Afghanistan has unraveled into a s—- show, and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised at all.
But then, as President George W. Bush, who first got us into Afghanistan, noted, “Americans aren’t very good at looking in the rearview mirror.” No, they aren’t, W. Our ignorance and fear — they go hand in hand — of science have made a muddle of our response to everything from Covid to climate change. And our disdain of history has sent us careening from one hotspot to another in which we never have any clue as to the place or the people we’re purportedly trying to help.
President Joe Biden might think Afghanistan is not another Vietnam, but as today’s heartbreaking reports prove Afghanistan is Vietnam right down to the whirring helicopters and those poor souls clinging to the wheels of the planes, desperate to flee the brutality that is already there. (I shudder to think what life is going to be like again under the Taliban in a country that the historian Michael Wood once described to me as “no place for a woman.”
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Read MoreThe Americans have left Afghanistan and though President Joe Biden and the public are happy, many of us have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, at 20 years it was the United States’ longest war, and no one wants to fight a forever war. On the other hand, there is a sense of a mission unfulfilled, or perhaps one extended beyond its original purpose and thus unfulfilled.
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Read MorePresident Donald J. Trump has announced the withdrawal of 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with the intention of withdrawing all troops by the November election, thus bringing to a close America’s longest war, after 18 years. Or will it?.
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Read MoreMy family, friends and colleagues often tease me about my fascination for Alexander the Great. I get it. Who cares about someone – a single-minded Greco-Macedonian conqueror, no less – who lived some 300 years before Jesus?
But you see, the fact that we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ:” – and not Joshua bar Joseph, his historical Hebrew name – is because of Alexander and the spread of Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander, culture flowed east to west. After his conquest of the Persian Empire (331 B.C.), it would tend west to east. And the resulting tension between the two has reverberated down through the ages, particularly in the Middle East, the heart of his empire.
Our soldiers have been following in his footfall since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, as I wrote then for the Gannett newspapers. We’re still living in Alexander’s world. We just don’t know it.
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