Donald Trump’s absurd decision to send more troops to Afghanistan repeats Barack Obama’s folly. Its important to be clear about this. The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks. But Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney rejected the idea of going to war with Afghanistan. There are no valuable targets there, said Rumsfeld. After all, the Bush administration was after bigger fish: Iraq. Never mind that Iraq had even less to do with 9/11 than Afghanistan.
Fast forward to 2008: a jejune, inexperienced Barack Obama tried to burnish his foreign policy credentials by saying that Afghanistan was the “good war” and that the war in Iraq was “stupid.” At that time, the US had about 40,000 troops i Afghanistan but there was no pretense of a war with Afghanistan, only with Iraq. Obama said that if he were elected he would send 1 or 2 brigades (5-10,000 soldiers) to strengthen “our” presence. After he was elected Obama went through a true charade meant to bolster his image of intellectuality in which he was “deciding” what to do in Afghanistan. Big surprise he authorized two successive “surges”— the numbers are almost impossible to get clear because the troops were classified in different ways (combat, non-combat, etc.) but I am reasonably sure that at one point there were at least 200,000 US troops there. In 2011 in his well-known interview with Jacob Goldberg, Obama described himself as “jammed” (i.e., manipulated) by the military, when he authorized his troop expansion.
Why is this important? Why blame Obama when his Presidency was surrounded by the two worst Presidencies in American history: Bush’s and Trump’s? The reason is that the only way we are going to get out of the nightmare situation that the US is in is if there is a revival of an independent, socialist, radical left. And the most important thing a left can do is tell the truth. In 2008, everyone agreed that Bush was terrible. But in replacing Bush with Obama we gave up our own responsibility. We spent eight years protecting Obama and never criticized him, even though his domestic policy was written by the bankers just as clearly as his foreign policy was written by the military. We cant do this in 2020. We can’t just support someone because they are young, or good looking or even because of their gender or race (and I don’t deny that this was important in 2008.) The situation is too desparate for us to settle for an anti-Trump just as last time we settled for an anti-Bush.