After committing war crimes in Iraq, failing _completely_ at fighting corruption in Afghanistan, and failing to convince Trump to attack North Korea, this pathetic perfumed prince of a political general gets taken out to the woodshed by Col. Andrew Bacevich, who ridicules the man nearly to death over his attacks against foreign policy “restrainers.”
“Just as President Trump is adamant in refusing to fess up to mistakes in responding to Covid-19 — ‘We’ve made every decision correctly’ — so too McMaster avoids reckoning with what actually happened when the never-retrench crowd was calling the shots in Washington and set out after 9/11 to transform the Greater Middle East.
“What gives the game away is McMaster’s apparent aversion to numbers. This is an essay devoid of stats. McMaster acknowledges the ‘visceral feelings of war weariness’ felt by more than a few Americans. Yet he refrains from exploring the source of such feelings. So he does not mention casualties — the number of Americans killed or wounded in our post-9/11 misadventures. He does not discuss how much those wars have cost, which, of course, spares him from considering how the trillions expended in Afghanistan and Iraq might have been better invested at home. He does not even reflect on the duration of those wars, which by itself suffices to reveal the epic failure of recent U.S. military policy. Instead, McMaster mocks what he calls the ‘new mantra’ of ‘ending endless wars.’”
