Afghanistan

Donald Rumsfeld died this week — and it’s just so easy, isn’t it? It’s so convenient to dance on the grave of the man who helped bring about the disastrous Iraq war. For Rumsfeld, the old dictum, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, seems to have been discarded almost from the start. The obituaries, mostly in left-leaning publications like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, have been downright vicious. Rumsfeld was George W. Bush’s first defense secretary who, alongside Dick Cheney, pushed hard for deposing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Because of this, he’s been labeled a war criminal. He’s been held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan where he refused to accept a Taliban surrender.

C’mon man! That was Joe Biden’s message to the country on the Friday before his holiday weekend. Joe Biden is just a dude. He’s the dude for this time and place. He just wants to get home, crack a cold one, spend some time with his cars, his dog (RIP Champ) and his grill. Why is this so hard to understand, America? Today the last of the US forces stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan were making their final departure, as the Biden administration began the handover to a fragile alliance. But who really needs to answer questions from the press on that kind of monumental foreign policy decision when there is a giant cooler of 16-cent hotdogs waiting in the yard in Delaware?

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s football and wrestling teams. Successful candidate for office, easily reelected to Congress twice before he left to join the Richard Nixon administration. There he proved a success at navigating both the federal bureaucracy and the internal politics of the scandal-consumed administration. He survived Nixon’s resignation and soon became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — and after that, the youngest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, taking charge of a newly-minted all-volunteer force whose morale and discipline were in shambles after Vietnam.

President Joe Biden will honor Pride Month this Friday — just before meeting with the leader of a country where the maximum penalty for sodomy is death. Biden 'will deliver remarks to commemorate LGBTQ+ Pride Month,' the White House announced this week. And later, 'the President will welcome Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani and Afghanistan High Commission for National Reconciliation chair Abdullah Abdullah to the White House to highlight the enduring partnership between the United States and Afghanistan as the military drawdown continues’. Staffers will undoubtedly rush to box up the rainbow neck beads and Pride flags when Biden steps off stage to avoid an awkward bump in the hall when Ghani rolls up to the West Wing.

President Joe Biden announced this week that he was pulling all remaining American troops out of Afghanistan by September 11 — and the media rushed to frame the decision positively. They are technically correct — it makes zero sense to continue to put American lives at risk and spend taxpayer dollars on a decades-long 'war' with no foreseeable end nor desire to 'win'. But as you can guess, when former president Donald Trump announced he would withdraw troops from Afghanistan just last year, the media hysterically warned that he was emboldening the Taliban and making America less safe. 'Trump administration to cut troop levels in Afghanistan despite Pentagon warnings,' the Washington Post reported.

America’s longest war has just entered its 20th year. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda. Now, nearly a decade after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Afghan war continues. And everyone expects that if the Americans ever leave, the Taliban will return to power. Yet the Taliban who take charge will not be the same as those who harbored bin Laden. The median age in Afghanistan is around 19 years old: half the country’s population was born after the war began. The US is not fighting a limited reservoir of Taliban militants; it is fighting a cultural force that has renewed itself over a generation.

In just over a week, the Empire hopes to strike back. Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Biden voted for the biggest and most foolish intervention of that era, the Iraq War of 2003. He has not so much repudiated this act as tried to exculpate himself for it, claiming that in voting to authorize military force he didn’t think military force would be used. This is not credible on its face, and not the way anyone understood the vote at the time. It was as clear a vote for war as any vote has been since World War Two.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Thanksgiving Day, the most American of holidays, found President Trump performing one of the nation’s few remaining civic rites: supporting the troops. When the President secretly flew to Afghanistan to feed and thank servicemen at Bagram Air Base, he got a cheering hangar full of airmen in return. Those turkey-stuffed troops were a captive audience, of course. Still, enthusiasm for Trump among American servicemen, both active-duty and veteran, seems to be one of the more genuine things about this surreal phase of American politics. In polls, support for the president among veterans far outpaces that among Americans at large.

When Tulsi Gabbard announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination in Hawaii’s 2nd district in 2011 she was quickly endorsed by a laundry list of liberal institutions including the Sierra Club and Emily’s List. She was asked to speak at the 2012 Democratic Convention and by 2015 she was Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. National Democrats were eager to boost this rising star, but now that she is running for president they are just as eager to snuff her out. So why are Democrats giving her the cold shoulder? For starters, during the last election, Gabbard was not down with Team Clinton or the corruption that follows them.