Biden and America’s Legacy of Defeat in Foreign Wars

At the beginning of August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent American troops to Vietnam into combat against Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese people. Johnson sent a total of 180,000 troops, which might be comparable to 1 million American soldiers considering the strength of the North Vietnamese forces at the time. Further, most of the nations around Vietnam were allies of the U.S., and some of them hosted American bases. Despite this, after 11 years of struggle, the North Vietnamese, supported by the allies of Russia, China and people around the world, were able to defeat the American forces and send them packing. The window through which the American ambassador and his entourage climbed onto the embassy roof to escape by helicopter after the fall of Saigon, the seat of America’s power and that of its allies in South Vietnam, was plastered on every international news station at the time.

Since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, according to American records, approximately 1 million American soldiers have served in Afghanistan in the past 20 years. The number of permanent American forces in the first years exceeded 100,000 troops, in addition to the number of troops sent by NATO and six European nations. Former President Barack Obama increased that number by 20,000 when he took office in 2009.

On April 17, the American website Antiwar.com published a piece by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies, in which they argued that Afghanistan has become a cemetery for American soldiers, NATO allies and the six European nations which have sent their forces to Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001. The article quoted what Joe Biden said when he was vice president: “Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaida is degraded. It’s time to end the forever war.” And with that, and the usual lies which U.S. presidents repeatedly tell over the course of their wars, Biden is now extending the American troop presence another six months despite ascending to the presidency, knowing full well that former president Donald Trump had set May as a final date for the withdrawal of all American forces.

For these reasons, the two American analysts confirm that “[w]hat Biden did not admit is that the United States and its allies, with all their money and firepower, were unable to vanquish the Taliban, who currently control about half of Afghanistan and are positioned to control even more in the coming months without a ceasefire.” Their analysis indicates that the U.N. spent “2,488 U.S. troops and personnel, and trillions of dollars,” in addition to thousands more who were wounded, and yet its mission was not achieved.

It seems that America’s forever-war policy doesn’t end on this side of the world, but has started to transfer some of its symptoms with the use of weapons of war against Americans themselves. Incidents of random murder have increased in recent months, signaling a kind of atypical civil war within one state or another. On April 16, CNN, one of the United States’ biggest political broadcasters, presented a graphic image featuring incidents of active shooters in more than 13 locations inside the U.S. over the last few days. Most prominent among the incidents was a shooting inside a FedEx warehouse, in which eight citizens were killed by gunfire when an employee shot into a crowd.

Many believe these acts of violence started to increase among individuals and groups as a result of overt acts of racism, especially by police officers targeting Blacks and Latinos, and yet no definitive solutions appear on the horizon.

On the other hand, U.S. wars abroad indicate that 90% of American presidents have waged war during the last half century up through today. It is as though the work of scheduling wars against people of the world was among the top priorities of U.S. presidents, whether it be through the use of American forces, sanctions and economic blockades, or through the use of support for its proxy groups. It would not be an exaggeration to call the U.S. the biggest manufacturer of wars globally, since 90% involve the U.S. in one way or another. However, in most of these wars, the United States was not able to break the will of the people nor their leadership, who defended their homeland and independence. This is what the record of U.S. defeat proves, along with its most recent defeat in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Afghanistan.