Where have all the flowers gone?

So, that didn’t work out very well.

Can’t say we didn’t try. Twenty years. A couple trillion dollars. Way, way too many men, women, children displaced, injured, dead … on all sides.

Of course, we’re not the first global superpower the Taliban has tossed out of their territory. Trouble is, we didn’t learn much from the 10-year spanking administered to the Soviets and we most certainly paid no heed to the bloody nose the great and many greats grandfathers of the modern mullahs delivered to the British Raj, the Russian Tsars, the Persian Shahs, all the way back to Alexander the Great.

When it comes to saying, “Goodbye and good riddance,’ to the hills of Afghanistan, the American empire has plenty of company.

Still, there’s no denying, the whole thing didn’t work out very well.

It’s a disturbingly familiar feeling.

When it comes to war, it seems America has lost her touch.

I grew up with history books boasting that America had never lost a war. When it came to international combat we were world champs. In the heavyweight class of nations we were Joe Lewis, Sonny Liston and Mohamed Ali rolled into one. We were the 1926 Yankees writ large. We couldn’t be beat.

I’ll blame the Germans for this bit of generational hubris. Before the first half of the last century was out American boys had gone “over there” to help whip the Kaiser and then cut Hitler’s thousand-year Reich 987 years short. Add the image of General McArthur, shadowed by the big guns of the battleship Missouri, saying “Sayonara” to Hirohito’s top-hatted surrender delegation and we grew up pretty doggone cocky. Playing with our toy soldiers, we knew darn well who was going to win, sure as the cowboys were sure to beat the Indians.

In this respect, we were a generation ill served by our history teachers – as have most before and since. Take off the hometown fan glasses and view American military prowess at arm’s length and its record looks a lot like the Minnesota Twins – two World Series trophies and a definite mixed bag beyond that.

But what were we taught? They told us how the Minutemen stuck it to the British, but didn’t mention how French aid saved the colonials’ bacon. We learned about Old Ironsides in the War of 1812, but not much attention was paid to how we tried to take over Canada and were promptly sent skedaddling home. We had better luck cleaning Mexico’s clock in 1848, but teacher didn’t go into how the western third of the USA had been the northern half of Mexico before the Marines marched into the Halls of Montezuma. We came. We saw. We conquered.

And it goes on. Up here in Minnesota we learned we won the Civil War while kids in Alabama were taught they should have won, and black kids in the Mississippi delta grew up knowing no matter what, they lost.  

We whupped Spain in that “splendid little war” of 1898, but Filipino insurgents made American liberators feel mighty unwelcome. It took three years of fighting until Uncle Sam sent enough troops to kill enough of  ‘em to alter their attitude.

It seems we’ve been encountering that kind of bad attitude pretty much wherever we send our battalions to help the locals be more like us. The Korean War ended in a draw and after 70 years the North still holds a grudge. American-backed invaders weren’t greeted with open arms when they showed up at the Bay of Pigs and we all know too well how winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese worked out. And after 30 years being tangled up in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d be lucky to claim we’re back where we started.

For some reason, things just haven’t worked out well.

When will we ever learn? Yes, when will we ever learn?