(np) good article for today

[rich]

Hi all

I think for some context here, Rumsfeld even before 9/11 wanted a leaner,
more efficient military. That was his initial plans. Even after the 9/11
attacks from what I've read he was still not wedded to a heavy footprint
strategy even in the initial planning for Afghanistan. But he like many
others got swept away in fantasy land. Of course, that was the Iraq plan as
well. Win and get the hell out, but strategy there was botched from the
get-go and will remain one of the US (among many) most critical foreign
policy disasters. I knew we were in trouble when he refused to acknowledge
the word insurgency in Iraq.
The Taliban had no transnational interests beyond
the Afghan-Pakistan borders. They committed and still commit atrocious acts
of violence (as we continue to do--see recent Biden attack following
bombing at Kabul airport, killing once more apparently an innocent family
and not a bunch of suice bombers using a missile loaded not with explosives
but a series of sharp knives released on impact--a bunch of children carved
up--but that's been happening for decades now). But I do not consider the
Taliban terrorists in the sense we define them. We labelled anyone fighting
us in the GWOT a terrorist, all nuance and understanding lost. Not that we
really cared, just leave it to the 20 yr old grunts to deal with the
madness on the ground.
Remember, most of the country was behind the Afghan war in late 2001. The
US learned nothing from Vietnam, the military made the same mistakes. and
after 20 years we are left with nothing.
My point is that Rumsfeld's initial instincts were sensible but even a man
with much power within the Beltway got persuaded and/or swept along, at
least when it came to Afghanistan. Iraq was a different matter.  His legacy
is shit, but so is much of this country's the last 2 decades of murder,
torture and lies.
It's easy to lay the blame on easy targets like Don and Dick and Bush. But
we're all still ignorant lunatics (we do share something with the Taliban
after all) and the best we can hope for is to forget about the last two
decades as a bad dream.

rich

On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 7:24 PM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> https://theintercept.com/2021/09/10/september-11-america-response/
>
> ….The “it,” then, that Rumsfeld wanted to destroy on 9/11 was almost
> certainly every frustration he felt at the rest of humanity. This started
> with Al Qaeda and easily extended to Saddam and Iraq. But we can be sure
> that he also hoped to cow all the non-white people around the globe who
> were generally failing to comply. Next he could overwhelm the obstinate
> Europeans with their affectations to a higher morality. Obviously the
> Democrats, who continually tried to steal his money, would have to be
> crushed. And then at long last his daughter, going to Oberlin and dating
> that white guy with dreads, would see the error of her ways.
>
> Of course, this doesn’t make “sense” in the way we want to think of it. But
> neither has the “war on terror.” It’s been 20 years of mindless violence,
> cruelty, and waste, the U.S. lashing out like a gigantic beast without a
> functioning frontal cortex, visiting numberless 9/11s on innocents as it
> staggered around the globe. But that does make sense if you ignore all the
> speeches and op-eds and instead start from the presumption that the
> political class running this country is overflowing with the primate wrath
> of the powerful who are nonetheless not omnipotent….
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>