Republicans Carping About Afghanistan Can All Go Eat a Bag of Richards

Everybody on the Right seems to be forgetting that Trump set the stage for this debacle. It was Trump who chose to negotiate directly with the Taliban, cutting out the Afghan government. It was Trump who sent the strong signal that the Afghan government and the Afghan people were going to be thrown under the bus.

Remember this?

That's then-Secretary of State Pompeo meeting with Mullah Beradar in Qatar last September. That was when he sold out Afghanistan to the Taliban.

But see, this is what Republicans do. They make agreements to end feckless wars and then carp when their agreements are put into effect. It happened when Bush agreed to end American presence in Iraq and Obama carried it out.

Why is this so? It's because the word of Republicans is of no value. Trump embodied this to a T; he never made an agreement that he wasn't willing to break. But international agreements aresomething that are negotiated after time-consuming negotiations. They govern the conduct between nations. If the word of nations cannot be trusted, then what is left to govern international relations?

We've tried the Rule of Force before. That wasn't such a great thing when disputes were settled with spears, swords and catapults. It's a horrible idea in the era of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

Yet that is what apparently think we should go back to. Because, to them, international agreements are of no value.

(And anyone who thinks that the outcome would have been different if Trump was still president needs to lay off the opium pipe.)