printWere it possible to “lose face,” in this day-and-age, I’d say Fox New persona Tucker Carlson is embarrassing himself having crowned Lara Logan as his go-to Henry Kissinger on Afghanistan. That’s an indictment right there.
Carlson is also in thrall to Logan’s ersatz “philosophical” observations, treating this shamelessly confident woman as a Delphic oracle of sort.
You might have heard Logan claim recently and repetitively that everything in the world is very simple. “Everything is simple,” she keeps intoning in her appearances on the nepotistic Fox News. Logan’s “simple” premise being that America is omnipotent. Whatever occurs under its watch is all planned.
Ridiculous and wrong, yet Tucker giggles in delight.
They want you to believe Afghanistan is complicated. Because if you complicate it, it is a tactic in information warfare called ‘ambiguity increasing.’ So now we’re talking about all the corruption and this and that… But at its heart, every single thing in the world… always comes down to one or two things …”
Ridiculous and wrong why? Primarily because Logan’s explanation for America’s defeat in Afghanistan is not even the simplest explanation, despite her claim that it is. The simplest explanation, based on as much information as possible, would be that the US was outsmarted and outmaneuvered, and that the mission was impossible in the first place. Here:
Unlike Lara Kissinger Logan of Fox News, who “thinks” America could have won a war that other superpowers have lost—the Chinese and the Iranians are hip to what just happened. This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever,” says Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College London. “The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”
It would appear that our new Roger Scruton of philosophy likely read up recently on Occam’s Razor, which is a broad principle—hardly a philosophy—and she is currently applying it to everything under the sun, with little evidence or geopolitical and historic understanding in support of her Theory of Simple.
Occam’s Razor via the Browser’s first-page search:
What is an example of Occam’s razor?
For example, if a doctor is examining a patient with a high fever and cough, they may settle on the simplest explanation: the patient has a cold. … Occam’s razor is a good rule of thumb if you remember that it depends on making fewer assumptions based on as much evidence as possible.
A nifty principle, and certainly not a philosophy—Occam’s razor was not meant to apply to everything in the world.
RELATED: “Lara Logan: ‘Conservative’ Media’s Latest Blond Ambition”
Platitudes are what media, liberal and con, offer about their own drab homogeneity. A fellow South African expat, the well-to-do Lara Logan has not used her influenceto expose the horrors unfolding in our homeland of South Africa. Had Logan done so in 2011, she’d have been authentically heroic.
It’s certainly too late for Logan, who’s been mum about the systematic murder of whites in the country of our birth, to be a hero to South Africans.
UPDATE (9/7): What do you know? The Economist did not ask foxette Lara Logan for her “analysis” of “why America failed in Afghanistan.” The august magazine asked Henry Kissinger, a statesman, for his analysis. Kissinger says what this writer said over a decade back in columns like these. Read:
“To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question”
“Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim”
“Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own”
Excerpts from “Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan” to follow.