COMMENTARY-Reports of generals testifying before Congress that Biden withdrew the military from Afghanistan faster than they had recommended seems to smell a lot like after-the-fact CYA and self-serving in the extreme.
After all, it’s in the generals’ best interest that they come out of any disengagement smelling like roses to better promote their own careers. Either remaining within the armed forces or cycling into better-paying jobs with military contractors, helping their new employers rack up huge sales for overpriced material to sell to foreign and domestic plutocracies.
And yes, that is domestic. You thought you were living in a democracy?
Well, who do you think pays for those Congressmen and women and Senators to get elected?
The American war machine spreads its largesse far and wide, to every Congressional District in the nation. And as we’ve seen, too many of our elected officials pay their sponsors back in full by voting for further Pentagon budget bloat.
So, after that brief word on their sponsors, the generals are now blaming Biden for having the guts to do what Georgie Shrub didn’t have the cojones to do years ago just because 13 service members died?
Uh, didn’t those guys volunteer? Didn’t they know that they were going to fight an illegal war in a foreign country where the United States was uninvited (except for the puppet government they put in place) and unwanted?
Didn’t they realize that going to war means the possibility of getting killed?
How many more Americans would have died if the generals had stayed the course? Would they then be counselling Congress that the president should have taken their advice and pulled American forces out earlier?
Sure as shootin’, the Pentagon would have laid out a host of scenarios so that their collective asses could remain well-covered.
But what about U.S. “retaliation” for the men who died?
What about the ten members of one family that a drone operated by the U.S. military murdered in Kabul?
Read their names and weep:
Hayat Ahmadi, age 2
Malika Ahmadi, age 3
Somaya Ahmadi, age 3
Benyamin Ahmadi, age 6
Arwin Ahmadi, age 7
Farzad Ahmadi, age 10
Faisal Ahmadi, age 16
Zamir Ahmadi, age 20
Naser Ahmadi, age 30
Zemari Ahmadi, age 43
I do not weep for the Pentagon or the war-obsessed American generals.
I weep for the people of the United States and the people of Afghanistan.
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
