Was It Worth It?

  

If we’re talking about Afghanistan, I think the answer is, we had to “buy” it, so to speak, but we way overpaid.

The sheer magnitude of the 9/11 attacks on this country simply left us no choice but to respond, and quickly. Turning the other cheek, or waiting patiently for the best opportunity to strike back, were not options. We had to answer, and we did. This is America, so that usually means bombing something, which we did in spades within months in Afghanistan, and we came soooo close to taking out Osama bin Laden. Had we succeeded, there might not have been a 20-year war. But we didn’t, and there was. It was often said, we had to fight terrorism over there so we wouldn’t have to here. That rolled a little too easily off the tongue for my taste. But our blood was up. And we did hold off the Taliban for two decades. That’s not nothing.

In 2021, it was way past time for us to leave; there was virtually no argument about that. While the last-minute airlift of Americans and Afghans was truly heroic, it’s pretty clear that the process leading up to it was botched, and the world knows it.

That said, I wish the pundits would stop saying we were defeated or that we lost the war. We chose to leave. The Afghan government lost it by not bothering to fight it. As for our messy departure, some are saying that our exit from Vietnam was much worse, but for comparison, that’s a pretty low bar.

Was our time and money wasted in Afghanistan? Not entirely. True, we shouldn’t have tried nation-building, but if history serves, we were actually pretty good at it in Japan after World War II, though that was rebuilding. The problem with Afghanistan, as one writer has said, is that it is more of a place than an actual nation. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work there. Still, we did give many of its citizens, especially women, a good long taste of freedom, and hopefully, there will be enough Afghans ready to fight to get it back someday.

As for where we go from here, there has been much said in recent days about how great it was that this nation was truly united after the 9/11 attacks, and wouldn’t it be great if we could feel that way again. The trouble with that kind of unity is that it’s a reflex. The price we paid for it in 2001 was way too high. I hope someday we can get there by commitment instead.

Life, Abortion, and Balance

Some of you may not like hearing this from me, but I have a problem with abortion.  I just can’t be convinced that a fetus with a heartbeat isn’t alive, so abortion seems like killing something. I didn’t say “murdering,” that is a legal term; I said “killing.” All that said, I remain in favor of reasonable freedom of choice for women when it comes to abortion. It’s a question of balance.

“Thou shall not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments, and most of us would find ourselves in trouble if we violated it. That seems simple enough. But when it comes to the law, nothing is simple. There are exceptions. You CAN kill someone else if they pose a direct and immediate threat to your own life.

When it comes to abortion, many states that restrict it also have exceptions, allowing it in cases of rape or incest. But here comes Texas, essentially banning abortion outright, with no exceptions.

Those who want to end abortion entirely claim to be motivated by the sacredness of life. But do you think maybe those states whose legislators are most opposed to abortion also happen to have higher proportions of their states’ population on death row in prison?  So why is life sacred at one end and not the other?

Ideological purity doesn’t work in the real world. The function of law is to strike a balance among competing interests. In the broadest sense, Roe v. Wade has offered this balance between a woman’s right to decide what happens to what’s growing within her and society’s need to regulate. It has worked for about 50 years, but those days may now be numbered.

The Supreme Court majority seems to have made its position pretty clear, by declining to keep the Texas law from taking effect. Expanding the court, however, isn’t the solution to resolving its ideological imbalance. Both parties could use the tactic whenever the numbers were not in their favor. There are really only two paths open to those who want to preserve a woman’s right to abortion. Neither is easy.

One is to codify the provisions of Roe into federal law, which would have to get through both houses of Congress. Good luck with that! The other is to use the 2022 election to replace the legislators who insist on a total abortion ban. If the right-to-choose side really reflects a majority in this country, as is often stated, the voters will have to demonstrate that next year at the ballot box.