You had to know this was coming. In the last few days, President Joe Biden, on a foreign policy quest to show he is the master of all, so abruptly and ineptly screwed up Afghanistan policy that he has managed to unite both liberals and conservatives, each horrified. He wound up proving himself to be a master, alright. The master of disaster.
After staunchly denying that what he did was in any fashion resembling the frantic American retreat from Saigon in 1975 – then quickly retreating back to vacation – Biden’s actions produced even more indelible images of a panic-driven retreat than the infamous photos of an American helicopter attempting to leave the roof of the US Embassy with desperate South Vietnamese literally scrambling to cling on to the helicopter skids.
This time around it was television images of thousands of Afghans flooding the runway of an airport as a US C-17 transport jet attempts to take off, with panicked Afghans literally clinging to the fuselage or wings, with at least one losing his grip as the plane rose thousands of feet in the air, hurtling downward to his death. Across the media spectrum the outrage was almost unanimous.
Over at NewsBusters, my NB colleague Scott Whitlock headlined this of the stunning media unanimity:
SHOCK: Networks ABANDON ‘Completely Wrong’ Biden’s ‘Saigon on Steroids’
Wrote Scott:
“The shocking fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is such a failure that even the liberal networks on Monday have abandoned Joe Biden’s decision making (at least for now), hammering the President as ‘completely wrong’ and executing a Vietnam-esque Saigon ‘debacle.’”
From NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and Richard Engel to ABC’s Robin Roberts, Martha Raddatz and George Stephanopoulos to CBS’s Gayle King and Ed O’Keefe, appalled left-wing media journalists piled on Biden. ABC’s Roberts called the disaster “Saigon on steroids.”
USA Today headlined:
Biden’s Afghanistan horror: A well-intentioned miscalculation with disastrous, predictable results
The paper’s editorial board wrote, in part, this:
“Few American presidents have had their blunders so spectacularly validated in real-time as Joe Biden in Afghanistan.
‘The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,’ the 46th president told reporters in July after a decision to end U.S. military involvement there.
Taliban fighters entered Kabul Sunday demanding unconditional surrender after wresting nearly the entire country from government control in a matter of weeks.”
Over at The New York Times the editorial board was headlining about “The Tragedy of Afghanistan.”
Said the famously left-wing paper:
“The Biden administration was right to bring the war to a close. Yet there was no need for it to end in such chaos, with so little forethought for all those who sacrificed so much in the hopes of a better Afghanistan.
…The war needed to end. But the Biden administration could and should have taken more care to protect those who risked everything in pursuit of a different future, however illusory those dreams proved to be.”
Politico headlined the story this way:
‘Clearly botched’: Biden White House under assault on Afghanistan drawdown
Biden’s foreign policy experience fails him as the Taliban seize Kabul far sooner than expected.
Wrote reporters Natasha Korecki and Christopher Cadelago:
“President Joe Biden long touted his foreign policy credentials as a core asset he’d bring to the Oval Office. And once he was in the White House, he proudly proclaimed “America is back” on the world stage.
Instead, chaos and confusion dominated his first major foreign policy decision — the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Far from bringing a return to stability as he promised, it has led to the sort of imagery he insisted would not take place on his watch: scenes of American diplomats fleeing the U.S. embassy by helicopter as the Taliban tightened their noose around Kabul.
…Heart-rending images of desperate Afghans trying to board flights out of the airport in Kabul flooded social media, while Taliban militants broadcast live from the presidential palace amid reports of al Qaeda and other extremist prisoners breaking loose from government facilities.
‘The White House was clearly blindsided and unprepared for the speed of Afghanistan’s collapse. Even Biden allies will not try to claim this as a job well done or say this is what they had planned….’ said Brian Klaas, a political analyst and expert on democracies who now teaches at University College London.”
One could go on…and on and on.
All of this starkly reminds of the long-ago assessment of Joe Biden’s abilities on foreign policy as assessed by Bush and Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, also a one-time CIA Director. Said Gates:
“I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Exactly.
The harsh – very harsh – reality here is that whether the issue is the fall of Afghanistan, the thousands of COVID-19 riddled illegals swarming the US southern border or the economy’s spiraling inflation and gas prices Joe Biden is a master all right – a master of disaster.
And he’s only 8 months into his presidency.
Buckle in, America. Buckle in.
A prayer or two for the country and the world might help as well.
