 Bush-era war criminals are louder than ever because they've lost the argument. After the US troop withdrawal, established conclusively that the Afghan government they'd spent 20 years pretending to nation-build with was a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they've been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history. But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former British Prime Minister who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending the forever wars, bloviating about radical Islam, and asking, has the West lost its strategic will? It's essentially a 2,750-word temper tantrum, authored by the same man who fed the British people this load of horseshit after 9-11. The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in wanton squalor, from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan, they too are our cause. This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder the world around us." He promised that by helping the Bush administration usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism, they could seize this unfortunate event to reorder the world in a way that would benefit all of its most unfortunate people. Mountains of corpses and tens of millions of refugees later, it is clear to anyone with function in grey matter that this was all a pack of lies. And now, like any sociopath whose reputation is under threat, Blair has begun narrative managing. This is also why George W. Bush has released his own statement through his own institution. It's also why Bush-era neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are doing media tours, and why Bill Crystal, whose neoconservative influence played a key role in the Bush administration's military expansionism, is now promoting the arming of proxy forces against the Taliban. They are narrative managing. They're narrative managing because they've been proven wrong, and because history will remember them as men who were proven wrong. Their claims that a massive increase in military interventionism will benefit the people of the world have been clearly and indisputably shown to have been false from top to bottom. So now they're just men who helped murder millions of human beings. It's about preserving their reputations and their legacies. No, no. We're not mass murdering war criminals. We are visionaries. If we would have just remained in Afghanistan for another 20 years, history would have vindicated us. If we would have just killed more people in Iraq, it would be a paradise right now. This catastrophe cannot possibly have been the fault of the people directly responsible for orchestrating it. It's got to be the fault of the officials who inherited it. It's got to be the fault of the ungrateful inhabitants of the nations we graciously invaded. It's the people and their imbecilic desire to end the forever wars. But of course it's their fault. None of this needed to be this way. It was made this way by stupid people with no functioning empathy centers. They can try to reframe it and spin it however they like, but history will remember them for the monsters they are. The saner our society becomes, the more unforgiving our memory of their crimes will be.