Quite a week in the history of American empire. I listened to the commentary unfold this week as the 40-year war in Afghanistan drew to a close and I was reminded of, well, 40 years ago. Around that time I read a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky unwrapping the reams of commentary that followed the end of another seemingly endless American war, the one in Vietnam. A lot of what he was writing about is just as true today as it was in the mid to late 1970s.
The collection was called Towards a New Cold War and I should probably re-read it. I suspect it would prove a useful guide to the dreck I am hearing on a daily basis from the mainstream media – specifically, in my case, from the panel on Morning Joe. That show is as close to the center of the imperial enterprise as any media property. They should rename it “The Blob Speaks” or something along those lines.
Bungling efforts to do good
One of the narratives that emerged from the disaster that was the Vietnam War was the myth of good intentions. It went something like this: we entered the conflict intending to save the Vietnamese, then things went wrong. Articulate opinion was making this case back in the mid to late seventies, and we are hearing their modern counterparts doing the same today with regard to Afghanistan.
I have seen minor variations on this theme. The most popular one, as far as I can tell, is the argument that we shouldn’t have tried to remake Afghanistan in our own image. In other words, the Afghans are too corrupt, ignorant, backward, etc., to appreciate our way of life, our mode of governance, etc. Our efforts to impose our innate goodness on them amounted to hubris, albeit a very benign variety of that vice. Ungrateful wretches!
Assessing the costs
Another subject of post-Vietnam reflection was the notion that the destruction was mutual. President Carter even framed Vietnam in those terms. As someone who lived through the war years, I must admit that I don’t recall the non-existent Vietnamese air force dropping napalm on my neighborhood or flattening my town with high explosives. Maybe I slept through it.
While I don’t want to minimize the suffering of our Afghanistan War vets – far from it – there’s no question but that Afghans bore the overwhelming brunt of the suffering through this conflict. They died in the hundreds of thousands, their country torn to pieces. We lost a lot of people, spent a lot of money, but have not felt the impacts of this war as much as Afghan families.
We care, damn it!
Then, of course, there’s the virtue signalling. Once the United States was out of Vietnam, we became obsessed with the fate of the people of Indochina. As people fled the destroyed remains of Vietnamese society, our opinion-makers used that as a cudgel against the newly unified government of Vietnam.
While the Morning Joe couch and other commentators now express concern for Afghan refugees, they said very little about Afghans over the past twenty years. The fact is, millions of Afghans have been displaced by this war, both internally and in neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan and Iran, since 2001. Want to help Afghan refugees? Look there first. And while you’re at it, consider helping refugees from our other wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, for instance.
I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that I am glad we are ending this useless war. No more posts like the ten-year anniversary piece I did a decade ago, right? Let’s hope not.
luv u,
jp
