By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Jim Boyd once wrote editorials for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

He is a friend of mine; I have known Boyd for more than 30 years. He and I have one other thing in common — besides being former editorialists. We served in Vietnam; both of us were in the Army. Boyd worked in “the bush”; I did not.

My friend today endorsed President Biden’s speech to the nation about the tragedy in Afghanistan. Boyd takes a different view than what I have expressed. I want to share it here. It’s a brief Facebook post, so bear with me.

Biden just gave the best foreign policy speech of my lifetime. He learned the lessons of Vietnam and Iraq — needlessly spending the lives of Americans and residents of those countries in pursuit of mistaken policies — and then he applied it in mission-creeped Afghanistan. It was the clearest, truest statement on refusing to waste American lives I have ever heard. And I have been listening since I went in the Army in 1968. Bravo, bravo, President Biden.

The president’s decision to pull our forces out of Afghanistan was a sound call. I would argue only that the logistics of the withdrawal has been, shall we say, clumsy.

The criticism of the president’s policy pronouncement has centered on the lack of planning for the protection of the thousands of allies we employed while fighting the Taliban. They served as interpreters, deep-cover operatives, staff personnel. They want out of Afghanistan. President Biden did not produce an evacuation plan prior to making his decision to pull out. Should he have done so in advance? Of course!

However, what I heard today from the president was a clear and unambiguous statement of ownership of a critical decision, just as President Kennedy took the heat for the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. President Biden stood strongly behind his decision to end a war that had become something that one of his predecessors, George W. Bush, didn’t foresee … at least not publicly.

Indeed, President Bush pulled his own eyes off the target when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the double-barreled phony mantra that (a) Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and (b) he had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.

So, our nation’s war effort in Afghanistan has ended. There will be no more American lives lost on this particular far-away field of battle.

I join my friend in saying, “Bravo, President Biden.”