Biden’s Defenders Are Flailing

By David Harsanyi

Monday, August 23, 2021

 

Here is Juan Williams regurgitating White House talking points in The Hill today:

 

Congratulations to President Biden.

 

Last week he gave the most effective, most honest foreign policy speech by an American president in the last 60 years.

 

Biden made no excuses.

 

And where the last three presidents kicked the can down the road, refusing to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan — even after more than 2,400 Americans died in that fight — Biden took responsibility. He shut it down.

 

Williams then spends a good chunk of his column attempting to shift the blame for Biden’s disastrous handling of the Afghanistan pullout onto Donald Trump, who made a deal with the Taliban in Doha last year.

 

Who knows? Perhaps Trump would have botched the Afghan withdrawal as badly as Biden has. Or perhaps he would have preemptively evacuated Americans and our allies. Perhaps he would have changed his mind or maybe he would have delayed the withdrawal to a more opportune time in the winter. And maybe the Taliban would be more hesitant when beating Americans and hunting Afghan partners if Trump were threatening to atomize them. Biden has harsher words for Republican legislators than he does the Islamists overrunning Afghanistan, whom he continues to laughably coax into joining the international community.

 

Counter-histories are useless today. The fact is that the Taliban peace talks failed, and Biden was under no obligation to pull out. The notion that Biden — who, despite a surplus of historical evidence to the contrary, fashions himself a keen foreign-policy mind — feels constricted by the decision of the former president is laughable. Biden’s case for the presidency was predicated on undoing Trump’s decisions. Indeed, Biden already delayed withdrawal from May to September, so why not another month or two to ensure that Americans and Afghan translators and intelligence sources were safe? Most likely, Biden, whose political spinelessness over the past five decades has led him to take virtually every position on every issue, was driven by polls that told him that voters were in favor of leaving. One imagines they are far less supportive when seeing America humiliated.

 

Williams also pretends that the conversations we’re having right now are predominantly about whether to withdraw from Afghanistan. Right now we should be concerned about the lack of basic competency and honor. Biden’s praetorian guard keeps conflating those issues or acting as if everything is going swimmingly:

Not only is Rubin’s contention likely untrue, but Krugman tweeted the above only minutes after Pentagon press secretary John Kirby was unable to narrow down how many thousands of Americans were left stuck in Afghanistan. Kirby also admitted that the United States has no inventory of military equipment left behind to the Taliban. The administration undertook the operation without preemptively ensuring that Americans were safely ensconced on planes and that military equipment was not falling into the hands of a third-world militia. None of this is to even mention the miscalculation regarding the Taliban’s rapid takeover.

 

The last four administrations bear responsibility for the failures of Afghanistan, but this shameful withdrawal is all on Biden, who said only this April that the pullout would be done “responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” It has been none of those things.