Tyler Koteskey wrote an article to say that America should come out of the entire Middle East, not just Afghanistan. Willis L. Krumholz, wrote an article to express his disagreement with Adam Kinzinger who said that America should not withdraw from Afghanistan.
Koteskey’s
article came under the title: “The US should rethink its military presence
across the Middle East,” published on July 18, 2021 in the Washington Examiner.
Krumholz’s
article came under the tile: “Why Adam Kinzinger Is Wrong About Staying In
Afghanistan Forever,” and the subtitle: “In the end, all America’s troops and
dollars can’t build a cohesive, peaceful democracy out of nothingness. The
future of Afghanistan needs to be up to the Afghan people.” The article was
published on July 19, 2021 in The Federalist.
When
you think about the arguments that were presented in these discussions, and you
pursue them to their logical conclusions, you cannot honestly dismiss what you’ll
discover, which is that there is something seriously wrong with both America’s
system of governance and America’s moral priorities.
The
role that petroleum has played in much of what America has decided when it came
to its own security and that of its allies, demonstrates how self-defeating
America’s system of governance has been. To understand this part, we need to
know something about crude oil. Well, there is conventional oil, which is known
to most people as fluid that’s pumped from the underground by the familiar oil
rigs. And there is unconventional oil, which can be of the Canadian tar sands
kind or the American shale kind.
The
easiest and cheapest oil to extract, is the conventional type. Its technology
was first developed more than a century ago, and has been improved on ever
since. The tar sands and shale kind, on the other hand, required a different
kind of technologies. The oil companies started working on these technologies
several decades ago but were not in a hurry to put them in use because to do so
would have run counter to the economic decisions that the companies were making
at the time. How is that?
Well,
it used to cost a little more than 2 dollars to extract a barrel of oil
(conventional) in the Middle East. It used to cost a little more than 6 dollars
to extract a barrel of conventional oil in America. And it would have cost a
lot more to extract a barrel of non-conventional oil, had the technology existed
at the time, which it did not in any case. The companies were happy to keep the
unconventional oil where it was underground while exploiting the Middle Eastern
resources, which they intended to do till these resources were depleted.
That
is when the companies would have started to increase America’s extraction of
its own conventional oil, and would have started to develop its unconventional
resources as well as those of Canada. But the oil embargo that the Arabs
imposed on America in 1973 changed that calculation. When, in addition, the
OPEC countries raised their prices afterwards, Canada and the United States
rushed to develop their own unconventional resources.
During
the decades that this was percolating in America, something was happening in
the Middle East. Here is an account of that, according to Tyler Koteskey:
“Despite the $6.4 Trillion we’ve spent in the Middle East in the past two
decades and the more than 7,000 US service members we’ve lost, America has few
vital interests in the region.” And here is what Kinzinger has admitted to: “America
has spent hundreds of billions to nation-build Afghanistan, and 2,312 US
military personnel have been killed there, along with more than 71,000 civilians”.
Had
the system of economic exploitation that was practiced by the oil companies in
America been replaced by a system such as the one practiced everywhere in the
world, the government of the United States would have required the companies to
develop the unconventional oil long ago, and there would not have been a need
for America to go kill people in their homes, and see its own children killed
away from home, to prevent what did not happen and may never have happened. Can
you now see what was wrong with America’s system of governance?
As
to what’s wrong with America’s moral priorities, it comes down to a simple
choice that Americans must make but cannot make, being entangled in useless
haggling that’s blinding them to the most elementary of truths which is sitting
under their noses, begging to be seen but remains unseen and ignored. And so,
to those who hide behind the skirt of little girls and shed crocodile tears about
them not going to school, consider the following from Krumholz’s article:
“Many
Afghan officials and many warlords and Afghan security forces practice ritual
child abuse called ‘boy play.’ One US soldier could hear Afghan police officers
sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base: ‘at night we can hear them
screaming’ he said. Another US soldier had a fight with a US-backed militia
leader because the warlord had a boy chained to his bed. These examples are far
from isolated. The widespread abuse boosted the popularity of the Taliban,
which does not tolerate the practice, and punishes the abusers”.
Now,
answer this question, America: Which scene is more depraved to look at, a girl
with her mother learning to cook in the kitchen instead of being in school, or
a little boy chained to a bed and screaming with pain while serving as sex
slave to the most animal-like savage, built in human form, you can ever
imagine?
Have you made your choice, America?