{"id":16016,"date":"2021-05-25T08:19:31","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T12:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=16016"},"modified":"2021-05-25T13:31:38","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T17:31:38","slug":"george-w-bushs-bogus-bloody-afghan-halo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/25\/george-w-bushs-bogus-bloody-afghan-halo\/","title":{"rendered":"George W. Bush’s Bogus Bloody Afghan Halo"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, May 25, 2021<\/h3>\n

Afghanistan: George W. Bush\u2019s First Disastrous War<\/span><\/a><\/h1>\n
\n

It was a misguided effort from the start, built on lies and false idealism, and it has left a bloody legacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
|by <\/span> James Bovard <\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Former President George W. Bush is bewailing President Joe Biden\u2019s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Bush told Fox News<\/a> last week, \u201cI\u2019m also deeply concerned about the sacrifices of our soldiers, and our intelligence community, will be forgotten,\u201d after the war ends. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the American media has already forgotten how Bush\u2019s lies turned U.S. intervention in Afghanistan into a quagmire that pointlessly killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers.<\/p>\n

After Al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes on September 11, 2001, wreaking death and destruction in New York and Washington, it was inevitable that the U.S. military would respond. But rather than targeting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, Bush chose to conquer Afghanistan and seek to rebuild it as some type of female-friendly utopia. While the Bush White House boasted of liberating the downtrodden Afghan people, Bush\u2019s military geniuses let Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders escape at Tora Bora<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brazen lies permeated Bush\u2019s efforts from the start<\/strong>. In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush frightened Americans with a bogus nuclear threat: \u201cOur discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears. . . . We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities\u201d in caves used by Al Qaeda. Senior CIA and FBI officials followed up with \u201cbackground\u201d briefings to the media, revving up the threat that Afghan-based Al Qaeda fighters were targeting U.S. nuclear power facilities. This made the terrorist threat far more ominous and spurred support for Bush\u2019s preemptive war policy against Iraq.<\/p>\n

Two years later, Bush administration officials admitted that the president\u2019s statement was completely false and that no nuclear power plant diagrams had been discovered in Afghanistan. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, who had testified in 2002 on this falsehood at closed hearings on Capitol Hill, commented that Bush was \u201cpoorly served by a speechwriter.\u201d This was a farce\u2014as if the deceit stemmed from some speechwriter\u2019s poetic fancy\u2014as opposed to the conniving of a phalanx of high-ranking officials and the complicity of George W. Bush. Bush\u2019s lies on a nuclear threat from Afghanistan paved the way to his far more destructive lies regarding Iraqi chemical and biological weapons in his 2003 State of the Union address.<\/p>\n

Bush shamelessly exploited the deaths of soldiers he sent to Afghanistan<\/strong>. On May 1, 2004, Bush wrapped up his speech to the White House Correspondents Dinner by exploiting the recent death of a former pro football star to valorize his Afghan war. Bush declared, \u201cThe loss of Army Corporal Pat Tillman last week in Afghanistan\u2026 reminds us of the character of the men and women who serve on our behalf\u2026 Friends say that this young man saw the images of September the 11th, and seeing that evil, he felt called to defend America\u2026. We count ourselves lucky that this new generation of Americans is as brave and decent as any before it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time of Bush\u2019s paean, the Pentagon was claiming that Tillman had died while leading a charge against Al Qaeda forces. An on-scene investigation quickly revealed that Tillman had been killed by other American soldiers. A week after Tillman was killed, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a top commander in Afghanistan, notified the White House<\/a> that Tillman was killed by U.S. troops: \u201cI felt that it was essential that you received this information as soon as we detected it to preclude any unknowing statements by our country\u2019s leaders that might cause public embarrassment if [!!!] <\/em><\/strong>the circumstances of CPL Tillman\u2019s death become public.\u201d [Emphasis the writer\u2019s<\/em>] There was a flurry of emails between the White House and the Pentagon on the Tillman case on April 28 and 29, as a White House speechwriter got key details for Bush\u2019s spiel at the correspondents dinner. The Pentagon delayed admitting that Tillman had been killed by American soldiers until after a grandiose memorial service in Arizona featuring Sen. John McCain.<\/p>\n

In May 2005, Patrick Tillman, Sr., bitterly complained<\/a>: \u201cAfter it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up\u2026 They realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.\u201d The Bush administration continued covering up the details of Tillman\u2019s killing, vexing the family.<\/p>\n

Bush sanctified his Afghan war as the greatest triumph for women\u2019s liberation in modern history. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush boasted, \u201cThe mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes.\u2026 Today women are free.\u201d But a United Nations report the following year on rural Afghanistan concluded that \u201cthe situation of women has not changed to any great extent since the removal of the Taliban.\u201d New York Times <\/em>columnist Nicholas Kristof, who visited Afghanistan in early 2004, reported that \u201cmany Afghan women are still captives in their homes\u2026. The rise of banditry and rape has had a particularly devastating effect on women. Because the roads are not safe even in daylight, girls do not dare go to schools or their mothers to health centers.\u201d One international aid worker commented that during the Taliban era \u201cif a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged\u2014now she\u2019s raped.\u201d In 2009, shortly after Bush\u2019s presidency ended, the U.S.-appointed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, approved a law entitling husbands to starve their wives to death if they denied them sex.<\/a><\/p>\n

But at least the U.S. government was not systematically subsidizing the rape of women\u2014unlike the brutal fate of Afghan boys<\/strong>. Since the start of Bush\u2019s invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has poured money into Afghan government operations guilty of Bacha bazi<\/em>\u2014turning young boys into sex slaves. The Pentagon ignored the abuse until a 2015 New York Times<\/em> expos\u00e9<\/a> of American soldiers who were punished for protesting atrocities against young boys. The Times<\/em> reported that U.S. troops were confounded<\/a> that \u201cinstead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages \u2014 and doing little when they began abusing children.\u201d In 2017, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported, \u201cAfghan officials remain complicit, especially in the sexual exploitation \u2026 of children by Afghan security forces.\u201d A 2017 Pentagon Inspector General report revealed<\/a> that some U.S. troops were \u201ctold that nothing could be done about child sexual abuse because of Afghanistan\u2019s status as a sovereign nation, that it was not a priority for the command, or that it was best to ignore the situation and to let the local police handle it.\u201d But the U.S. government continued bankrolling Afghan child rapists.<\/p>\n

During his 2004 reelection campaign, Bush boasted, \u201cThanks to the United States\u2026 Afghanistan is no longer a haven for terror. Afghanistan is a free country.\u201d But the Bush administration did nothing to prevent the Afghan government it installed from tyrannizing the Afghan people. Even more damning, the U.S. military and CIA brazenly tortured Afghans, atrocities that President Bush perpetually denied even though it was reported as early as December 2002<\/a>. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times<\/em> reported<\/a> allegations that Afghan soldiers detained by the U.S. government had suffered \u201crepeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks, being hung upside down and toenails being torn off.\u201d The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Bush-era torture<\/a> vivified what happened at the COBAL secret CIA site interrogation center north of Kabul:<\/p>\n

CIA detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. Lack of heat at the facility likely contributed to the death of a detainee. The chief of interrogations described COBALT as a \u201cdungeon.\u201d \u2026 At times, the detainees at COBALT were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. Other times, the detainees at COBALT were subjected to what was described as a \u201crough takedown,\u201d in which approximately five CIA officers would scream at a detainee, drag him outside of his cell, cut his clothes off, and secure him with Mylar tape. The detainee would then be hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush has never taken responsibility or shown any remorse for setting up an illegal worldwide torture regime<\/strong>. During his years in the White House, Bush perennially denied that he had approved torture. But in 2010, during an author tour to promote his new memoir, he bragged about approving waterboarding<\/a> for terrorist suspects.<\/p>\n

Bush\u2019s Afghan war was not good intentions gone awry: It was profoundly dishonest from the start.<\/strong> Afghanistan quickly became nothing more than a political boasting point for Bush. In October 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was appalled when Bush did not even recognize<\/a> the name of the U.S. general in charge of Afghanistan and had no interest in meeting him. Christopher Kolenda, a U.S. Army colonel who repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan to advise top U.S. commanders, declared that the Afghan government had \u201cself-organized into a kleptocracy,\u201d a government of thieves, by 2006. Ryan Crocker, Bush\u2019s ambassador to Afghanistan, admitted, \u201cOur biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption.\u201d An investigation by SIGAR found that it was \u201ccommon at military headquarters in Kabul \u2014 and at the White House \u2014 to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.\u201d In 2019, SIGAR chief John Sopko summarized<\/a> the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan: \u201cThe American people have constantly been lied to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new political treachery. George W. Bush now serves as a \u201cuseful idiot\u201d for politicians who want to perpetuate America\u2019s disastrous interventions abroad.<\/strong> But if there is any justice, the name of George W. Bush will live in infamy as a betrayer of American soldiers and an enemy of decency<\/a> and the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

James Bovard<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Lost Rights<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>, and\u00a0<\/em>Public Policy Hooligan<\/a>. He is also a\u00a0<\/em>USA Today\u00a0columnist. Follow him on Twitter\u00a0<\/em>@JimBovard<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, May 25, 2021 Afghanistan: George W. Bush\u2019s First Disastrous War It was a misguided effort from the start, built on lies and false idealism, and it has left a bloody legacy. |by James Bovard Former President George W. Bush is bewailing President Joe Biden\u2019s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Bush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42,2843,347,137,2842,428,490,27,1756,513,1259,12],"class_list":["post-16016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-afghanistan","tag-bin-laden","tag-cia","tag-george-w-bush","tag-hamid-karzai","tag-joe-biden","tag-john-sopko","tag-lying","tag-pat-tillman","tag-rape","tag-sigar","tag-torture"],"yoast_head":"\nGeorge W. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16016"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16019,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016\/revisions\/16019"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}