We Are the Champions My Friend

I saw a film today, oh boy
The English army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book
John Lennon From the Lennon McCartney Song “A Day in the Life”

Hubris – excessive or exaggerated pride or self-confidence – synonyms: arrogance, conceit, conceitedness, haughtiness, pride, vanity, self-importance, self-conceit, pomposity, superciliousness, feeling of superiority

I was going to entitle this pearl of wisdom “hubris”, but Janice told me that this is not a word that a lot of people use. So, then I had to struggle for a title and came up with this. Let me explain. There are woefully few things that the political left and right can agree on these days. But they seem to have hit on something over the last couple of weeks – the Afghan war withdrawal and especially the situation at the airport. Oh sure, they may put a different slant on what has happened and who exactly is to blame. The Republicans gleefully make fun of the President, call him senile and incompetent and call for his resignation and or impeachment. The Democrats point to the fact that President Biden was handed this fuzzy lollipop and there was nothing that he could do with it but to complete the withdrawal. And after all they say, this is all the fault of former Secretary of State Pompeo and former President Trump who negotiated a bad deal. But despite the spins that the various groups put on it there is a consensus that our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a debacle, a blow to our esteem and to our standing in the world and just in general a totally unacceptable MESS. The pundits say we are the most powerful country in the world. We SHOULD be able to do this or anything else that we set our minds too. WHO SCREWED THIS UP? Well truthfully it really IS a mess. But I am not sure who is to blame. Did Trump and Pompeo negotiate a ticking time bomb with the Taliban that they gleefully handed over to President Biden? How could our vaunted intelligence services misunderstand the situation so grossly that they so badly failed to predict how all of this was going to go down? Did President Biden get bad information or did he IGNORE good information. Is he being weak or wise?

You can add this dilemma to the list of many that I am just not fully certain about. We have spent twenty years in Afghanistan, spent by some estimates over a TRILLION dollars and most tragically have spent the lives of nearly 2,500 of our best young people, about 65,000 to 70,000 thousand Afghani soldiers, over 50,000 Taliban fighters and nearly 50,000 innocent Afghani citizens. The war started under Republican President George W. Bush, was extended, expanded, and contracted by Democratic President Obama, was extended by Republican President Trump and is now in the hands of another Democratic President, Joe Biden. I think there is plenty of blame to go around. But I want to talk about something other than who is to blame.

In the conservative and liberal media, the talking heads, the retired generals and other “intelligence experts” rage and rail about the sorry state of affairs. It strikes me as an indictment of how we see ourselves (I would argue of how we delude ourselves) versus how others see us. If you ask most Americans who won World War II, they will say America did of course. I shudder to try to interpret what was in the mind of Lennon and McCartney when they wrote the words listed above. (They were probably stoned.) But it is safe to say that most Brits think that THEY won the war. Oh, they would agree that the Yanks came to help, as usual late to the party, but that THEY paid the price. (Most scholars think that the US and the UK lost a similar number of military personnel, but the Brits lost nearly 70,000 civilians.) The French, Canadians, Aussies, Norwegians and several other groups would have their own take on things. My point is that we think that we have always been and always should be ALL POWERFUL. We think we can do anything we want in the world because we have the largest economy (for now), the most wealth and the most military power on earth. And by jiminy, if we DON’T get our way, it is because somebody (usually our political opponent) has screwed everything up. I think that is a key to why Americans are so conflicted about the Vietnam war. It is hard to argue that we WON that war. Some would say we didn’t lose the war, but I think that is equivocating. And this setback in Afghanistan will be just as difficult to weave into our “we-are-the-champions” (to paraphrase Freddy Mercury) mentality.

And of course, we Americans think that we KNOW what is best for every situation. Thus, we have coined the term “nation building”. Is that what we were doing in Vietnam and is that what we have been doing in Afghanistan? Let’s try to be balanced, our work in Afghanistan is NOT all to no avail. We built schools, hospitals and greatly improved the infrastructure of the country. It is said that Kabul was an overgrown village with dirt roads in the 1990’s when the Taliban took over and now it is a bustling modern city of over 4,000,000. But along with what we have built, how much physical and societal infrastructure did we destroy? And perhaps more to the point, what made us think that we KNEW what government was best for this scattered, mostly rural, tribal, fundamentally Islamic country that has steadfastly resisted other attempts at organization over the centuries? Perhaps there is no central government there because they don’t WANT one!!

I have said before and I will say it again. I love America. I think it is without doubt the best country in the world. I would never want to live anywhere else. But is it possible that in reality even with all our power and wealth that we CAN’T do exactly what we want in every situation? And if we can’t is this such a sign of failure? What about the rest of the world? Do they have anything to say about how things are done on this planet? Is it possible that we DON’T have the solution for every problem that arises in the world? Is it possible that we can’t right every thing that we perceive to be wrong in the world? I am not an “America First” advocate because I think that radical nationalism has far too many negative aspects to it. As the most powerful nation in the world, I believe we DO have responsibilities. But would it make some sense to work on SOME other problems instead of engaging in the military misadventures we seem to be prone to entering? What could a trillion dollars have done to address poverty, pollution, and global climate change? And by the way I am not saying that we would address those issues only within our borders. Maybe we should try to become the world leader in something in addition to military might.

Some will call me Un-American for even uttering these words – perhaps we should eat some humble pie and own up to the fact that we DID NOT accomplish our ill-defined goals in Afghanistan and that we are making the best of a bad situation that was of our own making and that we will learn from this misadventure. And once and for all admit that we CAN’T be all things to all people. We don’t have all knowledge and wisdom and we need to stop beating ourselves up for these truths.