A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Forever Nonsense of Forever Warriors
A world without ubiquitous U.S. military presence? Horrors!

What remains of the U.S. foreign policy establishment-also known as
"The Blob"-is a group of people and institutions so dedicated to
their attachment to America's costly and counterproductive military
empire, i.e. "forever wars," that its avatars are now abandoning all
logic to attack President Joe Biden's welcome decision to minimize the
damage to the nation's reputation, economy, and loss of life that war
necessarily entails. Following Biden's excellent speech

on Afghan withdrawal on Tuesday evening, Council on Foreign Relations
President Richard Haass tweeted
that
the "most debatable claim" in Biden's speech was that "US choice
in Afghanistan was to leave or 'commit tens of thousands of more
troops going back to war.' There was a 3rd choice: to stay as we were
as costs of mil presence had gone down b/c of previous troop reductions
& end of combat ops."

This is transparently false, and Haass surely knows it. Donald Trump
agreed in February 2020 to a ceasefire with the Taliban. Under the terms
of the "Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan
,"
the U.S. promised to withdraw all of its troops, and the Taliban agreed
not to attack them in the interim. Biden extended the deadline of that
withdrawal by three months and then, despite the chaos, oversaw the
largest airlift in history. Haass pretends that the U.S. could have
continued its relatively peaceful presence while at the same time
breaking its word to the Taliban, thereby inviting more attacks and
therefore an expanded war, demanding more troops, more death, and more
billions wasted on something that does virtually nothing to enhance U.S.
security.

His longer argument, published on the website of the Council of Foreign
Relations, "America's Withdrawal of Choice
," is no
better. Yet it is exactly such incoherent arguments that have dominated
our discourse. Haass is not even among the worst of these withdrawal
critics, as this Media Matters round-up

demonstrates. As Matthew Dowd
, the
former chief strategist for the Bush/Cheney 2004 presidential campaign,
rightly tweeted. "if the media covered the assault on democracy here
and the rise of white supremacist terrorism in America like they have
Afghanistan, we might actually have a voting rights bill and we could be
holding domestic terrorists and their instigators accountable."

The editorial staff of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal

complains that Biden's speech was "defiant, accusatory ...
dishonest, and so lacking in self-reflection or accountability." A
better description of the editorial page's take on just about
everything would be hard to find. This was their Pavlovian reaction to a
Democrat refusing to opt for more war, but the Journal's page is often
no more reliable when its authors take their time and attempt a more
historical viewpoint. Here, for instance, is former Bush official Tevi
Troy's attempt to contrast Biden's alleged failure in Afghanistan
with John Kennedy's success in the Cuban Missile Crisis
.
The problem is that Troy's understanding of said crisis is almost half
a century out of date. For instance, he praises Kennedy for creating the
"ExComm," which "deliberately included people outside the National
Security Council to get external opinions," and then praises them
because "The Kennedy team successfully used the ExComm for
deliberations during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which was resolved
without nuclear confrontation."

Had Troy been even remotely familiar with the literature of the crisis,
say, by 1978, when Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published Robert Kennedy and
His Times
-building
on the partial story in Kennedy's own posthumously published Thirteen
Days

in 1969-he'd know that Kennedy solved the crisis without the ExComm.
Instead, JFK sent his brother to work out a last-minute deal with the
Russians to deliver his promise to exchange U.S. missiles in Turkey for
the Russian missiles in Cuba-and did not even tell the members of the
ExComm he had done so. The president even let them debate the
possibility of a strike against the missiles in Cuba after he had made
the offer that settled the crisis. Kennedy lied about this and that lie
spawned countless other lies, and helped pave the way for Lyndon
Johnson's folly in Vietnam. I explain this in great detail in my
long-ago book When Presidents Lie
.
The main reason for the ExComm was to keep hawks "pissing inside the
tent" rather than going public with their attacks, giving them the
mistaken impression that Kennedy cared what they thought. In fact, he
was always going to settle the crisis without war.

OK, so Troy is out of league as a historian, but what I find funniest
about his sage advice is the fact that he writes, "Another problem is
that Biden seems particularly sensitive to stories about internal
disagreements," because "Mr. Biden dislikes 'process stories,'
by which he means news articles about 'palace intrigue.' If aides
know the president doesn't want to read about infighting, they will
strive to make him happy by minimizing behaviors that signal
disagreement."

Got that? Biden does not like reading stories in which people leak their
internal disagreements to the media after he has made a decision on
policy. Jeepers, Mr. Troy. I agree this is really weird. After all,
virtually every president other than Biden has relished seeing himself
second-guessed by anonymous "sources" inside his administration in
the media. What can possibly be the matter with Joe Biden?

If you want to convince yourself that our country's future is
hopeless, all you need to know is that "Fox News, bolstered by
viewers' rapt attention to Afghanistan, beat the broadcast networks in
last week's ratings, AP writes

from Nielsen figures," with something like 75 percent more viewers
than CNN and MSNBC put together. The Pew Research Center notes

that dishonest, anti-science, pro-insurrectionist, racist, sexist
sources like Fox-whose Afghanistan "experts
"
are often war profiteers themselves-and their even more evil spawn are
increasingly becoming the only news source for Republicans, who
apparently cannot abide even the minimal amount of truth that makes it
into the mainstream institutions that desperately court them with
intellectually indefensible both-sidesism
.

Here are some especially worthwhile pieces I've read recently about
the end of the war:

David Rothkopf in The Atlantic

James Dobbins in Foreign Affairs

Andrew Bacevich in The Nation

And somewhat incredibly, Ross Douthat in the Times
.

****

I also want to strongly recommend this piece on U.S. foreign policy more
generally by Ben Rhodes, also in Foreign Affairs. He explains
:
"The kinds of attacks that the country spent trillions of dollars to
prevent would have caused only a fraction of the deaths that could have
been prevented by a more competent response to COVID-19, by the minimal
gun safety measures that have been blocked by Congress, or by better
preparation for deadly weather events intensified by climate
change-all of which were neglected or stymied in part because of
Washington's fixation on terrorism. The scale of the costs-and
opportunity costs-of the post-9/11 wars suggests that the country
needs a structural correction, not simply a change of course."

Oh and by the way, new Wall Street Journal reporting

now appears to be embracing the arguments I made regarding the
relationship between job seeking and unemployment insurance in this
"Altercation" newsletter
,
which was critical of the Journal's misleading reporting on the same
topic. Don't expect Laura Ingraham to stop calling for starvation

as a response, however.

Last week saw the observance of the 101st anniversary of Charlie
Parker's birth. I don't think anyone changed the way jazz was played
more than Parker did, at least since its invention, and what's
remarkable about his compositions is how fresh they sound today, and how
many musicians are still inspired by them. Whenever I have the bad
fortune of being stuck in the city for the last week of August, I am at
least able to enjoy the consolation prize of being able to attend the
annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival
up in Harlem, sponsored
by the City Parks Foundation.

This year, it featured three nights of music. I missed the first one,
which apparently went on despite flash flood warnings, but I was happy
to join a wonderfully diverse audience of New Yorkers to hear Donald
Harrison Quartet and the Harlem Symphony Orchestra perform on Saturday
evening. Harrison did a set with his quartet of Parker songs and songs
Harrison wrote to sound like Parker, (which inspired some impressive
jitterbugging on the part of audience members). But the highlight was
the joint performance of the two of Parker's seminal "Charlie Parker
with Strings," a rare treat given its demands (for strings, etc.).

Sunday night featured a pickup band of local jazz players supporting
four separate alto sax players and, even at a free concert in a park,
the "ballads" part of the night hypnotized the audience into
perfect, rapturous quiet. Here
is
the great Whitney Balliett on Bird from 1976, and here
is
my late, great friend Stanley Crouch, who wrote his biography.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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