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Well, how nice! We Americans can glow with pride and slap our red white and blue bumper stickers on our cars, confident that we are once again, blameless in another international geo-political fiasco.
Just as we have no foresight, we also have no hindsight. Not even a decade. We conveniently forget that we used Afghanistan as a proxy in our cold war with the Soviets and then just walked away from the devastation when the Soviets pulled out. It was a perfect opportunity to rebuild a nation upon democratic principles and give ourselves a justified presence in an unstable region and we blew it. We have failed to learn from our elders of “The Greatest Generation”. They did not walk away from Western Europe, Japan, Philippines, Greece, South Korea, et al, after the wars of the 20th Century. They seized the opportunity for “nation building”, only they called it “building strategic and trading partners” rather than giving it a right-wing derogatory code name to justify a short-sighted and dangerous isolationism. And don’t accuse me of blaming America first. I put us about fifth, behind the Taliban, Soviets, British Empire, and Pat Buchanan.
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