Donald Trump is backtracking from his assertion that Vladimir Putin is a “genius” for invading Ukraine. Tucker Carlson actually admits that he was wrong about Ukraine- although it’s Joe Biden’s fault that he’ was wrong.
America and the world have united behind a brave people determined to remain free and their heroic citizen-president. Russia thought overrunning Ukraine and putting a puppet in President Zelenskyy’s place would be easy. It’s turning out not to be.
Putin has been fighting with one hand behind his back. He’s been trying for propaganda reasons to at least appear to be exercising restraint. The more frustrated he becomes, the more likely that he takes the gloves off and fights dirty like he did in Chechnya. He will be even more discredited in the eyes of the world, but it won’t be pretty to watch much less experience. Not that it’s actually pretty now.
Putin has stepped in it. This invasion may be his undoing. But the odds are still overwhelming that Ukraine will be overrun. I don’t think President Zelenskyy will leave, and I’m very much afraid that Putin will have him killed. May God protect him.
But the salient reality is that Ukraine is going to be impossible for Russia to hold. The people of Ukraine won’t accept Russian occupation. A continuing insurgency will make Ukraine a hell for Russia. It will only be a matter of time before Ukraine recovers its independence.
Even Switzerland is joining in the sanctions. Germany has overcome its traditional reluctance to be actively hostile to Russia. Finland and Sweden are considering joining NATO. And barring a return of the Cheeto Benito to the Oval Office, NATO will not only survive but will be stronger and more united than ever.
Brave people are dying and will continue to die. The valiant people of Ukraine are suffering terribly and will probably continue to suffer for a long time. But what looked a couple of weeks ago like it was going to be another bleak triumph for authoritarianism and the bullies of the world seems to have turned completely around and rallied the world to the cause of humanity and democratic values.
However much suffering they inflict, it seems clear that at the moment the bullies are on the run. The forces of illiberalism and reaction are reeling. Right now, the good guys appear, at least in the long term, to be winning. It’s been a long time since that was the case, and it feels good.
Slava Ukraini!
Human Rights
Russia must howl
The invasion of Ukraine- you know, the one Vladimir Putin wasn’t going to order- is underway. Predictably, so is the idiocy from the MAGAverse.
Donald Trump- who never met an authoritarian he didn’t like- just loves Vladimir Putin. He fawned over Putin throughout his presidency, defending him from charges that Russia was involved in hacking the computers of both major American parties during the 2016 campaign despite conclusive evidence to the contrary obtained by the American intelligence community. He enabled Putin’s ongoing goal of undermining NATO by insulting and even lying about other members of the alliance and openly questioning whether NATO was even necessary now that the Cold War is over.
Putin, on the other hand, takes a different view, whether he admits it or not. This invasion is motivated by Putin’s objection to the possibility that Ukraine might someday join NATO. Despite the fact that every invasion over the border between Russia and the rest of Europe since World War II has been an invasion staged by Russia (this is Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine, and he’s recently attacked Georgia and has virtually taken over Belarus), Putin sees the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as “encirclement.” This fits well with Russia’s historic paranoia about invasion from the West, even though the West has far greater reason in recent history to fear invasion by Russia!
Nevertheless, Russia sees the presence of a country allied with the United States on its border as somehow a provocation. And international law aside, he believes he has every right to invade any such country and- well, make it not aligned with the United States. Tucker Carlson’s odd nightly attempts to justify this by suggesting that we would be justified in invading Canada if it were aligned with Russia make sense only to those who don’t stop to reflect that no, we wouldn’t be justified in doing that and that moreover, we would be unlikely even to consider it. The Putin/Carlson view of the matter makes sense only to the paranoid and those not in the habit of thinking much before forming their opinions.
Putin’s overarching goal is to undermine and, if possible, destroy the Atlantic alliance. Donald Trump, of course, is on board. It’s worth reflecting that on one occasion while he was president Russian state television jokingly referred to him as a Russian “asset,” and suggested that, in view of his service to the Rodina, he be offered an apartment in Moscow to move into when he left the White House.
Ukraine is not, at present, a member of NATO. There were no plans for it to become a member of NATO any time soon. If it were, we would face an even darker situation tonight- that is, if Putin invaded Ukraine at all. If Ukraine were a current member of NATO, he probably wouldn’t. The reason is simple: under Article Five of the NATO charter, an attack on any member of the alliance would obligate all of the other members to treat it as an attack on each of them, and respond accordingly. If Ukraine were currently a member of NATO, Putin’s invasion would be tantamount to a declaration of war on the United States, Germany, the UK, France, and the rest of the Atlantic alliance. We would be obligated to respond accordingly.
Putin has already sliced off a piece of Ukraine- the Crimea- in a previous invasion. He seized nearly a quarter of Georgia. We did very little about either. This invasion is the next step in his ongoing quest- which Mr. Trump is apparently fine with- to reassemble the Iron Curtain, establishing Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe once again and creating a buffer zone of client states between itself and the rest of Europe. He has, again, no justification in recent history for thinking that he needs a buffer zone; he’s the guy who does all the invading. Whatever happened in Operation Barbarossa, today’s Germany is unlikely to repeat it any time soon!
But here’s the problem: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia- pretty much all of the remaining states of the old Soviet empire- are member states of NATO, as, of course, is Germany. Among other things, the invasion of Ukraine is a test case of NATO’s resolve. We did little when Crimea and much of Georgia were conquered or when Belarus was virtually annexed. This is a test case of our resolve. The next step in Putin’s long-term plan will almost inevitably be to move against one of the former satellite states- probably Estonia or one of the other Balkan nations- that are members of NATO. An invasion of one of them would trigger Article Five, and one of two things would happen. Either the United States and its NATO allies would come to the defense of the member state that was attacked, resulting in a major war that might well turn into World War III, or they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, NATO would be revealed as a toothless paper tiger, and effectively collapse- and Russia would effectively dominate the European continent.
The European Union would be of little use in preventing that. For centuries, each of the European states has had as its primary foreign policy goal the prevention of any one of the others from dominating Europe. France managed it for a little while during the Napoleonic era. Germany managed it during World War II. It didn’t turn out well for anybody else either time. The EU is a delicate balance of power in the political and economic realms; everybody is anxious to prevent any one nation from assuming clear and undisputed leadership. And while Donald Trump and the neo-isolationists don’t seem to grasp the point, that’s why the only powerful Western democracy that isn’t a part of Europe has to lead NATO. That’s why the existence of NATO is vital to European security and stability, and to world peace. And that’s why the United States has to lead it.
Mr. Trump is notoriously ignorant when it comes to international relations, as is the case with many other things. He doesn’t realize all this. And insofar as the only apparent organizing principle of his foreign policy seems to be a fondness for authoritarians and bullies, that’s why he’s rooting for Russia in its war with Ukraine. I doubt that Tucker Carlson even has a reason for siding with the bully, other than that it’s what Trump does. The same is true of a good many MAGA neo-isolationists.
That, and the utterly clueless argument that what happens in Europe is “none of our business,” and “doesn’t affect us.” Of course, it does affect us. It affects us profoundly. The economic consequences of a Russian-dominated Europe for the United States alone would be catastrophic, just as would be the case if China achieved hegemony in Asia. And unless we come out of the current war in Ukraine with Russia deterred from continuing Putin’s quest to undermine NATO and achieve European hegemony, the only alternative would be a strong possibility that sometime in the near future the United States and Russia are going to come to blows militarily.
Which, by the way, literally nobody is advocating at the moment. Despite all the voices being raised to warn against our intervening militarily in Ukraine, literally nobody is suggesting that. Nobody. Although I am intrigued by Jonathan V. Last’s suggestion that while we shouldn’t attack any Russian naval vessels, it might not be out of place for the U.S. Navy to send the yachts of some of the Russian oligarchs who make up Putin’s power base and happen to be docked in foreign ports to Davey Jones.
President Biden is being blamed by Trumpworld simultaneously for not doing enough to push back against Putin and for doing too much. The illogic is typical, considering the source; opponents of the orange god-king subject themselves to the disapproval of the cult not for the substance of their actions or positions, but merely for opposing Trump. In Trumpworld, as among extremists generally, emotions rather than logical arguments drive people’s attitudes, and it’s unnecessary to make sense. When you live in an alternate universe, truth is the least of your concerns, Any fact that disagrees with what one wants to believe is either false or irrelevant and any lie that supports it- however bizarre and transparent- is the truth.
But for honest people in contact with reality, any consideration of the situation has to begin with praise for Mr. Biden because at least he’s standing up to Putin. That’s refreshing after four years of a president who was Putin’s lapdog and who seems actually to be on board with Putin’s ambition to destroy NATO. The heroic people of Ukraine will fight bravely for the cause of freedom while many Americans either stand by apathetically or even, like Tucker Carlson, openly root for a bully and tyrant. But the thoughtful among us realize that America’s interests are deeply affected by the events in Eastern Europe, and those who are truest to our founding values will be rooting for the good guys.
The people of Ukraine will fight and die and inevitably lose. This war is a mismatch. There is no question as to its outcome, and tragically, we can’t help Ukraine avoid the inevitable. The democratically-elected government will be deposed, and a puppet regime with Putin pulling the strings will take its place. It’s too late to prevent that. Bolstering our military presence in Eastern Europe might have made a difference at some point as a token of our resolve. It might have made Putin think again. But it’s too late for that now.
All we can do is honor and pray for the heroic people of Ukraine, and resolve to make Vladimir Putin howl with sanctions so crippling that he gives up his ambition to recover Russian dominance of Eastern Europe and destroy NATO. That, and make sure that his orange lapdog doesn’t get anywhere near regaining a position from which he can help Putin achieve those objectives.
We can hope that Joe Biden is tougher and more resolute than Barack Obama and Donald Trump were. And maybe torpedo a yacht or two, if that’s what it takes to make Putin and the kleptocrats who keep him in power think again before repeating this crime.
Liberty and anarchy are two very different things
During the Carter administration, a peace demonstrator at the White House carried a sign which read, “Nothing Is Worth Dying For.”
Unlike most signs carried at protests and demonstrations, that one drew a great deal of attention. Someone pointed out that if nothing is worth dying for, then neither is anything worth living for. I would guess that the young man who carried that sign hadn’t thought his slogan through that far. People who are caught up in movements often don’t.
Being a history buff, I’ve long been aware of the White Rose, a group of idealistic German students who opposed the Nazi regime. Hans and Sophie Scholl are the best-known of the many members of the group who paid for their courage with their lives. The Scholl siblings were guillotined for passing out anti-Hitler leaflets at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich.
The leaflets were slapdash, typewritten, and mimeographed affairs, and it’s easy to see them as naive and futile gestures. It’s hard to see what practical effect they could possibly have had. But practicality was beside the point. They said things that needed to be said:
Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?
and
Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way … The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!
The White Rose bore witness. Like the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square, its members stood in the way of totalitarian terror and shouted, “Stop!” Many of its members paid with their lives. They considered what they had to say worth dying for. And bearing witness against the Nazi nightmare gave their lives meaning, as well as their deaths. Few of us will lead lives as worth the living as Hans and Sophie Scholl.
Just today, I became aware of another youthful resistance group in Nazi Germany with a floral name. It was far more practically oriented and far larger. Many of its members, too, paid for their defiance of the regime with their lives. Its members, too, said “no!” to coercion and terror. But without denigrating the individual sacrifices of the Edelweißpiraten (“Edelweiss Pirates”), their agenda wasn’t quite as lofty.
The Edelweißpiraten weren’t protesting the Holocaust or the other crimes of the German government. They simply were opposed to compulsion in principle. They didn’t like being told what to do. Again, without diminishing the courage of its individual members, some of whom were just as nobly motivated as the members of the White Rose, the program of the Edelweiss Pirates as a group boiled down to words which needn’t be chiseled into granite on any monument: “You can’t make me!” Some had no particular political or moral agenda at all. They simply didn’t want to be told what to do.
Sometimes a thin line can separate principle and childishness. None of us likes to be told what to do. But the grownups among us not only are willing to be told what to do in certain areas but insist on it. Any thoughtful adult realizes that rules are necessary for any group to function in a peaceful and constructive way and that without laws that restrict individual liberty, civilization itself would be impossible.
“You can’t make me!” might almost be America’s national slogan. ” Liberty!” was the battle-cry of the American Revolution, and when Baron von Steuben came here from Prussia to train George Washington’s army, he nearly despaired. How can an effective army ever be built, he wondered, when the soldiers who comprised it refused to follow an order unless the reason for it was explained first, and they agreed with it?
But follow orders they did- and disobedience was duly punished. Although the first Continental soldier to be condemned for cowardice and desertion, Ebeneezer Leffingwell, received an eleventh-hour pardon from Washington because of his “previous good character,” the general warned that those who emulated Leffingwell in the future would be shot. And they were.
Washington did not hesitate to order the compulsory vaccination of his soldiers against smallpox, a precedent that seems to be lost on a great many contemporary Americans, including certain Republican governors. And the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that compulsory lockdowns and quarantines as public health measures lie well within the constitutional authority of states under the Tenth Amendment. In fact, the principle is so well established in American law- and has been, since the earliest days of the Republic- that it’s difficult to take the odd claim that quarantines and lockdowns and vaccine mandates violate individual rights seriously. Such objections are really more on the order of a childish, petulant “You can’t make me!”
The idea that there is somehow a constitutional right to endanger the health of others- and thus their rights- by refusing both vaccination and reasonable restrictions on their movements and activities if they decline to be vaccinated would be a hard one to defend from the writings of the Founders or the history of American constitutional law. Far from being somehow a violation of the principles of liberty, “vaccine passports” are not only reasonable, at least in principle, but well established in legal precedent as constitutionally legitimate tools in times of pandemic. In fact, in 1824, John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United States, made the parenthetical observation in Gibbons vs. Ogden, a case involving maritime rights, that quarantine laws “form a portion of that immense mass of legislation which embraces everything within the territory of a state not surrendered to the general government.” If, for religious or other reasons, an individual declines vaccination, fine. But in such a case it falls well within the authority of the state to quarantine that person for the sake of the public good, a point which the Supreme Court has acknowledged ever since the days of John Marshall!
Why are we even debating this?
Are mandates and lockdowns and quarantines necessary? Are they prudent? Nobody argues that unnecessary restrictions on the bodily autonomy or movements of American citizens are legitimate or desirable. But whether they are necessary or prudent in any specific case is a medical question rather than a legal one, to be answered by epidemiologists rather than by lawyers, judges, and politicians. And despite the ongoing attempt by COVID-minimizers to exaggerate the very small number of medical professionals who dissent from it, and often their credentials, the consensus of the medical experts is firmly on the side of their use, at least in general principle, and has been ever since the pandemic began.
Granted, it’s inevitable that a society that places as much emphasis on individual liberty as ours, there should be a perennial debate about its limits. Tom Paine railed against taxation, for example. Even Chief Justice Marshall wrote that “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” But the courts have consistently upheld the power of taxation, despite the healthy suspicion of its use by conservatives ever since the foundation of the Republic. The reason is obvious. George Washington put it well: “It is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.” James Madison, the author of the Constitution, wrote, “The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.”
But perhaps the most relevant quotation of all comes from Benjamin Franklin: “Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”
One of the “taxes” we have paid in this pandemic has been laid upon us by folly, levied through our slowness to embrace and implement sensible and reasonable public health measures in the face of what is now the deadliest pandemic in the nation’s history. We have paid it in the lives of friends, neighbors, and relatives, at the present moment about 837,000 of them. The number of deaths we suffered in the Civil War is not precisely documented, but it seems to have been somewhere around 750,000. During this pandemic, America has matched and exceeded the butcher’s bill for the deadliest war we’ve ever fought, and in half the time. Yet amazingly, there are those who continue to minimize the pandemic and resist common-sense measures whose constitutionality is established beyond any reasonable doubt on the ground that they violate “individual liberty!”
There is a difference between a prudent suspicion of heavy-handed government (and there can be no doubt that in some cases the government has been heavy-handed in its handling of this pandemic) and what the British call “bloody-mindedness.” There is a difference between a proper concern for the preservation of our legitimate rights and the selfish, unreasonable assertion of the “right” to compromise the rights of others.
Those who strive to preserve individual freedom against arbitrary and unnecessary government restrictions are worthy of praise. But it seems to me that modern libertarianism- and conservatism generally- more and more frequently mistake principled resistance to tyranny with a petulant, childish whine of “You can’t make me!.” Sometimes, as was the case with the White Rose and the Edelweiss Pirates, people and movements find themselves fighting the good fight side by side. But that doesn’t mean that their motivations are identical, equally thoughtful, or equally valid. To be an extremist and a selfish jerk is not the same thing as being a freedom fighter!
A liberal society (in the broad, Enlightenment sense of the term “liberal”) seeks to strike the optimum balance between protecting individual rights from being violated by an overbearing government, and from being violated by other individuals. Achieving that balance requires a clear understanding that, as someone once said, “You have every right in the world to swing your fist- but only until it comes into contact with my nose.”
And to refuse to be vaccinated without taking measures to avoid exposing others to a virus one may be carrying without even knowing it is to make firm contact with the nose of others. Not only is it to risk being a personal vector of infection, but it also means keeping us further from reaching herd immunity and giving the virus further opportunity to spread and evolve. True, the Omicron variant seems to be less deadly than previous iterations of the virus, but it’s also far more contagious and seems to have made some progress toward making our vaccines less effective.
Contrary to what many of us seem to think, “I don’t wanna, and you can’t make me” isn’t really the same thing as “Give me liberty or give me death!” License and liberty are entirely different animals. Speaking theologically, human government is fallen, potentially dangerous, and worthy of suspicion not because it’s government, but because it’s human.
But individuals are also potentially dangerous, and also worthy of suspicion because they, too, are human, and therefore fallen. My political faith tells me that the Constitution has invested in the individual the authority to serve as a check on the fallen, human government. But my religious faith, on the basis of Romans 13, tells me that in His wisdom God has instituted the government as a check on the fallen, human, individual.
To lose the proper balance between the two is to risk either tyranny on one hand, or anarchy on the other. And human rights evaporate just as quickly under the one as under the other.
ADDENDUM: The Supreme Court has struck down President Biden’s requirement that employees of large businesses either be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing by a vote of 6-3. It did uphold the mandate for healthcare workers by a worrisome margin of only 5-4.
Given the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, I’m not surprised. But I guess it just goes to show that conservative justices are just as liable as liberal ones to allow controversial political debates to cloud their reading of the Constitution.
ADDENDUM II: Or not. The Court did uphold the mandate for healthcare workers, and the Tenth Amendment argument is predicated on the authority to quarantine and to utilize other restrictive measures in times of pandemic being vested in the states and not in the Federal government.
A very strong case can be made that the United States led the world in COVID deaths during too long a period (a nation with four percent of the world’s population- the most scientifically advanced nation in the world- for quite a while had 20% of the world’s COVID deaths) because while every other industrialized democracy on Earth was undertaking a coordinated nationwide effort to control the pandemic, we had a president who claimed that the virus was no worse than the flu, would mysteriously vanish overnight, and to the extent that it was worth addressing at all was an issue for the states alone. In the process, Mr. Trump ignored the obvious Federal role in coordinating the efforts of the individual states, even to the point of mismanaging the allocation of equipment and supplies under Federal control, arguing that it wasn’t the Federal government’s problem. The degree to which a worldwide (and therefore nationwide) pandemic demands a greater role for the Federal government is a matter worth debating, even to the point of asking whether the Federal government’s mandate in the Preamble to the Constitution to “promote the general welfare” might not in extraordinary circumstances modify the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of such powers to the states. But thinking the matter through, I have to admit that the Court’s ruling in the matter of the Biden mandate for the employees of large companies is in accord with precedent after all.
I would argue that the mandate itself was a matter of common sense. But a strong case can be made that under the Tenth Amendment, it’s something the states rather than the Federal government should address.
Again, we face the troublesome difficulty presented by our living in a smaller world in the Twenty-First Century than the one in which the Constitution was written, in which commerce is global and the automobile and the jet plane have replaced the horse and carriage and the wind-powered ship. Worldwide pandemics weren’t the threat in 1789 that they are today; even viruses had a harder time traveling back then. What once were national problems are now global ones, and what were once local and state problems now have national and even worldwide implications. As an adherent of Antonin Scalia’s “dead Constitution” philosophy, which sees the Court’s role as interpreting the words of the Constitution as written rather than adapting them to a changing world, I actually have a certain amount of theoretical sympathy for what apparently was the Court’s reasoning.
Maybe amendment is the answer. Maybe the Federal government needs explicit constitutional authority to deal with matters which in the modern world are as national as they are local, if not more so. But I have to think that the extraordinary situation posed by COVID justifies the view that “promoting the general welfare” in a nationwide epidemiological crisis implies Federal authority under the Constitution to act even in a realm that historically has been seen as the purview of the states.
If I lived in Ukraine, Estonia, or Taiwan right now…
…I would be very, very nervous.
The United States has a military second to none. Nobody is even close. No country in the world could defeat us- if we had the will to defeat them instead.
It would be difficult right now to make the case that we could summon the will to much of anything. Two consecutive administrations, one of each party, has been naive enough to believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not two sides of the same coin, and that the fall of Afghanistan would not give them once again an entire nation to use as a training and staging-ground from which to attack us. Yes, al-Qaeda is active elsewhere. But since the invasion of Afghanistan they haven’t had a whole country to play with. Today, they have Afghanistan back again.
There is no “Taliban 2.0,” They remain the same brutal outfit we kicked out of power twenty years ago. For all their talk of moderation, we will hear about the mass executions and atrocities again very soon. The Trump administation was naive and feckless and just plain clueless enough to think they could negotiate a deal with them and that they would keep their word. Mike Pompeo and company were so deluded that they even suggested that the Taliban would keep al-Qaeda in line and even fight them if necessary to keep them from using Afghanistan as a base again. But they’ve been using the Taliban-controled areas of Afghanistan as training bases for quite a while. The only reason the Taliban’s alter ego has not been launching terrorist attacks on the West of late is that they’ve been concentrating all their resources on defeating us in Afghanistan. Well, now they have.
The discussion below is between three journalists with extensive experience both in military matters and in counter-terrorism. Tom Jocelyn in particular has forgotten more about Aftghanistan than it would appear a great many of those who have been fashioning our foreign policy and military strategy ever knew. David French is a veteran of the war in Iraq as well as one of the sharpest political columnists we have. Steve Hayes, too, has been covering this stuff for a very long time. You are about to learn things we should have been hearing from the last three presidents. Instead, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have each focused their attention on assuring that this day would come, and that there was no way that it could be prevented. Ever since George W. Bush, the government of the United States has made it clear that its number one objective in Afghanistan was getting out. The objective of the Taliban, on the other hand, was always winning.
Not on a negotiated settlement. Not on power sharing. On winning.
I’ve written before about North Vietnamese Col. Bo Tin’s observation that his government and the Viet Cong planned all along to simply wait the Americans out, because democracies lack the will to stay in a long fight until the end. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion below is French’s explanation of why the Afghan army- and the South Vietnamese army, too- fell apart so completely and so suddenly. President Biden’s insulting statement that it “refused to fight” ignored the 66,000 casualties it had just taken before the collapse.
As French points out, something changes when the United States enters a war. The side we support knows that we’re the toughest kid on the block. They know that are soldiers are trained professionals, let at least in theory by competent officers. They know that they’ll have American air support on their side. The entire dynamic of a war changes. America’s allies believe that because we’re fighting beside them, they can win.
That belief is diminished when it becomes clear, as it did in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, that we aren’t fighting to win, but rather that our objective is simply to get out. As happened with the South Korean army in the face of the Chinese invasion during the Korean War and with the South Vietnamese army a couple of decades later, any army ceases to be an effective fighting force when it ceases to believe that it can and will win. American troops were able to step into the breach and turn the tide in Korea. The ROK army was able to believe again that with us at their side, they could win. The Chinese and the North Koreans were driven back. The war ended in, at worst, a draw.
Not so in Vietnam. Not so in Afghanistan. In neither case was it any secret that the United States was looking for a convenient exit, not for victory. In neither case did this reassure our ally. And there comes a point, as it did just before the fall of Saigon and again just before the fall of Kabul, that it sinks in that we don’t have their backs, that they are on their own, that we’re going to abandon them. And the lose the thing that motivates soldiers, the thing that the very intervention of the mightiest nation on Earth first gave them: hope. And when they lose that, the army collapses. It melts away. And it can all happen in a matter of days.
We remain the mightest nation on the planet. Nobody can match our power, or even come close. But even might as massive as ours is useless without will. And it has been decades since not only the world but thoughtful Americans have had such good reason to doubt America’s will.
We don’t even know how many Americans are in Afghanistan right now. We have told them to go to the airport in Kabul. We have also told them that we cannot guarantee their safety on the trip. And there are Taliban checkpoints everywhere that they will have to get through. Some won’t. And in coming days or weeks or, at most, months, the Taliban will be taking American hostages, and threatening to behead them if we don’t make humiliating concessions.
Having won the war, humiliating the United States will be their next objective. We don’t know yet when the next 9/11 will be attempted.
Certainly at this point it’s nearly hopeless to think that most of the Afghans who have put their lives on the line for us- the soldiers, the translators, the cooks, the secretaries, the teachers, the clerks- will be saved. Some will. But President Biden has shamefully disclaimed any American obligation to them. The Trump administration thought it could negotiate a peace with monsters who have no honor and whose word was worthless; the Biden administration could have denounced the betrayal, and if it exited at all done so in a deliberate, orderly fashion. Instead, the incompetence of two consecutive American administrations- arguably three- has doomed the people who risked everything to be our friends, and innocent people all over Afghanistan.
By the way, it’s no coincidence that the final Taliban offensive began on May 1. That, after all, was the day President Trump had set for our exit as part of a “negotiated settlement.” Today he praised the Taliban and their courage, claiming-falsely- that they’d been around for “thousands of years.” The plan has been to humilate the United States all along, and their goal was advanced by the fact that they were negotiating with a fool, a sucker.
Already the Chinese state media are tormenting the Taiwanese with the message, “You put your faith in the Americans. Are you watching what’s happening in Afghanistan?” American prestige is not all that has taken a beating from this. Our credibility is at an all-time low. The European Union seems to share in the impression that we have been building all over the world for decades that America simply cannot be trusted, that our word is no good, and that we will always betray our friends. Several European leaders have spoken of the need to make their security arrangements without depending on us. The process of alienating our allies, begun and earnestly pursued by the Trump administration, seems to have been vastly advanced by the Biden administration, and the hope of its friends that the comic-opera incompetence of the Trump administration had been replaced by something better and wiser has been deeply shaken.
No power on Earth can match the military might of the United States. Russia, China, and bad actors all over the globe are given pause by that power, and hesitate to provoke us because they only suspect, and are not entirely sure, that we lack the will to use it and to press our cause to final victory.
They are considerably surer tonight. No, I would not want to be a citizen of Estonia or Ukraine or Taiwan tonight. The realization that melted the hearts of they Afghan army is nagging them. Once again, we have proven to the world that while we have the might to keep our committments, we lack the will, and will always let our allies down. And it’s only a matter of time until Russia or China decide to take the risk and put that theory to the test.
Dispatch Live: Afghanistan from The Dispatch on Vimeo.
A truly warped concept of “freedom-” and ethics
Leaving aside the fact that nowhere in the Constitution, in the history of classic American political theory, in the law, or in any respected ethical or theological tradition is there a right to infect others with a deadly virus as a matter of personal freedom, the time has come to stop coddling people who permit and even excuse things like this.
We need vaccine passports, especially in schools; mask mandates where necessary (certainly including schools in areas of high transmission, if the schools are open at all) and those who find these to be violations of their own sensibilities should be invited to join Tucker Carlson and emigrate to Hungary or other truly authoritarian states. This is what you can expect of the kind of people with enough chutzpah and little enough ability to reason from (a) to (b) that they can claim to simultaniously be disciples of Ayn Rand and of Jesus Christ. What in God’s name have we come to when we value illusory, sociopathic “freedom” to selfishly refuse to take simple, common sense public measures above he lives of human beings? And yes, children can indeed get COVID- and get very sick and even die from it. The Delta variant is just as contagious as chickenpox or Ebola. We were on the verge of eliminating COVID in the United States. And now we’re letting the chance slip between our fingers.
The GOP moves to enable the spread of COVID-19
In a move of moral perversity ignoring the logic of every public health effort ever undertaken, Republicans nationally are pushing legislation granting protection against discrimination to- wait for it- unvaccinated Americans.
Yes, that’s right. Republicans are on record as supporting the granting of special rights to potential carriers of the COVID-19 virus, and effectively adding sociopathy to race, religion, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation as legally protected characteristics meriting special status under civil rights legislation. It continues to become clearer and clearer that the GOP believes that there is a constitutional right for ethically depraved narcissists to selfishly risk spreading a deadly virus among the rest of us.
Well, no. I should retract that. The logic of the general Republican position would not discriminate. It would grant legal protection to all viruses. Logically, it would mean that people who might be infected with smallpox could freely mingle with the rest of us, and their movements could not be consistently restricted. Folks potentially exposed to Ebola could jostle us in the subway, and there wouldn’t be a thing the government could do about it. Ain’t freedom wonderful?
How do people become so preoccupied with their own supposedly unbounded and unlimited “rights” that they fail to see that for a person who might be a carrier of a potentially deadly and highly contagious disease to mix freely with the rest of the population deprives everyone else of their right to remain healthy and alive? I guess that’s what happens once we elect a narcissist president. All of a sudden, a movement arises to make narcissism our national ethos forevermore.
You can’t make this stuff up. It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that this is not a debatable matter about which reasonable people might disagree, any more than Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters (well, except for sociopaths and the willfully ignorant, whom they apparently want to make protected categories). This simply nuts. The position that sees lockdowns, masks, and strong incentives to be vaccinated as somehow violations of individual liberty is pure, unadulterated moral and intellectual perversity, and if we let the sociopathy from which it springs prevail (which I’m confident that we won’t), we all deserve the consequences natural selection will inflict upon us.
As well it may. At this very moment, a new flare-up of the Delta variant is occuring in the states with the lowest vaccination rates. What we’re experiencing now is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” If the consequences were restricted to them, one could argue that they would simply be the result of decisions the newly-infected had made for themselves. But some people are becoming infected because for one practical reason or another they can’t be vaccinated. And as long as Missouri, Mississippi, and the other hotbeds of resistence to vaccination remain, the virus will have a chance to mutate in their midst and produce new variants- variants against which the vaccines may no longer be effective. It is not an exaggeration to say that those who willfully refuse to be vaccinated are responsible for keeping the pandemic going not only in their own midst, but potentially elsewhere. They are putting us in danger of losing a golden opportunity to put COVID-19 behind us. They are not only endangering the lives of those in their midst who cannot be vaccinated. They are potentially also endangering the lives of those of us who have, but who can’t assume that Missouri and Mississippi and the other vaccine-resistent states will not be statewide Petrie dishes, breeding variants of COVID-19 against which the vaccines will be useless.
The rhetoric to the contrary, nobody is advocating compulsory vaccination. But it seems only reasonable to treat vaccination against COVID the same way we’ve historically treated vaccination against smallpox, polio, and other diseases. It’s not simply reasonable that unvaccinated people be prevented from participating in activities through which they might potentially spread the disease to others. “Vaccine passports” stand firmly in the mainstream of the way in which ours and other democratic societies have always dealt with situations like this.
It’s not merely the entire history of Western political theory and of constitutional law that tells us that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at the point of the next guy’s nose. It’s common sense. But common sense seems to have entirely vanished from a conservative movement increasingly dominated by the fruitcakes these days, and there seems no limit to the absurdities it can unabashedly embrace.
As “pro-life” as a MIRVed ICBM
Appropos of yesterday’s post on the incredibly bad logic behind the radical right’s anti-vax rhetoric, Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark had a piece today on the “depraved indifference” of #TeamVirus’s campaign of disinformation and sociopathic posturing in opposition to the efforts of the Biden administration to get us to herd immunity and end this pandemic once and for all by getting enough people vaccinated.
This all started because Donald Trump a) popped off about another lunatic conspiracy theory that struck his fancy and, of course, refused to back down when it was shown to be nonsense, as usual; and b) recognized the economic impact of common-sense public health measures to control the pandemic, realized that it would destroy the healthy economy that was the only real argument for re-electing him, and placed a greater value on his own re-election than on human life.
The willingness of such a great percentage of American Christians to show themselves to be hypocrites by casting aside the very “pro-life” values they used as an excuse to support Trump if that was the cost of getting him re-elected is one of the great scandals of church history. This is not to say, of course, that every pro-Trump Christian is a conscious hypocrite about the sanctity of innocent human life. A great many just got carried away with the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates both sides of the political divide these days, and failed to think the matter through.
But there it is. This issue is a perfect illustration of why I cannot be a Republican any more, and why I have a difficult time understanding how anybody with a conscience and the ability to reason can go along with #TeamVirus, now that it doesn’t even have the excuse of saving Donald Trump’s political hide anymore.
Tens of thousands of Americans are dead who would otherwise be alive because of this depraved, performative pretense that enabling the spread of a deadly virus is somehow a protection of “individual liberty.” One wonders how many unneccessary deaths will be necessary before people with an iota of ethical sensitivity wake up and smell the decomp.
Look. It doesn’t matter that COVID seems only to have a fatality rate of one percent. This is one of the most contageous viruses we’ve even had to deal with. Even with that comparatively low a fatality rate, it’s killed 600,000 Americans in a little over a year.
This isn’t rocket science. And it isn’t just a tragedy. It’s an ethical stain on a large percentage of the American people, and a cause of scandal for American Christianity,
One wonders how many more have to die.
The fallacy that’s driving #TeamVirus
One of the amazing things about the idiotic controversies surrounding lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and practically every other aspect of the pandemic is the degree to which the extreme right fails to understand the purpose of public health measures.
Let me be blunt: There is a difference between libertarianism and sociopathy. When people claim that compulsory lockdowns, mask-wearing, and so forth violate their individual rights, they are operating out of the erroneous and self-centered assumption that their purpose is to protect them. They point out that they’re capable of making their own decisions about the risks they take with their health. And if that were the issue, they would be right.
But it’s not the issue. Admittedly, the CDC, the WHO, and the public health establishment generally have failed miserably to communicate the fact that while masks, for example, do seem to provide protection for their wearers from contracting COVID-19 (while the pores are big enough to allow the virus to pass through, they are not big enough to let the droplets through which the virus is spread get through, and people who wore masks in public throughout the pandemic seem to have contracted the virus half as often as those who never wore them) that has never been their primary purpose. Remember back in the beginning of the pandemic, before we knew as much about the transmission of the virus as we know now and masks were not recommended by Dr. Fauci and others except for people who actually had been exposed to the virus? The purpose of masks is not primarily to protect their wearers. It’s to protect others with whom the wearers come into contact.
Nobody- literally nobody– knows for certain that they are not carriers of the virus, spreading it everywhere they go. A huge percentage of infectious carriers- perhaps most– are asymptomatic and don’t realize that they have the virus! And that is why we’ve all been encouraged to wear masks- not for our protection, but for the protection of others! There has never been any doubt that even paper masks are effective in preventing people from spreading the virus. And that is, and always has been, the point!
Lockdowns weren’t mainly intended to protect people from being exposed to the virus. Again, if they were, those who have opposed them on the grounds that they are capable of deciding what risks to take with their own health and that their individual rights were being violated by being forced to stay home would have a point. But they weren’t. Again, the purpose of lockdowns was primarily to prevent carriers- including carriers who might well not even know that they were carriers- from mixing with people who didn’t have the virus and giving it to them!
The rate at which people are getting vaccinated against COVID is lagging. There is worrisome evidence that it may be reaching its ceiling. The idea that both the government and private entities have both the right and the responsibility to require vaccinations against infectious diseases as a condition of participating in activities through which various viruses might be spread (including going to school and serving in the military) is both well-established and simple common sense. In a pandemic, there is an additional factor in play.
Obviously, there are a small number of people who for one reason or another- sometimes medical, sometimes logistical- cannot be vaccinated. They clearly are not to blame for circumstances beyond their control. But herd immunity- the percentage of the population that is immune to a virus at which the virus ceases to spread from person to person for lack of available new hosts- is somewhere between 70% and 90%. Nobody knows exactly where the critical percentage falls with COVID. But the virus will continue to spread until the percentage of the population who as either been vaccinated or has had COVID and recovered from it reaches that point.
A refusal to be vaccinated, again, is not a matter of individual freedom. It affects all of us, not just the person who isn’t vaccinated. It prevents us from reaching herd immunity and keeps the pandemic going. And the longer the virus is circulating, the more it will mutate. The available vaccines continue to be effective against the rapidly-spreading Delta variant of COVID, but to a lesser degree. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, is 90% effective in preventing people from becoming infected by other strains. But against the Delta variant, its effectiveness drops to 65%. At this point, the chances of a vaccinated person coming down with specifically the Delta variant remain small. But the longer it’s circulating, the greater the chances will be. Worse, the longer the virus continues to spread, the more it will mutate. It’s entirely possible that new variants may arise against which the vaccines are less effective.
The percentage of the population that has been vaccinated varies from state to state. States such as Missouri or Mississippi, for example, in which relatively low percentages of the population have been vaccinated, are breeding grounds for new variants. It’s not only the populations of those states who are endangered. It’s all of us. If a new variant that is resistant to the vaccine develops, say, in Missouri, it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to the states where the majority of people have been vaccinated. There is no question of individual freedom involved here. People who decline to be vaccinated are putting all of us in danger.
The situation is complicated, obviously, by people like former President Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the far right media, who continue to spread misinformation about the virus, the vaccines, and the danger. #TeamVirus is large and influential. Ignorance ceases to be a private concern when it endangers others. And the resistence to vaccination is driven by ignorance and misinformation, just as resistance to lockdowns and mask-wearing have been.
Freedom is never unlimited. To paraphrase a famous statement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, freedom of speech does not protect someone who falsely shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theater. John B. Finch once described a hypothetical conversation that might well have been about face masks or the refusal to be vaccinated:
“Is not this a free country?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have not I a right to swing my arm?”
“Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”
The right to exercise one’s personal freedom when one’s own safety is one thing. But there is no right to endanger other people.
There is no right to spread a deadly virus.
There has never been a question of prudent public health measures being a violation of individual rights simply because they restrict or mandate behavior that otherwise might be a matter of individual choice. The argument to that effect is simply silly. This is not a matter of freedom. For most of us, it’s a matter of personal responsibility.
It’s a matter of obligation. Nobody is saying that anyone should be forced to be vaccinated. But the government would be derelict in its responsibilities if it didn’t protect the rest of us by restricting the activites of those who refuse to be. And resistance to that premise isn’t libertarianism. It’s sociopathy.
#TeamVirus can believe what it wants to believe. But facts are facts, lies are lies, and #TeamHumanity has the right to protect itself from those who confuse individual liberty with selfish indifference to the consequences of their behavior for the rest of us.
THE ONION is eerily prophetic
It’s not often that The Onion accurately predicts a news story. But there’s a first time for everything.
The United States is literally sneaking out of Afghanistan in the middle of the night.. Our forces abandoned Bagham Air Force Base, a major hub of our operations in that country, under cover of darkness and without telling our Afghan allies that they were going to do it. They left behind huge caches of supplies and equipment, supposedly for the Afghans- who eventually found out that the Americans had left through the grapevine, shrugged, and moved in. But the Afghan army will have to make do with what the looters left for them.
The Biden administration’s Afghan policy seems to be identical to that of the Trump administration’s: get out of Dodge just as fast as our legs will carry us; do not pass go, do not collect $200. Our armed forces can’t be blamed, of course; they take orders from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But our latest abandonment of our allies- something that is becoming a regular part of American foreign policy, and understandably causing them to conclude that the U.S. can’t be relied upon- is in some respects making the fall of Saigon look like the Alamo by comparison.
At least in Vietnam our final withdrawal came because we had lost the war and the enemy was attacking our ally’s capital city. But in the case of Afghanistan, we’ve yawned, stretched our arms, said “I’m tired and I’m going home,” and are in the process of letting the enemy win. Few doubt that they will- and given Taliban gains since we began a withdrawal that is now 90% complete, it will probably be rather quickly.
True, we have been fighting this “forever war” for twenty years. True, it’s been very expensive. But it’s cost us fewer than three thousand lives. By comparison, Vietnam cost us 57,000.
Contrary to what many people have claimed down through the years, it was not the great North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Communist victories over both France and the United States, who was the source of the statement below. It was North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin, who made it in a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal. But it’s hard to miss their significance both for our involvement in Afghanistan and in the future:
Q: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
A: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”
Bui goes on to explain that given the roles dissent and protest play in democracies, they cannot win protracted wars. Even though Bui doesn’t say so, that isn’t necessarily the case when everyone can clearly see that their own immediate welfare and that of the nation are on the line. But when the war is on the other side of the globe, and it’s hard to see the immediate consequences of failing to prevail, when a war begins to drag on and on- even if, as in Afghanistan, casualties have been minimal- the citizens of democracies tire of them. And in the long run, democracies will never be able to summon the will to see a lengthly foreign war to a successful conclusion unless the nation itself would be put in immediate danger if it failed to do so.
That, ultimately, was the lesson of Vietnam. We can win short, decisive conflicts. But in a war like Vietnam or even one like Afghanistan, in which casualties have been light, it is a built-in weakness of countries in which the people finally call the shots that unless there are obvious and fairly immediate consequences to losing, democracies simply cannot and will not stay the course..
That is a fact of life history has taught us at a considerable cost in lives and treasure. Both Donald Trump-style isolationists and George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson-style internationalists should take it as a fundamental law of nature and govern their policies accordingly.
We forget that we went to war in Afghanistan originally because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Queda in Afghanistan. The war was enormously popular in the United States at the time, and jolly well should have been. We kicked the Taliban out. The trouble is that Afghanistan, like Iraq, is an ancient and relatively undeveloped region, rather than a nation in the modern sense. Like Vietnam, and like Iraq, it is essentially an artificial nation cobbled together by outsiders. We defeated the Taliban, and removed them from power. But as in Iraq, we then faced the dilemma of lacking any abiding sense of mutual identity or a generally recognized central authority to install in power in place of our defeated adversary. The “forever war” has been a struggle to prevent the Taliban- which, like the Viet Minh and its successors in Vietnam, was the only truly unified force capable of forming a stable government, from stepping into what amounted to a vaccum and seizing power again.
The rule of the Taliban- a misogynistic outfit of religious fanatics intent on ruling by strict Sharia law- was a nightmare for the people of Afghanistan. It is a nightmare into which they are about to be plunged once more.
An aside: If you haven’t seen the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, based on the book by George Crille III, I highly recommend it. It’s a funny but also an important film, somewhat fictionalized but preserving the essense of what actually happened when a lovable and rather blatantly corrupt congressman combined with a bizarre collection of marginal characters inside and outside the CIA to get the Mujahideen- the Afghans fighting the Russians- Stinger missles and other military support which they could use to repel the invaders. Afghanistan was a far different experience for the Russians than it was for us. It’s misleading to call it the “Russian Vietnam,” as some do; we lost 57,000 soldiers and sailors in Vietnam, whereas the Soviet Union lost only 15,000 (our own loses in Afghanistan total 2,376). But it was enough to convince the Kremlin that the war was unwinnable, and get them to pull out.
The movie ends with a sad postscript about how, having won the trust and friendship of the Afghan people, we squandered them by losing interest and forgetting about Afghanistan. The result was the Taliban coming to power. History, it seems, repeats itself. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if our interest in a stable Afghanistan that wasn’t going to be a playground for bad actors had continued. Perhaps the “forever war” might never have been fought at all.
Effective and empathetic foreign aid when possible, and covert operations to support our friends, or even short, decisive military encounters when they are necessary, can and should be undertaken when they’re in our interests, and in the interests of freedom and stability. But not twenty-year wars, even when they result in fewer than 3,000 casualties over that entire period.
How do you avoid quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we can keep the bad guys out of power only if we stay involved at a level we cannot sustain in the long run? First and foremost, you try to help avoid the circumstances in which they develop. But contrary to the paleocon/Trump/Buchanan/Paul isolationist instinct, we can’t simply shut ourselves within our own borders, behind the ramparts of two oceans, and cry “America First!” World War II proved how badly that works. Throughout history, there has always been a leading world power that has lent stability to world affairs. The Brits played that role for a long time. We are their successors. The alternative is a global power vacuum in which Hitlers arise. The days of “Fortress America” are far in the past. The world has become too small. We are too deeply effected, economically, culturally, and in many other ways by what happens on the otherside of the globe to curl up in a ball and hide.
And above all else, we can be mindful of our limitations. I’m not sure what the answer is when our military presence is or might be the only thing keeping tyrants and monsters from filling power vacuums on the other side of the world. But the Butterfly Effect is real in modern international affairs. It may be very indirectly, but we in the United States will be affected by the impending descent of Afghanistan back into the dark medieval night of Sharia law, misogyny and tyranny. And like it or not, history has cast us in the role the British played for so long, not necessarily as a world-bestriding empire but as a strong anchor for peace and order, a rallying point around which the nations can gather to protect the interests of peace and even civilization. 9/11 is a chilling reminder of what happens when we lose interest in what happens beyond our borders.
Multilateralism is part of the solution, to be sure. But then, our effort in Afghanistan has been multilateral; it’s been a NATO operation. And our NATO allies, too are democracies, subject to the short attention span of their voters.
I suppose the best we can do is to encourage enlightened people and movements non-militarily, and on a limited and even covert scale when military action must be taken, again unless it’s possible to bring overwhelming force to bear to bring about a clear, quick, decisive, limited, and well-defined outcome, as was the case in the First Gulf War.
We dare not run away from our responsibilities in the world because we cannot. The world will not let us. The fruit of any prolonged effort will be bitter indeed; as it is, the damage done to our posture in the world and our relationship with our allies by four years of Trump isolationism will probably take decades to repair. But there are limits, as a practical matter, to what even a democracy as mighty as ours can do. We need to learn those limits, stay within them, always keep a clear and limted goal in mind, and do the best we can. Reality is a harsh mistress, and we have no choice but to obey it. And in our misadventures around the world since the 50s, reality has spoken clearly, and keeps repeating itself, it seems.
We should not mishear it. We dare not respond to Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan by withdrawing from the world, or by failing what we can do to lead the world order in staving off chaos and disaster. If we won’t do it, China will- and the consequences won’t be pretty.
The Biden administration is doing its best to avoid a reprise of the disaster we experienced in the fall of Saigon. But there will be Afghans who have put their lives on the line to be our friends, and who will lose those lives because we have abandoned them. And that is a cause for deep shame.
We have lost only 2,367 lives in Afghanistan. Each of those lives is a universe for the friends and family of the casualties. But those are far fewer losses than we’ve experienced in previous wars. We are not leaving Afghanistan because the cost of staying would be too high. We are leaving, yes, because it seems unlikely given the nature of Afghanistan itself that we can finally prevail, unless perhaps we stay there for 50 or 75 or a hundred years. But fundamentally, we’re leaving because democracies can’t summon the political will to fight protracted wars unless they’re invaded, or in immediate danger of being invaded.
But leaving means that while no life lost in the defense of freedom and decency is ever spent in vain, those 2,367 lives will have been lost in a cause that failed. Perhaps if we’d paid more attention and done our nation-building in peacetime, the war would never have had to be fought and those men and women would still be alive. As it happened, we find ourselves in a situation in which final victory in Afghanistan is probably impossible. Yes, there is a case to be made for getting out before more lives are lost. But while on the whole I’m a supporter of the Biden administration, it ought to be a cause for shame that our withdrawal is not happening more thoughfully and deliberately, over a far longer period. It’s not the MRI’s and DVD’s and ordnance we’re leaving behind that bothers me.
It’s the people.
We hold these truths to be what?
Suzanne Garment has an interesting post in today’s American Purpose on what may be the central issue of our political life at this moment in history: whether the (supposedly) shared convictions upon which our nation has built can survive the current onslaught of authoritarianism from both the left and the right.
From the rigidity of politically correctness to the attempt to stifle academic freedom and limit the right to vote, it seems that we all believe in freedom for those who agree with us, but not for those who disagree. “Cancel culture” is a phenomeon on the right as well as the left, and it’s often impressed me that while the far left and the far right alike are filled with distain for the other’s attitude toward the standards of freedom and civility upon which our system depends, they resemble each other quite closely in their apparent conviction that those standards only apply when it’s convenient for “the good guys.”
A student activist violently disrupting a speech by a conservative on campus and the selectively conservative populist taking a swing at a protester at a Trump rally are nothing more or less than mirror images of one another. It’s striking how similar the rhetoric of MAGA-world and the fashionably progressive often can be. It almost seems as if Jesus had America at this moment in its history especially in mind when he spoke the words recorded in Matthew 7:1-5. And yet folks on both ends of the political spectrum quote that passage when criticizing those who disagree with them freely and with no apparent sense of irony.
One’s dedication to freedom of speech is best tested by one’s attitude toward the expression not of thoughts we agree with, or even with which we agree to disagree. The test is whether we’re willing to defend the freedom to express the very thoughts we find most repugnant. By that standard, our dedication to the values of the First Amendment these days doesn’t pass muster no matter which side of the spectrum we inhabit.
Can the Founders’ vision survive? Can our system? It’s hard to say. Voltaire never actually said, “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the experiment that began on July 4, 1776 can only survive if we as a people become considerably more willing to live by that principle.
Disapprobation of ugly ideas and of what we consider less than perfect rhetorical manners is one thing. There is nothing wrong with disapproving of what other people say. But except where a clear and present danger of violence or other great public harm exists, we belie our dedication to the principles we all claim to share when we try to suppress it.
Watersblogged 