Crenshaw Labeled a ‘Warmonger’ For Bashing ‘No More Endless Wars’ Stance

During a Monday interview on MSNBC, Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) advocated for the United States to devote more blood and treasure to the already sunken cost of America intervening in a 20-year war to try and save Afghanistan.

Now, as Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, Crenshaw wanted more intervention. “There’s two choices that we have,” he said. “You either have a residual security force or you have an Islamic authoritarian emirate that is killing people and providing a safe haven for terrorists and bringing us right back to the situation that was pre-9/11. And that doesn’t make people feel very good when you lay out those options but those indeed are the options.”

Eddie Scarry of the Federalist in a piece called “There Will Never Be Enough Blood Or Money Spent In Afghanistan For Warmongers Like Dan Crenshaw,” writes: 

Crenshaw never defined “residual security force” in terms of how many troops that would require (we’re about to have 7,000 on-site), but he did say it shouldn’t be confused with “100- 200,000 troops” that are tasked with “nation-building.” No, he said, this “residual security force” would “advise,” “assist” and do “training missions” with the Afghan government with the hopes that it wouldn’t collapse into a “failed state.”

That raises the question: When has Afghanistan not been a failed state?

“Let’s say it’s 20 years of training and building up an army,” Crenshaw said on MSNBC. “That’s not a lot of time in the grand timeline of history. It’s actually a very short amount of time.”

“On training the military, did they give up: Yeah they did, obviously,” he said. “That hurts my heart as much as anybody else but we can’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy on this. Just because we spent a lot of money doesn’t mean we should cut and run.”

Then, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Crenshaw wrote, “The ‘no more endless wars’ position has another blind spot.” He added, “Its advocates are unable to distinguish between wasteful nation building and a small residual force that conducts occasional counterterror operations. As a result, when many Americans hear that there is a single soldier on the ground in Afghanistan, they interpret it to mean ‘nation building’ and ‘world police.’ That’s wrong. There are a lot of foreign policy options between nation building and giving up.”

Crenshaw has also been labeled a neocon and a “RINO” by Republicans for his refusal to agree that fraud claims in the 2020 election led to the defeat of 45th President Donald J. Trump to Joe Biden.

AAN Staff