Lordre: neoconservatism

Showing posts with label neoconservatism. Show all posts

Will "Ukraine fatigue" become Ukraine defeat?

Far from defending its sovereignty and independence, since February 2022, Ukraine has become an empty shell dependent on handouts from Western countries.

Ukrainian government officials receive their salaries from the US government. Under Russian strikes, the country has lost its military industry (once a key strength and source of pride for Ukraine), and is entirely dependent on pleading for US and NATO supplies now.

The war to start all wars

From the above facts, it should be clear by now that the war is not being fought to protect Ukraine's independence and sovereignty. The war is being fought to establish Ukraine's Western alignment and the positioning of Western weapons on its territory. NATO wants Ukraine. The Ukrainian government, for its part, is more and more under the spell of American neoconservatives who see no use for diplomacy in international relations and think the US should rule the world.

Sanctions have failed

Unfortunately for NATO, the biggest part of its strategy has backfired. As of now, international sanctions on Russia have failed. Vladimir Putin's government is going strong, with ample popular support for his military campaign, whereas Western regimes are faltering and unable to find a convenient exit strategy from what is becoming a new long-term foreign policy disaster following their defeat in Afghanistan.

Your sacrifices for Ukraine

It is now clear that Western efforts to help Ukraine are the source of the cost of living crisis, having resulted in higher food and petrol costs. More accurately, this cost of living crisis is directly caused by our sanctions on Russia.

Rather than create a case for removing the sanctions on Russia, ministers (and also the "opposition") are instead trying to justify the cost of living crisis and lecture the public by saying to us that we want to sacrifice our money and welfare willingly for Ukraine (some sort of mind trick?) They are then proceeding to do this for us, without offering us any choice in the matter anyway. We have two major parties in Parliament who both want to do this.

False promises

Politicians have also managed to hoodwink their constituents into thinking this connection between our failing effort to save Ukraine and the agonising cost of living crisis doesn't matter or should be tolerated because there will be ways to mitigate the cost of living crisis. However, nobody actually has a plan to make this work.

Ukraine tires

Boris Johnson recently warned of "Ukraine fatigue", something also predicted at this blog, which deliberately uses the same language used with regard to public frustration with the Covid-19 pandemic and the policies associated with it. This is an appropriate term to use, being the subject of a post already at this blog.

As established earlier, Ukraine depends on us. However, that lifeline keeping Ukraine fighting is a flimsy thread that can suddenly snap once our people here in places like Britain get bored with the repetitive messaging and flag-waving. Increasingly, there is a recognition that time is on Russia's side, producing calls either for the West to escalate aggressively or tell Ukraine to surrender territory before the outcome looks too much like a Russian victory. "Ukraine fatigue" is not just inconvenient to Ukraine, it is fatal.

Ukraine faces South Vietnam's fate

Once the war is too old and intractable for people to be interested in maintaining it in the West, Western support for Ukraine will evaporate as quickly as Western support for South Vietnam or the Ghani regime in Afghanistan did. Both of them were buoyed by similar Western delusions and propaganda claiming they were feisty independent nations, when they were actually cardboard cut-outs sponsored by the US. Any suggestion that the Russians will give up first is absurd, since Ukraine's territory is in their heartland and is their business, on an indefinite basis. The West has once again propped up a regime in a region where it does not have the will to win, and the other side does.

Neoconservatives turn America into all the things it always tried to condemn in other nations - warmongers, tyrants, torturers and enemies of freedom. Guilty of launching the Iraq War, torture programs, and mass surveillance against their own people, there is seemingly no limit to what they might try to do.

Some of these traits may be shared simply by extremists on either side of the political spectrum, but any prominent person or intellectual adopting the below views is a neoconservative. They are a neoconservative because they have the views exclusive to the neoconservative ideology, complete with its absolutistic, utopistic bloodlust.

#1 Condemning “appeasement” regularly

They like to say “appeasement” frequently when describing supposedly weak responses to international conflicts, using it with regard to virtually every war, especially wars their country was already unethically involved in.

#2 Blaming the world's problems on a single “dictator”

They keep pointing to a single person as the public enemy at all times (usually a perceived authoritarian figure e.g., Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Bill Clinton, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin). They portray all these people almost like some reincarnating bogeyman, and the extent of their political theory is that killing or impeaching this bogeyman over and over again will save the world. They claim that political events surrounding this dictator have moral clarity and are like a movie, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end at which this “villain” is killed or defeated, by them or some hero figure, usually an American.

#3 Saying “can”, “should”, and “must” too often

Usually this is preceded by the word “America” or “we” as shorthand for the nation, or Western military alliances like NATO and US or Coalition military forces, usually accompanied by the idea that these forces are invincible in war and are only held back by weak liberals. They might personally have the physical prowess of a potato resting on a couch, but believe that their suggestions about sending soldiers into combat makes them akin to a cape-wearing hero. They also might make statements that America would have won or even did win in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but was betrayed by liberals (very similar to the “stabbed in the back” Nazi myth about World War One).

#4 Hating Kissinger and Carter

They think Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, is a coward for not sharing their simplistic good-vs-evil view of international affairs and conflicts. They might also really hate Jimmy Carter, seeing his administration as the weakest in American history. They might think America was later redeemed by the hero Ronald Reagan, seen by them as a superhero who single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union. They hold the false belief that the Cold War was not a complicated affair ended by agreements, and instead insist it was simple battle between good and evil, believing that the good side (the West) won this “war”, and Russia surrendered and gave up its security (a key cause of the current Ukraine war).

#5 Advocating atrocities

They are willing to go on television and just advocate killing a civilian, even if this isn't their job, and think this is socially acceptable. They might think other members of their own society or fellow citizens should be censored, detained, tortured or killed for disagreeing with them on issues such as the above, presenting their own view as an unambiguously moral or factually correct default position rather than realising they are bloodthirsty fanatics for an ideology. They have no moral problems with torturing your body and killing your entire family if they judged you to be an impediment to their ideology (yet another trait they share with Nazis).

#6 Having protagonist syndrome

Another thing all neocons have in common is that their ideas are rooted in entertainment rather than reality. Neocons have Hollywood brains that love simplicity, villains, heroes, and a lot of violence against whoever they decided is bad (even if it later becomes clear that they are not bad). To quote someone taking the neocon path, “I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo”.

Pakistanis may be forced to choose between accepting the imported government that was imposed by the removal of PM Imran Khan, or setting a course into destabilisation as the West’s agents and local traitors use any trick to keep control.

Some commentators such as George Galloway (tweet deleted but I linked it when it was still live, anyway) seemed to suggest there could be some sort of conflict breaking out between the people and the imported government of Shehbaz Sharif. The demand of everyone concerned is just that there should be an election soon, rather than an acute political conflict, but how likely is a peaceful and valid election to happen in a country just recently subjected to US-led regime-change? It seems more likely that protesters would have to fight, just for this modest demand to be met. The question then is, is it really worth it?

State effective at suppressing the people

One must consider that any organised aspect of mass disobedience is always suppressed quickly if the state takes serious action to stop it (this applies in any country). The people themselves are never a sufficient force for regime change (or in this case, restoration), which is only ever orchestrated successfully by people with foreign backing or substantial state-like powers, regardless of how much support they have among everyday citizens.

When people, such as Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States, believe too much in American national founding myths and consequently think that popular disaffection alone can result in regime change, they are invariably disappointed. Real regime change, or even a successful movement, is coordinated by organised actors, whether for good or evil ends.

It is clear that the Shehbaz Sharif government (likely with the blessing of the Democrat-controlled White House) is okay with treating Imran Khan supporters in a repressive way via arrests, much the way Trump's supporters were treated after the Capitol Attack.

Even the most unpopular regimes are able to maintain their grip on power, only really losing it if they cannot maintain the living standards, food supply and necessities that keep the people indebted to their power.

If it were to happen, the only likely regime change or even guarantee of prompt elections in Pakistan would have to probably come from the intervention of the Pakistani Army, who are accused anyway of playing a big role in removing Imran Khan in the first place. And a scenario of the Army or security forces mutinying, even to side with the people, is dangerous, especially considering the possible foreign involvement of the US and its ability to sponsor violence if it does not like such a change of power.

First and foremost, the top concern should be that people of Pakistan should stay safe, even if it results in a puppet regime. It is a difficult moral choice between being a subservient nation for the sake of order and safety, or a defiant nation that could risk chaos and strife.

All stability is precious

Pakistan is by no means exceptionally vulnerable or contemptible, even as a US puppet. Britain is also not its own master, compelled by what are arguably pro-American and pro-European traitors into ignoring the national will or treating it with disdain, as seen with Brexit. It seems to be in our character that we make the choice for stability rather than for confrontation on an insurmountable issue, because people are just more worried about anarchy than injustice, and we have always been this way.

What marks good people apart from the kind of psychopathic warmongers who drive US foreign policy plotters and their coups is the view that stability is a precious oasis in a chaotic world. Order is invaluable to the lives of the vast majority of people, however suffocating the status quo may be to an idealist. US warmongers and Neocons cannot hold such a view, because their distorted morals hold that mass death and misery on any scale and for any duration are justifiable to satisfy their often crazed and anarchistic political demands (which are often based on propaganda and fakes anyway). They are uniquely evil among sentient beings for this reason (the only other faction like this being ISIS, which many Neocons were apologists for in Syria). Responsible players need not be like them, and should instead opt for stability and reconciliation even when their political wishes are not quite met.

Uprisings and acute political conflicts are tolerable only if the alternative is known to be worse. If the imported government in Pakistan creates intolerable conditions for the nation because it places Western masters over the people, then the time is right that the people and state must take risks to save themselves. Until then, everything should just be subjected to a risk-benefit assessment, with any sort of dramatic regime change or restoration being understood to be a dangerous course.

Former president George W. Bush accidentally stated the truth about his 2003 invasion of Iraq, referring to it as unjustified and brutal.

Rather than taking the chance to suggest that the American regime has changed since its aggression in 2003 (like Bush's fellow Iraq-era war criminal Antony Blinken did), media stories were instead trying to cover for Bush and convince us that this old war was in fact justified. This makes sense, because the same journalistic outlets helped to cause that war, so of course they have a reason to be apologists for the aggression.

Iraq and Ukraine wars incomparable

The Iraq War was much more brutal and lethal than the war in Ukraine, with no concern for mass civilian casualties during US attacks. In the opening days of the US attack on Iraq, American troops murdered far more people than their Russian counterparts did in the same length of time in their attack against Ukraine’s embattled regime.

The Iraq War is also obviously far harder to justify, waged far away from US shores (in contrast to the Russian intervention in the neighbouring state) and against a country that posed no threat, was at peace, and was receiving no foreign instruction and backing to a wage war (contrast Iraq with Ukraine, which was getting huge weapons deliveries specifically to kill Russian troops before the Russian attack).

It would have been a mistake if Bush had said that the Iraq and Ukraine wars are similarly brutal and unjustified. US actions in Iraq were far more brutal and difficult to justify than Russian actions in Ukraine. Again, Iraq was at peace and posed no imminent threat to the US. Ukraine was already at war with local rebels and was being equipped, to loud applause, specifically to pose a threat to Russian troops.

American superiority?

The Iraq invasion is only more justified than the Ukraine invasion if you subscribe to the idea that the US is simply better than other countries, being the indispensable country and thus more morally entitled to take direct action to defend its security than Russia. The people subscribing to this idea think it is great if the US attacks potential small threats thousands of miles away, but also believe Russia must never be allowed to use its military to penetrate across the border to address a far more substantial threat. Even more ridiculously, the proponents also think Russian leaders should base Russian foreign policy on this same idea: the US is indispensable and must never have its security undermined, whereas Russia is dispensable and it is okay for Russians to perish. Any suggestion by any nation that it might care about its own security more than the United States is deplored by the United States, which demands fawning and adoration by the whole world.

The preposterous idea described above is “American exceptionalism”, as famously affirmed by Barack Obama in a West Point speech. There, he said “The United States is the one indispensable nation”.

Others know this dispensable point of view simply as chauvinism and the unexceptional, historically unimaginative craving of each a powerful Western country to gain world domination. The same view was shared by Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Germany, and now the United States. In the case of America, the asserted moral clarity (that America is a "force for good") turns mere exceptionalism into neoconservatism, which became guilty of war crimes, lies, torture and cancer-spreading weapons.

Bush’s gaffe and the media’s attempts to cover for him reveal the vacuous, fake morality governing all the outraged Western responses to the war in Ukraine. The people wanting to punish Russia are not really unnerved by scenes of death or the inhumanity of any atrocity, as they themselves are responsible for worse crimes and continue to give justifications for those acts.

Rand Paul delaying military aid to the central government of the Ukraine, in the hope Americans can get better assurances about how their money is being spent, was unquestionably a good thing.

One thing the media is getting right is that Americans need to think more about their country’s foreign policy, and they need to think more about how it affects them. Unfortunately, the majority of opinions being presented amount to a simplistic pro-Ukraine messaging campaign, undoubtedly also sponsored by the US government.

Costs of interventionism

Previous adventurism and foreign entanglements were at very little cost to Americans, compared to the possible fallout over the Ukraine. Biden himself warned of pain when it comes to Americans affording gas, connecting it with the conflict he wants to intensify in the Ukraine.

There is ample reason to think the war in the Ukraine will be lost by the West, however long it takes. The two-decade War in Afghanistan was more likely to succeed than a war on the Russian steppes of the Ukraine, where Russia is highly invested and sufficient millions of ethnic Russians reside, enough to justify not just a temporary Russian presence but a permanent one, even with great loss of life.

No hope of Western glory

The Ukraine conflict offers no hope of Western victory and expansion, just like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Revelling in Russian soldiers dying, which has been the case anyway for local Russian civilians in the Donbass since 2014, won’t change the connection of these people to a land they long possessed and have the ability to at least control a great deal of. For us to think killing Russians is the answer to the West's problem here is nothing more than a manifestation of violent urges to compensate for the Western flight from Afghanistan, and no more than a continuation of killing the Taliban, which turned out to be pointless. In the end, the land will always be possessed by the people who live and die on that land, and not by those who want to brag about how many people they killed there, which is all the US does in every conflict it loses.

Conflict with Russia exposes countries to potential famine, as Biden blamed food shortages on Russia. Western countries are not immune to this problem, and the West could be swamped with the emaciated fleeing migrants from other countries. Given that global warming can affect crop yields, we could end up facing famines in our own countries, the UK and US, if the war lasts a long time and the Russians are willing to endure it for decades.

Notice the unelected parasites of US policy

For the first time in recent history, foreign policy issues seriously affect Americans, such that their welfare may depend on identifying and removing the long-term US foreign policy strategists guiding successive administrations into failed wars. Unfortunately, there is no clear means to achieve this. The revolving door between so-called "journalism" and foreign policy advisory roles exposes that the junta of undemocratic maggots stays in control, no matter what administration replaces the last, and these maggots never leave.

Look at Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Ned Price, as a few examples of varied importance. While sharing the same murderous neoconservative glare, responsible for thousands of deaths in failed wars in the Middle East, each such person has never stood for election, instead cowering from the people and worming their way around them, and yet still shaping policy and laying out the only options available to the administration. The American people will need special tweezers or an iron fist to remove these unelected parasites, or their ideas will be responsible for creating unmanageable costs for citizens.

Pope Francis claimed that NATO "barking" at Russia’s frontier may be responsible for the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This will have led to rage from many, who believe that the only acceptable position on Ukraine is a one-sided condemnation of Russia.

Pope doesn't respect Western foreign policy

Interestingly, the Pope had previously seemed to align with NATO and Ukraine by kissing a Ukrainian flag. In reality, he was just trying to encourage peace, not giving his blessing to Ukraine's savage interethnic conflict of 2014 to present, to which Russia merely introduced itself as an apparently unwelcome belligerent in 2022.

While it may seem obvious that the Catholic Church is a Western organisation with commitments to a Western-led international order, shared by the supporters of NATO, this is not true. Pope Francis is not the Pope of white people, liberals or Westerners, but of the people in the slums of Argentina, whose views he is more likely to be receptive to.

Vatican staying above the fray

The Pope was trying to be neutral and not be seen as a participant in the conflict, as taking a side could undermine his international standing. We should bear in mind that the majority of practicing Catholics reside in the Southern Hemisphere, in developing countries, outside the exclusive zone of NATO political and military propaganda monopoly. For the Pope to align himself with NATO, against the better judgment of many Catholics, would be potentially damaging to the authority and credibility of the Vatican rather than any help to NATO.

At the same time, the Pope does not want to be seen as allying with Russia, since Russian troop presence in Ukraine is unauthorised by the United Nations. Russia violated the letter of the UN Charter by sending troops into Ukraine, albeit only as seriously as Turkey and the US are violating the Charter in Syria and hardly warranting the disproportionate, Russophobic Western response.

The Pope cannot be seen as an aggressive proponent of one side or the other, in a conflict in which Russia may expand with small territorial acquisitions and NATO is fully loyal to the bloody neoconservative dream of a new American century.

Pope Francis is right

The Pope is correct to accuse NATO of provoking the evil it supposedly wants to deliver us from. NATO is desperate to preserve itself as an organisation, therefore encouraging adversaries to be more aggressive so that people will be scared into believing they need NATO. NATO creates disaster by insensitively ignoring the security concerns of other powers, encroaching on them, declaring them ideological enemies, and declaring any subsequent response to be unprovoked and proof that the target began acting strangely.

NATO is worse than a barking dog. It yearns to create the threats it will shield us from. If neoconservative hawks did not have Russian and Chinese villains to talk about, they would only cook up some other villain. They might restart their so-called war on terror, combing the world again for the next imaginary or fantasy threat we can imagine to be menacing the fragile West.

Former Bolivian president Evo Morales described NATO as something that should be eliminated, linking the alliance to imperialistic wars and the plundering of natural resources.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is popular, out of habit, among the more cohesive mass of simpletons whose votes settle the outcomes of elections in countries such as my own Great Britain. However, in fact, the US-led bloc is detrimental to the national interests of any country whose obligations lie elsewhere abroad and not in propping up America-centric strategies.

The Bushism and Neoconservatism of NATO

An increasingly immature and intellectually bankrupt attitude is guiding Western foreign policy, with leaders seemingly less and less familiar with the normal behaviour expected in diplomacy. There seems to be absolutely no appreciation of the complexity of other countries' foreign policy, as Western governments think in black and white terms. You are with them, or you are against them.

You are either supporting democracy, in which case you support all countries joining NATO or being forced to comply with the US government's policies (what Pakistan's Imran Khan called being their slaves), or you are siding with the dictators and the terrorists. One must collude with and enchain their nation to the American master, or they are to be condemned and their legitimacy somehow questioned.

The reign of the neoconservatives, who gave rise to George W. Bush's maxim, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists", overrides all Western foreign policy thought, rather than being rejected as it should have been when it led to the terrorist blowback problems in Afghanistan and Iraq. The NATO powers are increasingly obsessed by the idea that everyone must join them, and that there can be no neutrality anymore. Even Switzerland seems to have somehow been pressured into aborting its neutral status.

What is happening now poses an existential threat to the Global South. The US will demand that they all join NATO, whether officially or unofficially, aligning with the West. Those who do not ally with them will be deemed to be authoritarian despots - a qualification that is met solely if you do not support American military deployment on your territory.

The NATO of the South

The 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) are all perpetual candidates for violent regime-change and chaos, as the US supported in Ukraine in 2014 in an action that ultimately led to the current conflict underway in that country. What the assassinated former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi called a "NATO of the South" was and is a necessity, because the non-aligned countries remain the most vulnerable to wars of aggression and regime-change attempts by the West.

Both Muammar Gaddafi and Hugo Chavez, the latter also being an advocate of South-South cooperation and mutual defence, perished under conditions that suggest the United States gave the orders for their deaths. If true, it is because, even without Russia and China, a cooperative Global South represents a potentially insurmountable military obstacle to the Western imperialism and parasitism against the sovereign natural resources of the colonised nations.

Yes, without being able to, metaphorically, suck the blood of the people of the Global South, the Global North and NATO are deprived of the raw materials that provide for their supreme military strength. They cannot have these countries outside their control and, in future, even nonalignment and pacifism in the oppressed South will be increasingly seen by NATO as hostile as the Western powers seek to enslave them as servants.

Pacifism is not the way. A good course for non-aligned countries is to build an intimidating network of defences to repel NATO attack, develop economic self-sufficiency to resist sanctions, and nationalise so as to return control of natural resources to the people.

The US has seized on what it regards as Russia's breach of international peace and stability to reassert its mantle of responsibility over a just world. Why did America lose this mantle, and is there reason to support this country having another try at some form of global order?

The question isn't really one for European governments or other American client states, but for humanity as a whole. What good would it do, if a country with butterfingers is given another chance to remake the world in its image?

Their own worst enemy

The US has had such free rein for so long that it is the source of most of the security threats in the world today, like some capricious deity responsible for unleashing evil into our world. Remember that the US played a major role in creating the Afghan insurgency that gave rise to al-Qaeda, it armed Saddam Hussein, it sponsored coups, and it inflamed civil wars. It caused chaos in a number of countries such as Syria, giving rise to ISIS.

Just about everywhere the US is able to act freely to make the world a better place, it makes it a worse place. Then, promptly, all media coverage of whatever troubled region we were talking about ends, leaving suffering people behind as the US eyes the next region it intends to operate on - like some mad surgeon with a hundred percent death rate behind him.

Rules-based disorder

At present, we are faced with the apparent collapse of an international "rules-based order", the favoured term of America and its allies when they arbitrarily moralise about international affairs and declare through various media platforms "what must be done" about some problem they happen to find offensive to them. American leaders presume to define good and evil (the current Ukraine narrative), and assign the former label to themselves or US clients in all cases, although in practice good and evil are not typically good assessments of the behaviour of states. The result of this mindset is hardly order but disorder, enmity and the inflammation of crisis everywhere across the world.

There are two big reasons that would compel one to decline America's pleas to be given a second chance as the world's moral arbiter and sole superpower. The first is that of its failures being rooted in its own core identity, such that it is doomed to continue failing and repeating itself indefinitely, because it creates all the alleged problems it hopes to address. The second is that of the character of those who currently guide American foreign policy.

Agents of chaos

America keeps failing to establish "order" because its identity is chaos. Americans are always most glad when they are destroying governments and handing out guns to bandits around the world, in keeping with their own ideas about guns belonging in the hands of random citizens. As a country born from sedition and criminal secession from Britain, the Americans can't help thinking like criminals at the international level and coveting scenes of disorder rather than order.

It is a fundamental part of American liberalism, whether handled from a progressive or conservative angle, that America sides with gun-toting rebels and contras rather than those who maintain the peace. They fail to govern the world because their ideological reverence is not for a body of laws but for chaos and banditry. The romantic urge to recreate the Wild West overpowers their reason, compelling them away from the path of responsibility even if they try to plan otherwise, like some dog unable to resist scratching its flea-ridden hide, no matter the wishes of its owner.

Serial failures

The current American foreign policy establishment is especially underserving of a second chance at creating the "American Century", as they used to call their dream. Every single foreign policy idea they have presented, from the insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the occupation of Afghanistan of 2001-2021, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003, backfired spectacularly and endangered their own country.

The Americans are all too eager to give themselves a second chance at governing the world and creating a stable order. Others should not be so keen to see that.

Being a sore loser about his defeat and incompetent retreat in Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden seems okay with stealing money from grieving mothers and putting children at risk.

Afghans, including even the Taliban, had nothing to do with 9/11 or international terrorism. However, American neoconservatives need targets to attack, and the Afghans seemed shootable to them.

Now, yet another neoconservative-stuffed administration finds it okay to take money from Afghans and hand it to 9/11 victims in a demonstration of what they really represent. This is intended to perpetuate the belief in American righteousness and victimhood, even as these neoconservatives stand unapologetically over the bodies of those they killed.

Twenty years of defeat

The United States occupied Afghanistan for twenty years, supposedly to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who was dead for half the time of that occupation. When the US entered the country in 2001, Afghanistan was in civil war, with the Taliban holding the capital but facing substantial resistance. The US allied themselves with the Northern Alliance, who were resisting the Taliban. According to the righteous neoconservative logic, an American presence would bolster a powerful coalition and secure inevitable victory.

When the United States departed Afghanistan in 2021, in despair and shame, the Taliban held almost total control over the country before US forces had even exited. With barely a shot fired, and with American troops forced to watch and be humiliated in front of the world, the Taliban were able to overtake the country in a way that had not been possible even prior to the US intervention. The US, or at least those who still maintain control over its foreign policy right now and faced no consequences for their careers, failed all their objectives and were kicked out of the country.

To give some idea of what that failure meant, let us consider the words of Joe Biden:

"We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need"

Every moment, every dollar spent, and every soldier killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan was a waste. The strategies and predictions of US think tanks and foreign policy experts all failed to materialise. All the propaganda and self-important rhetoric about democracy and freedom, which continues unabated but has shifted to other conflict zones like Ukraine, led nowhere.

Rewarded for creating misery

Rather than firing the people who caused the biggest foreign policy defeats in their history, America and its allies listen even more to the instincts of neoconservatives such as Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, who maintain a familiar aptitude for false claims, false expectations, civilian casualties, and slow defeat. It is as if they have no thinkers with an interest in foreign policy other than these quacks who have a hundred percent chance of being wrong.

When hearing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the US is acting differently in #Ukraine than #Iraq because the US is trying to prevent a war this time, remember that he directly supported the Iraq War.

He is literally the liar he is trying to contrast himself with.
— Lordre (@LOrdreNet) February 20, 2022

By punishing the Afghan people when they needed help, Biden makes it clear that twenty years of alleged support for them was a sham as the US attempted to spread its own influence and power in the region. We should not forget that it is under moral pretexts and international media fanfare that the US coldly murders civilians and tries to station soldiers in every strategic region of the world.

We should be thankful for the end of the war in Afghanistan, but be under no illusion that it marks the end of American cruelty and oppression. The neoconservative (or interventionist, if you like) army at the heart of American foreign policy is continuously re-hired and sent to all conflict zones in the world to get more civilians killed, drag America further through blood and mud, and then fail.

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