One unfortunate outcome of the controversy over the release of Bowe Bergdahl, the US army sergeant held by the Taliban for nearly five years, is the exposure of Chris Matthews’s neoconservative streak. On Hardball for the last two nights, Matthews has championed the war in Afghanistan as an ongoing US war against an intolerant Taliban, praised Guantanamo’s merits as a holding cell for bad actors who are never charged, and suggested that Bergdahl helped American enemies and that Obama’s deal to free him and five Taliban adherents has helped American enemies.
In this segment two nights ago (above) Matthews was all but abusive toward Kim Dozier of the Daily Beast and MSNBC’s Goldie Taylor, a Marine veteran, for stating that the deal might be a harbinger of the end of war in Afghanistan. Last night he was equally contemptuous toward Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at Gitmo, when Davis said that the US had failed to establish criminal conduct by the five Afghans to be freed in the Bergdahl deal. Matthews said he was being legalistic.
“That’s why we have Gitmo,” Matthews said, for bad guys we can’t try or free. And he approvingly aired criticisms of Bergdahl’s military conduct from Bill Kristol– who avoided serving in the Vietnam War (as Stephen Colbert established). Matthews seemed to suggest that the U.S. should be at war with the Taliban forever.
Women have to now be covered up? Their faces have to be covered up? No more movies over there? They blow up Buddhas again?… Are we going back to crazy Taliban behavior?… What if the Taliban gets power again.
Matthews bridled when his guests suggested he was wrong. When Dozier said the deal portended reconciliation talks and the Taliban is a political force in Afghanistan, Matthews scoffed that the Taliban would not accept losing an election. “They’re democratic forces? They accept democracy? This is definitely hopeful thinking.” I happen to share Matthews’s skepticism; but that can’t be a reason to put down a guest, or for the U.S. to be occupying Afghanistan for 13 years. He seems to think it is:
“We went to war in Afghanistan because the Taliban was in power,” Matthews said. “Basically we continue to fight.. the Taliban…. From the top, the US Government is at war with the Taliban… We went into that country to overturn the Taliban.”
Matthews struck me as mean-spirited, especially when Chris Hayes came on next and offered support to the Bergdahl deal.
Matthews often attacks neoconservatives, but his own neoconservative streak was well-documented by Media Matters. He opposed the Iraq war, but was also a cheerleader for the war for a couple of years, praising George Bush as a hero and even accusing Hillary Clinton of cutting and running as he hailed the strength of John McCain and Joe Lieberman. And he was openly critical of Phil Donahue, who lost his MSNBC slot over his opposition to the war, as Digby wrote last year:
[T]he thing that surprises me the most is the idea that Chris Matthews was some kind of stalwart opponent of the war who stood up bravely against the establishment. While it’s true that he wrote a column (maybe two) in which he expressed opposition, what he portrayed on TV was something entirely different. Indeed, I thought it was well known that he was extremely nervous about being perceived as anti-war, so much so that he endorsed the firing of Phil Donohue. … I think what people misunderstand about that is not that he was personally for the war, but rather that he was a careerist who didn’t want to endanger his very lucrative gig.
P.S. Of course a lot of the Taliban argument carries over to Hamas in Palestine: it too is a political force that must be reckoned with. There is nothing the neocons would like more than that we be engaged in a “clash of civilizations” forever in the Middle East, one in which Israel looks like a white knight.
I have to take a deep breath and take my pulse…
For starters, the Taliban is courtesy of our “ally” Pakistan and spawn of the ISI .
Our “involvement and manipulation” in Afghanistan prior to launching a terrible war on them is really not debatable– it is quite shameful. But then again, we were buddies with Saddam before we launched that horrible war, too… I could go on, but I will save it and my ire.
As for Chris Matthews– I guess he left the Peace Corps long ago. Then again, Swaziland is kinda far (in miles and more) from Afghanistan…
It was a shitty deal. We just have to come to terms with that.
Furthermore, it wasn’t just about the POW, which is the Obama administration’s propaganda to the press. It was also used as a “trust-building measure” as the reporter said in that clip.
And Matthews is right to be cynical and skeptical. Do they really think the Taliban will accept democracy and stop oppressing women? You’d have to be delusional to believe that.
The problem for Matthews is that Afghanistan isn’t our problem. We shouldn’t have gone in there from the getgo. But the lust for blood after 9/11 was overwhelming. Americans have to abandon this notion of enforcing democracies from 10,000 ft. And we have to accept the fact that some socities are primitive – yes that’s the word – and that they are fine with that.
Just like Western elites have tried to pretend that Erdogan is a great Islamist moderate, yet he’s turning into a muslim Putin by the hour. Now he’s planning to hold on to 2020s, sitting in power for over two generations. And his support is deep among the Turkish people, which is why he is crushing his opponents.
While you attack neocons, lets not forget that the left have their fair share of interventionists, too, who cannot accept the fact that not every society either wants or is ready for Jeffersonian democracy.
” And we have to accept the fact that some socities are primitive – yes that’s the word – and that they are fine with that. ”
Afghanistan is not/was not “primitive”. I don’t really think that you “know” Afghanistan nor the Afghan people. Your generalizations are quite sweeping, and sadly not at all unusual for the average consumer of the MSM. I don’t know how folks can blame the Afghans for 35 years of unrelenting war and privation…for which we bear a LOT of responsibility and blame.
>> While you attack neocons, lets not forget that the left have their fair share of interventionists, too, who cannot accept the fact that not every society either wants or is ready for Jeffersonian democracy.
Lord Acton’s Dictum in full flower. The human impulse to use power to achieve a view of what’s best for others knows no politics, only the direction varies with politics. As empires decline the divergence between believed power and actual power determines the degree and scope of the stupid decisions taken.
After all those junket trips to Israel, this journalist now shrills for that parasitic nation in the Middle East. What would they have done to make him now sing a different tune? Brainwash? Blackmail? Offer a better job in the zionist media?
was it the same offer that Congress gets, to get undying support and allegiance to Israel over their own nations? Mathews is simply trying to undermine President Obama’s decision to get Bowe Bergdhal’s release, after all Israel now looks like a warmonger, and trouble maker, ever since the world ignored it, during the Iranian peace talks, and now that the world, and the Obama administration, have agreed to work with the Unity Government of Palestine, Israel is once again looking like the mean monster of the ME. So let’s be prepared to hear their minions here (plenty of those too) try to make the O administration look bad. Shame on Mathews.