| | | I agree about Boot, I should not have used him, but I have mostly quoted more reliable people like Richard Engel, et al.
It would some will look at the "big picture'.
Here is the "big picture" as I see it and would invite anyone to show me where I have it wrong. But I think most know I do not have it wrong, but it is an inconvenient truth.
I think I have a case for staying there in terms of both humanity and military, and at least expecting a humane exodus, but I am not sure some are engaging logic here, but rather emotional gut responses e.g the constant mantra:" we had to leave" which is really just rhetoric.
Why don't we need to leave Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, etc?
1) Regarding the humanity and morality: The New York times did an in depth study of the number of those left behind that qualified for evacuation, and that we had given assurances to, as being around 250,000, but up to a million.
Biden just left them behind and said, in no uncertain terms, "it was too risky to stay and get them out." So he valued hundreds of thousands of lives as less important than the possibility of a few deaths if we stayed to make sure they got out.
Worse yet, and the fascist Republicans are going to hit us with this, and so many other things, Reuters is reporting this morning that Biden KNEW, in July, the Afghan army could not hold out and told the Afghan president to "project power", essentially lie, and still he did not make plans to get our allies out.
In my book, that is unethical.
Military: Biden said, and I saw him say this:" Our number one job is to protect our country. Sure, fine, but what he said and what he did are illogical.
Who will argue we are safer, and our intelligence about possible terrorist attacks will be BETTER, after we leave? We had am organized presence their with thousands of informants to WARN us of possible terrorist attacks and now we have NONE.
And we have not had any major attacks for 20 years, and now Osama Bin Laden's security chief is back in Afghanistan, and we are partnering with our old enemy!? This country will become a hot bed of terrorist activity because "they do not know any better"!
This is what David Ignatius (who disagreed with leaving) was talking about as "Interim Insurance" if we stayed.
So for about 5,000 troops we needed to leave in Afghanistan, we could have protected 38 million people from a life of terror, torture and death, and had a military presence in the heart of the area so dangerous to us going forward.
And we already are getting reports of summary executions and door to door searches and thousands of people hiding for fear of death.
So I invite anyone to tell me where I got this wrong.
And this has put our Democrats in a really bad spot come 2022 as the Republicans are going to bludgeon us with this issue. |
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