> Biden continues to fuck it up to this day

what is there left to do on COVID? The healthcare system is not collapsing and lockdowns have ended. Remember, the lockdowns where there only to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. We even have vaccines and a host of other treatments widely available. If you're expecting total eradication of an airborne respiratory virus I don't think you're being realistic.

Obama doubled down on Afghanistan from the get-go -- I consider that fiasco as much his as his predecessors.

As an "anti-war leftist", I find myself cheering on the assistance to Ukraine, as that is the first war in my memory that seemed worth fighting.

Still no love for the Military Industrial Complex though...

I'm a different anti-war leftist, but IMO it's a lose-lose. This is more about mitigation than doing what's good. The MIC wins whether or not we support Ukraine - if Russia conquered Kyiv, you think the MIC wouldn't be ramping everything up in preparation for further invasions of NATO allies?

It's not like Ukraine is some socialist utopia I want preserved at all costs. But it's a free nation that's less fascist than Russia, and it deserves to exist, and more importantly the Ukrainian people deserve to exist. If Russia wins, we'll be looking at genocide on a huge scale (because we're actually currently dealing with genocide on a "small" scale). So, I'm more anti-genocide than I am anti-MIC, and I think it's a good thing we're helping Ukraine fight back against Russia.

I would say, they are both complicated.

Afghanistan shows that trying "nation building" on a place where they don't actually want any nation doesn't really work. But it did work for Japan and Germany after WW2, so maybe it was worth trying. I'm sure the women who are now forbidden to learn to read liked the Americans more than they like Taliban, but does that mean extending the war was worth it?

As for Iraq, the WMDs were a complete lie and Bush and Cheney just wanted more war - some say Cheney was the mind behind and Bush was just idiot, some say Bush wanted to finish what his father started - but average Iraqi is now better off than with Saddam. That doesn't help those who died in the war, of the people who could have has better lives for the money the war had cost though.

It was actually Ukraine that changed my opinion on Iraq, because the arguments "Iraq under Saddam's brutal dictatorship wasn't that bad, there was no reason to war" started resonate with "don't help Ukraine, their lives aren't going that bad under Putin's brutal dictatorship, tell the to surrender" little too much. Was Iraq different from Ukraine only because in one the dictator was status quo and in the other it wasn't?

Yeah, complicated.

But they emphatically said they weren't nation-building, and armies are only good for fighting and destroying things, not building things (with an exception to the Corp of Engineers).

There was never a plan, more so, never a formal declaration of what the hell victory was supposed to look like.

Neither Japan nor Germany needed "nation building", because the corresponding nations were already formed long before then.

As far as Ukraine and Iraq, one big difference is that there Iraq under Saddam was not fighting a war on its territory when US invaded in 2003. So you have to consider the number of people who would have likely died due to political repressions vs the number of people who died from the war and the resulting instability - and I don't think that arithmetic is in favor of the war even today.

OTOH in Ukraine it was Russia that invaded and forced the war on them, so from the perspective of outside assistance you have to compare the number of Ukrainians that would die resisting by themselves vs the number that will die resisting with Western aid. I don't think this comparison is a given either way - there's a lot of rhetoric in the West along the lines of, "if we didn't support them they'd fold quickly and then the war would be over", but given the determined resistance that we have seen and the sheer number of people who joined the volunteer territorial defense units and their willingness to engage early in the conflict (e.g. under Kyiv), I think it's more likely that even if Russia managed to occupy the entire country, it would still be dealing with large-scale guerilla warfare, with all the massive civilian casualties that entails.

The other key difference is that Iraqis under Saddam weren't really given a choice whether they preferred to suffer Saddam or an invasion to remove him. Ukrainians, OTOH, are pretty open about their preferences.

I'm a huge Obama fan but Afghanistan was his biggest mistake. In fairness, he got sold a bill of goods by the Pentagon and with the economy in a shambles, he was somewhat distracted. The Republicans greeted anything he did with stubborn resistance with McConnell pledging to make him a one term President. McCain prevented him from closing Guantanamo.

But he was still Commander in Chief.

Yes, he was sold a bill of goods, but in his 8 years never re-evaluated the situation.

I'm going to guess that he was wary of the political attacks over doing so -- if all it took was french mustard or a tan suit, imagine the outrage of "cutting and running"

> Biden continues to fuck it up to this day

In what way? Don't get me wrong, I think Biden sucks. But when wearing a mask became an issue of deepest political ideology before Biden was elected, it's a tough task to change public opinion when you're a politician.

There's something to be said that we literally lost the war on covid and just kinda pretended that it ended, but I'm not sure what other option there was. If democrats pushed to keep fighting covid with gusto, it would not have been popular and would easily lead to Republicans running everything in the next decade.

History books will hopefully acknowledge just how terribly the entire world handled it.

Yeah I agree but, like I say, we were defeated by COVID before Biden was elected, just like we were defeated in Afghanistan before he was elected. He could have pulled off something excellent in either case, but that would have been very difficult and I don't know how he would have done it.

How was this country defeated by covid? What could he have done otherwise? Hospitals aren't overwhelmed today, that was the entire concern of the pandemic.

People forgot about the whole "flattening the curve" thing, and a bunch of narratives cropped up about what the end goal was.

The goals, which were never real, started to have political consequences and it became a whole thing.

People forgot about flattening the curve because we literally did flatten the curve. It was about hospital capacity:

https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/flattening-curve...

We were defeated in the sense that the very idea of fighting covid became a political hot button and a huge percentage of the US population decided not to fight.

Yes, it could have been worse, maybe we could have had utter collapse. But hospitals did get overrun multiple times and many people died completely unnecessarily because we stopped fighting. I really wouldn't call this a win; covid is now endemic and continuing to evolve inside us. At best this is a bloody stalemate.

Covid is over. It might still be around but we are done melting down over it.

We won the war on covid though, it was always about hospital capacity.

The outcome of the conflict will be the only metric that matters for assessing Biden's performance. If we end up spending hundreds of billions of dollars and have nothing to show for it except Russia controlling the territory they originally intended to seize, it will be difficult to consider anything we are doing as 'skillful'. Dumping money and weapons into the proxy war du jour is the default policy of D.C.

Biden shouldnt be judged on the outcome of Ukraine. And im no fan of Biden. But its just not in his power nor all of NATO, unless we got in a direct conflict with Russia.

And sadly, this is more normal than peace when it comes to Russian border states.

American leadership deserves to be judged if they commit hundreds of billions of dollars to cause with no benefit to the American public. A Russian victory that we are spending huge sums to prevent doesn’t bring any benefit to the American public.

A Russian victory in Ukraine being would be Pyrrhic. No matter what the PR on the war's eventual end is, Putin hollowed out Russia to fight this war. The negative impacts on Russia will last until the end of this century, and beyond.

Im not sure I agree that the US shouldn’t fund Ukraine. Very sympathetic to that but not sure I agree. And yes Biden deserves blame for it to the extent that anyone deserves blame for it.

But that’s entirely different than blaming him for not solving the crisis.