Don't throw the baby out with the orange-tinted bathwater
George W. Bush, the architect of our 9/11 wars, is trying to tell us how to think and feel about the Afghanistan withdrawal.
AUGUST 10, 2021
Written by
W. James Antle III
As America’s longest war finally seemed to be inching toward a conclusion, one of its main architects briefly emerged from a comfortable Texas retirement to lament the fact.
“I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad and sad,” former President George W. Bush told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle when asked in an interview this summer about whether he believed U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan was a mistake.
The same could be said for Bush’s foreign policy. According to an estimate by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the forever wars launched under the 43rd president’s watch cost $6.4 trillion, led directly to the deaths of 801,000 people, and displaced another 21 million.
Iraq in particular inflamed the extremism it was launched to combat, left us at heightened risk of another disastrous war with Iran, and destabilized the Middle East in an attempt to disarm Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction it did not even possess. And in Afghanistan, should we join Bush in celebrating “how that society changed from the brutality of the Taliban,” or should we believe him when he says in the next breath that that country is 2,000 U.S. troops away from a dystopian nightmare?
Bush left office with a 34 percent job approval rating, according to Gallup, after briefly uniting an unfathomably high percentage of Americans behind him in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the next three presidents of both parties repudiated his approach to foreign policy and tried, with varying degrees of commitment and success, to disentangle America from the endless interventionism he set in motion.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/08/10/dont-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-orange-tinted-bathwater/
DO NOT RESUSCITATE.
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