VIEWPOINT / WHO IS TO BLAME?

By W. Timothy Weaver,  Ph.D.

Anyone with empathy greater than a mealworm has to be moved by scenes on television this week. Why did this whole affair come to such a chaotic denouement? In a word—a completely failed but desperately clung to theory. America can go where Angels fear to tread. We would not be interred in the Graveyard of Empires. We could build from scratch an Army, Air Force, an entire government that would act as we act. This created apparatus would defend the nation, agree to grand national goals and defeat their rivals, the Taliban. 

The premise was wrong. This was not Germany, Korea, or Japan. We take credit for rebuilding those nations. Note, we are still occupying those countries, although we’ve long convinced ourselves and enough of them that we are still there to “protect” them. The premise that we could repeat the blueprint from WWII was flawed from the start. Yet, four consecutive administrations perpetuated the Big Lie that the Afghan government was growing stronger each year and could and would act as we would if insurrectionists attempted to overthrow the government. They would fight like wildcats. It was a false prophecy that no one could admit—not the politicians, not the military. 

We watched the theory fail in Iraq right on our television sets when only the Kurds would fight ISIS to defend their land and their way of life. The Iraqi military cut and ran every time the US command left them on their own. Yet, we learned nothing from that experience. Nothing. 

The reason chaos ensued in Afghanistan is that no political leader could bring himself to publicly state the absolute truth: we have deluded ourselves. We deluded ourselves first in Vietnam and then in Iraq and from those experiences we learned nothing. We have again deluded ourselves in Afghanistan. Not only have we deluded ourselves for two decades but we’ve come to believe the delusion was reality. The entire political establishment is to blame. The bottom of this pyramid of lies is a chronic condition of lying, deceit and covering up in public life. This endemic and chronic illness arises from a nearly universal belief that it is OK to lie for a good enough reason. 

We need a new civics and American history curriculum that honestly digs into the fundamental nature of politics in the absence of ethics and morality. We owe our children the tools to detect when leaders are lying. Sadly, their noses do not give them away. Only digging deeply into the facts and learning which sources are seeking the truth can lead us to the truth. The Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko, has been writing brutally honest reports on progress or lack thereof in Afghanistan. 

No politician of either party has stood on the floor of the House or Senate and read details from Sopko’s well researched and well written reports. Here is the link. Read and be informed, please: https://www.sigar.mil/allreports/. Be sure to share with friends and family.

When lying becomes standard practice we become less informed. That seems to be the function of chronic lying among the nation’s political leaders. It may never be written or stated as a goal or policy, but functional analysis suggests that chronic lying has a reason. A misinformed public has no basis on which to make intelligent choices at the voting booth. Self-perpetuation in office seems to at the root of this illness. What else could the function be? 

I am now reading Sissela Bok’s book, Lying. I strongly advise others do the same.

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