Yesterday on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, he made some really great points. One of them was that no country has ever learned how to end wars, only how to start wars.

I agree with most of your comments. The top priority now needs to be bringing everyone (Americans and allies who helped us) to safety. We can play the blame game later.

But we MUST address how this happened in the first place.

After Lawrence's opening monologue, which was brilliant and brought me to tears, the IG who has been following and reporting on this (He just released his final report on the total and utter fiasco that has unfolded for over 20 years in Afghanistan) said that "We will do this again."

The only way to prevent it is to completely change our approach to war, occupying other countries, nation-building, and so on.

At my last job one of my areas of focus was walking people through the process of doing a retrospective. The idea being that we don't learn from mistakes if we don't admit them.

When everyone is safe and we close the chapter on this debacle, we need to take a serious look at that IG report. Instead of pointing fingers at laying blame, we need to focus on cause and effect.

I suspect we'll find that Biden did not do a horrible job, he did a brave and extremely difficult thing: he ended a 20-year war that four prior presidents were to fearful to even discuss honestly.

There is no game plan for this kind of thing. We've never done it well. Viet Name was much worse--we only got 7,000 out--total.

The fact that we are now mobilizing and getting out thousands a day and have promised to keep going until everybody is out is something we've never seen before.

Yes, logistically it's a clusterfuck. But the folks responsible for that are at a very different level than Biden and while he is our leader, he did not hire or train everybody responsible for what's happening on the ground. I think he deserves more credit than you give him.