David Brooks Hasn't Learned a God Damn Thing

Mr. David Brooks has returned from vacation to his exhausting, one-column-per-week grind at The New York Times just in time to show up at the PBS News Hour studios and share with Totebag America his opinion that we should never, ever, ever have left Afghanistan. 

Amna Nawaz: ... What do you make of how [President Biden] is handling this moment in his presidency?

David Brooks:   I think very poorly.

I thought the decision to leave was a mistake. I thought we had achieved some level of stability, and we could manage the problem. And I think we just invited the downfall.

And the sad thing to me is, one of the good things that has happened in the Middle East over the last several years is that people have taken a look at the Taliban, and they hate it. A survey of 11 countries, Muslim countries, only 13 percent of positive views about the Taliban.

In country after country, people are sickening of religious theocracy, because they just find it doesn't work. And that's in Iran. That's across the region. And so, at a time when liberal democracy is beginning to have a little momentum, and theocracy is taking some blows, we now have a period where we're seen to be brutally abandoning Muslims, not living up to our allies, betraying our — the people who helped us.

And we're doing it in the most shambolic way. And so I think a lot of people take a look at this week, and, certainly, a lot of the people I have been reading think it's — this is what national decline looks like.

Yes, according to "a study" which Mr. Brooks never bothers to identify (Tiger Beat?  Modern Bride?)  the Taliban were so unpopular and the 20 years of blood and treasure we've poured into Afghanistan has had such a vitalizing effect that the minute it looked like were packing up to going home the president of the country fled, the army laid down their arms and what remained of the government handed the Taliban the keys to the kingdom.  

Amna Nawaz:  ...Do you — I mean, given that everyone has said, yes, starting wars is very easy, ending them is difficult, it would have been chaotic regardless, you still believe that the U.S. shouldn't be leaving at this point?

David Brooks:  Well, now it's too late.  But, yes, I thought that's — we talked about it weeks ago. And I thought, over the last year, we had 2, 500 people in there. They were not in combat roles. We hadn't had a combat fatality in a year or more. And we were — we and our allies were providing a measure of stability for decency to live in Afghanistan.

            And there are some — some problems you don't solve. You just try to manage them...

Says the guy who dumped his wife and married his very much younger research assistant.

But Brooks being Brooks couldn't just dump her.  Instead he had to burn though three different thesauruses (thesauri?) to try to make it into some kind of  sweeping, philosophical ode to the Olympian Importance  Of Dumping Ones Old Wife For Young Pussy, which he promptly published in The New York Times because there was no one to stop him and which Chumplady very efficiently vivisects here:

Be a hero and sign this nice divorce settlement I’ve prepared for you. I know you’re hurt, left in the vapor trail of my awesomeness. You probably crave contact — more awesomeness, David! MORE! But ask yourself — what would a hero do?

A hero would fuck off, Sarah.

But do please continue Mr. Brooks.

David Brooks:  You just try to live another day, so the Afghans can decide their own future. We have learned over the last 20 years we can't decide anybody's future for them. We can't invade and tell them, here's the kind of government you're going to have...

And yet that is literally what David Brooks has been 100% in favor of us doing.  And some of you longtime readers may notice what an uncanny resemblance all of this bears to what Brooks was writing about Iraq seven years ago.  From me in 2014 ("David Brooks Promises Peace With Honor in Vietnam"):

From the safety of his impregnable Neoconservative fastness high atop the New York Times, tireless Iraq War cheerleader and professional revisionist, David Brooks, has written a column blaming the collapse of Iraq on Barack Obama's unwillingness to shovel even more of the sons and daughters of Americans-who-are-not-David-Brooks into the bottomless well of misery and sectarian horror created by George W. Bush.

...We’ll never know if all this effort and progress could have led to a self-sustaining, stable Iraq. Before the country was close to ready, the Obama administration took off the training wheels by not seriously negotiating the NATO status of forces agreement that would have maintained some smaller American presence.

In his own way, Brooks has proven to be a little like Sulzberger family's in-house Afghanistan-style fuck-up:  a bad decision from the start on which the Times has been pissing away its money and its reputation for nearly a generation, and yet all these years later Brooks remains exactly the same tenaciously myopic Neocon automaton he was the day the Times hired him.

And while the United States may have finally decided to face the painful fact that it made a terrible mistake with Afghanistan and cut its losses, there is virtually no chance the Sulzberger family will ever do the same with Mr. David Brooks.

Burn The Lifeboats