With central and eastern Europe being swallowed up progressively by the NATO alliance, Russia has legitimate security concerns. Abutting its border, Russia will soon have to endure all NATO members carrying out military maneuvers. And as we know so well, NATO and its paymaster, America, would never-ever dream of regime change. It’s not like the US (which controls NATO) has done regime change before, right? David and I take you back to the 1990s, when it all began, except, that back then, leadership such as that of Reagan and Gorbachev understood what was at stake, and worked against Cold War and toward détente.
NEW ON HARD TRUTH: In “With Friends Like Gen. Mark Benedict Milley, America Doesn’t Need Enemies,” David Vance and myself marvel at the institutional tolerance in the United States—among spineless Republicans, especially—for Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
In the dying days of the Trump presidency, Milley is alleged to have contacted the Chinese to promise them he’d give them plenty notice if the United States were to attack them. Azimuths and all, presumably.
Finally, pundits are using the “T” word; pundits, but not Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Sure enough—and this is so very curious—Fox News has shelved the Milley breaking-news story, on its website and in live reporting. As David and I were had predicted, the GOP and its TV appendage would back-down.
Fox News celeb anchors continue to trip over one another to talk up the wonders of our Afghan allies and the affront of failing to lift them to safety.
Between the Republicans and the Democrats, there isn’t a country in the world that could not be a target for resettlement in America. (“DHS Official: Afghans Without Visas Being Brought to U.S.” On what moral basis are the lot at Fox News objecting?)
Truth be told, I’m deeply repulsed by legions of Americans, ex-soldiers and other emotional sniveling wrecks, rushing to bring Afghanistan to the US. I’m an American. Who’s rescuing people I love in South Africa? Many are subjected to race-based depredations and all are far more compatible with life here, although my South Africans have a comorbidity: they’re white.
One of the networks interviewed one Tim Kennedy, a teary, hardened military man from Special Forces. On August the 26th, as he packed his bag, Kennedy waxed fat about dying for anyone who wants to fight for a freer world. And off he went to fight for his people, the Afghans. (He is on Twitter, too, promoting the Special VisasAfghanSIVApplication@state.gov.)
I find it hard to respect this kind of deracinated soldier of empire.
I can’t listen to Kennedy’spat neoconservative rants (never with any journalistic proof) about the Taliban and their crimes. These soldiers of empire remain so vested in homelands not their own, this as their own homeland is being invaded and is filled with poor, sad people.
If members of the US Military had a moral core, they’d disobey orders en masse and head to the THEIR OWN COUNTRY’S South-western border.
Or, help such pathetic, helpless and hopeless Americans like “The Whittakers: An Inbred American Family,” living like animals in the United States of America. There is so much unutterable suffering in the US. The bravado of the typical, tough-talking military man, gushing over—and rushing to—Afghanistan not only doesn’t impress, but turns my stomach.
As I watch the wretched of the world living within America’s borders, I think of the words of Cullen Murphy, superb author of “Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of Rome”:
“Imperial overstretch” is “the idea that one’s security needs, military obligations, and globalist desires increasingly outstrip resources available to satisfy them” (Are We Rome, p. 71).
Outsized and excessive: The above is a perfect description of the improper and misplaced exhilaration of this Kennedy ex-Special Operations, on his private mission to Afghanistan. Everything about it is outsized and excessive. Such a military sickens, as a military is designed to defend the homeland and the homeboys.
UPDATE (9/7): “Here’s another ex-Special Forces guy bragging about the massive global effort he and a GOP Congressman put forth to import foreign Muslims into our neighborhoods,” writes a Twitter friend. He is Cory Mills.
“We’ve seen picture of US service members at the Kabul airport cradling babies,” puled Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Yes, and how it nauseates any person with a solid understanding of what the mission of the US military ought to be: defend the homeland and its inhabitants.
Perhaps if “our men and women in uniform” exemplified less “compassionate courage” for The Globe, as Blinken describes the cradling Marines, and better, more spry situational awareness—perhaps they’d have their eyes peeled and would have spotted suspicious, shifty strangers about to detonate themselves in their midst.
On the other hand, this is what the Marines, paid for by US taxpayers, are trained to do: Be a “global force for good.” In fact, in 2009, this was, for a short time, the motto of the Marines, until it met with objection. That objection would no longer be noticed.
