This was the global policy genius behind the "you break it, you bought it" idea to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan, and try to grow democracy by planting a seed, and then yanking on the shoots as soon as they sprouted. Which worked about as well for Middle Eastern democracy as it does if you try it with corn or wheat.
Had he retired after being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, after Gulf War I, he would have been a respected military hero and genius strategist, for winning a 6-week war capped by a 3-day ground game, and devastating the retro-armed and bloated half-assed army of the biggest pain in the ass in that quadrant of the globe in decades, for the relatively modest cost of less than 300 American dead.
Instead, he fulfilled his Peter Principle destiny, promoted not to a great SecDef, a job at which he would have excelled, but rather to being a mediocre Secretary of State, who helped get us into two more pointless wars, and materially contributing to the total waste of the lives of over 6700 US troops, 8000 private contractors, and the suicides of over 30,000 former US servicemen since the war's end. We won't know the final toll until we find out how many US citizens have been killed since the abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan, and the last OIF/OEF veteran eats his own gun. That's a lot of blood on the hands of just one incompetent affirmative-action hire. I hope he wore bermuda shorts and a t-shirt to the afterlife, because it's likely to be pretty hot were he's gone.
All for a foreign policy strategy for Mesopotamia more appropriate for running a Pottery Barn.
But he got his vaxx, and it availed about as well for him as his foreign policy did for the U.S.
And some people say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.
But he has served one useful purpose:
If anyone hasn't tripped over the concept that "fully vaccinated" is now a synonym for "marked for death", you haven't been paying close attention.
