The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

It’s time to play the blame game.

Who exactly is at fault for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan?

There are those who can’t see the similarities between this collapse and the one we saw in South Vietnam.

I think it is a carbon copy!

I know of a local serviceman who was on one of the last helicopters out.

The French failed in Vietnam So we went in, and with 55,000 dead later, we barely got our people out before the full collapse.

On my three trips to Vietnam I was shocked to see the streets full of fighting-age men and women who were content to let us fight their battle for them.

We apparently learned little from the French loss.

The French had a much better chance to succeed than we did. It was a colonial war and the Vietnamese won.

What we got for our efforts was a granite wall in Washington D.C. with 55,000 names on it and a very large dent in our national treasury.

Now it has come to this in Afghanistan.

The Russians tried it for 10 years only to be chased out.

We apparently learned little from this. With the old American know-how, we were going to show how it is done.

It seems we have a habit of trying to prop up dictators who are only interested in building up their Swiss bank accounts.

The picture of the final helicopters taking off from our embassy in Saigon is firmly in my memory.

Now this scene was repeated in Afghanistan.

At one time, we had built a paper army of 600,000 in Afghanistan, a substantial army of people who wouldn’t  fight.

Now, the blame game that got us into a 20-year war that continued to worsen as the years wore on.

The only people happy over this were the Russians and the dictators who robbed us, and the tragedy is we knew it all the time.

There were a few generals who built up the number of stars they have on their shoulders. Come to think of it, there is also a strong similarity to what happened in Iraq.  We just are not good at building up nations in a way that is contrary to their history.

Looking ahead, and after the blame game dies down, we no doubt will want to build some kind of monument to celebrate this failure.

The tragedy in all this is the loss of life, ours and the countless nationals killed and maimed. 

Countries, if they are smart, will shy away from asking for our help.

There are plenty of politicians that share the blame, spread out over the past 70 years or so.

Now the nation is seeing the same kind of thing, only coming in a different form.

That’s the coming storm from the Delta varient.

Some are willing to give up thousands of lives by refusing to get vaccinated, or the wearing of a mask. All these statistics show that the virus attack is largely against the unvaccinated.

Who will get blamed for this nonsense, and will we build a monument for this stupidity?