Afghanistan war neocons like George W. Bush would like you to know this isn't their fault
The neoconservatives who launched the war in Afghanistan would very much like you to know the war’s ignominious ending is someone else's fault.
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote a piece titled, “Afghanistan Is Your Fault,” saying the loss of the war should be blamed on American voters. Former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum said we could have won the war in Afghanistan with this one little trick (namely killing Osama bin Laden in December 2001 instead of May 2011). Eliot A. Cohen — a founder of the infamous neoconservative group Project for the New American Century — said now was a time for “for meticulous soul-searching” that is “without recrimination.”
But very few people in American history are as due for recriminations as the neoconservative cabal in then-President George W. Bush's administration who drove us heedlessly into decadeslong conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sober analysts at the time made clear that remaking Iraq and the “graveyard of empires” into Western-friendly, capitalist, liberal democracies was a fool’s errand.
As we evaluate the failures of those efforts today, we must recognize the problem was not in the execution of the wars, or the withdrawals, but in the very idea of committing American lives and wealth to forcibly “rebuilding” nations across the globe to fit neoconservatives' vision of society. Their hubris and greed cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives — and did more to diminish American power than our stated adversaries ever could.
While neoconservatives claim to be motivated by a commitment to promoting liberal democracy abroad, their push for war and empire was justified through lies and deception. And that played a huge part in undermining the stability of liberal democracy here at home.
There is a direct line from the loss of trust in government caused by the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction to Donald Trump’s claim as a presidential candidate that “I alone can fix it.” The hatred and fear mobilized to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seamlessly flowed from the Bush era into the tea party and then the white nationalist movement that Trump surfed to the White House. Most importantly, the trillions spent on weapons used to bring foreign populations to heel was money that was not allocated instead to pay for desperately needed health care, education or infrastructure here at home.
More at:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/afghanistan-war-neocons-george-w-bush-would-you-know-isn-ncna1277267
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So, so sad. 
