But we’re not just talking about leaving a conflict area, we’re talking about leaving a conflict area where we lost.

We also seem to be mesmerized by the horrific scenes at the Kabul airport, while minimizing that every week the Taliban, and the Afghan and US forces, had been killing scores of people. And US military deaths (artificially lowered because we don’t count all of the civilian contractors we hire) averaged about 10 a month through twenty years of war — so the 13 dead in the ISIS airport bombing are not a significant departure from the Afghan war as usual.