Food for Thought: Views on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan amongst the common American population one week after the retreat from Afghanistan tells us the State of the World today in this one graphic chart below: (Source: Sober Look)
It’s pretty clear, that Joe Biden only went ahead and retreated from the 20-year sham of a military expedition in Afghanistan because he knew that beneath all the popular bluster and blather about keeping the world safe from Terrorism and championing Democracy and Human Rights under Pax Americana, when push comes to shove, there was really nothing more that the average American Joe wanted than to be able to say “to hell with the rest of the world” and “il faut cultiver notre jardin” (we need to cultivate the garden in our own backyard).
It took 20 years each in Vietnam and in Afghanistan for ordinary American people to finally realise that their political leaders had tricked and manipulated them to walk down the garden path into war in so many different parts of the world where they really had no business to be … except that Presidents and Secretaries of State and Defence had no choice to do so since they were obliged as slaves to serve and meet the private ends and self-interests their masters behind the scenes —- a powerful imperialistic cabal known in America as the Great American “military-industrial-Wall Street complex”.
As the enveloping mists and murkiness took their time all these years to slowly lift from the grand delusional somnolence of the average American Joe’s mind, American taxpayers themselves discovered at last but too late that, during the same time they were all slumbering, they had lost a few trillion $ of their own tax-money, had thousands of lives of their young dead on battlefields and where too millions of innocent got killed in the bloody, savage civil wars in those faraway countries and societies where America had chosen to meddle. … A brave man called Julius Assange had warned them all about it more than a decade ago … but then a President named Barack Obama called him a dangerous international insurgent and had him locked up in jail … where he slowly rotted and went mad.
For America, it is, better of course, that it has woken up from its delusions so late than never at all… but meanwhile for the millions of families in the rest of world whose loved, near and dear ones have been killed and maimed and destroyed in wars and strife in countries like Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and now Afghanistan …. late is never going to be better than never since, as History will in time, sooner or later, surely show the world, that in spite of some sort of a distant mirage of peace arriving to comfort them suddenly now in their lives rather very late perhaps, all what they have already lost, alas, is never going to be returned to them.
“Better late than never” is not necessarily going to get any better… because, who knows, won’t it get much worse even?
Sudarshan Madabushi