 So, we actually surprisingly got some good news out of the White House regarding foreign policy specifically as it relates to the nearly two decades long war that we've been waging in Afghanistan. It's coming to an end. Joe Biden announced via Twitter, we will be leaving in 2014. And that sounds fantastic to me. The war will be over in 2014. Yeah. Okay. I think I just said 2014, but I messed up. I believe this is the graphic that I intended on showing you. This time, we're bringing the troops home before September 11th, so mark your calendars. This time, it's definitely happening. And as CNN reports, President Joe Biden, having concluded there is no military solution to the security and political problems plaguing Afghanistan and determined to focus on more pressing national security challenges, will formally announce Wednesday that U.S. troops will withdraw from the country before the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terror attack, a senior administration official said. The withdrawal extends the U.S. troop presence past a May 1st deadline set by the Trump administration in an agreement with the Taliban. But only by a matter of months, Biden has been weighing the decision for months with his advisors and signaled he did not believe U.S. troops should remain in the country long past the deadline. Yeah. Okay. So, I guess that the way I feel about that is, as Ken Clippenstein puts it, I'll believe it when I see it. If it actually happens, when it actually happens, then he gets credit. But since we've been here before and this announcement has come and gone and the troops are still there, we'll have to wait to reserve judgment to determine whether or not this actually happens. What's interesting, though, is in Washington, D.C., just the mere announcement, the possibility that we might be pulling troops from a country that we've occupied for almost two decades, that is incredibly controversial and it's not just Republican war mongers and neocons who are attacking him. Democrats are also attacking Joe Biden. As Jordan Carney of The Hill reports, the GOP backlash was swift, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanding Biden explain publicly why he's abandoning our partners and retreating in the face of the Taliban. Senator Lindsey Graham called it a disaster in the making and dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous. Senator James Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that the decision was outrageous. Senator Jean Shaheen, a Democrat, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said she was very disappointed by Biden's decision. Quote, the U.S. has sacrificed too much to bring stability to Afghanistan to leave without verifiable assurances of a secure future, she said. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, also a Democrat, was briefed this week by Defense Secretary Lord Austin on the decision, but asked if he supported it, Reed visibly paused before saying, you know, there is no easy answer. Mmm, there kind of is though. There is an easy answer. Now, I want to play a little bit of a game here. Before I show you who Jack Reed's top donors are, I want you to see if you can guess who they are before I even name any of them. See if you can get at least two of them correct. I'll give you a moment. Okay, let's take a look at number one. We have Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor. At number two, we have Lee Harris Technologies, a defense contractor. At number three, we have General Dynamics, a defense contractor. At number 20, we have Raytheon Technologies, also a defense contractor. You know, for some reason, defense contractors really seem to love Jack Reed. And don't get me wrong. People love Jean Shaheen as well, Raytheon does in particular. But we don't even have to check the Republican Party's donors, anyone like Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, who spoke out against this. I think it's obvious what they're going to say because of who funds them. You see, the issue here is that this isn't just about strategy. It's not that, well, we have to stay longer to make sure that their stability in Afghanistan, and if we pull out all this work, all the effort that we've made to stabilize this country will have been for nothing. All of that is bullshit. We are there because war in America is now a business. It is a very lucrative business. In our capitalist system, we've commodified everything, including war. So ending war is bad for business. It hurts profits of defense contractors who also donate to Democratic Party and Republican Party officials. So if you're wondering why whenever there's any talk of withdrawing from a country that we've occupied for a very long time, you hear all these weird defenses like, oh my God, this is dangerous. It endangers our national security. It puts our allies in the region at risk. Nine times out of ten, these are disingenuous, bad faith arguments. These are shills who are being paid to say the things that they're saying that promote this idea that never ending war is a good thing that we should always have happen in this country. So whether or not Joe Biden actually withdraws from Afghanistan, we'll have to wait and see. If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably not going to happen. I would be more than happy if he proves me wrong here in this instance. But what we have to do is end imperialism more broadly speaking. We have to stop permanently occupying countries, not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but we can't continue to do drone strikes in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Somalia. That isn't just against international law. It's illegal under the US Constitution because that all constitutes acts of war, which Congress did not authorize. So it's just thinking about how strong of a hold the military industrial complex has on our lawmakers. It just really it gets me in a doomer mood. It makes me feel really depressed and hopeless. But let's just hope that Biden actually holds his ground and doesn't cave to the pressure that he will inevitably receive and we'll have to wait and see.