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Nagging questions always remain; Why did it happen and who was to blame…*
So, Afghanistan. It sucks. Lately, we had been sending kids in uniforms there who were not even born when the Taliban’s guests flew their hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that Pennsylvania field on 9/11/01. And now that we are withdrawing, the Afghan government we’ve been supporting for the better part of twenty years has melted away faster than we could leave. We don’t know why, but we are still eager to blame. There are plenty of answers, none of them good.
You know who I don’t hear beating this dead horse? The NATO allies we left holding the bag in Afghanistan when we invaded Iraq in 2003 to get at Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that no one ever found there…. Hold on. This just in: “After the tumult of Trump’s presidency, Biden has repeatedly promised that ‘America is back’…. ‘Is America back or has it turned its back?’ one British official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘It looks very much as if the Americans have gone home in a rather Trumpian manner — rushed, chaotic and humiliating’.”
Please don’t let the American electorate off the hook, good people of planet Earth. Upwards of 90% of American voters at the time approved of invading Afghanistan. The vote in Congress was 420–1 to authorize war powers to the Bush-Cheney administration…