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Recently, glancing at one of my bookshelves, I noticed an old book I had been involved in creating and, almost 15 years after its publication, had basically forgotten. Back in 2010, at the moment when President Barack Obama was dispatching thousands more American troops to Afghanistan and expanding that war in a myriad of ways, Nick Turse put together a bluntly entitled volume, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, in part from the work of TomDispatch authors, including me. All these years later, I picked it up and began reading through it again, noting the thoughts of authors and old friends (some no longer here), ranging from Chalmers Johnson and Juan Cole to Ann Jones and Andrew Bacevich. What struck me, of course, was that, more than 10 years before this country's disastrous departure from Afghanistan, it was already blindingly obvious -- to those who cared to look -- just how badly things were going there and what should be done. (Of course, to put even that in perspective, by December 2002, just a year after the post-9/11 American invasion of that country, with TomDispatch barely a year old, I was already referring to that war -- to use a word I borrowed from the Vietnam War era -- as a potentially disastrous "quagmire.")
As Turse wrote in his introduction to that book:
"To begin to imagine a true military withdrawal -- of troops, bases, and the full-scale machinery of war and occupation -- from that country has been the one serious option that has never been put on the proverbial 'table' on which 'all options' are so regularly said to be placed. It remains on no one's agenda among Washington powerbrokers, and no part of the discussion and debate among its punditocracy or the mainstream media more generally. And yet the situation in Afghanistan calls out for a serious consideration of just that."
Which is exactly what his book did in a striking fashion, a path that, he added, has "long been on the road to perdition."
And all too sadly, it would remain so for (disastrous) years to come, while that book, so totally on target, would essentially fall off the face of the earth. Sometimes, on this increasingly strange planet of ours, it simply doesn't pay to be right. In fact, it's hell on earth if you're on target but fall into the category of -- to use a term TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon has employed so strikingly in the past and again today -- a Cassandra, when being right couldn't be more wrong in terms of how the world will treat you. With that in mind, let Gordon once again play the role of an all-American Cassandra at TomDispatch. Tom
What Did We Know
And When Did We Know It?
A few days ago, my partner and I went in search of packing tape. Our sojourn on an idyllic (if tick-infested) Cape Cod island was ending and it was time to ship some stuff home. We stopped at a little odds-and-ends shop and found ourselves in conversation with the woman behind the counter.
She was born in Panama, where her father had served as chief engineer operating tugboats in the Panama Canal. As a child, she remembered celebrating her birthday with a trip on a tug from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, sailing under an arch of water produced by fireboats on either side.
"But that all ended," she said, "with the invasion. It was terrifying. They were bombing Panama City. The Army sent my family back to the U.S. so we wouldn't be killed. I've never been back." She was talking, of course, about the 1989 invasion of Panama ordered by President George H.W. Bush to arrest Manuel Noriega, that country's president. For years, Noriega had been a CIA asset, siding with Washington as the Cold War played out in Central America. He'd worked to sabotage the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN guerillas in El Salvador who opposed a U.S.-supported dictatorship there. And he'd worked with Washington's Drug Enforcement Agency while simultaneously taking money from drug gangs.
That a CIA asset was involved in the drug trade could hardly have come as a surprise to that agency, given its own long history of cooperating with drug merchants, but when journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of Noriega's drug connections, the U.S. decided to cut him loose and hardline neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams, one of the architects of the Contra war in Nicaragua, began pushing for an invasion. Abrams himself would resurface in the second Bush administration, where he would become a cheerleader for some of the worst crimes of the Global War on Terror. He would bob up yet again like some kind of malevolent cork in Donald Trump's administration. And then, in July 2023, perhaps in a fit of bipartisan amnesia, President Joe Biden would nominate him to serve on his Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
My partner and I told this woman that we remembered the invasion all too well. In fact, we'd joined a group of demonstrators occupying Market Street in San Francisco to protest it. But, I added, "Lots of people in this country don't even know that there was an invasion, or that hundreds of civilians died."
She nodded. "Nobody here knows about that. I've never met anyone who does. It was just one crook fighting another and Panama got in the way." As we prepared to leave, she asked us, "Do you mind if I give you a hug?" We didn't mind. We were honored.
The Curses of Cassandra
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