The excellent Eric Boehlert:A media chorus of excited critics have been relentless this week, denouncing President Joe Biden for the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and warning that his entire presidency is now “stained.”
Tightly adhering to Republican talking points, the pundit class is sure Biden has stumbled into a historic crisis as the Taliban seizes Kabul.
The U.S. has spent trillions in Afghanistan stretching back 20 years, yet Biden, who has been in office for seven months and who campaigned on bringing the troops home, is being tagged as an architect for the Taliban’s inevitable rise to power there.
A convenient, gaping hole in the coverage and commentary? The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was unalterably damaged when President George W. Bush hijacked that post-9/11 military mission and foolishly turned the Pentagon’s time, attention, and resources to a doomed invasion of Iraq.
Much of the mainstream media cheered that utterly failed war.
Battered by accusations of a liberal bias and determined to prove their conservative critics wrong, the press during the run-up to the war -- timid, deferential, unsure, cautious, and often intentionally unthinking -- came as close as possible to abdicating its reason for existing in the first place, which is to accurately inform citizens, particularly during times of great national interest.
Today the media’s role in marketing the Iraq War has been flushed down the memory hole, even though Iraq should be central to any discussion about the U.S.’s running failure in Afghanistan.
“Remarkably, the word “Bush” was not mentioned once on any of the›Sunday shows” this weekend as they focused nonstop on Afghanistan, noted Jon Allsop, at the Columbia Journalism Review.
You cannot discuss the rise of the Taliban in 2021 without talking about the U.S.’s doomed Iraq War in 2003. But the press today wants to try.
It’s another example of how pro-Iraq War cheerleaders in the media not only have paid no price for being spectacularly wrong, but they’re still allowed to dictate the parameters of our foreign policy discussion.
“For those of us who remember well how the mainstream media enthusiasm for war helped fuel not just this ill-advised war in Afghanistan twenty years ago, but the even bigger debacle in Iraq, the current media narrative is both bewildering and exhausting,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon. “This larger media outrage over the withdrawal is a dark reminder of the pro-war bias in the press that helped create this mess in the first place: luring the American public into thinking a war in Afghanistan could ever end in any other way.”
It’s especially jarring to see the Washington Post and the New York Times lead the way this week with finger-pointing Afghanistan coverage, considering those two outlets played essential roles in supporting the Iraq invasion, which became a turning point for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
And from Greg Olear:
THE UNITED STATES MOVED into Afghanistan when the Soviets did, in 1979. The mission was codenamed Operation Cyclone. Jimmy Carter was president. The CIA was involved. And I was in first grade. That’s how long we’ve been in Kabul.
Forty-two years of history in a fantastically complex foreign country, spanning eight presidencies, cannot be adequately explained by a soundbite, by the high-blood-pressure ravings of a performative pundit on one of the cable news programs—and certainly not in the first few hours of a withdrawal at the end of a military conflict (some call it a war; others, an occupation) that lasted two decades.
After four years of desperately normalizing the mob money launderer-cum-Kremlin puppet in the White House, ignoring his ownership by Vladimir Putin and his inveterate ties to the criminal underworld, not to mention his drug abuse, his history of rape and sexual assault, and his egregious lack of qualifications for the gig—how many times did Kushner’s buddy Van Jones say, “Today is the day Donald Trump became president?”—our mainstream media crucifies Joe Biden if he so much as stammers, snaps at a lousy White House correspondent for asking a stupid question, or goes home to Delaware for the weekend.
What we learned these last two weeks is that the MSM, even the supposedly objective outfits like CNN, want the [Democratic (ed)] president to fail.
There’s simply no other way to explain the biased, predetermined-narrative-driven, lazy coverage of the Afghanistan evacuation.
The mainstream media rushed to cast the Afghanistan withdrawal as Benghazi, or the evacuation of Saigon.
It is neither of those things, analogous only in the most dumbed-down and ill-informed way.
The cable-news yowlers and Twitterstorians who a week ago attacked Biden by comparing the withdrawal to the end of the Vietnam War already sound particularly foolish.
Gerald Ford presided over the Fall of Saigon, but I don’t recall pundits in 1975 blaming him for the entire Indochina conflict dating back to Dien Bien Phu. It was astonishing how little Trump’s name was mentioned in the frenzied coverage, or Mike Pompeo’s, or the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika that got us into this mess in the first place.
Mass-evacuating troops and civilians after 20 years was always going to be messy, no matter what The Former Guy says.
Biden’s decisive, courageous handling of Afghanistan already looks better this week, now that the last of the armed forces are gone.
Next month, it will look even better; in a year, Joe will be praised by anyone not drunk on MAGA Kool-Aid; and history will look even more kindly on what is already the best presidency of my lifetime.
The mistake most of these so-called experts made, in their hot-take analyses, was to conflate four separate decisions, which I present in reverse chronological order:
The execution of the withdrawal (2021, Biden)
The decision to withdraw and hand the country to the Taliban (2020, Trump )
The decision to remain in Afghanistan after defeating the Taliban (2001, Bush II)
The decision to go to war post-9/11 (2001, Bush II)
