Bill Mauldin

Once again, with the Biden-engineered humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, many active duty military and veterans are asking themselves: Was it worth it?

How the hell did everything get so snafu’d? Did your friends die in vain? Were the lives of the tens of thousands maimed and psychologically crippled pissed away? I survived my own service, but was it just a stupid way to spend my most productive years?

All we hear today (and for most of the last few years) is how we should never have been in Afghanistan. It was a waste of lives and treasure. That it was utterly useless. While people say “Thank you for your service,” it’s lip service uttered without conviction that you performed a real, significant service.

You’ve got a right to be angered. But don’t question the value of your service. We needed to remain in Afghanistan. The years of fighting had created a valuable and necessary foothold in the cradle of deadly terrorism. A place on the ground where accurate intelligence could be gathered.

You were fighting for freedom. Saddam Hussein, you remember him–the guy who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. Against the insane radicals who stone to death women for, what, doing what men do? Those people we fought in Vietnam were communists who, like Fidel Castro, executed or “re-educated” thousands of their own people upon taking over. Pol pot, the communist dictator of Cambodia, purged almost two million people, leaving their skulls to decorate his “killing fields.”

In Afghanistan, you fought alongside brave Afghans whose reputations now have been unforgivably dirtied by the likes of President Joe Biden. More than 50,000 of them died. You were defending the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who now left to the tender mercies of evil men, people who we have forsaken. America’s shame will blaze red for decades.

I don’t expect you to be treated with the same disdain as the Vietnam veterans when they returned home–ridiculed and damned. It took Chicago a shameful ten years to finally getting around to staging a welcome home parade.

More likely, you’ll be ignored. Considered to be willing tools. Not getting the honor that you deserve.

But you know. It was the blockheads who crafted those failed policies. Most recently the administrations, bending to an uninformed public, that engineered the Afghanistan botch.

It is a false argument to say that “America cannot be the world’s policeman.” Obviously, that’s not America’s job. But is our duty to honor our commitments and defend our allies in the name of liberty.

And here’s the joke of the month. A Washington Post op-ed declaring, “Democracy across the world is in crisis. Biden’s summit is needed.”

Those who hold democratic values dear should applaud President Biden’s announcement of a Summit for Democracy, to be held virtually Dec. 9 and 10, with a follow-up next year. Dictators have been emboldened in recent years not only to deny liberty to their own people but to infiltrate and undermine freedom elsewhere. They have learned to exploit capitalism and globalization to enrich their kleptocratic regimes. They have learned to stage phony elections, parties and media while maintaining a monopoly on power and rejecting genuine competition. They have turned rule of law into a cudgel, accusing those who dissent of being “foreign agents” or “extremists” and throwing them in prison.

Blah, blah, blah. Biden has demonstrated that he is all hot air. That the “bold action” that the administration goes on about are words. That there’s no action to back up those words. Notice how he rushed to support the spontaneous Cuba demonstrations for freedom. Sure.

To those who did the actual fighting. You were betrayed. Be proud. Thank you.

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