America’s Abandonment of its Afghani Allies is Preceded by a Long Line of Unforgivable Betrayals
By
David Gottfried
It appears that Afghans who saved our lives are being left to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Our abandonment of those brave men and women is the latest in a long line of betrayals committed by Americans in foreign policy.
I once knew a Tea Party nincompoop who said to me, apropos of nothing, that America was so good to the world, forever fighting for everybody’s rights while the entire godless world spat on America. Although this tea party cretin was subject to great gusts of hysterical emotion and forever feeling put upon by “all them no good foreigners,” she really spoke for most of her American countrymen. While most Americans do not speak with the passion of tea party or Trumpian fruitcakes, they essentially believe what most people in the tea and trumpets party say. As Alexis de Tocqueville said, Americans are so certain of America’s nobility and purity that they never question America and, consequently, can be easily deceived by America.
I will list eleven examples of America abandoning its friends in geo- politics:
1) In Gulf War One, we encouraged Shiites to rise up against Sadaam. They did. Then, after we decided to end our war against Sadaam, Sadaam’s men slaughtered the Shiites without any meaningful protests from the United States. And do we really have to wonder why so many Shiites hate our guts.
2) We periodically helped the Kurds, and we periodically abandoned the Kurds whenever our principles did not comport with our present-day needs. We are nothing like the Wilsonian idealists of our delusional imagination. We are practitioners of real politic and exude more cynicism than Metternich at the Congress of Vienna.
3) America betrayed our World War Two allies, including the British, the French and the Russians, when it tried, in the 1960’s, to induce Poland and The Soviet Union to return territory to Germany, See The New York Times, June 21, 1966. Of course, a central feature of US foreign policy, after World War Two, consisted of our energetic effort to recruit Nazis in our Jihad against Moscow. American efforts to augment the size of Germany prompted Charles De Gaulle, the French leader, to visit Moscow, to make neutralist voices and to suggest that the French must be more independent of the United States. Of course, the American press generally slammed the French for playing patsy cake with Moscow, and of course our press, whose selective reporting of the news effortlessly infantilizes America’s knowledge of the world, did not say why the French were irritable with the United States, i..e., we were too ready to make concessions to the Germans.
4) Toward the close of 1942, American troops landed on Northwest Africa and captured territory that had been under the control of Vichy France. Vichy France was a traitorous nation that collaborated with the Nazis. It sent troops to the Eastern front, to attack the Soviet Union, and it eagerly put Jews on trains headed for the camps.
In any event, after the United States had taken Northwest Africa from the Vichy French, the Americans decided to let Vichy control and govern French Africa. Obviously, since the Vichy French were French, they were better able than Americans to administer a nation that had been French. However, there were other Frenchmen to choose from. The Americans could have made common cause with either the Communists, and could have let the Communists govern French Africa, or the Americans could have linked arms with non-Communist followers of Charles De Gaulle. Instead, the Americans rejected all of the Free French whether they were communist or non-communist. America implicitly rejected the very terms of its alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
Do my unschooled, silly countrymen really have to wonder why so many Frenchmen have a critical and scathingly jaundiced view of Americans. We Americans claim that we are so brave and strong, and so unlike the wimpy and effete French, but to avoid fighting the Vichy French we decided to let the Vichy French remain in control. If one were to take the US position, in Northwest Africa, to its logical conclusion, one would contend that to avoid fighting the Nazis we should have let the Nazis remain in control of Germany.
5) President Theodore Roosevelt arbitrated an end to the Russo Japanese War of 1905. He was markedly pro Japanese and Anti-Russian. Among other things, he decreed that Japan would reign over Korea, and for the next forty years, until the end of World War Two, the Japanese, thanks to our “peace treaty,” ruled Korea with cruelty and sadism. Of course, the Japanese gave us something in return: they recognized our dominion over the Philippines which we had just stolen from Spain in the Spanish American War. So, what most people have hailed as a peace treaty was a power grab by the Japs and the Americans. We have always said that we believe in freedom and independence, but of course our abstract mutterings melt like snow when confronted with our desire to dominate, plunder and pulverize. In any event, since we decreed that Korea would be a vast prison toiling for the Japanese Empire, do we have to wonder why so many Koreans, especially North Koreans, hate our guts. (The forerunners of the South Korean establishment consisted of men who tried to accommodate and acquiesce to Tokyo.)
6. At the Geneva Convention of 1954, it was agreed that elections would be held in Vietnam in 1956. The United States commissioned polls, and these polls showed that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win the election. Accordingly, the United States cancelled the election. For many succeeding years we fought in Vietnam. The United States government said that we were fighting the Communists to defend Vietnam from Red aggression. Of course, that was a lie: We were fighting the Vietnamese because we opposed their dalliance with revolutionary Marxism. Once again, America, a professed lover of liberty and freedom and free elections, skewered the right of self- determination.
7. In 1967, Nasser, the ruler of Egypt, blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba. He effectively shut down Israel’s port of Eilat. Among other things, this seriously endangered Israel’s survival: Modern armies require gasoline and jet fuel, and in those days shipments of oil came to Israel through the port of Eilat. (Interestingly enough, before 1967 Israel got its oil from Iran. Shortly after Israel became a state it had gotten its oil from the Soviet Union. And I am sure some Orthodox Jews in Boro Park, Brooklyn --- I am referring to the guys who were opposed to wearing masks to better express their support for their Fuhrer, Trump – want to nuke both Russia and Iran.) When the port of Eilat shut down, the clock was ticking on Israel’s energy reserves. In addition, Nassar sent hundreds of thousands of Egyptian troops to the Israeli border and Arab capitals were thronged with frenzied masses screaming that they would drown the Jews in the Mediterranean Sea.
President Lyndon Johnson told Israel not to take any action. Johnson said that he would send an “armada” of ships into the Gulf of Aquaba to open the waterway to ships bound for Eilat. However, Johnson did no such thing. Israel was compelled to launch the 6-day war and has, ever since then, been tagged as an aggressor state.
Actually, some analysts believe that the Six Day War was not truly caused by either the Jews or the Arabs. Instead, it may have been caused by the cynical manipulation of Jews and Arabs by outside powers. I would like to flesh this out with the specific ploys and plots implemented by Moscow and Washington, but that will have to wait for another essay as this is already far too long.
8. For a little more than two decades, support for non-communist China, and constant vitriol against Communist China, was a salient theme of American foreign policy. Non communist China was seen as a land of gorgeous ladies in flowing silks serving us an endless succession of Chinese savories and sweets; communist China was a land of brilliant and wicked scientists and savages who would chop us up and make us the savories served on their fearsome platters of food.
Among other things, American politicians said, again and again, that they would never recognize the People’s Republic of China, also known as Communist China or Red China, and that they would never permit Communist China into the UN and certainly never permit Communist China to get a seat on the security council of the United Nations. However, when Richard Nixon saw that he’d get a bigger bag of marbles if he’d play ball with Mao Tse Tung, he swiftly forgot his twenty years of excoriating the Chinese communists.
9. Obama entered into a Treaty with Iran. Trump saw fit to rip it up. If one President’s commitments can be ripped up by his successor, is a president’s word any good.
10. We ripped up our commitments to Indian Tribes
11. We abandoned the denazification program as we knew that Nazis are ardent foes of Moscow. The overwhelming majority of Nazis convicted in Nurenberg of war crimes and crimes against humanity were granted an early release.
However, can we really expect Americans to keep their word. Americans constantly violate the most sacred vows of loyalty. An enormous proportion of marriages end in divorce. An enormous proportion of elderly people are placed in nursing homes. (Today, after we have been living with Covid for almost one and a half years, it was reported that the Federal govt would order nursing homes to vaccinate its workers. Jesus, they should have been vaccinated at the very start.)
Not too long after I became a lawyer, the American Bar Association issued an ethical ruling to the effect that it was not unethical to advise a client to break a contract if it could get away with it.
We are, after all, a nation that William James said worships at the “altar of the bitch goddess success.” And a nation of sleek and sarcastic bitches (I don’t mean to disparage women. A huge proportion of straight men have the supercilious bitchiness of Lauren Bacall in her 1980 commercials for Fortunoff’s jewelry) doesn’t worry its pretty head about translators who don’t know how to dress for success.