Afghan Albatross

I’ve stopped watching the news or even listening to the radio. It’s just that bad. I can’t, I don’t want to, but still images and sound bites find their way to me like a bad dream. But it’s not a dream, it’s an ugly reality. Women beaten in public, people shot on the streets, desperate mobs of people, panicked and confused begging for help, children separated from their parents, people clinging to the exterior of airplanes for dear life. And now…..13 US Servicemen killed.

Bob Gates, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, warned us several years ago that Joe Biden has been wrong on every foreign policy issue in his entire 47 year career in politics. Had we only heeded his warning. Biden’s Afghanistan foreign policy is an unequivocal disaster, bad on every level imaginable: human angst, loss of life, military morale, financial waste, and international credibility. It may not be the most reckless, arrogant, naïve, costly, deadly, credibility- destroying and flat-out stupid decision ever made by a Democrat President over the past 100 years, but it typical of most of them. Let me say that again: Most decisions and policies made by democrats over the past 100 years are as disastrous for America as Bidens Afghan albatross. The only difference is that we don’t usually get to see the fall-out as quickly and as vividly.

Rather than doing what is best for all Americans and often the world, Democrats routinely make decisions that are founded in naïveté or are just outright self-serving, either directly to the decision maker or that will accrue to the long-term benefit of the Democrat Party. Wilson’s relinquishing the terms of the WWI Treaty of Versailles to the French and British in exchange for the promise of his failed League of Nations was naïveté at its worst. Hillary Clinton’s approval of Russian ownership of American uranium companies which personally enriched the Clinton family while she was Secretary of State is perhaps the most self-serving betrayal of modern times. Biden’s ongoing open border policy may well ensure the Californication of the entire United States within 30 years. LBJ’s Great Society was merely a ruse to “get the blacks to vote Democrat for the next 50 years.” And as he famously called it, the N-Word Bill, it has succeeded better than his wildest imagination, 90% of blacks voting democrat in exchange for the systematic destruction of their families. The list is long and dismal.

To date in Afghanistan, the worst development by far has been the loss of 13 of our wonderful Marines and servicemen, all of them young and in the prime of life. What makes their lives such a tragic loss is the naivete behind Biden’s decision, the belief that we can negotiate with an Islamic enemy and expect them to dependably adhere to the terms of any agreement, especially when they are handed on a silver platter the opportunity to humiliate the Great Satan. For certain, Democrat naivete has wreaked havoc on American armed forces before, in Mogadishu and Johnson’s pouring the US into Vietnam. Yet while Afghanistan may not be the worst in terms loss of life, the lives of another 13 well-trained, disciplined, and dedicated Americans have been needlessly wasted as a result of another Democrat’s display of gross negligence.

U.S. President Barack Obama laughing aboard Air Force One (Pete Souza/White House Photo)

Democrats are also typically arrogant, or, at best, condescending, in their approach to decisions. Obama chided us with the fact that “elections have consequences”, and Nancy Pelosi told us that “we will have to pass the bill to find out what is in the bill.” Biden’s treatment of our military, both before and during his Afghan crisis, demonstrates the same hubris. Above, I emphasized training, discipline and dedication because they are essential to building the finest military in the world. Sadly, these are not ideals that modern Democrats aspire to, or value, either in our culture or in the military. Instead, Biden’s number one priority for our military was forcing them to

undergo diversity, gender awareness, and critical race theory training. While America’s military leaders were focused like a laser on having our armed forces become woke, plans for an Afghan withdrawal were being created out of thin air with an eight-year-old magic wand. While it was a top priority to mandate vaccination for all armed forces personnel against an uncertain and fading corona virus, our Marines were left defenseless against the known and certain plague of Islamic jihad. On the day that our 13 Servicemen were slaughtered, the Sergeant Major of the Army informed us that it was Diversity Day in the US Army and that we should take pride in that. Not even Rod Serling could have scripted this.

Then there is just plain stupidity. Surrendering the Bagram military complex 2 months before evacuating American citizens and assets may not be the most stupid decision ever made by an American Commander in Chief, but I’m hard pressed to find another military example. Perhaps, Carter’s handling of the 444 day Iranian hostage ordeal comes close. There is also Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General Jaime Gorelick’s decision preventing US intelligence services from sharing information with each other on terrorist activity in the US leaving 19 Muslim terrorists free reign to carry out 9/11. But I think Biden’s decision to relinquish the 2 most fortified military bases in that entire part of the world to our enemy before the safe withdrawal of US citizens, military assets and intelligence, may better be compared to Obama’s Iran “Deal,” where the US gets nothing, not a verifiable treaty, not a dismantling of any equipment, not even one Iranian signature on a piece of paper. In return the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and number one killer of Americans for the past 40 years, gets the green light to create nuclear weapons along with $150 billion with which, of course, they will kill more Americans.

Finally, to round out the list of shameful consequences, there are also the requisite financial, international credibility and military morale costs that Democrats are want incur so often seemingly more as a matter of their mere existence than by cerebral volition. It’s not just the $83 billion worth of sophisticated weapons that were abandoned, what’s a few billion dollars compared to the trillions being thrown around these days on Democrat pork? After all, that’s equal to all the aid that we have given to Israel in 60 years. But it does make the Taliban the most fortified fighting force in the mid-east. The worst, however, may be that this will haunt US Forces for generations in the form of rapidly advanced Russian and Chinese military technology that they would never have otherwise gotten. And then there’s the issue of morale. Our military forces also face the immediate insidious undermining of morale among our fighting men and women who know they will be sent into harm’s way by self-serving leaders who possess neither morality nor reason to guide them. These are the kind of leaders who hand over fortified air bases full of weapons and intelligence. They hand over lists of US citizens still in country to the enemy. Who does this? Naïve, arrogant, reckless, self-serving Democrats do this.

Suffice it to say, the Biden Administration’s handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a quintessentially Democrat decision because of its poor planning, ridiculous rules of engagement, lack of understanding of the way the real-world functions, and the arrogance with which it was decided. But as previously mentioned, these flaws are common to Democrat leaders who have never been able to assimilate the truth that “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Nevertheless, Biden’s Afghan debacle does stand out from the litany of poor Democrat decisions in one distinct way, the compressed timeframe in which it happened, i.e., the immediate link between the cause of the disaster and its effect. Usually, the consequences of Democrat decisions take years to surface. Whether it is Roosevelt’s capitulation of Eastern Europe to the Russians after WWII or Clinton & Carter’s Community Investment Redevelopment Act that ushered in the 2008 real estate collapse, the anatomy of a typical Democrat decision follows a familiar life cycle: make a poor decision often based on expediency or pandering, take political credit for “doing something to solve a problem,” wait years or decades for the flaws of those decisions to play out, deny that negative consequences even exist if possible or, if not, blame a Republican administration whenever possible. Repeat as necessary.

But the compressed timeframe of the events surrounding the Afghan withdrawal gives us a unique opportunity to measure in real-time a characteristically ruinous Democrat policy/philosophy/decision from the actual point of decision implementation to the disastrous consequences it has for the American people and the world. In the case of Biden’s Afghan foreign policy, the cause and effect were immediate. As a result, the Democrat’s standard playbook of denial, blame and deceit have been up-ended. The non-stop news coverage by many news networks makes denial of the crisis pointless, even for an administration who is as brazenly adept at denial. Border crisis, what border crisis? Election fraud, what election fraud? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Not even the resurrected the Queen of Benghazi, Susan Rice herself, can obfuscate this disaster.

Their attempt to pass blame on others is equally anemic. First, they blamed Trump for starting the withdrawal process, then they blamed the Taliban for taking over the country too fast, and when all else failed, they had the gall to blame the American and Afghan citizens themselves for not evacuating soon enough. They come across as children playing in the sand but, for them, nothing has changed except the size of their sandbox. Since, neither denial nor blame appear to be having much effect, the Biden Administration is now relying on deceit. We are fed daily statements by grown adults, including military generals, who look into the TV cameras and tell us things like, “The Taliban are our partners. The Taliban have changed. The Taliban are very responsibly supporting American interests. They have shared interests and goals with the United States.” I suspect they actually think that we will believe them. Perhaps some of us will, hopefully, most of us will not. Move over George Orwell, it’s 1984 all over again, Democrat edition.

So, I’m back to not watching or listening. I just get angry and my blood pressure rises. I fear for the safety of my television set. But there’s also a part of me that knew this was going to happen. Not specifically this event, but something of this proportion, something this pathetic. We all knew that Biden & Harris are really this bad as leaders and quite frankly, as people, but we let them steal the presidency of the United States anyway. When we let the thief in the front door, can we really be surprised when he robs us blind? Nothing should “surprise” us when it comes to these two. This is that I-told-you-so moment, only without satisfaction or vindication, just pain. Why should I or anyone be surprised or upset at anything that happens? But, still, we are surprised, because we are Americans. We have souls and the level of incompetence even for these two seems inconceivable. As Victor Davis Hanson put it, “perhaps we are still in disbelief, anger hasn’t caught up to us yet.” No matter how much time we have to prepare for the death of a loved one, it’s still heart-wrenching when the day finally comes. We thought we were prepared for the buffoonery of the Biden Presidency and the problems it would bring. We were wrong. He has managed to singularly outdo all of his Democrat predecessors in accelerating the negative fallout of their collective 100 year ineptitude. The day is here, the death has come and we are in no way prepared for it. Every passing day it just keeps getting worse and another shoe drops. One can only wonder; how many more legs does this monster have?