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Herb Rothschild Jr.: We have nothing to learn By Herb Rothschild Jr. Dec 14, 2019 12:00 AM A A Having worked with considerable success to rid myself of the prejudices with which my culture infected me as a child, I developed still another as an adult: young white men in pickups. None of my best friends are young white men in pickups. I like some older men who drive pickups. Perhaps they changed their behavior after they turned 40. Or maybe they used to drive sedans. Whatever. They aren’t the ones who flip me the bird when I stand on the sidewalk holding a sign decrying war. Of the many occasions when I have, one was in the aftermath of 9/11. Young white men in pickups were driving around Houston with little American flags fluttering from their windows and bumper stickers that said things like, “These colors don’t run.” A small group of us stood on a downtown corner in front of the federal building with signs urging our government to pursue justice, not wage war. “Tell it to the Taliban,” yelled a young white man in a pickup. He was one of many. That occasion came to mind this past Monday when The Washington Post published its findings from a cache of documents about the war in Afghanistan that it had finally pried out of the federal government by using the Freedom of Information Act. The overall finding was that senior U.S. officials continually lied to the public about how the war in Afghanistan was going. In this regard, nothing changed when Obama succeeded Bush. Just as Nixon suppressed the truth about Vietnam and made it his war when he could have used the Pentagon Papers to distance himself from that debacle (Dan Ellsberg told me he was giving Nixon a chance he thought Nixon would welcome to blame the war on Johnson and pull out), so Obama did likewise. The documents are records of over 600 interviews conducted by The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of a 2014 project called “Lessons Learned.” Its purpose was to help us avoid in future military campaigns the mistakes we made in Afghanistan. John Sopko, who was head of SIGAR, told the Post the documents show that “the American people have constantly been lied to” about Afghanistan. Interviewees describe a disinformation campaign meant to turn discouraging statistics into evidence that we were winning the war. We can’t expect our military to acknowledge that the fundamental mistake — the one prior to all others — was going to war. War is what the military does; it doesn’t decide when and where we do it. But the very existence of the most powerful armed force in history is a standing inducement to its use. Early on, we heard a few voices caution that we shouldn’t launch a war without an “exit strategy.” That advice may have carried some weight with planners in the Pentagon, and as the war in Afghanistan stretches toward two decades, it doubtless resonates with the young men and women still killing and dying over there. But it means nothing to those young white men in their pickups. They wanted to show the world that nobody can push us around. Which means someone — it didn’t really matter who — had to die. And if our only exit strategy is to leave death and destruction in our wake, then the world will have learned its lesson. We have nothing to learn. Herb Rothschild’s column appears in the Ashland Tidings every Saturday. RothschildHerb.jpg