They’re narrative managing, writes Caitlin Johnstone, because history will remember them as wrong.
After the U.S. troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan “government” with which they’d spent 20 years pretending to nation build was essentially a work of fiction — thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan — you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history.
But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former prime minister who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of “obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’,” bloviating about “Radical Islam,” and asking, “has the West lost its strategic will?”
It’s essentially a 2,750-word temper tantrum, authored by the same man who fed the British people this load after 9/11:
“The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.
This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”
Blair promised that by helping the Bush administration usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism they could seize this unfortunate event to “re-order the world” in a way that would benefit all the world’s most unfortunate people. Mountains of corpses and tens of millions of refugees later it is clear to anyone with functioning gray matter that this was all a pack of lies.
And now, like any sociopath whose reputation is under threat, Blair has begun narrative managing.
This is also why George W. Bush has released his own statement through his own institution. It’s also why Bush-era neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are doing media tours condemning the withdrawal, and why Bill Kristol, whose neoconservative influence played a key role in the Bush administration’s military expansionism, is now promoting the arming of proxy forces against the Taliban.
They’re narrative managing.
They’re narrative managing because they’ve been proven wrong, and because history will remember them as men who were proven wrong. Their claims that a massive increase in military interventionism would benefit the people of the world have been clearly and indisputably shown to have been false from top to bottom, so now they’re just men who helped murder millions of human beings.
It’s about preserving their reputations and their legacies. “No no, we’re not mass murdering war criminals, we are visionaries. Had we just remained in Afghanistan another 20 years, history would have vindicated us. If we would have just killed more people in Iraq, it would be a paradise right now. The catastrophe cannot possibly be the fault of the people directly responsible for orchestrating it. It’s got to be the fault of the officials who inherited it. It’s the fault of the ungrateful inhabitants of the nations we graciously invaded. It’s the people and their imbecilic desire to end ‘the forever wars.’ “
But of course it’s their fault. None of this needed to be this way, it was made this way by stupid people with no functioning empathy. They can try to re-frame and spin it however they like, but history will remember them for the monsters they are. The saner our society becomes, the more unforgiving our memory of their crimes will be.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.