I became sick and tested positive for COVID-19 on December 30. Within hours, everyone was expressing a strong opinion about it. Not that anyone was changing their mind about anything.
This Is the Military! No Violence Allowed!
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The US military has announced an initiative to root out violent extremism within its ranks. Of course, violence and extremism are the very core of what it means to be in the military.
The Difference between Democrats and Republicans Equals Zero
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Democrats often ask progressives: how can you say that there’s no difference between Democrats and the Republican party? While there are differences of tone, on the most important issues there is little to no difference in policy. And Congressional votes reflect that.
Not Everyone Feels Bad about Military Suicides
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Military suicides among active-duty personnel continue to increase. It’s hardly surprising that some of the people who volunteer to kill innocent people feel guilty enough to end their lives. The mystery is why so many veterans don’t feel guilty.
General Idiocy
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Both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate held hearings last week in which they examined the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and the many mistakes made during the war against Afghanistan. The key witnesses were the same generals who presided over the 20-year mess. Meanwhile, over on cable news television, the usual retinue of retired generals, several of whom presided over a war we had no business fighting, held court. We might get less militaristic foreign policy results if we asked people who are not in the war business (like academics, journalists and antiwar activists) about whether or not we should start a war.
Happy 9/11 Day
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The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 left a bunch of ridiculous legacies that pretty much everyone with an ounce of sanity agrees we should let go. For example, let’s get rid of the TSA and go back to the old days of airport security. And let’s stop saying that we have to do something before we think about what to do.
The China Syndrome
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Now that the US military is finally out of the horrid occupation of Afghanistan, the clique of professional warmongers has convinced President Biden that China is a threat. What kind of threat, they can’t exactly say, but a threat.
Celebrate the Heroes Who Warned Us That Afghanistan Would Be a Disaster
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Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Afghans, $2 trillion down the toilet, a Taliban victory that leaves America’s international reputation in shambles. This disaster didn’t happen by itself. Political and military leaders, aided and abetted by the news media, are responsible and should be held accountable. Voters let themselves be led by the nose—and they should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror because what they did and didn’t do caused many people to die.
Antiwar heroes deserve recognition and respect for telling us not to go into Afghanistan and, after we did, to get out despite being marginalized and ridiculed. They were lonely. Despite widespread reports of casualties among Afghan civilians and the glaring fact that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11, 88% of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—supported George W. Bush’s war three weeks after U.S. bombs began raining down on Kabul.
Let’s celebrate the good guys.
During the fall of 2001 tens of thousands of demonstrators marched against the war in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other U.S. cities. The marchers were too few and too peaceful to move the needle. But the judgment of history is now final: the tiny minority who opposed invading Afghanistan were morally right and correctly skeptical about the outcome. If you know any of these true American heroes, thank them for their service and buy them a drink.
While nationalist nimrods drove around with their cars idiotically festooned by American flags, intelligent and ethical individuals spoke out for what was right. “Under the [U.N.] charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the [U.N.] Security Council approves,” said Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild. “Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men —15 from Saudi Arabia — did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the U.S. or another U.N. member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The U.S. war in Afghanistan is illegal.”
All 98 senators present, including Bernie Sanders, voted to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan and install the puppet regime whose corruption led to the Taliban takeover. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 420 to 1. There was only one sane, only one correct voice in opposition in the entire Congress: Barbara Lee of California. “As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she implored.
“For her lone stance,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2016, “[Representative] Lee was deluged with rancid insults and death threats to the point where she needed around-the-clock bodyguards. She was vilified as ‘anti-American’ by numerous outlets including the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Times editorialized on September 18 that ‘Ms. Lee is a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies — from Fidel Castro on down’ and that ‘while most of the left-wing Democrats spent the week praising President Bush and trying to sound as moderate as possible, Barbara Lee continued to sail under her true colors.’ Since then, she has been repeatedly rejected in her bids to join the House Democratic leadership, typically losing to candidates close to Wall Street and in support of militarism.” Two years later, pro-war Democrats denied her yet another post, as chairperson of their House caucus, to punish her for voting against the Afghan war.
Every congressman and senator who voted for this stupid Afghanistan war is a fool who should resign at once.
Americans who supported this stupid Afghanistan war should refrain from voting ever again.
Media outlets that editorialized in favor of this stupid Afghanistan war deserve to go out of business.
American history has been defined by war, mostly illegal and unjustified on the part of the United States government. That history will continue unless we recognize, elevate and employ the voices of people who speak out against stupid wars before they start.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Stop Listening to the Pro-War Idiots Who Got Afghanistan Wrong
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You’re going to read a lot of Afghan War postmortems in the coming days. Some have already been published.
Don’t listen to anyone who was ever in favor of occupying Afghanistan. They were wrong for thinking that the United States could have won. They were stupid to think that invading Afghanistan would prevent another 9/11, a horror for which the Taliban had zero responsibility. Afghan War supporters were immoral for supporting the bombing of civilians that were so routine that blowing up wedding parties became a joke, for backing the invasion of a sovereign state that never posed a threat to us, and for justifying the violent imposition of a corrupt puppet regime. Anyone who ever believed that going into Afghanistan was a good idea is too stupid to deserve a job in journalism, academia or military command.
Don’t listen to anyone who criticizes President Joe Biden for sticking to his promise to withdraw U.S. forces. We were always going to lose. The Taliban were always going to win. Biden and his team recognized reality. Accepting reality is a rare trait among our foolish leadership caste, one that should be praised.
Don’t listen to anyone who cries over the fate of Afghan women under Taliban rule. If they had really cared about gender equality on the other side of the planet, they would have criticized the soon-to-be-overthrown puppet government in Kabul for tolerating honor killings, child marriage, systemic rape and even stonings throughout their benighted 20-year rule under U.S. subjugation. They were silent and therefore complicit. Afghan women never stopped suffering; American liberals simply stopped caring.
It’s unfortunate that political punditry isn’t subject to the same performance standards as other fields in which a writer issues prognostications. A financial consultant who recommends that her clients buy a stock that loses value is likely to find herself out of work. A meteorologist whose incorrect weather predictions lead to a lot of rained-out picnics and weddings will probably suffer lower ratings and eventual dismissal. A film critic who raves about bad movies won’t be taken seriously.
Politics, particularly when it comes to international affairs, is different. Newspaper columnists and cable-news talking heads never get ghosted, much less fired, for being wrong about war. From David Brooks to Thomas Friedman to Max Boot to William Kristol, helping to talk the American public into disastrous foreign adventures in places like Afghanistan and Iraq results in zero accountability. To the contrary, these elite idiots keep getting invited back to share their stupidity in high-profile television appearances and lucrative book deals. Unlike the stupid stockbroker and the incompetent weatherman and the movie reviewer with poor taste, the implications of their incompetent prognostications are staggering, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
In a nation where one of the major national religions is militarism, this is a feature rather than a bug. Right or wrong about the outcome, it always pays to be pro-war. If you are a pacifist or skeptical about wars of choice in general, or merely anticipate problems with a particular military incursion, it doesn’t matter if you are 100% correct 100% of the time—you will be blackballed, ridiculed, disappeared. Whether you watch CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, you will never see a guest unreservedly opposed to a war.
The editorialists aren’t just on the editorial page. One major “tell” to reveal biased, pro-war and therefore worthless news coverage is when a supposedly objective reporter inserts loaded adjectives into what is supposed to be unbiased coverage of a foreign conflict where the United States has an interest. As the Taliban continue to sweep across Afghanistan, seizing control of one city after another, allegedly impartial journalists express dismay at the “deteriorating security situation” and the “bleak future” of that country. It’s OK to be against the Taliban, even to support the ridiculously corrupt puppet regime in Kabul, but why can’t they tell us what’s going on and keep their opinions to themselves?
For whatever it’s worth, I was one of the few American journalists and commentators who went to Afghanistan and traveled unembedded and independently of the American military. I was one of the few who told you in cartoons and essays and books from the beginning, and repeatedly throughout the last two decades, that the war against the people of Afghanistan was stupid, immoral and unwinnable.
It wasn’t worth much.
For my efforts I was ruthlessly and consistently censored, even by so-called “progressive” media outlets for whom Afghanistan was, in the immortally wrong words of President Obama, the good war. It was frustrating to know that I could have doubled my income by coming out as pro-war.
More importantly, a lot of people died because the voices of people like me were stifled. Because the American people were denied the truth about what we did in Afghanistan, we fought and killed and died for nothing.
Antiwar voices are still marginalized. Countless more will be killed.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
How to Stop the Next Stupid War before It Starts
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Americans are politically fractured but they agree that our longest war was a mistake. 77% of Americans, including many Republicans, told a recent CBS News poll that they agree with President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. That’s a reversal from the conflict’s early days, when between 85% and 90% of Americans supported the invasion.
What changed? We were lied to; now we know it. The Taliban were characterized by the news media as primitive religious fanatics, a fringe group that ruled by fear in a power vacuum created by our abandonment of the anti-Soviet mujahedin in the late 1980s. In fact they were a popular, homegrown phenomenon perfectly situated to frame themselves as a nationalist resistance organization. To whatever extent that Afghans felt “abandoned,” they wanted cash and infrastructure with no strings attached. Instead we imposed a corrupt puppet regime that they viewed as a humiliation.
The main casus belli, revenge for 9/11, fell apart after the world’s most wanted man was found and assassinated in Pakistan in 2011. If Osama bin Laden had been living in Pakistan for years, why were we still looking for him in Afghanistan? Why were we paying his Pakistani hosts billions of dollars? Voter support for the war evaporated after the killing of bin Laden.
Barack Obama said “we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq,” which he called the “dumb war.” He argued that “our real focus has to be on Afghanistan.” Now most people agree that they were both dumb.
How do we avoid fighting more stupid wars in the future? How can we stop ourselves from wasting trillions more dollars and thousands of more lives?
First we must remember how most wars start—with government lies. From the Tonkin Gulf non-incident to fairy tales about Iraqi soldiers yanking Kuwaiti babies out of ventilators to Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, American presidents, generals and media stenographers have conned one gullible generation after another into killing and being killed. The truth eventually comes out. By then, though, it’s too late.
The next time a president goes on TV to tell us we ought to go to war, we should turn our skepticism dial up to 11. After all, we’ve been lied to so often in the past—why give them any benefit of the doubt?
Ironically for a country whose values center around free-thinking and rugged individuality, naïvely going along with the call to war is hardwired into our political culture, no matter how outlandish the justification. If the president asks us to sacrifice our lives in a war, we’re expected to comply, no questions asked.
Consider the infamous Supreme Court decision in which chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously wrote that “protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” In the case in question, Holmes continued, “the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger…”
In Schenck v. United States the court ruled that, when it comes to war, there is no room for vigorous debate, much less dissent—First Amendment be damned.
The subject of that case is lost to history: Socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were jailed for the crime of mailing out flyers urging men to resist the military draft during World War I. The “clear and present danger” was not to the country itself. It was to pro-war propaganda. What if the leftists’ argument were to succeed? What if the government had to work harder in order to convince young men to fight and die in the charnel house across the Atlantic?
Holmes came to regret his decision and Schenck was partly overturned and discredited. Yet schoolchildren are still taught that the First Amendment runs into limits with “shouting fire in a theatre.” Those who ought to know better, like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, went so far as to write that “while the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, no one has a right to falsely shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” in an op-ed favoring gun control in 2012.
As Christopher Hitchens noted, the governments of Europe and the United States lit and fanned the flames of a war most of its combatants believed to have been pointless. The socialist pacifists were trying to restore sanity.
Someday, no doubt sooner rather than later, this president or the next will take to the airwaves in order to ask us to support another war. War is the most serious undertaking that a nation-state ever considers. It is therefore the highest duty of every citizen to carefully weigh the evidence and justification given to attack a foreign adversary with an open mind including the jaundiced knowledge that such arguments often unravel after the spilling of a lot of blood.
If we had lived up to our civic duty back in 2001, we would have done a little digging ourselves. We would have paid attention to the fact that none of the 19 hijackers was from Afghanistan. We would have noted the news reports that bin Laden was already in Pakistan and that the majority of Al Qaeda’s training facilities were also in that country, not in Afghanistan. We would have listened to academic experts and veterans of Russia’s failed occupation during the 1970s and 1980s, who warned that Afghanistan was the “graveyard of empires” because the one thing that pulled its people together was hatred of foreign invaders.
We should not have given George W. Bush a blank check to invade a sovereign state that never attacked us and never meant us harm. We should have withheld our support and tacit consent. We should have protested and demanded that Congress stop the war before it began.
We should never again take a presidential call to war at face value.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
