Listening to Joe Biden’s words as the US left Afghanistan was to hear echoes of George W Bush from 2001. Is this a crisis destined to repeat itself?
Many who heard President Biden’s pledge to exact revenge for the killing of 13 US Marines in an Islamic State suicide bombing in Kabul last week will have been struck by how closely they resembled the words of George W Bush almost exactly 20 years ago.
“I want justice,” Bush then told a nation traumatised by 3,000 deaths in the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. “And there’s an old poster out west that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’.” Bush is no longer president and Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks whose face was on the putative poster, died in a US special forces raid 10 years ago. But the rhetoric remains the same. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said on Thursday. Such language is unavoidable for the leader of a nation that retains and promotes a “frontier culture”, as a veteran CIA official told me last week, but it signals much more too.