Where Joe Biden levels with the American people about what war costs

I wasn't going to post any serious threads this week as I recuperate from world-weariness, but I'm making an exception for this.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation about the end of the war in Afghanistan. Some things stood out to me.

This was the most honest an American president has been about war in recent history. Pres. Biden covered the past twenty years of a war with no clear mission, no clear exit strategy. There's been braying that "We didn't leave Germany or Japan." No, we didn't. And when German or Japanese guerilla fighters start targeting US troops, then that would be an apt analogy. As it stands, it's nonsensical. Germany and Japan are stable, democratic nation-states whose security we underwrite because it's in the national interest. Afghanistan wasn't, and our efforts to make it a democracy failed miserably, because we assumed as always that liberal democracy can be imposed from the outside, rather than growing from native soil. This isn't to say that we didn't do much good during the past two decades. But such advances were untenable without buy-in from the Afghans, and there just wasn't enough. Germany and Japan were utterly defeated and tired of war. The Taliban were neither.

But then we get to near the end of his speech, and, again, he did something which you don't see American presidents do: Leveling with the people they serve as to the true costs of war.

He went through the financial costs. We spent $2 trillion over twenty years. That comes out to $300 million every day. Three hundred million. How many schools could have been built, how many lives made better in this country with that amount of money? Instead we kept pouring treasure into a conflict which we had no real hope of winning.

But then, he grew even more somber as he discussed the toll this war took on those who served. The dead, the wounded. Those who, at the clip of eighteen per day, take their own lives once home. Their war never ended, until they ended it for themselves. With ill-disguised scorn, he excoriated those who claim that we could have remained in Afghanistan at low cost. Any life lost is not a low cost. These are armchair generals who move figures on a battlefield map. They're not the ones sending their sons and daughters to fight in a decades-long quagmire. That part of his speech was a rupture with the history of speaking about our military engagements since World War II. It was an unflinching delineation of the true cost of war, to the one percent of Americans who serve in the military. The great and the good consider them expendable. This president does not.

This speech will go down as the greatest from an American president speaking about the futility of war, and how it must only be entered into with a clear, achievable goal, and once all other avenues have been exhausted. Those who profit off of keeping open the doors to the Temple of Janus will cry and wail. But we, and perhaps the world, will heave a sigh of relief.

Here is the speech in full: