Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

Encore Presentation: Embedding

Now we're beginning to see, thanks to Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, that the awful decline in President Biden's approval numbers was caused neither by public indignation over inflation nor Fox News bogus preoccupation with the president's age, but mostly by our "liberal" media's insane rage over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I felt like re-upping this post from when it was going on, trying to puzzle out what the journos were so outraged over:

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

Neoconservative Denial

Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM).

I want to stop, but maybe just one more column, this one from Robert Kagan of the Kagan dynasty, co-founder with Dr. William Kristol of the Project for a New American Century, and prophet of neoconservatism, as he defined it in 2008, as a kind of political faith going back to 1776 and Alexander Hamilton, whose tenets are

a potent moralism and idealism in world affairs, a belief in America’s exceptional role as a promoter of the principles of liberty and democracy, a belief in the preservation of American primacy and in the exercise of power, including military power, as a tool for defending and advancing moralistic and idealistic causes, as well as a suspicion of international institutions and a tendency toward unilateralism. 

(Though the quotation he uses to bring Hamilton to his side is pretty distorted, when he claims that "Hamilton, even in the 1790s, looked forward to the day when America would be powerful enough to assist peoples in the 'gloomy regions of despotism' to rise up against the 'tyrants that oppressed them"; in fact what Hamilton said, not in the 1790s but 1784, had no reference to "assisting" anybody in the future—merely to the young US already then setting an inspiring example, by its underdog victory in the Revolution: "The influence of our example has penetrated the gloomy regions of despotism, and has pointed the way to inquiries, which may shake it to its deepest foundations.")

But is, anyhow, very anxious at the moment from his (officially ex-neoconservative—he now identifies as "'liberal' and 'progressive' in a distinctly American tradition") position as Washington Post opinionist to assure us (contra WaPo's national security columnist, Greg Jaffe, who writes about the "hubris" of the American project) that the effort in Afghanistan was no effort in "advancing moralistic and idealistic causes" ("It wasn’t hubris that drove America into Afghanistan. It was fear."):

View From Nowhere

 

Spectroscope, British Library collections, via SolvingForPattern.

Peter Baker,  the New York Times reporter so devoted to the View From Nowhere that he notoriously refuses even to take sides in secret by casting a ballot in an election, has a characteristic take on the withdrawal from Afghanistan: that angry partisans missed a chance to find a compromise between the extreme positions, that US forces should withdraw or US forces should not withdraw ("All In or All Out? Biden Saw No Middle Ground in Afghanistan."):

“There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict,” Mr. Biden said as the Taliban seized Kabul this month.

Critics consider that either disingenuous or at the very least unimaginative, arguing that there were viable alternatives, even if not especially satisfying ones, that may not have ever led to outright victory but could have avoided the disaster now unfolding in Kabul and the provinces.

For the Record: A Very Sad Thing, supplement

 

Chris Cillizza, CNN opinionist, covered the Trump interview with Hugh Hewitt that we dealt with as a Literary Corner piece. He covered more of the story than I did, but did a shockingly bad job of it:

Cillizza is baffled in part because he's an idiot who doesn't do his homework. For example, the story of the Trump-Baradar phone call isn't news; it was well reported at the time, first by the Taliban, then State Department, then Trump himself. https://t.co/bWuvaLRkqF

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) August 28, 2021

Enemies

Drawings by Charles and Louis Haghe, from James Atkinson's Sketches in Afghanistan, 1842, via The New York Times.

So it seems we are now in a certain sense allies of the Taliban, by enemy-of-my-enemy standards, as the ISIS-K mounts a lethal suicide attack on the Kabul airport in order to demonstrate the weakness and incompetence of the Taliban, and 13 US service members are among the victims. Indeed, from the ISIS-K standpoint, we were already allies—they've been mocking the Taliban online for getting Afghanistan "on a silver platter" from the US, and suggesting that the US expects something from them in return. Which is also true in a certain sense: the Taliban are supposed to be protecting the American evacuation operations, right in the March 2020 agreement, which is what the negotiations over the last weeks have been about:

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies...

"But you can't stop us from threatening them!" says ISIS-Khorasan. That's what the attack was meant to demonstrate.

And by extension, we're allies, in a certain sense, with al-Qa'eda, the international group that has always been allied with the Taliban since the beginning (when the 9/11 attacks were masterminded from Afghanistan), and is unalterably opposed to ISIS.

Literary Corner: Isn't That a Very Sad Thing?

Pompeo and Baradar in Doha, 2020, via Economist.

Trump's original report on his call of 3 March 2020, four days after the signing of the Doha Agreement on the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and swap of prisoners between the Taliban and the Afghan government (which was not a party to the talks, but ultimately complied and released 5,100 Taliban prisoners as US promised), and three days before the Taliban resumed its attacks on Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, leading by June to the worst ANDSF losses in the history of the war:

Trump confirmed the Taliban’s announcement Tuesday that he had spoken by phone with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top political leader.

“I spoke to the leader of the Taliban today. We had a good conversation. We’ve agreed there’s no violence, we don’t want violence; we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “They’re dealing with Afghanistan, but we’ll see what happens. We had actually a very good talk.”...

“I’ll be meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not-too-distant future. And we’ll be very much hoping that they will be doing what they say they’re going to be doing: They will be killing [presumably ISIS] terrorists,” Trump said. “They will be killing some very bad people. They will keep that fight going.”

How he remembers it now, in conversation with Hugh Hewitt:

Pulling Out

Al-Nouri Mosque, Mosul, under reconstruction with UNESCO funding in 2020, via Archinect.

Ex-Proconsul Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Mesopotamia, would like you to know that he's a champ at nation-building, through the Wall Street Journal. I'm dubious.

The US press allowed Obama to pull out troops from Iraq in 2010. Ooh did they give him shit about it when ISIS showed up and smashed the Iraqi army in 2014. But in retrospect the pullout was the most effective "nation-building" thing the US did.

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 21, 2021

Of course the young Iraqi government had to call for a return of the US-led coalition to rescue them, but that's not the point. They also got plenty of help from Iran. 

Embedding

 

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

Narratology: Something Much Worse

I can't get over the videos of these Taliban fighters as ridiculous country boys. Sure they're woman-hating murderers, but so were the kids the US sent to Vietnam to take orders from Lieutenant Calley. Who's a bad guy? Think about it.

What actually happened, on the American side, is now getting a good deal clearer, thanks to the brilliant folks at Just Security and retired CIA analyst Douglas London, who has given them a statement ("Afghanistan, not an intelligence failure but something much worse") based on his own work as counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia in 2018-19 and as a Biden volunteer in 2020:

By early 2018, it was clear President Trump wanted out of Afghanistan regardless of the alarming outcomes the intelligence community cautioned. But he likewise did not want to preside over the nightmarish scenes we’ve witnessed. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the principal architect of America’s engagement with the Taliban that culminated with the catastrophic February 2020 withdrawal agreement, terms intended to get the president through the coming elections. Pompeo championed the plan despite the intelligence community’s caution that its two key objectives– securing the Taliban’s commitment to break with al-Qa’ida and pursue a peaceful resolution to the conflict — were highly unlikely.

America’s special representative, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, was a private citizen dabbling on his own in 2018 with a variety of dubious Afghan interlocutors against whom the intelligence community warned, trying opportunistically to get “back inside.” Undaunted, his end-around to Pompeo and the White House pledging to secure the deal Trump needed which the president’s own intelligence, military and diplomatic professionals claimed was not possible absent a position of greater strength, was enthusiastically received. Our impression was that Khalilzad was angling to be Trump’s Secretary of State in a new administration, were he to win, and would essentially do or say what he was told to secure his future by pleasing the mercurial president, including his steady compromise of whatever leverage the United States had to incentivize Taliban compromises. (h/t djchefron)

As in other cases, it was the announcement Trump wanted, not the thing itself, and he wanted it in the early part of the presidential campaign—for the presidential campaign. 

Surprise

 

Ration for five men in Kandahar, 2020, via France24.

watching tom nichols, max boot, jeffrey goldberg and michael o'hanlon analyzing u.s. failures in afghanistan on a splitscreen next to oj performing the ron and nicole autopsies

— man it’s a hot zone, (@Mobute) August 16, 2021

Indeed. Maybe not Goldberg, who came to a point of rationality on Afghanistan as he studied Barack Obama, e.g. in 2015:

I think Obama had the tragic sense, early on, that there was no possibility of nation building in Afghanistan, and so he focused his efforts on decimating al Qaeda.... Afghanistan has confounded outsiders since the 1850s and earlier, and so it is not remarkable that Obama has failed to ameliorate the situation.

But honestly, these other guys, the ones who became NeverTrumpers because they believed Trump was some kind of pacifist and voted for Biden in the hope he'd be a warmonger can just shut up.

Although what really shocks me is the retired pros who seem to have had no idea the nation hadn't been built in Afghanistan, even as they kept begging presidents from Obama till now to keep the troops there, like James Stavridis just on Thursday, I mean four days ago:

Afghanistan Note

Blue Mosque, Mazar-e-Sharif, site of the grave of Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. Photo by Steve Evans, 2005, via Wikimedia Commons.

Do we want to talk about Afghanistan? Not really. Maybe just to acknowledge that it feels pretty bad, and propose an official apology of sorts, not just for destroying the country, but for our inexhaustible conviction that we were actually fixing it, like deluded Americans in a Graham Greene story, the same story as always.

I feel especially bad because I found myself, in the last few weeks, starting to sort of believe people getting interviewed on BBC World Service, Afghan and US officials, suggesting everything might be fine, there's an excellently trained and richly equipped Afghan army. Everything was not fine, as we've been hearing for a while now. most importantly in this huge 2019 work from the Washington Post: 

American Identity Politics

Can't find a decent credit for this photo, but I think it's Kabul in 1960s sometime.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "The American Identity Crisis", New York Times, 16 July 2021:

Why can't liberals be more neoconservative? Don't they have any moral consistency at all?

Really, that's about the whole thing. He's regretting the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and while he recognizes that the Bush-era invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were a catastrophe causing the US to lose confidence in its ability to spread democracy and be a lamp unto the nations, he doesn't get why that should prompt us to quit. Just because our adventure in Afghanistan is a total failure, is that any reason to quit Afghanistan? 

I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.

But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.

We told you not to invade in the first place! We've been telling you for 40 years! You can't liberate people by force! They need to liberate themselves!

Afghanistan note

Via Amnesty International.

I don't know exactly what to think about the Biden plan for Afghanistan, except to say no, Ross, it's not Trumpism—it's President Obama, who set dates for complete withdrawal by April 2010 during the 2008 campaign; by 2014 in June 2011 and by 2016 in May 2014; and in 2015, Obama fixed a last date for withdrawing all the troops, in 2017, but the guy who was president in 2017 reversed that, almost doubling the number of troops to 14,000 instead. Obama's policy, wanting to withdraw them bet never quite managing to do more than draw them very far down, from 100,000 at peak in 2010 to 8,400 when he left office, has so far been the same as Biden's, who campaigned to bring them back by this May and has now pushed it back to September. Whereas Trump's policy, as ever, was to follow the advice of the last person he spoke to before posting the tweet, with varying results, because he spoke to different people.

It's become clear that nothing NATO troops do in Afghanistan is going to make the situation there any better, after 20 years. It's not clear that pulling troops out will make it any worse, especially, than it is, either: US military seems certain that the likelihood of another redoubt of anti-US terrorists living in the mountain caves under Taliban protection the way the Qa'eda did 20 years ago is extremely low, and they think they could handle it from outside the country if it did. Is it likely the Taliban will sweep through the country, destroying the social progress the capital has seen over the past 20 years, the way they did in 1996-98 with the social progress they had made during the time of Soviet dominance, pictured at top? That's the implicit threat that the corrupt and feckless Kabul government seems to be holding out—"Protect us, or they'll come and stick all the women back in purdah!"

Even some of the women in government are getting fatigued with the argument, per The Times, though:

“It is too early to comment on the subject. We need to know much more,” said Fatima Gailani, an Afghan government negotiator who is involved in the continuing peace talks with the Taliban. “One thing is certain: It is about time that we learn how to rely on ourselves. Women of Afghanistan are totally different now. They are a force in our country; no one can deny them their rights or status.”

and there are signs that the simmering "civil war", which continues to kill people all the time in spite of the presence of NATO, isn't a new struggle between two sides but the old multilateral warlordism that never went away:

As American troops prepare to leave and fractures form in the Afghan government, militias controlled by powerful local warlords are once more rising to prominence and attacking government forces.

I'd ask people to remember this: Afghanistan has never been a country, but a very big frontier, between the Persians of Iran in the west, the Turkic populations of former Soviet Central Asia and China to the north and east, and the Indic people, mainly Pashtun, of Pakistan and India to the south; the Taliban are Pashtun, not "Afghan" to the extent there is such a thing at all, and the charisma that enabled them to seize so much territory back in 1998 is gone; they're just another warlord group now, corrupt and creepy (Russia may still be helping them out financially, but stopped that bounty program over a year ago, and is now actively engaged with the US, alongside China and Pakistan, in brokering peace talks).

Maybe instead of worrying, as we tend to do, about whether NATO is "abandoning" the crappy old regime set up by the Bush administration, we should think of withdrawal as offering the best chance to people like Fatima Gailani to assert themselves. That—as opposed to propping up President Ghani—is the only prospect for an actually good outcome, inside Kabul at least. We'll keep sending money, and political advisers as long as it's safe. Why not try treating it as something that could be good for Afghanistan?

NYT Book Review: Sentence them to the galleys!

Right, "Intel" gave him a call 10:30 Sunday night after leaving him hanging for 48 hours. "Hi, Mr. President, Intel here, we got a line on that report that we've been collecting evidence going back to January that GRU has been paying Afghan militants to kill NATO troops since 2018, and it turns out when we had that emergency National Security Council meeting on the subject last March, as reported in The Times, WaPo, and Wall Street Journal, among other places, we apparently decided the evidence wasn't credible, so we didn't want to bother you. We suspect the New York Times Book Review of fabricating the whole thing."

With their field critics in Helmand, who planted the story with the militants ("Just tell the interrogators Russians were paying you, and in turn we'll get you lunch with an agent to pitch your manuscript"). No, the @nytimesbooks bit must be a bizarre Autocorrect. But in general he's once again gotten out ahead of where the cleanup crew can follow him, simultaneously acknowledging that the reports exist, "based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals", and claiming that The Times made them up.

And in other cheap shots:

And How They GRU

This story, reported last night by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz in The Times, is nuts: that the Russian GRU unit 29155, implicated in the attempted murder of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in Sofia in 2015, the attempt to assassinate the Montenegrin prime minister and overturn that country's government in 2016, the attempted murder of Sergey Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018, has also been active in Afghanistan, orchestrating attacks by Taliban-linked militants on American and other NATO troops there and paying them bounties for success in some fraction of those killings (something like 50 Americans have been killed in hostile fire and IED attacks in Afghanistan since 2017). 

Let's just say that again: Russian intelligence helping Afghan insurgents kill Americans, and paying them for it. The report doesn't offer any conclusions about how far up the Russian chain of command it goes, but we're always told that nothing big happens without Vladimir Putin's approval. 

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

The White House has been sitting on this information for close to four months, apparently unable to make up its mind to do anything, though. Except to keep it secret, apparently. Though Trump has been conducting his own Russia policy of pushing the readmission of Russia to the former G8, now G7, even though the crimes in Ukraine for which Russia was expelled (the annexation of Crimea and collaborating in an insurgency in the Donbass region) are ongoing, doubling down on the idea of invitating Putin to attend a G7 summit.. As Twitter was quick to note:

Camp David Discords

Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin in Camp David, MD, 31 August 1978, via Wikipedia.

My take last night, that Trump was not the author and that something was really wrong with the story:

Wonder who wrote this thread. Ghani's visit is real https://t.co/hRjiKqtlIY but Taliban has refused to negotiate with Afghan govt all along. So did they suddenly change their minds, invite themselves to Camp David, and THEN screw the deal??? Weird story. https://t.co/pMkb7koMIY

— Nasty Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2019

Actually Ghani had already cancelled.

Literary Corner: Sir Thing

Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (2017), via.

I liked this, from the Tucker Carlson interview, not just for its sonnet shapeliness but still more for the way it elevates the sir story into the hypothetical mood. When Trump imagines what it's like to be president, it's exactly the way he expects his TV and rally audiences to imagine it, like the court in a sword-and-sandals movie, where the sovereign stands, or sits enthroned, in the midst of a crowd of heroic-looking guys who "walk up to" him to announce their concerns.

Corollary to that is the insight that he must be aware he isn't, in fact, effectively president, to the extent that these scenes aren't really taking place, much as he clearly wishes they would. That's why . they figure so strongly in the stories he makes up.

Sonnet on the Poet's Theoretical Plan to Remove All the Troops From Afghanistan

by Donald J. Trump

But I would leave very strong intelligence
there. You have to watch because they do --
you know, okay, I'll give you a tough one.
If you were in my position and a great looking
central casting and we have great generals,
a great central casting general walks up
to your office, I say, "We're getting out."
"Yes, sir. We'll get out. Yes, sir." 

I'll say, "What do you think of that?"
"Sir, I'd rather attack them over there, than
attack them in our land." In other words, them
coming here. That's always a very tough
decision, you know, with what happened
with the World Trade Center, et cetera et cetera.

If the general's good-looking enough, George C. Scott type, it's war. There's a chance we haven't gone to war yet in Iran because it's John Bolton pushing the case ("If we don't fight them there..."), with his stupid facial hair.

Literary Corner: The area—the land—the area

Noon, 1947, Lee Krasner, via Wikiart.

Sonnet: On the Poet Attempting to Explain Why He Scolded the Intelligence Community For Disagreeing With Him on Syria Before Deciding That They Agreed With Him After All, Which Everybody Knows They Didn't

by Donald J. Trump

It wasn't so much a report. It was the questions
and answers as the report was submitted
and they were asked questions and answers.
We've done an incredible job with Syria.

When I took over Syria it was infested
with ISIS. It was all over the place.
And now you have very little ISIS and
you have the caliphate almost knocked out.

We will be announcing in the not too distant future
100 percent of the caliphate which is the area—
the land—the area—100. We're at
99 percent right now, we'll be at 100.
When I took it over it was a disaster.
I think we've done a great job with that.

Whaddaya know, I'm with Chomsky

Rebel-held Douma, May 2017, photo by ABD DOUMANY/AFP/Getty Images, via TheOdysseyOnline.

"Let's declare victory and go home." There was a lot of logic to that position in the Vietnam case, as had become clear to everybody by the time the Ford administration got around to it, about seven years too late for the victory-declaration part.

But what was really needed in that case was for the United States to lose the war, as did duly happen, and for somebody to win, namely the Communist Party of Vietnam and its armed wing, the People's Army, which was fully prepared to take power, though its rule would be harsh for the first decades, and a lot of people wouldn't be able to live with it—there was also a broad willingness in the US to take on refugees from Vietnam, which did a lot to alleviate that. It would have been much better if the US had lost a bit more definitively, and begun paying reparations as well, for the terrible environmental and economic damage it had brought about, but that did not happen. (Although the trade embargo ended under the Clinton presidency and economic cooperation became very lively under Obama.)

What I want to say is, when you make a violent assault on a country and recognize that it was the wrong thing to do, it's not enough to dust off your hands and walk away, "Oops, my bad." You need to do something about the horror you've created and to take some punishment. You need to give something back, preferably in a peaceful currency. If World War II was really "the good war", it was less on account of the wickedness of the enemies (nobody prevented the Rape of Nanjing or the Holocaust or gave Jewish refugees a home in North America) as much as the Marshall Plan in Europe and the Japan reconstruction initiatives, which truly did something to atone for the atrocities committed in turn by the Allies.

It would also have been a lot better if the US had definitively lost the war in Iraq, only in this case there wasn't anybody available to lose to—that is, I thought there was somebody (as I started saying four years ago), in the form of the populist-nationalist Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who was almost equally hostile to the US and Iran, and eager for collaboration with Sunni and actual-leftist factions, but I was alone in that view until lo these many years later, after his Sairun party won enough seats in the May elections to become an essential element in any ruling coalition, and some of the wise men started noticing him, like Michael D. Sullivan in Foreign Policy (a post slightly marred by Sullivan's insistent belief that he was just as right when he was anti-Sadr as he is now that he's pro):