"Unlike the 20 year Afghanistan war which only affected the people that actually had to fight in it. The vast majority of Americans’ lives did not change one bit from the decades-long war. That was just a made-for-TV event. We watched CNN and FOX after work to see how it was going. We learned about Fallujah and Kabul and a little history about how the Russians couldn’t beat the Afghans after 10 years of fighting. We got a little history and geography lesson and that was about it for most Americans."

Well, Bob, I have undergrad and grad degrees in history and spent 15 years living and working in the Arab Middle East. As you might imagine, I not only saw the whole Iraq/Afghanistan fiasco coming well down the road, I even wrote papers about it many years ago. A lot of good that did me (or anyone else)! Sadly, Santayana's famous observation went full cycle once again before Biden famously and catastrophically pulled the plug on the exponentially costly operation, finally leaving over several hundreds of billions of dollars worth of surplus materiel behind, to the eternal gratification of the Taliban. I wonder how those untold amounts of forfeited arms could have better served President Zelenskyy, as he struggles to save the Ukrainian nation he leads?

Most regrettably, there's an old Russian saying that translates roughly to "You can lead stupid (people) to school but you can't make it (them) think...". As a nation slavishly conditioned to increasingly worship the almighty dollar above all other gods, the only thing Americans REALLY pay attention to these days is the personal cost-hit to their lifestyle. How sad, how tragic....and how thoroughly American!

[By the way, you might enjoy Jeff Minick's balanced words of wisdom on the collective insanity that today weighs America down so heavily: https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/boats-against-the-current--taking-hopeless-times-and-making-them-otherwise/ ]

Cheers and aloha nui loa, -K2