This Historical Amnesia In Gallup's Afghanistan Poll

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

19 February 14

confess to being a little baffled by this Gallup Poll about the war in Afghanistan. What I think it means is that the war has gone on for too damn long, to no damn purpose, and that the American people are tired of dealing with a country whose people seem bound and determined to slaughter each other as a kind of statement of national identity. And it's not as though the margin of difference is overwhelming; the difference is one percentage point after 12 years of fighting. But what puzzles me is this. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats, and 36 percent of Republicans, think that sending troops into Afghanistan was a bad idea in the first place. This indicates to me that some serious historical amnesia is at work here.

Quite simply, in the aftermath of the atrocities of 9/11, there never has been a president in the history of the American republic who wouldn't have sent the military to blow something up somewhere. From under the bed, where it had been hiding since the attacks, the country was screaming for someone to pay the price. Some rubble had to be made to bounce. You can argue from hell until breakfast over whether or not President Gore would have been more diligent about doing his homework that summer. (Somebody, probably Maureen Dowd, likely would have mocked him for reading briefing papers while being on vacation. What a nerd.) But once the towers fell, the country wasn't going to allow any president the luxury of reflection. It was not going to allow the president to think, you know, they call that place the graveyard of empires, wonder if that's a marketing strategy? That's not the way we (let's) roll any more. We'd have thrown the poor bastard out the window and impeached him before he hit the sidewalk. I give the Republicans credit for consistency on this question; most of them are still in favor of the war. It's the Democrats -- the party, after all, of Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers -- who have changed their minds, as though there were any of their politicians willing to stand up with Barbara Lee and vote against the war in the first place. It was a time of understandable timidity; a frightened country produces timid politicians. That vote, of course, turned out to be the warm-up for the Grand Capitulation on Iraq, which was less excusable at the outset than Afghanistan was. Still, this country is not at its best when it turns against wars that have passed their sell-by dates. It's only worse when it decides to launch them in the first place.