Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Arlington cemetery and the fallout from Afghanistan" video.
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This video is not as advertised. This is not about the Arlington incident at all. It feels like a bait and switch, so that you could get something else (however legitimate your criticisms are) off your chest.
This unedifying coda to the Afghan war at Arlington was just another case of Trump having no respect for tradition, the rules, or the fallen. He and his team knew that the cemetery does not permit pictures of any kind to be taken over or near the graves of the recently deceased and ignored that, so as to get a picture of Trump, family members and his campaign team, grinning with their thumbs up, over the graves of a group of US veterans who were killed in a suicide bombing.
That incident, in isolation, deserves some attention, since we know it was a monstrous act, with no obvious gains to be gleaned from it that I can see. Worse still is the fact that, when the Arlington staff attempted to remind the trump’s of the rules and to prevent them taking pictures, there was a physical altercation (the details of which are sketchy) which is just ghoulish and horrific to contemplate.
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As to your broader commentary on the Afghan war, I find myself in agreement with almost all of what you said. Though I think it is important to note two things. Firstly, with regard to making the people who planned 911 regret taking part in that act of terrorism, and deterring nations and terror groups from contemplating further such acts, the invasion of Afghanistan was a 100% success. Ask any Afghani Taliban older than 30 if they think another atrocity along those lines would be worth carrying out? They would run a mile and, if they really thought you were seriously capable of doing it, they would probably eliminate you.
The second point is that Nation Building was the cardinal error of that campaign. That works in secular, developed countries, which is why it worked so well in Germany and Japan after WWII. But such a model had already been shown as impossible to implement in Iraq and the intractable issues surrounding the Middle East conflicts were also lessons ignored.
They never actually, “made progress,” of any kind. The allies tricked themselves into believing that, in the same way they tricked themselves into believing that Putin was a man we could do business with. The fact was that it was always going to be washed away unless the west committed to staying there permanently, which was something that was never on the cards.
Yet, once again, despite the fact that neither side comes out of that with anything but shame and disgrace, at least Biden’s administration is only guilty of misreading the situation and botching it. Trump’s is guilty of that too, but we must also add to that his wilful betrayal of America, releasing over a thousand KNOWN terrorists in one fell swoop, and inviting their bloody leaders to Camp David. An almost sacrilegious smearing of a national place of honour with his attempts at wheeler dealing with terrorist murderers. And all to no avail.
Unless you count the chaos to which trump deliberately added, which he saw as a win, because it, “looked bad,” for Biden? The cost in human lives never entered his thinking.
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