“The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too late. Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy; too late in realizing the mortal danger; too late in preparedness; too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance; too late in standing with one’s friends.” – General Douglas MacArthur
Over the past week, the world has racked its brain to come up with words to convey how horribly Joe Biden botched the Afghanistan pullout. It’s a disaster of biblical proportions. We’re not moving on.
“The way the Afghan operation has finished,” wrote author Douglas Murray in The Sun, “is a colossal, massive, generational screw-up.”
A group of retired U.S. admirals and generals who demanded that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley resign, wrote: “The consequences of this disaster are enormous and will reverberate for decades … The damage to the reputation of the United States is indescribable.”
After exhausting the English language of synonyms for the word “catastrophe,” the British Parliament punished Biden as much as they could. Censure. It made history. Members of the House of Lords seethed openly.
Lord Robathan: “…we should not underestimate the disaster and humiliation that this has been. This is a humiliation of the West, of NATO, of us, of course, but especially of the U.S. – which, apparently, leads the free world, or so we are told.
Lord Ricketts: “’America is back’ now sounds rather hollow – “‘America is backing down’ fits the case better.”
Lord Blencathra: “My Lords, all my life I have been pro-American and favorably disposed to the United States, but not anymore at this moment. What Biden has done in Afghanistan will go down in ignominy as one of the most shameful and despicable acts of betrayal by any American President.
But the tough words failed. After an avalanche of adjectives, nouns, and verbs, Biden and his Praetorian caretakers just dug in. They called the pullout an “extraordinary success.” So did our enemies. Nancy Pelosi called it a “historic evacuation” that was “remarkable.”
After Biden yelled out a twisted version of reality in his “The War Is Over” speech, he turned his back on America and its friends, and walked away. No parades. No celebrations. No grand message for posterity. No symbolic, MacArthur-style ship deck surrender. No treaty to build the peace. As the tectonic plates of international power shifted in favor of bad actors throughout the Middle East and in China and Russia, Biden declared that the war is just … over.
There. Done. Now turn the page.
Not so fast. America has a tweet-sized attention span but we’re not all stupid. We’ve seen this movie. Biden creates a catastrophe. Then shuffles to a podium to babble through a poll-tested, squinty-eyed speech that has no connection to reality. Then he congratulates himself like a self-licking ice cream cone. And finally he looks at his watch and walks away.
He did this with the border catastrophe, the crime catastrophe, the 2020 election catastrophe, the spending catastrophe, the anti-racism catastrophe, the energy catastrophe, the COVID response catastrophe, and now Afghanistan.
In his mind, when he walks away, the catastrophe disappears. It’s his attempt at Cognitive Illusion – like a psychotic version of David Copperfield making big stuff disappear right before your eyes. “Whether it is true or not,” he whispers, “project a different picture.”
Horrible advice when real danger is beating at your door, as former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani found out back in July. Ghani was politely desperate. Biden promised him air support if he drew up a military plan and put “a warrior in charge” to implement it. That would “project a different picture” that could “change the perception around the world,” and galvanize support, Biden told him. Ghani responded:
“Mr. President, we are facing a full-scale invasion, composed of Taliban, full Pakistani planning and logistical support, and at least 10-15,000 international terrorists – predominantly Pakistanis – thrown into this, so that dimension needs to be taken account of. … “And the last point, I just spoke again to Dr. Abdullah earlier, he went to negotiate with the Taliban; the Taliban showed no inclination. We can get to peace only if we rebalance the military situation.”
Biden shrugged him off. When the Taliban overtook Afghanistan as Ghani feared, Biden accused him and his Army of being cowards.
But whether we ended the war is not the point here. How we left, is. Knowing how dire the situation was in July, Biden had time to evacuate safely and orderly – on America’s timeline. He didn’t. Predictably, that decision put hundreds of Americans at the mercy of a cabal of terrorists who are “drunk on the fumes of victory,” as Victor Davis Hanson put it.
But Joe and Kamala seem too preoccupied with “projecting a different picture” to notice.
While millions of Afghan women were being beaten back into the 7th Century, America’s first Indian, blackish, female VP, rushed to California to campaign for a privileged, white male against a black man from South Central LA who spent part of his day, Wednesday, getting pelted with eggs, pellets, threats, and violence by a mob that unleashed a whitish woman wearing a gorilla mask.
As the 20th-anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Biden has never been busier trying to splash brighter shades of paint on his many catastrophes. He pivoted to Hurricane Ida, climate change and now COVID. It’s embarrassing.
In his six-pronged vaccine “requirement” speech on Thursday, Biden was tougher on “the unvaccinated” than the Taliban. As these barbarians kill their enemies with ruthlessness, Biden is trying to kill them with kindness. Dr. Fauci, who helped fund the research that likely killed millions, is not in jeopardy of losing his job. But Biden threatened the jobs of millions of workers – many of whom have natural immunity – for not getting vaccinated. He gives the “business-like” and “professional” Taliban free rein over stranded Americans, but “the unvaccinated” are so dangerous that their “freedom or personal choice” has must be reined in.
The tidal wave of words condemning Biden’s pullout was refreshing. But words alone will not stop these people. If they can leave Americans in the hands of butchers and carry on the next day as if it never happened, they are capable of anything. This is our domestic war. As inept and psychotic as they are, these people are dead serious about transforming America, and we’d better be just as serious about holding them accountable before it’s too late.
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