We’re doing it again

I’ve been reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG ARCHIPELAGO lately and I’m learning a lot I didn’t know about the Bolsheviks, The Soviets and the Red Terror. Unfortunately I’m learning a lot about some pretty awful things the West did during that period, as well. Solzhenitsyn claims, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, that the West wanted to appease Stalin and promised to repatriate any Russians they encountered. This included prisoners of war, minority populations opposed to Russian Rule (like the Kossacks) and even Russians who had fought alongside the Germans or the Allies in an effort to liberate Russia from oppressive Bolshevik rule.

Solzhenitsyn further claims that the West did so knowing that Stalin intended to imprison and execute every repatriated Russian, even the POWs, under the theory that to be captured alive was treason to the Fatherland. And the West certainly acted like they knew what they were doing was wrong, often lying to the Russians they encountered, so they could disarm and extradite them back to Russia without a fight. On Stalin’s orders, most repatriated Russians were shot on sight, without a trial, or hung in their cells. Solzhenitsyn seemed to carry a grudge about this reality even decades later which is totally fair, and I felt no small amount of shame as I read through those portions of the book.

Fast-foward 50 years to Ed Zwick’s movie THE SIEGE, a movie about Islamic Terrorism that came out (lucky for the filmmakers and the studio) almost exactly two years before 9/11, in 1998. At the end of the film when the heroes confront the lead terrorist they learn his motivation. He was an Iraqi who hated Saddam and tried to help the Americans depose him. And when the US left the battlefield they left him and his friends behind to be imprisoned, tortured and killed. His attacks on the city are his revenge for being abandoned.

Now, I don’t recall any terrorist attacks in the US having been launched by Iraqis who felt abandoned by the US in the wake of Gulf War 1, but I would not be surprised to learn that there are a lot of Iraqis, both in Iraq and in the West who feel that way. I certainly agree that we have a debt to those who aided us in deposing Saddam Hussein, just as we owe a debt to those who helped us in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.

But fast-foward to 2021 and, it appears, we are about to do it again. There are as many as 18,000 Afghans who helped the US-led coalition “defeat” the Taliban who are in real danger of being tortured and murdered after the US fully departs the country. And it appears that, for now at least, The Biden Administration has no plans to help our former allies avoid this horrible fate.

I sure hope they reconsider. I don’t want US authorities to be standing over some blown up rubble that used to be a building in New York ten years from now watching a spokesman for whatever new Terrorist Group might grow out of this debaucle saying something like this:

But beyond the practical aspects of supporting our allies, it’s the moral and decent thing to do.