Here is a list of 14 warnings from Mr. Trump on how the U.S. government must get out of Afghanistan.
On Monday, August 21, President Trump announced that he has reversed his previous plan to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. His speech is here.
Politicians know they can promise anything before they are elected, yet they can easily reverse course and suffer almost no lasting political damage. Their true believers, also known as schnooks, who voted for them will shrug their shoulders and not miss a beat. It doesn’t bother them at all. They get all hyped up during the election, not because they were stupid enough to believe any of the nonsense, but because every four years, Americans like to get hyped up for an election. It’s kind of like the Super Bowl. It’s a ritual, but it only comes once every four years. It costs a lot more than the Super Bowl. Also, we don’t get a lot of funny ads.
Politics is a matter of selective betrayals. It always has been. Sometimes we find that the betrayals are monumental, yet there are no negative sanctions against the betrayers. Woodrow Wilson campaigned in the election of 1916 of this slogan: “He kept us out of war.” exactly one month after his inauguration, he went before the Congress of the United States and demanded that the Congress vote for war. The Congress dutifully did this.
Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 duplicated this campaign procedure. He promised that he would not send American boys off to war. Then, he spent all of 1941 maneuvering diplomatically to get the Japanese to attack the United States somewhere in the Pacific. No reputable historian is supposed to say this, but that was reality in 1941. What made everything perfect for him was that Adolf Hitler, the greatest fool in history of military strategy, declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. Hitler really was was the perfect fool. He invaded Russia in June, and he lost Dunkirk in 1940. Roosevelt was lucky to have such a fool on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then there was George W. Bush. On the October 11, 2000 debate with Al Gore, he said this:
MODERATOR: We talked about that. Want me to do it with you? Lebanon.BUSH: Make a couple comments.
MODERATOR: Sure, absolutely, sure. Somalia.
BUSH: Started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that’s where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in this case it was a nation-building exercise, and same with Haiti. I wouldn’t have supported either.
Then came 9/11, an attack by a group of Saudi Arabians.
