The Beltway media sputters in outrage at Biden exiting the forever war in Afghanistan

Is there a word for bad nostalgia? Because the US media response to the end of 20 years of an Afghanistan policy that was effectively doomed from the get-go is making me think of the same media's performance in the lead-up to the Iran War.

My feeling is kind of like Stephen Crowder instantly iconic response to Sam Seder showing up unexpectedly on his show (Oh No! Sam Seder! What A Nightmare! 06/23/2021):

Eric Alterman unloads on the subject in How Low Can They Go? The Media’s Afghan Coverage The American Prospect 08/20/2021 harshes on the US coverage of the withdrawal, in this article with several helpful links:

The most obvious among the myriad failures of mainstream coverage of the crisis is its stubborn ahistoricism. The Biden administration may have screwed up the exit of U.S. troops and the friendly Afghans who helped them, but hey, this was a 20-year, nearly $2.4 trillion war effort that was built on lies and self-delusion and that we didn’t really want to win in the first place.

Josh Marshall also has some salty comments in The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines TPM 08/20/2021:

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here. ....

From the beginning of this twenty years there has been a tendency among intellectuals to cast America’s response to the 9/11 attacks and Islamist fanaticism in grand world historical terms.

Although Josh doesn't use the term American Exceptionalism, the attitude he describes among many reporters and their favorite establishment sources is a form of it. More specifically, he thinks after the heady days two decades ago when the Global War on Terror (even the acronym GWOT was common for a while):

... lingering long after has been the idea that the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were latter day analogues to America’s conquests, occupations and decades long military and diplomatic commitments in Asia and Europe which still form the cornerstones of US military and diplomatic strategies in the world. They were simply ones that contemporary America lacked the fortitude, commitment or character to see through.

This was simply never true. They were altogether different. These were far tawdrier affairs, a tawdriness that two generations of valor from American military personnel could never truly upgrade or burnish.

And yet official DC, which means the city’s elite national political press was deeply bought in. This doesn’t mean they were warmongers or rah-rah militarists. They were seldom the biggest cheerleaders for invasions and the organizations they work for often produced some of the deepest critiques or exposes of the failures and shortcomings of these efforts. But they were deeply bought in in ways that are likely best seen in sociological terms. Countless numbers embedded with US military formations. They accompanied members of Congress on ‘CODELS’ to the warzones. They’ve spent time immersed with a Pentagon which has spent two decades building hammers to hit nails in the Middle East and Central Asia. Their peers study and write in the world of DC think tanks focused on the best ways of striking those nails. Wrapping this altogether they have built relationships with America’s local allies, particularly the more cosmopolitan and liberal city dwellers who aspire to a future more like the one Americans take for granted in North America and Europe.

We hear about the very real and dire fate of women and young girls under the Taliban, robbed of futures, banished from public life. And yet when these realities are adduced as the justification for continued or expanded military occupations we must also see that they are both very real and also the latter day cant of empire, much like the way the British East India Company justified its rule of the subcontinent by banning practices like the suttee, the immolation of wives on their husband’s funeral pyres. [my emphasis]

Everyone can make their own assessment on whether he's being too generous in saying, "This doesn’t mean they were warmongers or rah-rah militarists." (Maybe they were "only" patsies for warmongers and militarists?) But he makes an important point.

And he generously notes, "It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days." Avoiding the denial in the first place has its advantages.

But after bending over backwards for several paragraphs to be understanding, he finally unloads:

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

Some additional useful pieces:

• Anatol Lieven, What Pakistan Stands to Gain From the Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan Time 08/18/2021
• Simon Jenkins, The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan Guardian 08/20/2021
• Marina Ottoway and Anatol Lieven, Rebuilding Afghanistan: Fantasy versus Reality Carnegie Endowment 01/03/2002

The key thing at the moment is that Biden is in the right forest - getting the US out of Afghanistan - so whether he identifies each tree precisely has much less practical importance.  But I do think the US press has a couple of other big problems in reporting on this, aside from the chronic "if it bleeds, it leads" issue that of course dramatic and sensational moments get prominent coverage.

One is their obsession with the political "horserace" combined with the Both Sides Do It mentality that leads to coverage like One Side says COVID is a deadly and highly contagious disease, the Other Side says it's all a big ole plot by George Soros and Bill Gates, and how are we supposed to tell the difference, we're just reporting the facts of what Both Sides say.

The "credibility" trope has played a huge role in bad US foreign policy decisions for decades. Is any national leader nutty enough to think that the US pulling out of Afghanistan after 20 years means that Mexico and Colombia are now going to mount a joint invasion to seize Florida because they think the US won't fight for its own vital interests? (Although, given the current Governor of Florida, a joint Mexican-Colombian occupation government would probably do a better job dealing with COVID!)