Afghanistan Vs WWII
We have an ongoing discussion on my forum re Afghanistan and I noticed that WWII is often invoked as the reason why we should intervene militarily - i.e. "Whatever would have happened had we not intervened in WWII?!" - by proponents of the War in Afghanistan.
So, whatever happened to "Never Again"?
Anyway, we'll never know now but I wonder what the world would look like today had the U.S. Administration taken a step back from 9/11 and done nothing, just coasted on all those condolences sent from abroad, maybe even used the momentum to re-sell Americans on the idea of a Peace Corp.
One thing is for sure, the next time someone invokes WWII (which we won, of course) in that "Whatever would have happened had we not intervened in WWII?!" vein, I'm going to respond, "I dunno. What if we had intervened and instead of winning - we'd lost?"
Because really, we only make the assumption that our intervention is valid based on the notion that we'll win in the end. And reaching back into history to WWII to draw parallels to Afghanistan is pretty silly anyway, because there are plenty of parallels to be drawn from Afghanistan itself - with no need to go back very far in history, at all.
And is it me? Or is our chronic assumption that WE'RE the good guys and THEY'RE the bad guys... well... a little dated? I mean, I guess we've updated it to, "It's for their own good." "We're liberators, not invaders." "Polls say some Afghans want us to stay there until the job is finished." (Sure, especially the ones on our payroll, I imagine.) And yaddayaddablahblah and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc.
Yet, I can't help but wonder if we'll still be using WWII 100 years from now as the parallel to the next invasion, "Whatever would have happened had we not intervened in WWII?!"
Okay. I lied. I don't really wonder.
