President Biden is finally ending one of the biggest mistakes in U.S. history.
Always fighting the last war, Afghanistan was the new Vietnam. U.S. troops bogged down, fighting a deeply entrenched, local army with no clear objective.
George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks primarily to cover up his own egregious failure to heed very explicit warnings of the attacks and to take steps to prevent them. It is a bit surprising how much we know now about the huge failings of the Bush administration on this critical point, that he allowed attacks on the United States that killed over 3,000 people:
The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called “the Blue Sky paper” to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—“getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” “And the word back,” says Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’” (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didn’t get the new threat: “I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties—they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.”
This is Republican dumbness. Republicans claim to be the “conservative” Party in the United States. To be conservative is to be suspicious of change, to try to resist it. The stupidity and arrogance of this posture is clear from the claim of notorious U.S. conservative, William F. Buckley, who said a conservative is someone who “stand[s] athwart history, yelling stop….”
It is not terribly surprising that a person, a man (!) who has this self image could do something as stupid as start a pointless, twenty year war with an invasion primarily to conceal his own huge mistake.
It is likely difficult for anyone who serves as president of the United States after World War II to avoid this sort of arrogance entirely. It is essentially the same impulse that led Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the man who, more than any other, ensured the passage of major civil rights legislation, to pursue the ridiculous fantasy of preventing communists from taking over Vietnam, on the logic that the tiny country in southeast Asia could pose any threat to the United States.
Not content with his initial act of stupidity, Bush then doubled down and committed what people now call the biggest mistake in the history of U.S. foreign policy. He invaded Iraq. That invasion did have one huge, perverse benefit that cannot serve as an excuse for making the mistake to begin with because no one could have anticipated it.
Invading Iraq left no good countries to invade for Bush’s even dumber, Republican successor, Donald Trump. As it usually does, public support for George W. Bush skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the ongoing “war on terror” helped him win a second term, at least partly because his enormous error in allowing the attacks to happen did not become public knowledge until after the 2004 election.
It is only testament to how hugely stupid Trump is, and how his stupidity was our saving grace, that he did not figure out he could have virtually ensured his reelection with the simple expedient — Trump is nothing if not a fan of expediency — of invading Iran. Boy, did we get lucky.
He had already established the predicate by abrogating, for no good reason, the treaty with Iran the Obama administration had negotiated at great pains. This was a dumb move on its own, but it had the salutary effect, from the dumb, Republican perspective, of increasing tensions with the Iranians.
But such is the power of national identity to overwhelm human reason, the public would likely have rallied behind Trump had he invaded Iran, no matter how hugely stupid doing so would have been.
The other action Biden has undertaken to reverse dumb, Republican decisions is to start the process of reviving the Iran nuclear treaty.
It really is refreshing to have a smart president who can undo the dumb moves of his dumb predecessors. Lucky us that Trump was too dumb to think up the dumb idea of invading Iran. In abstract terms, Trump is dumber than Bush, but Bush clearly wins the award, hands down, for lives lost and money wasted on his dumb decisions.
And this is just foreign policy. We could go on at length about dumb decisions both made in domestic policy.
Please, no more dumb presidents.