Tea and Vitriol

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is effectively dead. Conceived to prevent further Soviet expansion in Europe and bankrolled largely by the United States, it was merely a paper tiger and rarely effective anywhere. It took NATO a good long time to counter Serbia's genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo at the turn of the 21st century, while it ignored Serbia's similar attempts at genocide against Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina (ethnic cleansing) just a few years earlier. Go figure. One can argue that neither case involved states or territories that were part of NATO, yet NATO ignored the one case but involved itself in the second. Which, quite frankly, could provide NATO with an excuse to intervene in Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. If they had the balls to. Which they don't. Then, after 9-11 in the US, then President George W. Bush called upon NATO to make war against the terrorists based in Afghanistan who perpetrated that outrage. The result wa...

  Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban this past weekend and with it the effective government of that nation. It was not unexpected. The US and our NATO allies have been leaving for months, although there was still a sizable US presence in Afghanistan, as well as tens of thousands of native Afghanis who were associated with the Western Powers whose lives were therefore at risk after our departure. What shocked the world is the swiftness with which the Taliban captured Kabul, since the US blithely informed everyone that such an event was months away and the the western withdrawal could continue in a slow, steady pace. Then, pow! The Taliban took over, chaos reigned in Kabul as tens of thousands of people tried to get to the airport to escape on US transports out of the country, more Americans were trapped in other parts of Afghanistan... And President Joe Biden? He was on vacation. Yet, there was a sense of deja vu about this. We HAD been there before, in Saigon, w...