: The Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal Exposes a Dangerous Fault Line in Our Democracy #WorldNEWS “The baby boomers’ turn is over,” said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller in a

The Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal Exposes a Dangerous Fault Line in Our Democracy #WorldNEWS
“The baby boomers’ turn is over,” said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller in a video this past Friday. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it. ” His post, which quickly went viral, was in response to the previous day’s suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport, which killed 13 U. S. service members and over 150 Afghans. In his nearly five-minute-long post, Scheller laments the Biden Administration’s handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and calls out senior military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Berger, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up. ’” But Scheller’s remarks go one step further than a simple demand for accountability. He goes onto quote Thomas Jefferson who said, “every generation needs a revolution. ”
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When I finished watching the video, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. My first instinct was to categorize it as a rant. The Biden Administration has handled the evacuation of Afghanistan with an unprecedented degree of incompetence, so a rant—even if inappropriate when delivered by an active-duty officer—seemed understandable. However, after more thought, I concluded that what I had seen was something else: an act of self-immolation.
Before his swift relief by senior officers on Friday, Scheller held battalion command. The Marine Corps is very selective about which officers it grooms to become battalion commanders; the fact that Scheller held that job means he was—before this past week—well-regarded, a Marine with a future in the Corps. Furthermore, Scheller is seventeen years into a twenty-year career. At twenty years, he would have been eligible for retirement at half his base pay with other benefits, like healthcare for life. It took him exactly four minutes and forty-five seconds to throw that all away. Scheller is a husband and a father. Why did he do this?
Until the past two weeks, Afghanistan was not a place, or an issue, most American cared about. In 2018, 42 percent of the country couldn’t even say whether or not we were still at war there. Over the past two decades, the war in Afghanistan has been waged by an all-volunteer military and funded through deficit spending. Unlike other wars, there has been no draft and no war tax. It’s often been said that while America’s military has spent the past twenty years at war, America itself has been at the mall.