Two Books Blast Bush and the Neocons’ Iraq and Afghan Wars

The public library is one of the few government programs I use from the immense looting of my tax dollars. I was wandering through an Orange County library recently, looking at random books, and spotted these two: “Dog Company: A True Story of American Soldiers Abandoned by Their High Command,” from 2017 by Lynn Vincent, an investigative journalist, and Roger Hill, a former infantry commander in the 101^st Airborne, West Pont Grad and decorated combat veteran.

The second is “Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World,” from 2015 by Christina Lamb, and is her journal as a war correspondent.

Both books’ pages already are yellowing like our memories of these wars. They came out before Biden’s ignominious exit from Afghanistan in 2021. Trump had set up a withdrawal for February, just after he ended up leaving office, in the winter when the Afghanis stay home. Biden waited until the summer, when the Afghanis since time immemorial come out to fight either each other like baseball season, or any invader.

All that seems to have been forgotten now by the media as it grapples with putting a good face to the voters for Biden’s current twin disasters in Ukraine and Gaza. Although one exception is Brett Stephens, complaining in the New York Times about Biden pausing bomb deliveries to Israel. Actually, the real reason probably is there aren’t enough bombs in the pipeline because of too many wars – all supported by Stephens.

And he doesn’t take into account all those protesters shouting “Genocide Joe,’ a major reason a new poll showing him losing five of six swing states. His own paper reported, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden: A new set of Times/Siena polls, including one with The Philadelphia Inquirer, reveal an erosion of support for the president among young and nonwhite voters upset about the economy and Gaza.”

But here is Stephens: “The last time the United States bailed on an ally, in Afghanistan, the result was a political debacle from which the president’s approval rating never recovered. Why would the White House want to put voters in mind of that episode?” Yet Stephens himself has no military background. Born Nov. 21, 1973, he was 27 on the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and easily could have joined any of the services, a year later serving in Afghanistan. If he had fought there, I’m sure we would have won the war and Afghanistan today would be a free democracy.

Back to the books, which are two more reasons never to trust the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, especially someone long deep inside it as Biden: Everything is a lie. “Dog Company” even was heavily censored by the military. Here are pp. 304-5:

So much for the right of the people to know what’s going on in Our Democracy.

The publisher’s description:

The Army does not want you to read this book. It does not want to advertise its detention system that coddles enemy fighters while putting American soldiers at risk. It does not want to reveal the new lawyered-up Pentagon war ethic that prosecutes U.S. soldiers and Marines while setting free spies who kill Americans.

This very system ambushed Captain Roger Hill and his men.

Hill, a West Point grad and decorated combat veteran, was a rising young officer who had always followed the letter of the military law. In 2007, Hill got his dream job: infantry commander in the storied 101st Airborne. His new unit, Dog Company, 1-506th, had just returned stateside from the hell of Ramadi. The men were brilliant in combat but unpolished at home, where paperwork and inspections filled their days.

With tough love, Hill and his First Sergeant, an old-school former drill instructor named Tommy Scott, turned the company into the top performers in the battalion. 

Hill and Scott then led Dog Company into combat in Afghanistan, where a third of their men became battlefield casualties after just six months. Meanwhile, Hill found himself at war with his own battalion commander, a charismatic but difficult man who threatened to relieve Hill at every turn. After two of his men died on a routine patrol, Hill and a counterintelligence team busted a dozen enemy infiltrators on their base in the violent province of Wardak. Abandoned by his high command, Hill suddenly faced an excruciating choice: follow Army rules the way he always had, or damn the rules to his own destruction and protect the men he'd grown to love.

 “Farewell Kabul’s” description:

A definitive book on the war in Afghanistan by award-winning journalist Christina Lamb. Lamb's riveting account reveals a textbook case of how not to run a war. It is a tale of international confusion, competing military operations, civilian casualties and payoffs.

Alas, I only had time to glance through each book before the library began dinging my email about returning them. The results:

• According to the U.S. military’s casualties list: 4,148 Americans were killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and 31,994 wounded in action. Total: 35,142.

• And for Operation Enduring Freedom, the misnamed Afghanistan mistake: 2,350 were killed and 20,149 wounded.

• Brown University’s Cost of War project tallied: “An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.

• And the cost in Yankee Dollars? Brown found: “U.S. Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2022: $8 Trillion.” And that money all was borrowed. Meaning the cost will keep going up as we pay interest on it as part of the U.S. federal debt now $35 billion and rising at a clip of $1.8 trillion a year.

• The results on the ground? Osama bin Laden, whose hideout in Afghanistan was the casus belli, escaped to Pakistan and was greased by Seal Team 6 there in 2011, at least according to the official story, which might even be true. The Taliban, who were overthrown in 2001 and took to the mountains, came back to power in 2021.

In Iraq, the “weapons of mass destruction,” the causus belli, never were found because Saddam got rid of them, as weapons inspector Scott Ritter and others declared at the time. The Brits had used their classic Empire-on-the-Cheap strategy of putting a minority in charge of the majority, in this case Saddam’s Sunnis over the Shiites. Taking out Saddam let the new Shia government ally with its coreligionists in Shia Iran.

Then in 2023 China brokered détente between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. According to the pro-U.S. Empire Atlantic Council, a year later, “Chinese mediation that made this diplomatic breakthrough possible—spoke volumes about what one Emirati political scientist described as the new ‘post-American Gulf era.’” 

Oh, and the U.S. proxy war with Russia over Ukraine pushed Russia and China into what the neocons are calling an “axis” with Iran, which is more powerful than ever.

It’s hard to think of anything more disastrous that U.S. foreign policy by the current regime, Democrat and Republican. It’s running this country and the world into the ground. Who possibly could trust them over Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, China-Taiwan or anything else?