By Dan McLaughlin
Saturday, August 21, 2021
Joe Biden has badly, visibly bungled America’s
withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has compounded the problem with his sluggish
and dishonest public statements. This has gone so badly that even people and
institutions that are normally sympathetic to Biden and his party have noticed.
American allies have been appalled, and vocal about it. What is slowly dawning
on people is that Biden’s critics were right about him all along. Not since
James Buchanan has America had a president who came so prepared by experience
for the job, yet had so little clue how to do it. That reality will be shoved
from consciousness soon enough by people with a professional stake in not
acknowledging it, but a growing number of the American people are likely to
remember. So will our allies and enemies around the world.
The Hollow Man
It was possible, if you did not look too closely, to
construct a case on paper over the past year and a half for Joe Biden as an
appropriate person to be president of the United States, commander in chief of
its armed forces, and leader of the free world. Certainly, Biden did not lack
for experience in high, national public office, exposing him to everything a
man would need in order to be prepared for the job. He was a senator for 36
years, dating back to the closing days of the Vietnam War. He chaired the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee twice, including during the post–9/11 era
when Congress authorized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He served two terms
as vice president. He traveled to war zones and met scores of foreign leaders.
Biden was also a man who came up from humble means and was seasoned by personal
tragedy. One could characterize his years in office as the record of a public
servant who values important institutions, took many mainstream positions, and
showed a willingness and ability to work with people across the aisle.
Yet, longtime Biden-watchers knew better. Two sets of
critiques of Biden have followed him over the course of his career, and
Republicans and conservatives have hardly been the only ones to level them.
First were the things people noticed about Biden before 2019. For all his
time-serving in Washington, Biden was widely understood to be a lightweight, a
fabulist, a plagiarist, an exaggerating braggart, a walking gaffe machine, a
purveyor of malarkey who covered his inch-deep grasp of everything with his
Irish charm and his ability to talk fast and at length until the listener had
long since lost track of the topic. Biden rarely had ideas of his own, and when
he did, they were usually the subject of mockery. His capacity for filling
airtime at Senate hearings without actually saying anything was legendary. Yet,
as Clarence Thomas and others warned, Biden could also be two-faced, reassuring
people with promises in private and breaking them in public.
He could handle the Senate because he’d been there since
he was 29, and there are lots of places to hide from accountability as one of a
hundred. When Obama made the biggest right decision of his career to take out
Osama bin Laden, Biden was the guy in the room saying “Mr. President,
my suggestion is, don’t go” because there would be nobody to pass the political
buck to if it failed.
It wasn’t just the bin Laden raid. Biden was also known
for being wrong on just about every significant foreign-policy issue in
Washington for half a century, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. In
1973-75, after the United States had signed the Paris Peace Accords that were
supposed to end the Vietnam War without the collapse of South Vietnam, Biden
was a loud voice in the Senate for cutting off any further U.S. assistance to
prevent the North from overrunning the South. He didn’t care about America’s moral obligations:
“I may be the most immoral son of a
gun in this room,” Biden said at a Democratic caucus in early 1975 as he argued
against aid to Cambodia. . . . “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about
morality, our moral obligation. There’s a point where you are incapable of
meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.”
He didn’t care what happened to the people we abandoned,
either:
“I do not believe the United States
has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals. . . . The
United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”
Barack Obama was in high school in Hawaii in the years
that led up to the fall of Saigon. Donald Trump was still just another no-name
real estate developer from Queens. George W. Bush was packing off to Harvard
Business School. Bill Clinton was fresh out of law school and teaching in
Arkansas. Jimmy Carter was winding down his single term as governor of Georgia,
still unknown on the national stage. Ronald Reagan was leaving behind his
governorship of California and gearing up for his first serious national
campaign. But Joe Biden was already in D.C. helping shape the congressional
policy that tied the hands of Gerald Ford while Saigon was overrun.
Hawks and doves alike blasted Biden for opposing the Gulf
War in 1990-91, supporting the Iraq War in 2002-03, opposing the surge in 2007,
and supporting the 2009-11 withdrawal (a move that was
seconded by Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, now his secretaries of state and defense). In
2010, Biden boasted of the U.S. departure from Iraq, “Some said
that our drawdown would bring about more violence. Well, they were wrong,
because the Iraqis are ready to take charge.” Instead, ISIS took over nearly
half the country, and the United States had to go back to war.
Biden never actually ran anything bigger than a Senate
committee (which runs on its staff) until he was vice president. The things he
ran as vice president (such as overseeing the stimulus) were notable
disasters. Politico reported that Biden’s own boss, Barack Obama, warned
another Democrat in 2016, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things
up.” It has not been hard to notice how much Obama has kept his distance from
his former veep as Biden does just that. You might prefer partying on Martha’s
Vineyard with George Clooney and John Legend, too, if the alternative was
making your political legacy a hostage to fortune in the hands of Joe Biden.
The façade of Biden’s genial charm was also prone to
cracking when he was actually pushed to do more than just run his mouth. His
infamous meltdowns on the campaign trail in 1987 happened when reporters were
hot on his trail for stealing another man’s speeches and biography. Biden told
one voter, “I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” and tried to shout
down the press with a series of lies about his academic attainments. “I
exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden conceded later. Yes, we noticed. When he
debated Paul Ryan in 2012, he went full Joe Biden, shouting over Ryan
repeatedly to prevent any sort of engagement with his ideas.
With Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign came a second set
of newer critiques. He was visibly not the same man in his late seventies, no
longer able to talk his way around trouble. That was widely noticed by
progressives in the primaries until it became inconvenient to mention. The
quick-tongued gaffes turned to confusion and sentences that were abandoned
midstream after Biden lost his way. Without the old gift of blarney, Biden’s
fuse when confronted was shorter — he called one voter a “lying, dog-faced pony
soldier,” and berated another with “look, fat” and challenged the guy to a
push-up contest. The man who once would talk to anyone about anything for any
amount of time retreated to taking questions only from pre-scripted lists of
friendly reporters. Biden was always a man without courage, but now he was
discarding long-held positions overnight, allowing himself to be bullied by his
own party’s extremists. Generational changes in Congress had also robbed him of
his feel for how the Hill works.
The pandemic was a godsend, allowing him to hide in his
basement for months and avoid unscripted questions. He won the election by
making himself as small and low-profile as he needed to be. Opinion polls for
much of this year have shown him enjoying a honeymoon period with voters tired
of Trump who are happy to have an absentee president for a while.
Leading from
Behind
Biden’s handling of Afghanistan has exposed all of that.
Presidents can remain aloof from Capitol Hill. They can send out underlings to
handle public-health guidance, lawsuits, or new regulations. But foreign crises
demand active, personal leadership. That has gone badly. Everyone who said for
decades that Biden was a lightweight ill-equipped to handle a major crisis has
been vindicated.
The country has fallen rapidly into chaos, ruining the
work of two decades of American soldiers in ways that cannot easily be repaired.
Bagram Airfield was inexplicably abandoned to the Taliban without
even informing the Afghan army commander. More than 10,000 Americans were
caught behind the lines, and Biden’s national-security team had no plan to
get them out. Biden had even eliminated a State Department program for evacuating
Americans in danger overseas. Billions of dollars in weaponry we provided to the Afghan army
fell into Taliban hands, to use or to barter to other enemies who can
better deploy it. At a Pentagon briefing on
Monday, General Hank Taylor admitted that he could not answer whether the
United States was “taking any other sort of steps to prevent aircraft or other
military equipment from falling into the hands of the Taliban.”
Once again, as in Vietnam, Biden was blindly committed to
total withdrawal without regard for the consequences on the ground, and more
determined to pander to his party’s left flank than to ensure a competent
withdrawal. As in Vietnam, the military, strategic, and humanitarian costs were
terrible, and played out on television in a spectacle of national humiliation
that reverberated around the globe.
Once again, as in Iraq in 2010, Biden was blithely
confident in public that all was well and would work out fine. He even
pledged that the situation was nothing like South Vietnam in 1975. He
promised in early July — six weeks ago — that the Afghan army
could handle the situation, and that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban
could take over. Those assurances proved demonstrably false. Biden
has lied at enormous length. Stuck in a defensive crouch, Biden
has fallen back on his habit of just making stuff up and then trying
to talk over the truth:
The New York Times confirms
what many of us suspected, that President Biden was informed of how the Taliban
was likely to quickly reconquer Afghanistan, and he simply chose to lie to the American public.
“Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an
increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President
Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly,
according to current and former American government officials.”
In his first public remarks, Biden refused to take
questions but nonetheless managed to spin out a web of falsehoods and
blame-shifting. He blamed Donald Trump for agreeing to leave Afghanistan in May
2021 (a deadline that Biden himself inexplicably changed to September 11), yet
tried to take credit for ending the war. In fact, Biden has reversed course on
plenty of Trump foreign-policy initiatives, even ones that were intensively
negotiated with allies and adversaries across the globe. It was Biden’s choice
to go forward, and Biden’s choice how to do it. Biden blamed the Afghan
government for not negotiating with the Taliban. He misleadingly blamed the
Afghan army for folding up despite U.S. close air support, not mentioning that
we had in fact withdrawn that support when he decided to pull out.
Biden’s anger when cornered has also come out again. When
he sat down with George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday and took just a few
pre-scripted questions Friday, he bristled at even a few probing questions. In
the Stephanopoulos interview, when asked about the scenes of chaos in Kabul,
Biden sneered that this was old news: “That was four days ago, five days ago!”
It was two days earlier; Biden had lost track of the days. On Friday, he shut
down the questioning after a single adversarial question from NPR, of all
sources.
Biden has, as Jim Geraghty has detailed, kept a very light schedule of
public appearances as this has all spun out of control, while taking few calls
from foreign heads of state. Yet, even limited to the most delicate schedule,
he is unequal to the task.
Too Ugly to
Ignore
Biden might, in normal circumstances, have relied on the
American and European press, Democratic politicians, and his allies abroad to
close ranks against any criticism. But instead, they have come to face what he
really is.
Why? Perhaps because the failure is too public and too
easily dramatized to ignore. There is a difference between bad, and bad with
pictures. For all the American media’s political biases, there is no rule of
television more certain than “if it bleeds, it leads.”
The cable news networks have rediscovered the power of
the visual images of American failure, led by CNN’s Clarissa Ward. The public
is alarmed, with Biden’s approval rating crashing ten points in a month and
likely to get worse before it hits bottom.
American allies have been aghast at this performance,
given that we acted unilaterally and high-handedly in ending a collective NATO
operation, and did so with little consultation with them:
In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden
made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in
his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had
to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr.
Biden on the phone.
The Washington Post, maybe the newspaper with
the most important readership among the center-left Washington establishment,
published a column on Thursday titled “Withdrawal from Afghanistan
forces allies and adversaries to reconsider America’s global role”:
President Biden’s decision to
withdraw from Afghanistan has triggered a globe-spanning rethink of America’s
role in the world, as European allies discuss their need to play a bigger part
in security matters and Russia and China consider how to promote their
interests in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. . . . In the European Union, which held
an emergency session of foreign ministers on Afghanistan on Tuesday, officials
offered rare criticism of Washington for risking a flood of refugees to their
borders and the return of a platform for terrorism in Central Asia. . . .
Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, Armin
Laschet, on Tuesday called the withdrawal of forces “the greatest debacle that
NATO has experienced since its foundation.”
In fact, it appears that Biden lied to our allies about his intentions:
President Joe Biden told key allies
in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to
ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S.
withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the
country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg. Biden
promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of
Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain
in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note
said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to
ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating.
Critics in the British Parliament were scathing on
Biden’s “dishonour.” As the BBC summarized the
reaction in the British press:
A number of papers also highlight
anger at Joe Biden — with the Daily Telegraph headline: “Parliament holds the
president in contempt”. It describes the criticism as an unprecedented rebuke
to a US president. An unnamed cabinet minister tells the Times the US
failure to realise that Afghanistan was on the brink of collapse shows that
America is “looking inward and is unwilling to do even a modest amount to
maintain global order”. The minister adds: “The US remains by far and away our
most important ally, but we are not Washington’s most important ally by some
stretch.”
The Beeb, hardly a redoubt of hawkish or right-wing
sentiment, has been blasting away at Biden all week. North America editor Jon
Sopel, for example, thundered:
The shambolic unravelling of
America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook
of “how to lose at everything”. Warnings hadn’t been heeded, intelligence was
clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful. . . .
Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal
for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren’t there, poised to fill the
vacuum? . . . After the bewildering events of the past few days, how exactly is
America back?
Politico found reactions in Europe to be
something on the order of scales falling from their eyes:
Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe
Biden was an expert on foreign policy. Now, the American president’s decision
to allow Afghanistan to collapse into the arms of the Taliban has European
officials worried he has unwittingly accelerated what his predecessor Donald
Trump started: the degradation of the Western alliance and everything it is
supposed to stand for in the world.
Across Europe, officials have
reacted with a mix of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Even those who cheered
Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic
relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing
short of a mistake of historic magnitude. “I say this with a heavy heart and
with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and
far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert
Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee. “This
does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”
. . . While Merkel has avoided
direct criticism of Biden, behind the scenes she has made it clear that she
considered the hasty withdrawal a mistake. “For those who believed in democracy
and freedom, especially for women, these are bitter events,” she told a meeting
with officials from her party late Monday, according to German media reports.
Back home, Leon Panetta, the defense secretary under
Obama from 2011 to 2013 and a man who has served alongside Biden for decades,
looked at the inept execution of the withdrawal and commented, “It just
struck me that they were crossing their fingers and hoping chaos would not
result.” Panetta suggested that Biden just isn’t the same man anymore: “It’s
not the Joe Biden that I often saw in the National Security Council raising
questions about the planning involved in any decision that the president had to
face.”
Three different Senate committees, all led by Democrats,
have now promised to launch probes of what went wrong — a
highly unusual display, given the longstanding refusal of Democrats on Capitol
Hill to investigate their own administrations. New Jersey’s Bob Menendez: “I am
disappointed that the Biden administration clearly did not accurately assess the
implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal. We are now witnessing the horrifying
results of many years of policy and intelligence failures.”
It is long past time for people to notice who Joe Biden
always was, and who he has become in his dotage. He is a hollow man, incapable
of managing a picnic, let alone a war. His credibility, always unearned, is
shot. His only real skill is his quick tongue, and it has deserted him. Even
his onetime virtues — his old-timey patriotism, his faith in institutions, his
empathy for others — are easily discarded as the old man reverts to his base
instincts when cornered. Biden must hobble through the remainder of his
presidency, if only because the alternative is Kamala Harris, his imprudent choice — or threat — of an heir. But nobody
should, any longer, pretend that Joe Biden is fit to lead this nation.
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