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James Scaminaci III

@4GWDOTDOTDOT

3 Sep

Americans support Afghanistan pullout — but not the way it was done, a Post-ABC poll finds washingtonpost.com/politics/post-… The national security elites, formerly deployed vets, and elite media imagined a perfect withdrawal executed in a tactical vacuum. Hearing all that noise, the public

2/ does not like the final process. And yet, there were Afghan leaders who did not suspect their govt & army would collapse. What did happen is that all the errors the national security elites ignored & lied about, came to the fore during the collapse. So, how do you withdraw

3/ gracefully while controlling at best the airport? Is there a perfect plan for that? What about the previous 4 years when Congress did not speed up the SIV program? What about a State Dept that today still lacks confirmed officials for significant policy areas? Congress should

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James Scaminaci III

@4GWDOTDOTDOT

22 Aug

As Biden Faces a Political Crisis, His Party Looks On in Alarm nytimes.com/2021/08/22/us/… The NY Times pissing its pants. The pandemic is raging because Ds & Rs, Ws & Bs, of various persuasions are not getting vaxxed. The pandemic is raging because of the unvaxxed. That's a message

2/ even Gov Ivey of Alabama is putting out. Get vaxxed. Second, the NY Times acts as if the Democrats have nothing to run on. In FL CD1 Matt Gaetz's first bill was to zero-out the EPA. Pensacola has 6 Superfund sites downtown. We have terrible water. We have ground contamination

3/ from abandoned chemical plants. Perdido Bay is poisoned from International Paper discharges. Biden passed bills to give every family money for children. To build infrastructure. To get broadband to rural areas. Matt Gaetz voted against every Biden bill to improve the lives of

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James Scaminaci III

@4GWDOTDOTDOT

16 Aug

@ForeignAffairs

We All Lost Afghanistan foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite… via @ForeignAffairs This article is very good in hitting the reasons for the collapse. It ends with "all of us," which is not supported by many excellent preceding paragraphs. But this "all of us" theme among the elites is puzzling.

2/ As if every American shares the responsibility--those who work, have children, lost jobs due to Covid, etc. People who do not pretend to have expertise in military strategy or geopolitics or Afghanistan. Let's suppose during the Cold War that the USSR deployed an ICBM system

3/ that suggested we needed a strategic defensive shield. The DOD, think tanks, Congress, the president, corporations, weapons labs, all agreed on the need for a strategic shield. Twenty years later, the defensive shield does not work. It is not deployed. The prospects for

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James Scaminaci III

@4GWDOTDOTDOT

16 Aug

@RadioFreeTom

@RadioFreeTom Here is a scholar-analyst who writes about experts & expertise needing respect and who does he blame for Afghanistan? The American voters. People who have the least expertise in the manner. No, this shitshow is totally on the national security elite in both parties,

2/ political parties, think tanks, Beltway Bandits, and the DOD. This is an elite failure. He pooh poohs The Afghanistan Papers which are built on SIGAR interviews & oral histories of the participants & architects of the war. They knew this will a train wreck waiting to happen

3/ and lied about it to Congress and the American people. DOD sold to the public a bullshit narrative about the Iraqi surge & then sold the same bullshit for Afghanistan. Then, many retired generals went on cable news and sold the same bullshit night after night. No, this

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James Scaminaci III

@4GWDOTDOTDOT

15 Aug

Opinion | Twenty years of Afghanistan mistakes, but this preventable disaster is on Biden washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… This disaster was not preventable. It was only delayed. Max Boot wants to pretend there was a military solution that somehow escaped the DOD for 20 years. But, if you

2/ assessments of analysts who saw this coming 10 years ago, this is not on Biden. One, the Iraq surge applied to Afghanistan was two failures. The Iraq surge's success owed more to AQI brutality that shocked Sunni leaders than our brilliant strategy. Two, applied to Afghanistan,

3/ this was no doubt going to end in failure since it didn't work in Iraq. Three, the Afghan govt was corrupt from the president to the lowliest policeman. By 2010, the USG knew for fact certain that the elite corruption was only going to get worse. Four, corruption led to ghost

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James Scaminaci III

@4GWDOTDOTDOT

13 Aug

Afghanistan is proving treacherous terrain for Biden washingtonpost.com/politics/biden… Anybody solely blaming Biden for this collapse is totally wrong. This is a bipartisan clusterfuck from Bush43 to Trump45. No strategy. Rampant corruption. Nation-building done foolishly. The US was still

2/ in Bosnia when we went to Afghanistan. The US/UN had a model for training police and abandoned it. The US/UN had a model for governance that needed to be revised but we repeated the same stupid mistake: let's have a fucking election. We knew very little about Afghanistan's

3/ culture and social dynamics. From Day One, we were forking over suitcases of cash to warloads. Hello, corruption. We tolerated elite corruption on a massive scale. We allowed US contractors to rob the American taxpayers blind with projects that were only fulfilled on

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