Preview

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.