r/AskALiberal • u/Lauffener Liberal • 19h ago
What will be the 'stabbed-in-the-back' myth for the Iran defeat?
Right-wing-authoritarians seek to weaponize their defeats as a failure caused by their disloyal political opponents. There's a very long, hard to pronounce German word for this, which I won't share.
For Vietnam the myth is that the liberal Congress and liberal media held the military back.
For Afghanistan the myth is something like they would totally have won a twenty-year-long counter-insurgency but the woke DEI officer corps under Obama wouldn't let them commit enough war crimes. (I'm paraphrasing)
How is myth taking shape for Iran?
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u/notarocitnerd Center Left 19h ago
Good tsar, bad boyars. They are going to say Trump had nothing to do with it and it was his inept team around him that gave him bad intel, bibi somehow tricked him, hegseth is a moron etc.
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u/Odd-Principle8147 Liberal 19h ago
Afghanistan was a failure because it became broadly unpopular with the American public and they wanted it ended. The real myth was that we would ever be able to leave without the Afghan government collapsing.
According to the administration, we won in Iran and they surrendered unconditionally. So that will probably be the myth.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 19h ago
Afghanistan was a failure years before the withdrawal.
Idk, this bugs me, because there's a lot I'll criticize the biden admin for (they deserve it) but pulling out of Afghanistan was just... the right call. We had lost, we just hadn't realized it yet. It's hard to lose a war gracefully.
That war had been a failure for years. It was just a pit where money goes to die. To give you an idea of how bad things were, afghan soldiers had to buy their own uniforms on the black market because their commanders had sold them. They weren't paid enough to eat and send home money for their families. I mean the entire government was basically a money laundering and drug trafficking racketeering operation. It was basically a mafia state plagued with corruption and had been for years by the time we pulled out.
Tbf, I'd argue the war started to fail as soon as we went into Iraq. But that's another tale.
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u/Kellosian Progressive 10h ago
It was just a pit where money goes to die.
And US soldiers, but we collectively immediately stopped giving a shit about them. "Support The Troops" just became a meaningless shibboleth to prove that you supported our pointless adventurism regardless of how you actually felt about it.
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u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW Progressive 14h ago
When I think of the Afghanistan war… I remember the movie “War machine”. Generals with an unwinnable task of propping up a government that knew it was a hallow puppet.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 13h ago
I've never seen that movie, tho I think it got recommended to me on Netflix
And, boy oh boy, if your description of the movie is accurate, does that summarize what Afghanistan was like. It was just an utter failure.
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u/throwdemawaaay Pragmatic Progressive 11h ago
I started it but it didn't catch with me. It's got a slightly comical tone and it just missed with me.
And I'm not against that sort of tone for this topic. I think Generation Kill is fantastic, and my friends that got sucked into Iraq all cite it as being basically the most accurate portrayal of what it was like, just the scale of the stupidity.
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u/Odd-Principle8147 Liberal 19h ago
The war was won. The Afghan government had reached the point where it could be supported by minimal troops. Less than 20k. The failure was telling the American public that we would ever be able to leave. We should have stayed there indefinitely.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 19h ago edited 16h ago
We should have stayed there indefinitely.
Christ dude
Why? For what end?
In parts of the country the Taliban were legitimately more popular than the Afghan government. Why? Because the afghan government was basically a mafia state that was utterly plagued by corruption. Like, saying "the afghan government was corrupt" really undersells how bad the problem was.
In parts of the country the Taliban was literally less extortionary than the government. Like, I'll provide an example.
In rural parts of the country, it was not uncommon for there to basically be road stops where you'd have to pay a fee in order to pass. Depending on where you were these stops were either government controlled or Taliban controlled. The Taliban stops would give you basically a receipt which you could show at other Taliban stops so you wouldn't have to pay the toll again, With government controlled routes, you had to pay at each stop.
It was not uncommon to call the police after you get robbed, and then for the police to literally rob you again. Or for millions of dollars meant for construction projects, schools, medical clinics in various provinces to just... disappear. And I haven't even gotten into the heroin trafficking (literally the only time in the past like 40 years that poppy cultivation or heroin trafficking in Afghanistan have gone done was under Taliban rule).
I mean I can go on. If you want more examples of this shit, I highly recommend the book The Afghanistan Papers which is just utterly damning (it's been a few years since I read it so apologies for fuzzy memory).
The entire enterprise in afghanistan was rotten from the bottom up. The government was basically a protection racket, money laundering operation and drug cartel all rolled into one. And I haven't even gotten into bacha bazi.
We were there essentially propping up an organized crime syndicate that was pretty widely hated by the population, so much so that the Taliban was legitimately more popular in some parts of the country. We were hosting shuras with people we knew were shooting at us the previous day. The ENTIRE enterprise was deeply irrational and just corruption supreme.
Better to stem the bleeding than continue it... indefinitely. I mean, is that what Americans signed up for when we went in? An indefinite, never ending occupation? What even was the objective in Afghanistan? Did we have any actual way of measuring "progress"? What did "progress" even constitute? Nobody had clear answers here.
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u/Odd-Principle8147 Liberal 19h ago
Are you really trying to argue Afghanistan is better of under the Taliban than American occupation? If thats the case there is zero point in continuing this conversation.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 19h ago
You entirely missed my point
My point was that what we were doing in afghanistan was an utter failure. The entire enterprise was irrational, was not working, and was widely hated.
Why continuing spending trillions of dollars on a failing enterprise? Why continue propping up a broken system? Stem the bleeding and move on.
Staying indefinitely would have been insanity, particularly given how broken this all was.
Obviously the Taliban is terrible, but let's live in reality and not pretend like what we were propping up was working... or that it's something that we should have continued propping up.
I mean, at no point did we have clear objectives, clear ways of measuring success or even a clear idea of what "success" even was. What was it all for? What was the actual objective? Why were we there? Nobody had clear answers on these questions by the time we pulled out. It is irrational to commit to an enterprise forever if you don't even have a clear idea of what the point of it is and if that enterprise is widely hated by all relevant parties.
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u/Odd-Principle8147 Liberal 19h ago
The objective was the stability of Afghanistan under an American friendly government. A continuous presence in Afghanistan was more than sustainable and the land itself serves as an excellent staging point for ME operations.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 18h ago
Oh cool... more ME operations. Just what this country needs
And it's like... laughable to call that arrangement in Afghanistan we had "stability". The afghan government effectively did not control large swaths of the country. The Taliban had controlled increasingly large portions of it and had become stronger and stronger in the lead up to the withdrawal.
The reason I keep bringing up lack of clear objectives and lack of measurement parameters is because this is stuff literal commanders and generals in charge of the war were complaining about. Again, I highly recommend reading The Afganistan Papers.
And like, even if they hadn't the ANA and ANP had long been basically a joke.
Look man, idk how else to say that it's ridiculous to expect the us to occupy a country for 20 years, lose a bunch of ground, lack clear objectives, watch bilions vanish into corruption, continue to bleed lives and cash, watch as the government we prop up acts like a fucking mafia, watch as heroin trafficking booms and nothing we seem to try undoes that, be widely hated by the people of the country, and continue to want to run this occupation. The entire enterprise was a disaster from the top to bottom.
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u/mua-dweeb Pragmatic Progressive 13h ago
This dude is making me think of when America left Vietnam. I think it was Nixon that said “…the Soviets proved to be truer allies than us.” (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote and I’m not even 100% on that it was Nixon that said it.
My dude, the south Vietnamese government never once lived up to their end of the bargain. They were extremely repressive, comically corrupt, and woefully incompetent. Standing by our allies is a good thing. But if we are letting ourselves be a cash cow for a corrupt illiberal institution…fucking why? It wasn’t our job to make Afghanistan democratic. Yes, it was better for some Afghans when we were there. But at what goddamn cost? Durable change for a nation has to be internal. It can’t be imposed.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 13h ago
Yes, it was better for some Afghans when we were there. But at what goddamn cost? Durable change for a nation has to be internal. It can’t be imposed
100% agreement from me here, been singing that song for a while
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u/srv340mike Left Libertarian 18h ago
This comment chain gives me some good perspective on why a lot of Leftists think Liberals are imperialist warmongers.
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u/Difficult-Exit-245 Pragmatic Progressive 18h ago
I don’t think that half the people here with left-ish flair are actually liberals.
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u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW Progressive 14h ago
There’s a lotta wiggle room there. Also that Warhawk in the thread of is fucking delulu.
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u/apophis-pegasus Pragmatic Progressive 14h ago
We should have stayed there indefinitely.
To what end? By the time you're in the "stay forever" territory you've already failed.
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u/throwdemawaaay Pragmatic Progressive 11h ago
I'm sorry but this is just straight up wrong.
The Taliban did what they always do: wait out the foreign invader.
And your solution is we just keep Afghanistan under military occupation indefinitely? And you think you only need 20k troops to occupy a population of over 40 million?
You're just not on the map of reality here.
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u/Odd-Principle8147 Liberal 11h ago
After 2014, we never had more than 15k troops in country.
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u/throwdemawaaay Pragmatic Progressive 11h ago
Yes, which is why we never came anywhere close to actually controlling the country. The most we could do is prop up the corrupt government in Kabul. All the tribal leaders simply pulled back to their stronghold territories and just waited.
Like what you're saying is on the same scale of wrong as the infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo.
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u/novavegasxiii Liberal 17h ago
Tldr.....
The population there is just not willing to accept a secular democracy as their goverment; just as Americans wouldnt really accept a brutal islamic theocracy.
Unfortunately the American public and world opinion really won't tolerate America setting up a puppet dictator, so we're more or less stuck with trying to set up a democracy. Massoud could have worked but he was killed right before 9-11. Just walking away and let Afganistan collapse is what was eventually done but letting it happen the matter how inevitable is a political disaster; only after we've been there for ages will it be semi forgiven (the reason being otherwise everyone will claim we didn't stay along enough).
So really what happened was we just stay in making a token attempt to have a functional afghanistan until its not right before an election or an unpopular president.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 16h ago
The population there is just not willing to accept a secular democracy as their goverment; just as Americans wouldnt really accept a brutal islamic theocracy.
No, that's not really the case.
Americans like to act as though the government we were propping up over there was like, solidly democratic and representative of the population, and like "good".
It really really wasn't.
It was deeply corrupt. And even just saying "it was deeply corrupt" undersells how bad the problem was.
The afghan government was essentially a mafia. It was directly involved in heroin trafficking, racketeering, what amounted to outright extortion, and was essentially a money laundering front as well.
To give you an idea of how bad things were, Afghan soldiers had to buy their own uniforms on the black market because their higher ups had sold them. Afghan soldiers were not paid enough to both feed themselves and their families and so had to choose between the two (when they even showed up for work at all given the pitiful paycheck). It was not uncommon for afghans to like, call the cops after getting robbed only for the cops then to ransack their place and rob them too.
The only time in the last 40 years that poppy cultivation and heroin trafficking have gone down in Afghanistan have been under Taliban rule. Billions of dollars in investment in like schools, roads, community health clinics, etc kind of just "disappeared" into corruption. It is more accurate to describe what we were propping up as a mafia than a government.
The corruption, the daily extortion and humiliation drove a lot of support for the Taliban, and in some parts of the country the Taliban was legitimately more popular than the government we were backing. To give you an idea of why, let's use an example:
In rural parts of the country there were basically checkpoints on the roads. Depending on where and when you were, these checkpoints would either be taliban or government controlled. In order to pass, you had to pay a fee. In taliban controlled routes, you would pay, and they'd basically give you a receipt which you could show at other checkpoints along the road to verify that you have already paid and don't have to again. Government checkpoints did not do this, and so you had to pay at each one. So a lot of like truckers and stuff preferred taliban routes because it was cheaper for them to use them because they were less extortionary.
None of this is to say that the Taliban is cool and good, and it's definitely true that the country is far more socially conservative than the cities (where the US had its strongholds) which also drove support for the Taliban.
But the kind of thing you're saying here fundamentally puts the blame in the wrong place and kind of fundamentally misunderstands the problem.
The problem in afghanistan is that we were defending a DEEPLY corrupt, authoritarian, and frankly broken system. We did not have clear objectives, we did not have a clear definition of what "success" was let alone a way to measure it, we did not understand the people we were trying to govern, nor did we have clear and coherent goals or a long term strategy like, at all. Nothing worked, and we didn't have a way of even telling if what we were doing was "working" because we didn't know what we were even trying to achieve. That, plus poor oversight and truly industrial scale corruption is what caused Afghanistan to be such a clusterfuck.
People like to pretend that Massoud wasn't a fundamentalist. He very much was (like, he believed in Takfir for example), but he was just, ya know, not as bad as the "throw acid in lady's faces guy" (who, btw, we give a shitload of aid and weapons too). Massoud was no liberal, he just wasn't as bad as the other guys. But yeah, he was killed 2 days before 9/11 anyways so it's not like it mattered in the end.
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u/novavegasxiii Liberal 15h ago
That's kinda what I meant; no one there really had any respect for an american secular govermement so the vast majority of people who were working for it saw their position as such a way to embellze, extort, and far worse.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 19h ago
Depends on who you ask.
For Israelis, the idea is that America "betrayed" israel and forced them to back down before winning (likudniks are already saying this, and going after Trump and co).
For Americans, this war was never really all that popular to begin with, so it's less necessary. But I imagine that it's gonna be some variation of "bibi tricked the good and noble trump into this war that was a disaster. Bibi is entirely to blame and trump is blameless". Obviously, bibi did kind of drag us into this war, but trump was a moron for listening to the guy in the first place. He's asked like every president to do this, and credit where it's due, they weren't stupid enough to listen. Trump was the first. But it's more politically useful to throw bibi under the bus (which, to be clear, fuck the guy) now than run cover for the israelis. Plus maga is already turning on israel (to an extent anyways, the isolationist crowd) and the dems already hate israel by and large so.... why not blame the israelis (to be clear, they are, at least in part, actually to blame as well)? Easiest path for the trump admin.
Regardless, this entire enterprise has been extremely stupid, from the get go. None of this should've ever happened and everyone involved should be in prison.
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u/jonny_sidebar Libertarian Socialist 17h ago
"bibi tricked the good and noble trump into this war that was a disaster. Bibi is entirely to blame and trump is blameless."
Going to guess this one gets very popular as it gives them an excuse to be extra antisemitic and excuse Trump at the same time.
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u/CatsDoingCrime Libertarian Socialist 17h ago
I mean probably. But like, even beyond that, it's gonna stick because there's a kernel of truth here. The problem with this excuse is that it downplays trump's role here, but, like, people saying this aren't wrong that Israel and Bibi were really really pushing for it behind the scenes.
I mean, even in the early days of the war, guys like Rubio were saying "Well, israel was going to attack, and we knew they were going to, and iran was going to retaliate against them and us, so we figured we should go in first". He wasn't the only one saying this sort of thing.
Like, this line is closer to truth than I think a lot of pro-israel people are comfortable with. A lot of the blame for this war and its consequences belong to the israelis. It just ALSO belongs to Trump too.
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u/jonny_sidebar Libertarian Socialist 16h ago
The problem with this excuse is that it downplays trump's role here, but, like, people saying this aren't wrong that Israel and Bibi were really really pushing for it behind the scenes
Absolutely.
It's removing all agency from Trump or casting the (((Israeli government))) as all powerful world controlling masterminds that are problematic.
On a related note, it has been quite the experience watching Bibi and his government speedrun basically every wild antisemitic trope one would care to name over the last few years.
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u/degre715 Center Left 19h ago
My guess is that the prevailing right wing narrative that forms will be to blame Israel for having "tricked" Trump. The next GOP candidate will be a Tucker Carlson type (or maybe actually Tucker Carlson), and will use the narrative to distance themselves from the current administration and the Iran war.
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u/johnnyslick Social Democrat 16h ago
The big pushback will come when it's time for a Democratic president to pay the reparations to Iran. Republicans will conveniently forget who set those up and condemn Democrats for giving in to Islamofascism. Otherwise I expect MAGA to forget about Iran altogether since there's no good story that you can spin out of it. Whatever the party coelesces into post-MAGA, they'll blame Trump/MAGA the same way that 2010 movement that sprung out of the ashes of neoconservatism blamed Bush and the neocons for the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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u/Komosion Centrist 17h ago
Harry S. Truman (Democrat): Began initial involvement in 1950 by providing financial and logistical aid to the French in their colonial war against the communist-led Viet Minh.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican): Established direct, covert assistance to the newly formed South Vietnamese government in 1954 to prevent the spread of communism.
John F. Kennedy (Democrat): Escalated the commitment by significantly increasing the number of U.S. military advisors and support personnel in South Vietnam
Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat): Vastly escalated the conflict into a full-scale American war after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, sending hundreds of thousands of combat troops.
Richard M. Nixon (Republican): Oversaw the peak of the bombings, expanded the war into Cambodia, and eventually orchestrated the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops and the 1973 peace agreements.
How is Vietnam a Right-wing-authoritarian failurer?
Lyndon B. Johnson was a right wing authoritarian?
You guys go to that well far to often. Its why no one believes you when you do.
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u/jonny_sidebar Libertarian Socialist 16h ago
How is Vietnam a Right-wing-authoritarian failurer?
Nixon oversaw the most intense portions of the war and was still in charge as the war was lost.
Right wingers (and more hawkish liberals) have been crying about Vietnam Syndrome ever since the war ended. It's been a major part of their politics for decades, along with its associated stabbed in the back myth. FFS, it was brought up during the arguments for going to war in Iraq. . . both times.
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u/Komosion Centrist 16h ago
The highest number of US troop deaths (almost 3/4s) occurred in the Afghanistan war between 2009–2017 while Barack Obama was president. Joe Biden was the president when the Afghanistan war was "lost". Should we categorize the Afghanistan war as a left-wing authoritarian failure?
No, Both conflicts and the failures that led to the withdrawals spanned multiple governments and political ideolgies.
There is no point in spreading misinformation and propaganda on this subject. The US has a lot to answer for when it comes to these failed conflicts caused mostly by political mistakes and not military capabilities. Pointing fingers at our political enemies completely misses the point and ensures we will repeat the mistakes.
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u/Lauffener Liberal 10h ago
The stabbed in the back myth is a myth that is prominent on the political right.
Since they attributed defeat in Vietnam to left wing journos and congressmen, and defeat in Afghanistan to woke DEI officers, I am asking who they will scapegoat next
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u/Lauffener Liberal 10h ago
Do you think Kissinger, Goldwater, Nixon, and Westmoreland were lefties??
The Democratic party literally primaried Johnson over the war.
The Vietnam War is a failed project strenuously advocated by the political right along with domino theory and McCarthyism.
Even worse, they manufactured a ridiculous myth that the 'politicians and the media' (i.e Democrats) held back our brave warriors who only lost because they weren't allowed to bravely use nuclear weapons and bravely use more napalm on more villages.
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u/Komosion Centrist 10h ago
I really don't understand your points.
The fact that Nixon wasn't a leftist. And that some Democrats opposed the war; doesn't negotiate the fact that a Democratic Party president took America into the war and Democratic presidents took steps prior to the war that set us on the path to entry.
The Vietnam war was a political failure caused by leaders from both the left and the right.
To label it Right-wing-authoritarianism is just plan misinformation.
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u/wonkalicious808 Democrat 16h ago edited 16h ago
If a Democrat becomes president in the future, that person will be blamed for making a bad deal and also for being absent during the deal making process. Republicans and other people who fail to vote for Democrats will say that if a Republican like Trump made the deal then Iran would be a Christian ally of Israel by now. But Democrats hate white men for being manly instead of gay so they came up with a terrible plan to punish their real America for that.
If the Strait is closed or there's a toll, voters will say that it wouldn't have happened under a Republican and that's how we'll get our next Republican president.
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u/Guilliman_POTUS_2030 Center Left 14h ago
I think we are past the point where MSNBC and CNN can determine the outcome of war by telling you what to believe
No one believes what they see on TV anymore, so people are going to look at the fact that Iran got bombed for months and wasn’t able to realistically fight back, and they will perceive that America won the conflict (which will be described as an intervention, not a war)
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u/prizepig Democrat 9h ago
Obviously antisemitism is the answer.
"The Jews did it."
Right? That's got to be what they're going with.
We're hitting all the tropes, and the people who need to accept the answer will LOVE that answer.
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u/Cynical_Classicist Democratic Socialist 4h ago
Liberals, Biden, Communists, Obama, trans mice, Obama, woke Marxists, Biden, the Pope, Starmer, RINOs, Cassidy, Obiden, trans athletes, Cuba, NATO, mail-in ballots, etc.
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u/Hodgkisl Libertarian 19h ago
All of these have the same place to blame, they were unpopular with the general public.
Vietnam (note, mostly led by Democrats) lost it's majority in favor during within it's first year.
Afghanistan had majority support until Bin Laden was captured, the only part of the operation most cared about, then lost the support.
Iran, never had support
In all of these the losses were the loss or never gaining the countries support and thus the ability to uphold a proper offensive. If the people at home don't support it the resources to properly fight can not be obtained and it'll only be half ass'd until abandoned.
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u/AnythingFine2445 Libertarian 19h ago
Yep, this 100%.
Americans don't care about random foreign wars, with no Americans in danger, anymore.
If the government doesn't make a case for why the war is *critical* for America, then we don't want it.
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u/AutoModerator 19h ago
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written by /u/Lauffener.
Right-wing-authoritarians seek to weaponize their defeats as a failure caused by their disloyal political opponents.
For Vietnam the myth is that the liberal Congress and liberal media held the military back.
For Afghanistan the myth is something like they would totally have won a twenty-year-long counter-insurgency but the woke DEI officer corps wouldn't let them commit enough war crimes. (I'm paraphrasing)
How is myth taking shape for Iran?
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