Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem
Posted on AllSides August 26th, 2021
From The Left
OPINION
In 2005, two of my colleagues at The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, wrote an essay I think about often. It was called “The Incompetence Dodge,” and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administration’s maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality. But the same dynamic suffuses the...
Some content from this outlet may be limited or behind a paywall.