Proving that no good lesson goes unlearned — Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Haass are still shrill

30 August 2021

Should we overhaul reason and semantics?

The below listed three (historically unreflective) psychopathic warmongers think so.

Former British Prime Minister — and happy co-creator of the Iraq War debacle — Tony Blair wrote that:

The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics.

We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending “the forever wars”, as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even ten years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.

We did it in the knowledge that though worse than imperfect, and though immensely fragile, there were real gains over the past 20 years.

[R]ead the heartbreaking laments from every section of Afghan society as to what they fear will now be lost. Gains in living standards, education particularly of girls, gains in freedom. Not nearly what we hoped or wanted. But not nothing. Something worth defending. Worth protecting.

© Tony Blair, Why We Must Not Abandon the People of Afghanistan – For Their Sakes and Ours, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (21 August 2021) (quote begins at paragraph five of the opinion piece)

In other words, attempting (blatantly unsuccessfully) to remake Islamic and tribal-like Afghanistan in the image of a Western developed nation was worth all the deaths and financial expense.

And furthermore, continuing to do so against Afghanistan's Islamic cultural grain would be a good thing. That so, apparently because killing people abroad is both lucrative and the Military Industrial Complex's purported honor must be defended.

According to Blair, only imbeciles think that strategically useless forever wars are undesirable on common sense and Clausewitzian 'planes' of reasoning.

From my perspective, former Prime Minister Blair — that perfect example of History-discredited mind and moral rot — remains in quoted circulation only due to Corporatism's forever death-dealing hold on the Media.

Second — Paul Wolfowitz

Paul Wolfowitz is one America's best examples of a morally clueless proponent of unendingly sacrificing other people's lives to his Grand Ideas for Remaking the Universe.

Below, for example, Wolfowitz argues that continuing the war in Afghanistan would be a good thing. Here with my comments in bracketed italics:

President Biden, like his two immediate predecessors, seems to think you can end “forever wars” simply by leaving them.

Thursday’s unprovoked attack, on people who were fleeing and those who were helping them, demonstrates the truth of the soldier’s adage that “the enemy always gets a vote.”

[The lack of rational acuity in Wolfowitz's mind is well illustrated with that non sequitur.

Leaving a forever war on strategic and moral grounds has nothing to do with the enemy purportedly "getting a vote".

Especially so, when the enemy's action is exactly the form of purpose-lacking destruction that the withdrawing nation is now refusing to further incite.]

We were never in Afghanistan to participate in its civil war. We went there to prevent a murderous gang from regaining control of Afghanistan, where they ruled 20 years ago and where they enabled an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people on American soil.

The war with that gang and its affiliates won’t end because the U.S. has quit.

Thursday’s bombings appear to have been the work of a rival gang, ISIS-K.

Mr. Biden called it “an archenemy of the Taliban,” but the two groups both hate the U.S. and believe it’s glorious to kill Americans.

[W]hoever wins will make Afghanistan a haven for anti-American terrorists.

[With that, Wolfowitz repeats the proven failed logic that underlies the entirety of the Global War on Terror.

Evidently, according to these Forever War proponents, terrorists will only disappear when American physically and economically controls the whole world.

Somehow, the fact that insurgency, freedom-fighting, and asserted 'terrorism' continue even after the United States is 'some place' in great force — escapes these History-denying minds.]

Mr. Biden should have known to expect this because something similar happened 10 years ago when we withdrew our forces from Iraq.

Lacking U.S. air support and advisory capabilities on which the Iraqi army had grown to depend, it collapsed under an assault by Islamic State.

Three years after the withdrawal, President Obama had to rush 1,500 troops back to Iraq to assist in the fight to drive out ISIS. By 2016 that number had grown to 5,000.

[Here, Wolfowitz — probably intentionally — overlooks the fact that the United States keeps its client puppet governments weak by design.

The idea that those puppets might actually be able to defend themselves — without a vast inflow of American armaments and profit-seeking non-military corporatists — is anathema to us.

With his failure to acknowledge this long-demonstrated foreign affairs phenomenon, Wolfowitz discredits both his objectivity and his ability to reason on the basis of History's facts.]

No one should have expected Afghanistan to become a modern democracy overnight.

[L]ike a gardener who pulls up weeds to allow plants to grow, keeping the Taliban off the backs of the Afghan people would have enabled them to continue some of their impressive successes, particularly in educating girls and women, successes that are being extinguished under the Taliban’s medieval tyranny.

[With that example, Wolfowitz does what neocons always do. Magically, it is the United States' responsibility to 'garden' the world for its inhabitants' benefit, as those benefits are perceived by Americans.

Evidently, it is not okay for some cultures to indulge their 'medieval tyranny' under circumstances among which Beneficent America could (deludedly) stride to their rescue.

That salvation occurring, even in spite of forceful objections posed by the strongest group (or groups) comprising the allegedly medievality-affected culture.

As long as it is other people dying and being maimed, necons are happy.]

Third — Richard Haass

Ah Richard, you constant manifestation of seeming reasonability in the propagation of sheer stupidity.

Here is Haass tweeting that:

The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not “endless occupation” but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited.

Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea.

And yes, withdrawal was the problem.

Talk about deviously manipulated semantics and blazing non sequiturs.

This is the kind of irrational jumble that appears to occupy these neoconservative airheads' skull space.

Anyone who juxtaposes:

(a) Japan, Germany and South Korea

and

(b) the attached historical circumstances that led to American occupying presences in each

as examples equivalent to

and

(d) the historical circumstances which attach specifically to both of those

— is, frankly, an idiot.

If Haass had a capably functioning brain, he would be embarrassed by his grand display of unalloyed, tweeted vacuity.

The moral? — Each of these Neocon Paragons has demonstrated himself to be . . .

. . . cognitively challenged in the most obvious ways.

Why are the powers-that-be and the Lamestream still paying attention to them?

Pursuit of money and power, of course.

Socio-psychopathy, we can deduce, describes our own culture.

PeteFree.com

Proving that no good lesson goes unlearned — Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Haass are still shrill