Washington Thinks You're Dull and Can't Remember
Washington Thinks You're Dull and Can't Remember
The Country Hopes they're wrong.
Background: Recent Foreign Policy Disaster
In mid-August, 2021, Kabul fell. President Biden flew off to take vacation at Camp David on Friday and when his helicopter touched back down at the White House Monday morning, Afghanistan was lost, and soon $7B worth of war machinery and 13 Americans were lost with it.
This was the first major Biden Administration foreign policy crisis, and it hurt American prestige around the world. Don’t get me wrong, the Afghanistan War was a failed exercise for most of its 20 year existence and we were there at least a decade too long. We should have never gone in for nation building, and the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon lied to us for years about the War’s aims, its status and whether we were making any progress. This is in part why, after the release of the Afghanistan Papers, which detailed these lies, in October of 2020 President Trump pledged to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. While there is enough blame to go around between the two Administrations concerning the US exit from Afghanistan and why it was such a disaster, President Biden (who was and is continually is touted as a foreign policy expert, despite Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ opinion that Biden has been wrong about absolutely every foreign policy issue) was at the helm and deserves the lion share of the blame. If conditions had not been set up properly for the withdrawal by the previous Administration, it was the current President’s job to correct this and ensure an efficient exit. He did not.
Indeed, the Biden Administration looked so weak and unprepared to do the job that there was talk - even by Democrats - that the fall of Kabul was best compared to the fall of Saigon, when US prestige and effectiveness was at an all time low. And for the first time, Americans more broadly began to question whether Biden was really up for the job. Right after this crisis, President Biden’s job approval dipped to unfavorable and has never recovered. Indeed, Biden continues to be the most unpopular President at this point in his term, other than Jimmy Carter, after World War II.
President Biden Job Approval Over Time, from 538
Failed Policies that Led Us Here
Since that crisis, the Biden Administration has continued to make mistakes in foreign policy. As we’ve written before, we’ve marched headfirst into funding a disastrous World War I-like trench stalemate in Ukraine, with 500,000 plus dead and nothing to show for it. It is important to remember at the same time that the Biden Administration and NATO refused to negotiate with Russia/Putin before its latest invasion into Ukraine - a war that has been going on since 2014. This Administration also reversed the Trump Administration policy, and restarted aid to Palestine, which no one believes goes anywhere but to Hamas in Gaza. The Obama-Biden Administration lifted sanctions and sent perhaps $50B to Iran in 2015 without addressing Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism at all, in essence allowing Iran’s sponsorship of terror to continue unabated. More recently, Biden clandestinely opened up talks with Iran to restart such a deal and infamously sent Iran $6B in other frozen assets (in essence, lifting previous sanctions).
All of these efforts went kaput two weeks ago after the Iran-sponsered Hamas attacks in Israel that killed thousands of innocents with shocking brutality. After the President’s failed policies hit the fan, as they say, he made a token trip to Israel where Arab leaders treated him with utter contempt, and he made a speech with no announced changes to policy. The speech was praised by many but not here - the only new idea announced was a pitch for more money, leveraging the outrage over the Israel crisis to pitch a $106B package in which more than $60B of it goes to Ukraine instead of Israel. This after $112B in Ukraine aid in 2022 alone, and 500,000 dead and counting, with no strategy for winning or exit.
War Mongerers Gonna War Monger
It was shocking to see, over the weekend, how quickly the warmongering UniParty in Washington DC and New York rallied around the President’s talking points. On Bill Maher, Brett Stephens (editorial writer for the New York Times) praised President Biden’s doddering blunders profusely and was all in for a new never-ending regime change war in the Middle East. It is no wonder, as he still thinks he was right to support the Iraq War, which the Iraq Body Count project estimates killed at least 300,000, with many more civilian casualties likely dead but unreported. Perhaps “reporters” like Mr. Stephens could work on getting accurate death counts for wars he supported before he supports starting new ones. Perhaps he doesn’t care.
On Fox News Sunday, one of the other Washington leaders well past his expiration date, Mitch McConnell, came in for supporting this zombie package that's mostly for Ukraine. This is your daily reminder that Ukraine is the second most corrupt nation in Europe that ranks 122nd out of 180 countries in such a measure. The Pentagon does not pass audits and our government can not (or, more likely, won’t) tell us where the $112B we sent to Ukraine last year went. Perhaps they don’t care.
Despite these major problems, Senator McConnell offered the same tired claims made repeatedly by President Biden and all of the Washington deep state interests - China is watching and if we lose Ukraine, we may lose Taiwan. In addition, Russia will attack a NATO country next if they win in Ukraine:
This is a repeat of the Domino Theory of the Cold War, which brought us the disastrous wars in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. I wrote about this briefly; more telling perhaps is Robert McNamara - one of the major proponents of the Domino Theory during the Cold War, and as Secretary of Defense helped lead America to war in Vietnam - admitted in 1995 that it was a major mistake:
In the spring of 1995, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said he now believed that the domino theory was wrong. "I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don't believe that its loss would have lead - it didn't lead - to Communist control of Asia." McNamara now argues: "Today, it is clear to me that my memorandum pointed directly to the conclusion that, through either negotiation or direct action, we should have begun our withdrawal from South Vietnam. There was a high probability we could have done so on terms no less advantageous than those accepted nearly six years later--without any greater danger to U.S. national security and at much less human, political, and social cost to America and Vietnam." (p. 271).
The truth of the matter is that when asked why Americans should give money they don’t have (remember, we had a $1.7T deficit last year) to Ukraine, this is the only answer they have - the Domino Theory. They make absolutely no positive case for continuing to fund war in Ukraine.
The second most popular answer from these charlatans has just recently developed - I heard it said by President Biden in his address to the nation and repeated, again, by Mitch McConnell in the same interview above. It’s a fake plea for American industry and workers. Here is what he said:
Yeah, one of the best things about this from a U.S. point of view, is when we give older equipment, to the Ukrainians, for example, we are rebuilding our industrial base in this country. There are jobs being created by the help that we're providing Ukraine in 38 different states, and rebuilding our industrial complex for the more serious big powers in Asia.
So, quite suddenly, we’re supposed to believe this is an American worker story! What a joke. What he leaves out is that the “industrial base’ he mentions really means Government Defense Contractors, who rule Washington with an iron barrel of money, shady, captured influence (80% of four star generals work for defense contractors) and graft. The American workers and our manufacturing base are a red herring, intended to draw on voter’s emotions to justify escalating violence and war without explaining our objectives and exit strategies. It’s disgusting and you should not take the bait.
At this point, we should thank the heavens there is no Speaker of the House, so we can avoid this escalation of funds for Ukraine until such time as the United States has a list of objectives and a clear exit strategy. A guy can dream.