
Date: September 01, 2021 01:38PM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: Kraniac
Date: September 01, 2021 03:31PM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: vision63
Date: September 01, 2021 03:53PM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: Kraniac
Date: September 01, 2021 04:13PM
|
Quote
vision63
Politics is politics. We handed the Republicans what, to accomplish what? All of a sudden, people that voted for Democrats are going to vote for Republicans instead? Why? Not saying that that can't happen. But over this? No. I don't believe that. If it does happen, it won't be over this. I fully don't believe the citizens of this country care all that much about what happens to Afghanis.
Bumbling through Vietnam, invading Cambodia etc., didn't stop Nixon from being re-elected. Nor, did not finding Bin Laden and bumbling through Afghanistan and Iraq keep W. Bush from being re-elected.
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: vision63
Date: September 01, 2021 05:03PM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: Lux Interior
Date: September 02, 2021 08:41AM
|
Re: Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
Posted by: testcase
Date: September 04, 2021 01:51AM
|