Eric Boehlert: Bush doomed Afghanistan when he invaded Iraq; pro-war press won't say so

[babylonsister]

Bush doomed Afghanistan when he invaded Iraq; pro-war press won’t say so
Never admitting mistakes
Eric Boehlert
2 hr ago


snip//

You cannot discuss the rise of the Taliban in 2021 without talking about the U.S.’s doomed Iraq War in 2003. But the press today wants to try.

It’s another example of how pro-Iraq War cheerleaders in the media not only have paid no price for being spectacularly wrong, but they’re still allowed to dictate the parameters of our foreign policy discussion.

“For those of us who remember well how the mainstream media enthusiasm for war helped fuel not just this ill-advised war in Afghanistan twenty years ago, but the even bigger debacle in Iraq, the current media narrative is both bewildering and exhausting,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon. “This larger media outrage over the withdrawal is a dark reminder of the pro-war bias in the press that helped create this mess in the first place: luring the American public into thinking a war in Afghanistan could ever end in any other way.”

It’s especially jarring to see the Washington Post and the New York Times lead the way this week with finger-pointing Afghanistan coverage, considering those two outlets played essential roles in supporting the Iraq invasion, which became a turning point for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

more...

https://pressrun.media/p/bush-doomed-afghanistan-when-he-invaded

[CrispyQ]

13. Five or so years ago, there was an online map where you could see what kind of military equipment

your community has. It was quite revealing & shocking.

[Ferrets are Cool]

17. And don't forget the amount of money that the Military Industrial Complex

had the opportunity to earn from a war in Iraq. Almost a MILLION civilians murdered for oil and the size of a dick.

[cstanleytech]

21. Not to mention the money that the MIC then funneled to varies Republican politicians as payment

for services given in varies forms.
Forms of payment like money for speaking engagements, money funneled to PACs to support them in elections, money given directly to their campaigns before elections and job offers after they left office.
Of course some of this could have been stopped but the Supreme Courts conservative judges have given their complete and utter support to such corruption.

[RVN VET71]

23. And Bush/Cheney killed more Americans than did Osama bin Laden

That is something I will never forgive or forget. The body count of American military personnel in Iraq alone exceeded the 3,000 that bin Laden murdered. I think the combined Afghan-Iraq body count was above 5,000.

And Cheney got an $800,000,000 windfall for his company, Halliburton, in a non-compete contract -- and many millions more in other sub contracts in Iraq. The son of a bitch got paid for his new found wealth in the blood of American troops.

But the media! They totally failed, absolutely, for ever and all time, failed to do their goddam jobs. While 100s of thousands of people protested in Europe, our media was tittering over moron waiters in New York City pouring French wine down the sewer for the cameras. The asshole Republicans -- while our sons and daughters were unnecessarily in harms way, getting killed, wounded, and traumatized by the violence of an illegal war -- showed their “patriotism” by renaming French Fries. And the blind support of republicans and many, many Democrats for the carnage Bush/Cheney unleashed in Iraq -- leaving Afghanistan hanging in warfare-limbo while they did so -- in no way hurt their donor base. Without NPR, I would not have known about the overseas protests against the war. Without NPR I would not have known that the inspectors sent to Iraq by the U.N. had determined, without any doubt, that Hussein had no nuclear program, that he had no weapons of mass destruction. And all it took was a freaking IQ in triple digits to know that Hussein and bin-Laden were, if anything, bitterly in opposition to each other in religion, in politics, in military goals. But our vaunted and excruciatingly overpaid media was focused on how cool were our weapons, and how powerful our military, and how dirty and evil were Husseins troops.

Sorry for this rant. I was so furious at the media for sucking up to Cheney/Bush by ignoring evidence and heaping praise on the savage bastards who destroyed Iraq at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, that I hit the roof when I noticed today the same sort of lock-step action by them now, this time in the attacks made on President Biden for getting us out of the mess that was started by a Republican Administration.

[RVN VET71]

27. And never forget that Blackwater was founded and run by Devos' brother, former Navy Seal

Eric Prince, a supporter of TFG. While sister Betsy was busy undermining public education through America, her brother was engaged in secret meetings with the Russians in an effort to establish a secret back-channel between Putin and TFG. I won’t call him an out and out fascist but . . .nah, I will call him an out and out fascist.

[Ferrets are Cool]

30. The media has failed time and time again. I don't see it changing.

[UpInArms]

2. They were sooo excited to show 10,000 bombs being dropped on Baghdad

It was horrifying

[Wounded Bear]

3. They lost Afghan war when the mission morphed from "Get bin Laden" to nation building

. Invading Iraq didn't help by turning Afghanistan into a sideshow, but the main reason we lost in Afghanistan was because the secondary mission of nation building was doomed from the start.

Not to mention, expecting the Bush Cabal to build a non-corrupt government was a reach of cosmic proportions.

[stopdiggin]

25. yeah. yet another explanation

on how we LOST Afghanistan. Without a nickels worth of consideration of what a WIN would have taken. I think it's pretty clear - after 20 years - that that goal was never within our reach. And 'explanations' that are still trying to skirt around that simple fact ... Are really kind of a waste of words and energy.

It's the media, it's Bush/Cheney, it's the military/industrial -- and blah, blah, blah.

[Johnny2X2X]

4. I've been saying this for almost 20 years

We went into Afghanistan with 15,000 troops, there were generals asking for 100,000. But Bush couldn't afford that many because he was always gearing up for a full Iraq invasion. So he listened to other "experts" who said a smaller force could get the job done.

Remember, Al Qaeda escaped to the mountains, maybe that wouldn't have happened if we have 7 times the troops and hardware to block their escape.

My uneducated thought is that with 100-120,000 troops we could have crushed Al Qaeda in weeks and prevented their escape and then gotten out in months. And also don't forget, the Taliban was not considered an enemy before 2001, we provided them with a ton in aid and considered them a legitimate government to deal with. It was Bush who said, "we're going to treat those who harbor the terrorists as if they're terrorists too." Well the Taliban wasn't really terrorists, just a brutal and sexist fundamentalist Islam society.

[sboatcar]

9. Didn't the soviets go in with 100k+ troops and lose too?

Honestly, I think there was no 'win' in this. Whenever we left the country was bound to fall back to whichever tribe had the most military. Afghanistan is a mostly ungoverned country and because of that there's no way to try to govern it from outside.

[Johnny2X2X]

10. We didn't have a defined mission

We could have won if we had a clear mission to crush Al Qaeda and then get out. The Taliban, who we already were dealing with and providing aid to could have stayed in power with some more pressure from us to institute reforms and guarantee no terror cells were allowed to be there. Instead we decided we wanted a puppet government there and spent $2 Trillion propping one up.

Just a terrible change, we went from crushing a terrorist cell to a multi decade nation building effort.

[MarcA]

19. The "mission" was to give $$$ to the MIC and nation-building friends. n/t

[maxsolomon]

15. We were saying it on DU in 2002: Bush's strategy was shit.

The US farmed the ground fighting at Tora Bora out to Militiamen who went back home for the weekend, while we dropped bombs from above. And then OBL escaped.

[dalton99a]

5. The Taliban is far better equipped now, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers

[Johnny2X2X]

16. Not entirely

We actually took payment from Afghanistan for much of the arms we gave them, and the high tech stuff is stuff they will not have the ability to use or maintain without our support.

[Voltaire2]

6. Bush doomed Afghanistan when he invaded Afghanistan

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

7. Thank you

I've been saying that ever since we went into Iraq.

Remember Bush's response when asked about Bin Laden after the Iraq invasion? "Oh I don't think about him anymore."

[The Magistrate]

8. He Is Right, Ma'am

Had we kept up there, rather than shifted focus to Iraq, a favorable outcome was certainly possible.

[bucolic_frolic]

11. pro-war press

Corporations all dependent on cash flow. Nothing makes a fast economy like war. They all stick together.

[Hotler]

12. This should be hung around the necks of the NECONs, BUsh, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfield,

Bolton, Bill Kristol, etc. Remember their outline for the middle East, "Project For A New American Century" Take control of seven mid-east countries in five years. They wrote that in order to get the American people to go along with the invasion they needed a Pearl Harbor type event. This was before 9/11.

[peppertree]

14. +1

People often forget how all this really started.

Talk about a big lie.

[MarcA]

20. +1000 n/t

[Warpy]

18. Draining resources for Cheney's oil war didn't help, that's for sure,

although I doubt there's much we could have done there to get the Afghan majority to abandon their culture. That just wasn't going to happen. Religious nuts were always coming back.

[stopdiggin]

26. A tribal society, that had no interest

in a modern western state - had absolutely no trust or faith (or really any belief) in their own central government - and even less incentive or faith to invest in a 'system' brought to them by an occupying western power.

The Afghans will shed themselves of militant fundamentalist Islam - when it is their choice to do so.

Speaking in terms of LOSING Afghanistan - means we still have not come to terms with the fact that it wasn't ours to win.

[Martin68]

31. I don't think the US could have created a sustainable democracy in Afghanistan in any case. But

Iraq is a different story. We had absolutely no reason to invade Iraq: UN were inspectors free to inspect any facility in Iraq, and Bush kicked them out to invade the country. He didn't want evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Cheney et al were whispering in his ear that he could create a "reformed" Middle East of democratic nations supporting Israel's right to exist and solving the "Middle East problem" in one powerful stroke of pure genius.

[krkaufman]

32. Nov. 21, 2001

Bush doomed Afghanistan before we'd even gotten started, when he ordered Rumsfeld, on Nov. 21, 2001, to deliver plans for invading Iraq. We then failed to dedicate the forces needed to lead the hunt for bin Laden and he was allowed to escape from Tora Bora a few weeks later. (Obviously, capturing bin Laden would have deflated public support for more wars.)

[AntiFascist]

33. The neocons had even bigger plans for attacking the Middle East...

where the next step was always to be the invasion of Iran and taking control of oil fields and gas pipelines.

Biden knows that we need to start using our funds to fix our infrastructure and reverse climate change, including the world's dependence on fossil fuels.