Broadly speaking, you probably agree with the large majority of the views commonly attributed to whichever group you identify with - what are the exceptions? Something that if you mention without a caveat immediately makes people jump to conclusions or even attack you?
Isolationism. I completely reject the idea that my country’s (the US) military interventionism is in any way driven by benevolence, or makes life better either for Americans (outside of war profiteers) or for the people of the country we’re fucking with.
This is really controversial on here, for some reason. The fact that I want to leave other countries alone and focus on investing in schools and hospitals and public transit instead of bombs and tanks (I don’t even really care if it’s being spent domestically or abroad, so long as it’s being spent on good things instead of bad things) causes a bunch of people to call me a “tankie” and say that I’m just as bad as a fascist. All because I say shit like, that I don’t want to start shit with North Korea. I don’t even give a shit about North Korea. Like, I just watched how Afghanistan played out and went, “You know, we probably shouldn’t do shit like that again,” and supposedly left-leaning people really, really hate me for it. It’s genuinely bizarre. I even got attacked once for defending Biden pulling out of Afghanistan! People just love sticking our nose in other countries’ business, for reasons I can’t even begin to understand.
Probably being an absolutist instead of considering case-by-case leaves room for criticism.
In your example, Biden pulling out of Afghanistan. Was it wrong to intervene in the first place, probably? But pulling out at that point caused the deaths of western allies and handed victory to the Taliban, causing millions to suffer eg. women can’t get jobs and single-mother families starve to death… and it was entirely foreseeable.
I would argue that Humanitarian Intervention should be excluded, and certain UN-led actions (although the bureaucracy has certainly led to interventions occurring after mass deaths, unfortunately).
That’s a completely ridiculous and absurd position. They did not “hand victory to the Taliban,” the Taliban won victory over 20 years of fighting and the withdrawal merely acknowledged that fact, a fact which Americans seem to have deluded themselves into thinking was anything but inevitable, and they really didn’t like their delusions being shattered. The embargo, not the withdrawal, is what’s caused most of the suffering. As the band Flobots said in 2007, “We already lost the wars they keep waging.” Somehow, in spite of over another decade of accomplishing absolutely nothing, people seem, if anything, more willing to keep fighting the pointless, hopeless battle.
What is the alternative to the withdrawal? Please, provide an answer to that question. Do you think if we stayed there another 20 years, then we could leave and our puppet regime wouldn’t instantly collapse? Or should we have just stayed there inevitably, even sending our grandchildren to go fight in that stupid pointless war?
The only thing that you said that’s correct is that on day 1 of the war, we should not have gone in. But on day 2, we also should’ve left. On day 3 we should have left. On day 300 we should’ve left. On day, what was it even, 7000? On day 7000, we absolutely, 10000% should’ve left. What possible reason could you use to justify delaying it further? What could we do in another 300 days that we couldn’t do in 7000? At that point, you’re just arguing for making it a permanent war of conquest.
Your problem, and the problem of everyone who thinks like you, is that you’re incapable of facing reality and accepting that sometimes good decisions are painful. When an alcoholic decides to go clean, what do you think that first day is like? Is it pleasant? Of course not. They may be irritable, they may have to have awkward conversations or confrontations with their drinking buddies, they may even lose friendships over it! But it’s still the right decision, the important thing is that they stopped. This is the same way. Yes, the immediate effects of pulling out may have been unpleasant, but you have to be very short-sighted to not recognize it as an obviously correct and necessary decision. Y’all just see the unpleasantness and say, “Everything’s been shitty since I decided to quit, I should just have another drink.”
Even the government we propped up told us to leave! How can you possibly justify continuing the occupation? And how can I possibly view you as anything but a warmongering imperialist for taking that stance? You’re talking about murdering people! Do you even realize that?
If a Taliban victory was inevitable, this is yeah totally true. The “rip off the bandaid” approach.
The question of how long it takes to peacefully handover power in a colony is an interesting one. It can be an absurd amount of time, may never be 100%, or it may never be peaceful, if resentment persists. I think it is possible, but we may differ there.
It’s certainly hard to justify the long-term cost to American life, expenditure, energy and focus to attempt beneficial cultural change on the other side of the world.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, some things are actually better in Afghanistan, since 2021. Definite evidence that war is in fact, worse, generally, than even a very dickish government. Looking at the data, I might come down on your side, it’s tough.
WHO Health data overview for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
Oh, I absolutely support “attempting beneficial cultural change on the other side of the world.” Go write a book, sing a song, make a movie, you can still do that, right now, nothing’s stopping you!
What I oppose is drone striking weddings halfway across the globe, kicking in doors and screaming at people in a language they don’t speak, classifying every “military aged male” as an enemy combatant even if they’re just a bystander to falsify your casualty reports, abducting innocent people indefinitely to secret torture dungeons without charge or trial, and that sort of thing. You know, things like, “forced rectal feeding without medical necessity.”
Like, have you looked into what the war actually, physically looked like for people? “Attempting beneficial cultural change,” what the hell are you talking about? Even if it wasn’t an extreme whitewashing of the situation, you don’t impose “beneficial” cultural change as an occupying force, at gunpoint! The only thing we did was make them hate us more.
By the way, do you know how we finally got bin Laden? It was by using a fake vaccination campaign to collect blood samples in Pakistan. You wanna talk about humanitarianism, do you have any idea how many people could die, how many preventable diseases we could fail to eradicate, if people in developing countries mistrust vaccination drives because the CIA uses them as cover? But you know, at least our lust for revenge was satisfied. (Speaking of, the US also promoted anti-vax conspiracy theories in the Philippines, during COVID, to keep them from relying on Chinese vaccines.)
Yawn.
We Americans used to at least try not to look for “foreign monsters abroad”. I was raised on that sort of old fashioned idea. Do you ever feel like an impossible person from a land that never existed?
I remember growing up in the 90’s and it being fairly common to think that there were no real enemies out in the world, that all the conflicts were over. “The end of history,” gets mocked a lot, but the idea of putting conflict behind us and working together towards a common cause of advancing together is something I really miss.
But if that period of relative peace had continued, then people would’ve started asking questions about why we’re still dumping more money into our military than the next 9 countries combined when the USSR no longer exists (to quote Terminator 2, “They’re our friends now”) and China such a big trading partner that nobody would dream of rocking the boat. And if people started asking those questions, it’d be real bad news for the war profiteers who make bank off that spending. And so it all went out the window, starting with the “war on terror,” and now the government’s trying to make us see everybody as a threat.
And so we can’t have nice things, like healthcare, we all have to tighten our belts so that we can make more tanks. I remember when that was seen as right-wing.
It still is a right wing position, but the trouble is not right or left specifically, it’s that the empire is overextended with its military obligations, the dollar has been badly debased, the US pays more in debt than its GDP, and despite all our spending, the US couldn’t possibly meet all of its military obligations if more than one big thing happened at a time. The dollar is still the world reserve currency, but only because there’s not yet a credible replacement.
The sad fact is that instead of minding our business, America wanted to be an empire - and empires have a pretty standard lifecycle. I don’t think it’s a question of if, but when, it goes the way of Spain and GB.