Thread by @djrothkopf

In the months & years ahead we need to do a deep accounting, not just within the government but on the national level, of the flaws in our system, our politics & our society that lead us to make mistakes on the scale of the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War & the "War on Terror."

While the war in Afghanistan began with a natural impulse to seek justice in the wake of 9/11, the policy process guiding it quickly was hijacked by opportunists with personal agendas that were ideological or industry-driven. Lies became the foundations for massive national endea

But they were not effectively challenges. The Iraq War was an indecent and indefensible distraction from the mission to get Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, but the majority of the foreign policy establishment supported it and accepted many lies without questioning them.

Within the system, too few people stood up and spoke truth to power, challenging the Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon leviathan. The mission in the Afghanistan war became an impossible one, nation building in a country that had defied such efforts for centuries.

A nation hobbled by grief accepted the idea of a "war on terror" as if such a thing was possible or right. The idea that a few hundred or thousand terrorists living in caves and on the run possibly could pose a real existential threat to the world's greatest support was accepted.

It was a ludicrous notion but in the wake of the Cold War, seemingly adrift without an enemy, we used the provocation of 9/11 to spin a narrative that was unsupported by facts or analysis but happened to suit the agenda of a political clique and our military-industrial complex.

The discussion became so overheated that we violated our most deeply held principles. We accepted torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, violation of other nations' sovereignty, wholesale deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Today we hear arguments that ending this era of war weakens us with our allies, diminishes our standing, but nothing could do so more than the way we conducted those wars. That is not to say that our soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, intelligence community, diplomats...

...contractors, NGOs and others did not often display great courage, embrace sacrifice, advance our values, make the lives of those with whom they came in contact better. They often did. But we conflated their goodness with policy rightness and the results were devastating.

Demagogues suggested that it would be an insult to the lives lost and 9/11 and after to question our leaders, particularly our military leaders. But time and again, those military leaders made errors. Some misrepresented what was achievable.

Others just played the Washington game, seeking to work their way up the greasy pole, saluting and saying "yessir" when they should have called for a different course, failing to admit our errors, the costs of those errors and how elusive our goals were becoming.

Politicians were the most cowardly of all, hostage to a toxic environment in which to admit a mistake was a political death sentence. They issued authorizations to go to war to our presidents that were essentially a license to battle on indefinitely, results and costs be damned.

One trillion dollars. Two trillion dollars. Three trillion dollars. We spent as though we were not mortgaging our futures on goals that could Neve be achieved. Today, the interest we will pay on this totals $6.5 trillion according to one estimate.

Those are schools not built, teachers not hired, roads and bridges not restored, investments in research and development not made, defenses against next generation threats not undertaken, steps to address urgent needs like combatting the climate crisis not taken.

We just kept writing blank checks to presidents who kept failing to live up to the responsibilities of their offices. By 2010 there were 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan although the year before many including Joe Biden argued we should be drawing down our forces.

Bush and then Obama and then Trump could see we were faltering but none dared, until Biden, to accept reality and none, until the current president, had the courage to end this era of cascading policy failures, failures of judgment, and failures of character.

Many in the media failed as well. Sometimes they failed by accepting the jingoism of leaders without question. Sometimes it was because a twisted sense of "objectivity" led to both-sidesisms that gave credence to ideas without merit and defenses of the indefensible.

Others simply stopped covering the stories at all, letting them fade from public view as wars raged on and costs were piled ever higher. And the public too bought into a political discourse that divided America itself into warring tribes.

Common interests were scoffed at. Serious debate among respectful opposing views was seen as weak, betraying higher partisan causes. Those who wanted to rethink our approaches were castigated as traitors, un-American, un-patriotic.

We knew it was going wrong. 20 years later there are more terrorists in the world many times over than there were when our "war on terror began." Iraq was never really part of that war...until we drew the terrorists there and inspired the birth of ISIS.

While we sought to ensure Afghanistan could not be a haven for terrorists, it never stopped being one...and all the while terrorist cells spread throughout the world, in part inspired by our abuses, our over-reach, our failures, the targets we presented.

For all those we helped, there were others we let down terribly, there were the deaths and there were the wounded, there was the suffering and the destruction. And we justified it and we enabled it to go on and on. And that, in the end, is on all of us.

So as we mark the end of this period, we owe it to ourselves to reflect and then, with seriousness of purpose, compile our lessons learned and then apply them with great urgency. This was one of the darkest periods in the history of U.S. foreign policy.

It distracted us from what should have been our 21st Century agenda for too long. Even as we finally embark on that agenda as President Biden is leading us to do, we must ensure we never make the same mistakes again.

That will require all of us doing what we have largely failed to do for the past twenty years, working together on common goals, with respect for one another and a willingness to demand the truth and to stand up for it and our values whenever they are challenged.