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The USS Intrepid was launched in Newport News. The aircraft carrier would serve throughout World War Two and two following wars, and be decommissioned in 1974. She is a museum ship today, docked in the Hudson in New York, and served as the FBI operations center following the September 11 attacks on New York.
Riots broke out at Uppsala, Sweden between Swedish Nazis and anti-Nazi demonstrators.
The United States and a coalition of Allies, including its principal western allies, on this day in 2003, commenced operations against Iraq. The war commenced with air operations.
The causa belli of the undeclared war was Iraq's lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors.
President Bush went on the air and stated:
At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
Congress is just now considering a bill to deauthorize military force in Iraq, which at this point would be more symbolic than anything else.
The initial invasion went well and swiftly, but the war yielded to a post-war, war, against Islamic insurgents that lasted until 2011. Iraq has remained unstable, but not Baathist, and it has retained democracy, although frequently only barely. Iran has gained influence in the country, which has a large Shiia population, which was not expected.
The war remains legally problematic in that it was a full scale invasion of a foreign power with no declaration of war, setting it apart from any post World War Two war, with perhaps the exception of the war in Afghanistan, that had that feature but lacked such a declaration. At least arguably it was illegal for that reason. Amongst other things, Art 1, Section 8, of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power to:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Presidents are the commanders in chief of the armed forces, and in Washington's day actually took to the field with it, so it would not be correct to assume that only Congress can deploy troops, even into harm's way. But full scale wars. . . that seems pretty exclusively reserved to Congress.
The war also came while the U.S. was already fighting, albeit at a low level, in Afghanistan, and the Iraq episode would prove to be a distraction from it, leading in no small part to that first war ended, twenty years later, inconclusively.
The war redrew the political map of the Middle East, which it was intended to do, so to that extent it was at least a partial success, although it took much longer than expected. It's effect on the national deficit, discussed this past week by NPR, is staggering and the nation still is nowhere near paying for it, something that will have very long term consequences for the nation going forward, and providing a reason, amongst others, that undeclared wars should not really be engaged in. Congress, for its part, simply chose not to debate the topic in that context, an abrogation of its duty, although it did authorize military action in another form.
The war contributed to the rise of ISIL, which was later put down. It increased Syrian instability, which has yet to be fully addressed.
It also contributed to a rising tide of military worship in the US, while ironically would be part of the right wing reaction to "forever wars" that gave rise to Donald Trump.
One of only two wars, the other being the First Gulf War, initiated by a Republican President since World War Two, the war had huge initial support from the left and the right, something that many of the same people who supported it later conveniently forgot.
CAPPELLA PAPALE
MASS
«PRO ELIGENDO ROMANO PONTIFICE»
HOMILY OF HIS EMINENCE CARD. JOSEPH RATZINGER
DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS
Vatican Basilica
Monday 18 April 2005
At this moment of great responsibility, let us listen with special attention to what the Lord says to us in his own words. I would like to examine just a few passages from the three readings that concern us directly at this time.
The first one offers us a prophetic portrait of the person of the Messiah - a portrait that receives its full meaning from the moment when Jesus reads the text in the synagogue at Nazareth and says, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing" (Lk 4: 21).
At the core of the prophetic text we find a word which seems contradictory, at least at first sight. The Messiah, speaking of himself, says that he was sent "to announce a year of favour from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God" (Is 61: 2). We hear with joy the news of a year of favour: divine mercy puts a limit on evil, as the Holy Father told us. Jesus Christ is divine mercy in person: encountering Christ means encountering God's mercy.
Christ's mandate has become our mandate through the priestly anointing. We are called to proclaim, not only with our words but also with our lives and with the valuable signs of the sacraments, "the year of favour from the Lord".
But what does the prophet Isaiah mean when he announces "the day of vindication by our God"? At Nazareth, Jesus omitted these words in his reading of the prophet's text; he concluded by announcing the year of favour. Might this have been the reason for the outburst of scandal after his preaching? We do not know.
In any case, the Lord offered a genuine commentary on these words by being put to death on the cross. St Peter says: "In his own body he brought your sins to the cross" (I Pt 2: 24). And St Paul writes in his Letter to the Galatians: "Christ has delivered us from the power of the law's curse by himself becoming a curse for us, as it is written, "Accursed is anyone who is hanged on a tree'. This happened so that through Christ Jesus the blessing bestowed on Abraham might descend on the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, thereby making it possible for us to receive the promised Spirit through faith" (Gal 3: 13f.).
Christ's mercy is not a grace that comes cheap, nor does it imply the trivialization of evil. Christ carries the full weight of evil and all its destructive force in his body and in his soul. He burns and transforms evil in suffering, in the fire of his suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favour converge in the Paschal Mystery, in the dead and Risen Christ. This is the vengeance of God: he himself suffers for us, in the person of his Son. The more deeply stirred we are by the Lord's mercy, the greater the solidarity we feel with his suffering - and we become willing to complete in our own flesh "what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ" (Col 1: 24).
Let us move on to the second reading, the letter to the Ephesians. Here we see essentially three aspects: first of all, the ministries and charisms in the Church as gifts of the Lord who rose and ascended into heaven; then, the maturing of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God as the condition and content of unity in the Body of Christ; and lastly, our common participation in the growth of the Body of Christ, that is, the transformation of the world into communion with the Lord.
Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards "the maturity of Christ", as the Italian text says, simplifying it slightly. More precisely, in accordance with the Greek text, we should speak of the "measure of the fullness of Christ" that we are called to attain if we are to be true adults in the faith. We must not remain children in faith, in the condition of minors. And what does it mean to be children in faith? St Paul answers: it means being "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph 4: 14). This description is very timely!
How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.
Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceipt from truth.
We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith - only faith - that creates unity and is fulfilled in love.
On this theme, St Paul offers us as a fundamental formula for Christian existence some beautiful words, in contrast to the continual vicissitudes of those who, like children, are tossed about by the waves: make truth in love. Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like "a clanging cymbal" (I Cor 13: 1).
Let us now look at the Gospel, from whose riches I would like to draw only two small observations. The Lord addresses these wonderful words to us: "I no longer speak of you as slaves.... Instead, I call you friends" (Jn 15: 15). We so often feel, and it is true, that we are only useless servants (cf. Lk 17: 10).
Yet, in spite of this, the Lord calls us friends, he makes us his friends, he gives us his friendship. The Lord gives friendship a dual definition. There are no secrets between friends: Christ tells us all that he hears from the Father; he gives us his full trust and with trust, also knowledge. He reveals his face and his heart to us. He shows us the tenderness he feels for us, his passionate love that goes even as far as the folly of the Cross. He entrusts himself to us, he gives us the power to speak in his name: "this is my body...", "I forgive you...". He entrusts his Body, the Church, to us.
To our weak minds, to our weak hands, he entrusts his truth - the mystery of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; the mystery of God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (Jn 3: 16). He made us his friends - and how do we respond?
The second element Jesus uses to define friendship is the communion of wills. For the Romans "Idem velle - idem nolle" [same desires, same dislikes] was also the definition of friendship. "You are my friends if you do what I command you" (Jn 15: 14). Friendship with Christ coincides with the third request of the Our Father: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven". At his hour in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus transformed our rebellious human will into a will conformed and united with the divine will. He suffered the whole drama of our autonomy - and precisely by placing our will in God's hands, he gives us true freedom: "Not as I will, but as you will" (Mt 26: 39).
Our redemption is brought about in this communion of wills: being friends of Jesus, to become friends of God. The more we love Jesus, the more we know him, the more our true freedom develops and our joy in being redeemed flourishes. Thank you, Jesus, for your friendship!
The other element of the Gospel to which I wanted to refer is Jesus' teaching on bearing fruit: "It was I who chose you to go forth and bear fruit. Your fruit must endure" (Jn 15: 16).
It is here that appears the dynamism of the life of a Christian, an apostle: I chose you to go forth. We must be enlivened by a holy restlessness: a restlessness to bring to everyone the gift of faith, of friendship with Christ. Truly, the love and friendship of God was given to us so that it might also be shared with others. We have received the faith to give it to others - we are priests in order to serve others. And we must bear fruit that will endure.
All people desire to leave a lasting mark. But what endures? Money does not. Even buildings do not, nor books. After a certain time, longer or shorter, all these things disappear. The only thing that lasts for ever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity.
The fruit that endures is therefore all that we have sown in human souls: love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching hearts, words that open the soul to joy in the Lord. So let us go and pray to the Lord to help us bear fruit that endures. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.
To conclude, let us return once again to the Letter to the Ephesians. The Letter says, with words from Psalm 68, that Christ, ascending into heaven, "gave gifts to men" (Eph 4: 8). The victor offers gifts. And these gifts are apostles, pro-phets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Our ministry is a gift of Christ to humankind, to build up his body - the new world. We live out our ministry in this way, as a gift of Christ to humanity!
At this time, however, let us above all pray insistently to the Lord that after his great gift of Pope John Paul II, he will once again give us a Pastor according to his own heart, a Pastor who will guide us to knowledge of Christ, to his love and to true joy. Amen.
From the Vatican Website, emphais added..
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Congress overwhelmingly overrode Richard Nixon's veto to pass the Clean Water Act. The Senate voted 52–12 for an override, and the House 247–23.
It was clearly a different era. It's almost impossible to imagine the GOP supporting the act today, and the television "news" would be full of vindictive comments.
The public had been mobilized by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, back in the day when it still could sit and read a book, and the 70s saw a host of environmental legislation pass. As the ABA has noted:
The 1970s was a seminal decade for environmental protection. Its first year saw three major accomplishments: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Air Act, and the creation of the EPA. NEPA alone was groundbreaking
All of which is an understatement. And that text omitted the Endangered Species Act.
The counter reaction set in soon, and already by the mid 1970s there were those who urged the repeal of nearly everything that had been passed, although it never occurred. What has occurred, however, is that an increasingly polarized public, fed slop by such things as "news" outlets that cater only to a person's preformed views, and loud voices on Twitter and Facebook, have made listening to unpleasant scientific news a political act that can be disregarded if it conflicts with a person's preformed views. This reflects a wider crisis in the culture on political issues, that are similarly fed, which is rapidly making the United States nearly ungovernable
On the same day, the USSR agreed to pay the United States $722,000,000 over 30 years for repayment for Lend Lease. The Soviets reneged the following year, but started again, with a reduced amount, under Gorbachev. They paid until 2006, with payments of the renewed obligation having been scheduled to run through 2030. In 06, however, the Russians paid in full and retired the debt. About that same time, the United Kingdom did as well.
ZZ Top preformed at Brannen's Tobacco Warehouse in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
American Bobby Fischer became the International chess champion in Reykjavík, Iceland, following the withdrawal from match 21 by Soviet player Boris Spassky.
I can dimly recall this, as it was really followed at the time, even though I was only nine years old. Then, as now, it was hard for me to really grasp the interest in this event. I like the game, but as an international sporting event, if that's what we'd call it, it's a little hard to grasp.
The Cold War must principally explain it.
Fischer's prize was $154,677.50, a substantial haul nor or then.
Fischer was an odd character and hard to like. He was anti-Semitic and became a Holocaust denier, even though his mother was Jewish. After the 1972 victory, he didn't play a competitive game in public for another 20 years, although he did play against MIT's Greenblatt computer in 1977, beating it three times. In the early 1990s he replayed Spassky in Yugoslavia, where he won again but where he also didn't seem to have evolved in the game. Spassky remained friends with Fischer throughout his life and introduced him to a known serious love interest of Fischer's, with that latter relationship not lasting, not too surprisingly.
The Yugoslavia match violated economic sanctions in place and made Fischer a fugitive from justice from the United States. He lived in various places before going back to Reykjavík, where he died in 2005 at age 64. A member of the Worldwide Church of God for much of his life, just prior to his death he became intensely interested in Catholicism and requested a Catholic funeral.
The United States dropped its claims on the Swan Islands in favor of Honduras.
Legendary fighter pilot Robert "Robin" Olds, Jr., son of an Army Air Corps officer of the same name, was born this day in Hawaii.
He became a triple ace, scoring kills in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam, and retired as a Brigadier General in 1973. His father had been a Major General.
Olds was a larger than life character in every way. He was married for many years to starlet Ella Raines, although their marriage eventually ended in divorce and he remarried (he still came in at half the total number of marriages than his father). His penchant for drinking likely kept him from rising higher in the Air Force than he did. He served on the Steamboat Springs Planning Commission in retirement.
He died in 2007 at age 84.
February 20, 1942: First US Eighth Air Force officers arrive in England. Japanese land on Portuguese East Timor and Dutch West Timor in the East Indies.
Among those items is Navy pilot Edward O'Hare being credited with shooting down five Japanese aircraft within six minutes on this day in 1942, a feat which secured him the Congressional Medial of Honor.
The aircraft that O'Hare struck were Japanese Betty bombers headed towards the USS Lexington which was off of Bougainville. In reality, O'Hare shot down only three aircraft, rather than the six he thought he had, or the five he was credited with,although he so disrupted their attack that he prevented it from being a success. One of the stricken Japanese bombers did attempt to fly into the Lexington, so four were in fact lost during the raid.
The heroic O'Hare was killed in combat in November, 1943.
Sundin also reports that the first advance party of the U.S. 8th Air Force arrived in the United Kingdom.
The 8th, of course, would go on to figure enormously in the US strategic bombing campaign over Germany.
Sundin also notes that the vast majority of Norwegian teachers, on this day, refused an order to become fascists, leading to some of them enduing up in concentration camps.
The Battle of Badung Strait ended in a Japanese victory, with the Japanese navy driving off a much larger combined Allied task force.
The Japanese landed forces on Portuguese Timor and took the airfield. Portugal wasn't in the war and was now enduring its second Timorese occupation, as the British and Australians had occupied it first to prevent it from being attacked by the Japanese. The Portuguese protested the occupation without success.
Portuguese Timor was in the midst of an interesting transition at the time. The Portuguese government had just turned education over to the Catholic Church, and as a result, the educational fortunes of the population were improving. During the Japanese occupation of Timor the distinction between Portuguese and Dutch Timor were ignored, fairly obviously, but the Portuguese reasserted their possession in 1945 and would maintain it until 1975. The region was then invaded, following the political turmoil in Portugal of that period, by Indonesia, but in 2002 it gained independence. It's own independence movement can trace its origin to the improved educational lot of the population that started in 1941.
The Japanese also attacked Koepang in Dutch Timor on the same day, logically enough as it was all one island. The action was unusual in that it featured Japanese paratroopers who landed to take an airfield, but who were successfully repulsed by Australian troops. Japan did have paratroopers but they received little use during the war, and were in fact mostly only used in the early stages of the war in the Pacific.
German U-boats started raiding ships off of the Lesser Antilles. The Italian submarine Torelli participated with them.
The Hakim of Bahrain, Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa, died on this day in 1942. Under his administration, which commenced in 1932, oil exploration in the country commenced. Bahrain was a British protectorate at the time, something that had come about as the ruling family needed outside support due to their unstable position in the country.
Adolf Hitler issued a formal statement claiming that the United States had attacked Germany, making reference to the German sinking of the USS Reuben James the day prior.
During wartime the Coast Guard has traditionally serves as an auxiliary of the Navy, while during peace time it used to be part of the Department of the Treasury. Post 9/11 it's been part of the Department of Homeland Safety.
The Coast Guard was transferred from the Treasury Department into the Department of the Navy for the ongoing emergency, recognizing that the US was very near being in a state of war.
Selective Service issued a list of key occupations which were to receive conscription deferments. The last two items are noted here:
The first mass use of Soviet multiple rocket launchers occurred. The production effort, which had actually commenced prior to the war, was so secret that the Soviets didn't even inform the soldiers assigned to them what their official designation, the BM13, was until after the war. As they were marked with the letter "K" soldiers nicknamed them Katyusha after the popular wartime Russian song, although Stalin Organs was also a popular name for them.
The weapon was groundbreaking. Inaccurate, it went for volume of fire and was deployed in mass batteries. It was copied by other combatants once it became known, being a simple weapon to make, and its the origin of multiple rocket launching batteries that have replaced heavy artillery in some armies, including the United States Army.
The song was written just before the war, in 1938, and has gone on to remain a hugely popular Russian tune. About a girl on the Steppes, it is in the same category as Lili Marlene in that it was copied by other parties in the war, including those fighting the Red Army, with new lyrics being written in some instances. A search for it on YouTube will bring up a zillion Russian versions, many with dancing Russian women dressed in wartime uniforms. It's remained popular with Russian expatriot populations, and is popular in Israel as a folk tune. The crowed singing the farewell tune in The Deer Hunter, in the wedding scene, is singing it, most likely spontaneously as it the extras in that scene are actually parishioners of an actual American Russian Orthodox Church.
The Slovakian government issued orders requiring Jews to ride in separate train cars and to wear to mark their mail with the Star of David.
Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls, another Depression Era project, was opened to traffic.
Barack Obama.
Yes, I meant that.
Already I can hear screaming from some that this is absurd. Obama was a Marxist Socialist Agent of Destruction who never got anything right. . .
Well, gentle readers, I'm not a fan of President Obama's. Basically, I think he stood for very little and like Woodrow Wilson confused talking with action. But he got Afghanistan right.
Here's why.
President Bush blew it with Afghanistan. The US had to go into the country after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, but the US should have treated that as a criminal act, not military one, which Obama would have done, had he been in office in 2001. Going into Afghanistan was necessary, but a short, sharp, destructive punitive expedition would have sufficed.
Yes, the last punitive expedition the country went into didn't catch the bad guy, Pancho Villa, but then neither did the long slow invasion of Afghanistan. That took years, and indeed it occurred under President Obama's watch. The Punitive Expedition into Mexico did serve, FWIW, to keep big forays across the border (well, at least armed ones, big forays across the border are going on right now, but not armed ones), from occurring again.
We could have done that. We pretty much could have destroyed much of the Taliban, maybe killed Bin Laden, and wrecked Afghanistan as a potential threat for some time without occupying it.
But once you do that, you are in it. You break it, and we did, you bought it.
President Obama seems to have gotten that. He intended to get out, but didn't. He even launched a "surge" which regained lost ground.
President Trump didn't get it, or didn't care. Probably the latter. No matter how you look at it, however, the Doha Agreement was inexcusable.
Also inexcusable was committing to a May pull out, which under the circumstances was abandoning the country to the Taliban. Further inexcusable was the effort to abandon the country prior to President Biden's inauguration. It's still unclear what that was even about.
At least Trump listened to his military advisers to the extent he didn't pull out in January of this year.
Then came in Biden and made a hasty, botched, departure. The administration has given the thin excuse that they expected the country to fall, but not so fast.
So, we have three Presidents who messed it up, and only one who got it right. We rarely give President Obama credit for much here, but we'll give him credit for that.
The pathetic blame game going on regarding the debacle in Afghanistan has me once again stunned, even though I really ought to know better.
My right wing friends were backing withdrawal from Afghanistan fully when Trump launched the current disgrace. As soon as Biden started what Trump started, they switched to decrying what occurred. The mess isn't praiseworthy by any means, but this exercise is really a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black.
Let's look at what really occurred leading up to this embarrassing American defeat.
Indeed, we'll go all the way back.
This morning, when I stumbled out of bed at what has now become a stress induced "late" time for me of 4:45 a.m., and then clicked on the computer and saw the morning's news, I saw a photograph of a Chinook helicopter landing on the US embassy roof in Kabul.
The Taliban has entered Kabul.
It immediately made me recall the North Vietnamese Army entering Saigon and our embassy personnel being taken off the roof.
There is no reason this had to happen. And it's going to be a bloody disaster.
That blood will be on our hands.
There's a lot of reasons this has occurred, and the blame for the disaster goes back to President Bush II and his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. There was never a reason for the United States to launch a war against Iraq in 2001 and the fact that we committed our forces, there, rather than in Afghanistan were there was a dire need to do so, set us off on a half cocked strategy of minimal force that allowed the Taliban to continue to exist and, eventually, recover.
Beyond that, the simple fact of the matter is that the American concept of instant national reform, simply because we are there, is idiotic. Germany didn't reform at the end of World War One. It took a second war and the dismantling of the nation to cause that to occur, and it had somewhat of a history of civil government. Japan, which had a parliament that had been semi functioning as well before it was co-opted by the military, saw its military dismantled and its culture swamped by Americans. Simply setting up a democratic government and thinking it was going to work right away was naive.
An American general has recently opined that significant forces in the nation combined with an intent to stay until 2030 was what was really needed. Rather than that, we hoped for a cheap and easy war and that people would suddenly become democratic and peaceful as that's in their DNA. Recent events should cause us to question if that's even in our political DNA.
If we were going to just go in, get Bin Laden, and not worry about what happened after, we could have done that. We didn't. And that was an option. A big raid just designed to kill Bin Laden could have been done. But once you invade a country, it's your responsibility.
There's no excuse for this whatsoever, and every American administration from George Bush II on deserves the blame for it. There's going to be piles of hand wringing and excuse making, and one of the things we will here is that our actions over the last several months don't really mean that our troops died in vain.
A person should question that.
A recent article I saw somewhere stated that a lot of Vietnam veterans are having an unwelcome recollection of the end of that war. One Vietnam vet I know personally told me that.
And the reason why is that they're seeing an abandonment of a cause we fought for in Afghanistan, just like we did in Vietnam.
It's an open question how long a democratic country can maintain a fight against an enemy that doesn't threaten to overrun it. The US fought for four years in the Civil War over what the nation would be, and twice that long to bring the nation into existence in the 1770s and 1780s. World War Two was fought, by the US, for four years as well. All those wars, and others, were fought to a conclusion, so obviously the US will do that. We more or less did that with Iraq, actually completing what we had started with the second Gulf War.
We didn't do that with Vietnam. We entered, in a minor way, in 1958 and left officially in 1973, but in reality we didn't really get rolling until 1964 and had pretty much gotten out by 1972. Still, Vietnam was a pretty long war by American standards, and we'd grown tired of the whole thing by 1968. Nixon was elected on a promise to get us out, which he did.
By the time we left Vietnam the American Army had basically been destroyed. Not a battlefield destruction by any means, the NVA and the VC were not capable of doing that. But its moral had completely been destroyed. Of the four services, probably the Marines and the Air Force were in the best shape. The Navy actually experienced a late war mutiny on an aircraft carrier, showing how bad things were for it. That's important to know, but it doesn't change the fact that we entered Vietnam in strength in 1965, converted the war to an American style war, were complicit by omission in the assassination of its civilian head of state, and then left. The US could have prevented the North Vietnamese victory in 1975 by the application of air power, but we chose not to.
That may beg the question of what would have occurred in the war had the US simply not become involved. Frankly, the Republic of Vietnam stood a good chance of falling on its own. But we did become involved and even had a bit of a role in seeing a non-democratic civilian government become a series of military ones. Only the first one arguably understood the country itself.
Intervening in a nation militarily imposes obligations on a country, wish for them or not. Wars don't end when the party initiating them concludes they're over. They end when both parties do. When we left Vietnam we did so under a fiction that we were turning the war over (back?) to the South Vietnamese. But we'd converted the war's nature into something else by that time, and taught the ARVN to fight like the US Army, with US equipment, and US airpower. It's no wonder the rank and file of the ARVN collapsed in 1975. They no longer had all of that like they had before.
And that's what is going to happen in Afghanistan.
Somebody whose feed I get on Facebook, at least for the time being, claims that we entered Afghanistan on a limited "punitive expedition" and should have gotten right back out. There's some merit to that claim, but that isn't what we did at all. Indeed, we botched the war there right from the onset, and that set the path for the next twenty years.
Donald Rumsfeld, who just died recently, was Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense and therefore was familiar with punitive expeditions. The US reaction to the Mayaguez's taking by Cambodia was sort of that. But by the time he was George Bush II's Secretary of Defense, he'd become a member of the technology v. troops trap that has so often ensnared Americans.
Moreover, while U.S. troops first touched ground in October 2001, the US put the war on a back burner preferring instead to take on Iraq in a war that was completely unconnected with the 9/11 attacks and which didn't need to be fought, or if it did, it didn't need to be fought at that time.
Indeed, often missed in the story of "America's longest war" is the fact that the US never committed to it in the way that was either required or really military necessary. At a high point, in 2011, there were 98,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which is a lot, but pales in comparison to the 500,000 men commitment that was made to Vietnam and Korea. Of course, those were large wars in comparison as well. By and large, however, the US kept its commitment to Afghanistan low and slow, which meant that the Taliban was able to adjuster, and for that matter so was Al Queada. That kept the war running. In December 2002, well after the US commitment had commenced, there were still just under 10,000 US troops in the country.
Fighting guerilla wars isn't easy to start with, but to really have caught and addressed the Taliban, the initial commitment should have been heavy and exclusive. We never did that.
It's also easy to now forget that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed until May 2011. It took us a full decade to achieve that goal, which had been part of the initial goal in the first instance. Having engaged the war in Afghanistan in 2001, and having not achieved that goal until a decade later, those who argue that the effort was to be a punitive raid have more or less missed that point.
As we were in the country for that length of time, it was necessary to attempt to restore a functioning Afghani civil government. But that sort of thing takes a very long time, which we should have been well aware of. As we're addressing in another post on a completely unrelated topic, democracy isn't instinctive and building a democratic culture takes a very long time. Germany and Japan, which had functioning parliamentary systems that were not completely democratic, but which did function, flunked it in the mid 20th Century and didn't achieve democracy until they were occupied after World War Two. China, which started off attempting in 1911, has never pulled it off. The US, our own example, started off with the reputation of being radically democratic, but only 6% of the population could vote in the country's first democratic election.
Given this, we can't really expect the Afghani government to be stable for a long time. It's had twenty years, some might note, but many nations have taken longer than that.
And its military is collapsing in the face of a Taliban onslaught. The best we can now hope for is that some regions of the country will become self-governing under their own local warlords. Not a cheery thought, but the best one. A 30,000 man strong body of Afghani commandos continues to fight well, but they are about it. The best they can hope for is that the Afghan central government becomes one more contesting force, sort of in the model of Lebanon of the 1970s.
None of this had to be. We could have avoided this by fighting the war intelligently and according to well established military principals in 2001 and 2002. But we botched that.
Having failed that, that committed us to the long haul. That would mean keeping some troops, and more particularly air assets, in the country for a long time, perhaps another twenty years. If that seems outrageous, we've now had troops in Europe since they landed in Italy in 1943, and some forces on Japanese soil that have been there since 1945. Our troops in the Philippines were there, under somewhat analogous conditions, from 1898 until the country was really made free in 1945, and continued on for various reasons decades after that. We've been in South Korean since 1950 in a technical state of halted hostilities.
When we left Vietnam in 1972 it took three years for the country to fall, giving the US the hoped for illusion of "peace with honor" that Nixon had hoped for, even as he knew the country would fall. The country has followed the Communist path since then, with all that entails, including a slow move towards a market economy directed from above. Lenin's New Economic Policy may never have taken root in the USSR, but it seems to have elsewhere in the Communist world, save for the Stalinist theme park of North Korea. No such hope can be realistically conveyed for an Afghanistan with the Taliban back in power. It never had any interest in anything other than a strict Islamic rule. And that's what is most likely to return in that country. We'll be complicit in that.
Addendum
Prior to the US announcing its intent to withdraw during the late portion of the Trump Presidency, total non Afghani forces supporting the government amount to 7,500 troops, of which 2,500 were Americans. The Afghan National Army was doing 98% of the fighting.
I'll of course add some commentary on the way, assuming this blog survives Google's effort to render blogspot obsolete.
While this post is going up on April 18, it includes the old posts from the Wars thread that started with President Biden's announcement of earlier this past week.
April 15, 2021
United States v. Taliban.
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. I’m speaking to you today from the Roosevelt — the Treaty Room in the White House. The same spot where, on October of 2001, President George W. Bush informed our nation that the United States military had begun strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. It was just weeks — just weeks after the terrorist attack on our nation that killed 2,977 innocent souls; that turned Lower Manhattan into a disaster area, destroyed parts of the Pentagon, and made hallowed ground of a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and sparked an American promise that we would “never forget.”
We went to Afghanistan in 2001 to root out al Qaeda, to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan. Our objective was clear. The cause was just. Our NATO Allies and partners rallied beside us. And I supported that military action, along with overwhelming majority of the members of Congress.
More than seven years later, in 2008, weeks before we swore the oath of office — President Obama and I were about to swear — President Obama asked me to travel to Afghanistan and report back on the state of the war in Afghanistan. I flew to Afghanistan, to the Kunar Valley — a rugged, mountainous region on the border with Pakistan. What I saw on that trip reinforced my conviction that only the Afghans have the right and responsibility to lead their country, and that more and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.
I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective.
I said, among — with others, we’d follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if need be. That’s exactly what we did, and we got him. It took us close to 10 years to put President Obama’s commitment to — into form. And that’s exactly what happened; Osama bin Laden was gone.
That was 10 years ago. Think about that. We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since. Since then, our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear, even as the terrorist threat that we went to fight evolved.
Over the past 20 years, the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe: al-Shabaab in Somalia; al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; al-Nusra in Syria; ISIS attempting to create a califit [caliphate] in Syria and Iraq, and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia.
With the terror threat now in many places, keeping thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders. We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result.
I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.
After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts, with the Congress and the Vice President, as well as with Mr. Ghani and many others around the world, I have concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home.
When I came to office, I inherited a diplomatic agreement, duly negotiated between the government of the United States and the Taliban, that all U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just three months after my inauguration. That’s what we inherited — that commitment.
It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something. So, in keeping with that agreement and with our national interests, the United States will begin our final withdrawal — begin it on May 1 of this year.
We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it — we’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely. And we will do it in full coordination with our allies and partners, who now have more forces in Afghanistan than we do.
And the Taliban should know that if they attack us as we draw down, we will defend ourselves and our partners with all the tools at our disposal.
Our allies and partners have stood beside us shoulder-to-shoulder in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and we’re deeply grateful for the contributions they have made to our shared mission and for the sacrifices they have borne.
The plan has long been “in together, out together.” U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO Allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan before we mark the 20th anniversary of that heinous attack on September 11th.
But — but we’ll not take our eye off the terrorist threat. We’ll reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent reemergence of terrorists — of the threat to our homeland from over the horizon. We’ll hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil. The Afghan government has made that commitment to us as well. And we’ll focus our full attention on the threat we face today.
At my direction, my team is refining our national strategy to monitor and disrupt significant terrorist threats not only in Afghanistan, but anywhere they may arise — and they’re in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
I spoke yesterday with President Bush to inform him of my decision. While he and I have had many disagreements over policies throughout the years, we’re absolutely united in our respect and support for the valor, courage, and integrity of the women and men of the United States Armed Forces who served. I’m immensely grateful for the bravery and backbone that they have shown through nearly two decades of combat deployments. We as a nation are forever indebted to them and to their families.
You all know that less than 1 percent of Americans serve in our armed forces. The remaining 99 percent of them — we owe them. We owe them. They have never backed down from a single mission that we’ve asked of them.
I’ve witnessed their bravery firsthand during my visits to Afghanistan. They’ve never wavered in their resolve. They’ve paid a tremendous price on our behalf. And they have the thanks of a grateful nation.
While we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily, our diplomatic and humanitarian work will continue. We’ll continue to support the government of Afghanistan. We will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defenses and Security Forces.And along with our partners, we have trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel today and hundreds of thousands over the past two decades. And they’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost. They’ll support peace talks, as we will support peace talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, facilitated by the United Nations. And we’ll continue to support the rights of Afghan women and girls by maintaining significant humanitarian and development assistance.
And we’ll ask other countries — other countries in the region — to do more to support Afghanistan, especially Pakistan, as well as Russia, China, India, and Turkey. They all have a significant stake in the stable future for Afghanistan.
And over the next few months, we will also determine what a continued U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan will look like, including how we’ll ensure the security of our diplomats.
Look, I know there are many who will loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage. We gave that argument a decade. It’s never proved effective — not when we had 98,000 troops in Afghanistan, and not when we were down to a few thousand.
Our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm’s way — U.S. boots on the ground. We have to change that thinking. American troops shouldn’t be used as a bargaining chip between warring parties in other countries. You know, that’s nothing more than a recipe for keeping American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.
I also know there are many who will argue that we should stay — stay fighting in Afghanistan because withdrawal would damage America’s credibility and weaken America’s influence in the world. I believe the exact opposite is true.
We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago. That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021.
Rather than return to war with the Taliban, we have to focus on the challenges that are in front of us. We have to track and disrupt terrorist networks and operations that spread far beyond Afghanistan since 9/11.
We have to shore up American competitiveness to meet the stiff competition we’re facing from an increasingly assertive China. We have to strengthen our alliances and work with like-minded partners to ensure that the rules of international norms that govern cyber threats and emerging technologies that will shape our future are grounded in our democratic values — values — not those of the autocrats.
We have to defeat this pandemic and strengthen the global health system to prepare for the next one, because there will be another pandemic.
You know, we’ll be much more formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.
And finally, the main argument for staying longer is what each of my three predecessors have grappled with: No one wants to say that we should be in Afghanistan forever, but they insist now is not the right moment to leave.
In 2014, NATO issued a declaration affirming that Afghan Security Forces would, from that point on, have full responsibility for their country’s security by the end of that year. That was seven years ago.
So when will it be the right moment to leave? One more year, two more years, ten more years? Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars more above the trillion we’ve already spent?“Not now” — that’s how we got here. And in this moment, there’s a significant downside risk to staying beyond May 1st without a clear timetable for departure.
If we instead pursue the approach where America — U.S. exit is tied to conditions on the ground, we have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions require to — be required to allow us to depart? By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all? And at what additional cost in lives and treasure?
I’m not hearing any good answers to these questions. And if you can’t answer them, in my view, we should not stay. The fact is that, later today, I’m going to visit Arlington National Cemetery, Section 60, and that sacred memorial to American sacrifice.
Section sisty [sic] — Section 60 is where our recent war dead are buried, including many of the women and men who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s no — there’s no comforting distance in history in Section 60. The grief is raw. It’s a visceral reminder of the living cost of war.
For the past 12 years, ever since I became Vice President, I’ve carried with me a card that reminds me of the exact number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That exact number, not an approximation or rounded-off number — because every one of those dead are sacred human beings who left behind entire families. An exact accounting of every single solitary one needs to be had.
As of the day — today, there are two hundred and forty- — 2,488 [2,448] U.S. troops and personnel who have died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel — our Afghanistan conflicts. 20,722 have been wounded.
I’m the first President in 40 years who knows what it means to have a child serving in a warzone. And throughout this process, my North Star has been remembering what it was like when my late son, Beau, was deployed to Iraq — how proud he was to serve his country; how insistent he was to deploy with his unit; and the impact it had on him and all of us at home.
We already have service members doing their duty in Afghanistan today whose parents served in the same war. We have service members who were not yet born when our nation was attacked on 9/11.
War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is degraded in Iraq — in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war.
Thank you all for listening. May God protect our troops. May God bless all those families who lost someone in this endeavor.
April 17, 2021
United States v. Taliban, cont.
Interestingly enough, the drawdown in Afghanistan is now predicted to temporarily increase the US troop presence in Afghanistan. This includes reasons that run from logistical to force protection needs during the drawdown.
In addition to the 2,500 U.S. troops being withdrawn, it should be noted, 7,000 allied troops will also be withdrawn. It's little appreciated that the US forces amount to only about 1/4 of the non Afghan forces supporting the Afghan government.
April 18, 2021
United States v. Taliban.
Wyoming Representative Elizabeth Cheney has strongly criticized President Biden's announcement to withdraw from Afghanistan. Cheney was also a strong critic of President Trump on the same issue.
May 1, 2021
The US withdrawal commenced.
