Watching America’s Crack-Up by Benjamin Kerstein

https://quillette.com/2021/08/09/watching-americas-crack-up/

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because from over here in Tel Aviv, it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.

January 6 as Distraction from Afghanistan, Other Crises How top officials traded the security and stability of Afghanistan, and by extension, America, to instead promote unfounded fears about white domestic terrorists. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/16/january-6-as-distraction-from-afghanistan-other-crises/

While Taliban forces rapidly overtook territories across Afghanistan earlier this month, Joe Biden held an overdramatic ceremony at the White House to once again perpetuate phony narratives about the events of January 6. Biden, falsely claiming officers died as a result of the Capitol protest, signed legislation passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate to bestow the Congressional Gold Medal to the United States Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police for their actions that day.

“A mob of extremists and terrorists launched a violent and deadly assault on the people’s house,” Biden said on August 5. “It wasn’t dissent. It wasn’t debate. It wasn’t democracy. It was insurrection. It was riot and mayhem. It was radical and chaotic.”

Ten days later, an actual mob of extremists and terrorists launched an assault to seize the Afghan capital in the most humiliating defeat of American political and military leadership in at least half a century. Biden, reportedly stunned by the success of an actual insurrection on his watch, remained in hiding at Camp David all weekend.

The war in Afghanistan, unlike January 6, has been deadly, costly, and largely futile. Lawmakers of both parties now are asking tough questions about how our exit went so wrong, so quickly. Finger-pointing is happening in all different directions.

The juxtaposition of the two events, however, shows how preposterous the framing of January 6 has been from the start. It also underscores the dangerous consequences of the ruling class’ nonstop fixation on the Capitol protest.

Political, intelligence, law enforcement, and defense leaders have shamefully redirected resources and time from real crises to perpetuate the falsehood that white supremacist domestic terrorists attempted to overthrow “democracy”—whatever that means—and that jihadi-like cells of Trump supporters, not foreign adversaries, pose the most significant threat to the homeland.

For more than seven months, official Washington has been in meltdown mode over the four-hour January 6 disturbance on Capitol Hill. A day doesn’t go by without some uniformed apparatchik—from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to an undercover narcotics cop—reminding the American people that their own countrymen are wannabe terrorists, ready to strike again. 

This unhinged obsession, bolstered on an hourly basis by the national news media, allows those in charge to ignore any number of real national emergencies including rising crime and escalating numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country, to name just a couple. Manufactured outrage about the imminent menace of “domestic terrorism” is fiddling while the country burns.

Biden Raises Afghan Troop Numbers to 7,000. 3X Number He Withdrew Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/biden-raises-afghan-troop-numbers-7000-3x-number-daniel-greenfield/

Biden disastrously withdrew the military before pulling out the civilians. 

His big withdrawal pulled out 1,900 troops of the 2,500 in the country. The Taliban quickly took over forcing an emergency evacuation and the latest reported numbers with the added forces that Biden has dispatched show that there are 7,000 American military personnel already on the ground or soon to be there.

That’s more than 3 times the number of troops that Biden withdrew.

Except that now American forces are operating in a dangerous and chaotic environment controlled by the Taliban.

Had Biden conducted a responsible withdrawal, American civilians would have been pulled out before the military. Instead, Biden and his radical incompetents wanted to celebrate a military withdrawal, and pulled out most military personnel, resulting in the collapse of Afghanistan which trapped many Americans in the country.

If the Taliban had been more aggressive, they would have countless foreign diplomats and reporters as hostages. Instead, the Taliban want to avoid giving Biden any reason to stay, so they’ve avoided any aggressive confrontations. 

But this is a disaster and it makes a mockery of Biden’s withdrawal.

Every 12 hours it seems as if another 1,000 troops are being dispatched to help cope with Biden’s withdrawal.

Biden Bungles Afghanistan A U.S. president facilitates the return of a global terrorist sanctuary. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-bungles-afghanistan-joseph-klein/

Afghanistan has become the playground of global Islamist terrorists once again, less than one month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America’s homeland.

The Taliban and their friends from al Qaeda and ISIS will be marching in the streets to celebrate, while we at home we will be mourning the lost lives the terrorists took on 9/11. We will also be mourning the fact that we are right back where we started twenty years ago. That’s when the Taliban was previously in charge of Afghanistan and provided al Qaeda a sanctuary from which to plan and launch its global terrorist jihad.

Back in July, President Joe Biden assured us that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Wrong.

“Unlikely” became reality when the Islamic jihadists overran Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on August 15th. The Taliban met virtually no resistance. Afghanistan’s president fled the country.

In short, the Taliban have overrun everything, and they now own Afghanistan. And Biden is responsible for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan that made the Taliban’s rampage possible. The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has risen again to become a magnet for Islamic terrorists from all over the world.

Biden tried to put as best a spin as he could on the Afghanistan debacle in remarks that he delivered to the American people Monday afternoon. ”I stand squarely by my decision,” Biden said, while admitting that events unfolded more quickly than his administration had anticipated.

Biden said that the buck stops with him, but he refused to accept any responsibility for the disastrous implementation of his decision to quickly withdraw completely from Afghanistan. Biden blamed the Afghan armed forces for lacking the will to fight for their country. He also blamed former President Donald Trump for handing him an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces that Biden claimed he could not break without having to send many thousands more U.S. troops back to Afghanistan for a “third decade” of war.

Biden’s excuses are a lame attempt to cover up his own catastrophic failures. This humiliating debacle that has gravely undermined the credibility of the United States is President Biden’s doing.

Trying to blame the mess on Donald Trump won’t cut it. It is true that the former president had negotiated the outlines of a peace deal with the Taliban and originally planned to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. But instead of just delaying the complete withdrawal by a few months and then moving full steam ahead with the withdrawal, Biden could have reversed Trump’s withdrawal decision altogether once he took office.

The choice was not between Biden’s disorderly cut-and-run versus recommitting many thousands of U.S. troops to continue fighting the Taliban. The Biden administration could have kept a limited number of special force operatives and air power resources in Afghanistan to make sure that Afghanistan would not reemerge as a safe haven for al Qaeda and ISIS. It was up to the Afghan military that we trained and equipped to protect the Afghan people from the Taliban insurgency. Nation-building is not a U.S. national security priority. But making sure that Afghanistan cannot be used as a global terrorist stronghold from which al Qaeda and ISIS can plan and carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens remains a vital national security interest.

Democrats Finally Get Comfortable Saying Obama Is a Jerk By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democrats-finally-get-comfortable-saying-obama-is-a-jerk/

Last week, our Charlie Cooke spotlighted an MSNBC commentator insisting Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump” and accurately dissected how Democrats talk about Republican officials in and out of office.

This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler.

There’s an inverse relationship with Democratic party lawmakers. The more time that passes since a particular Democrat was in elected office, the easier it gets for his fellow Democrats to acknowledge glaring flaws that they previously ignored or downplayed. Six years after Ted Kennedy died, it was safe to make a movie about Chappaquiddick – and lay out the facts that Kennedy left a young woman to drown. In 2017, nearly 17 years after Bill Clinton left office and when it was clear his wife would not become president someday, Matt Yglesias and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could safely acknowledge that Clinton’s affair with an intern should have forced his resignation.

And now this appears to be the moment when Democrats feel comfortable publicly ripping into Barack Obama. There were moments during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary where candidates and factions within the party grappled with their disappointment and recognized that if Obama was as terrific a president as they insisted, the American people would not have elected Donald Trump.

Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”

Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.

But what we’re seeing with criticism of Obama’s big birthday bash – particularly in Maureen Dowd’s column – is different; the focus is not merely policy disappointments, but an acknowledgement that Obama is being a narcissistic, self-absorbed, tone-deaf jerk.

“I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,” said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. “We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.”

Chinese Media Threaten Taiwan after Kabul Debacle: ‘The Island’s Defense Will Collapse in Hours’ By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/chinese-media-threaten-taiwan-after-kabul-debacle-the-islands-defense-will-collapse-in-hours/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

Chinese media outlets carried threats to Taiwan and criticisms of the U.S. during the chaotic American withdrawal from Kabul.

An editorial by the Global Times, a Chinese state-run outlet, took aim at Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party and President Tsai Ing-wen.

“From what happened in Afghanistan, [the DPP] should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and the US military won’t come to help,” the editorial states. “As a result, the DPP authorities will quickly surrender, while some high-level officials may flee by plane.”

The editorial called on the DPP to “keep cross-Straits [of Taiwan] peace with political means, rather than acting as strategic pawns of the US and bear the bitter fruits of a war.”

Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin also commented on the Afghanistan withdrawal on Twitter.

“After the fall of the Kabul regime, the Taiwan authorities must be trembling,” Hu wrote. “Don’t look forward to the US to protect them. Taipei officials need to quietly mail-order a Five-Star Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. It will be useful one day when they surrender to the PLA.”

In a separate tweet, Hu wrote, “Chinese netizens joked that the power transition in Afghanistan is even more smooth than presidential transition in the US.”

The head of China Daily‘s E.U. bureau, Chen Weihua, encouraged CNN anchor Jim Sciutto to explain to his son that the U.S. clearly lost the Afghanistan War.

From Biden to the Taliban with Love by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17655/turkey-afghan-migrants

The Afghans are facing possibly the world’s most brutal army of radical Muslims, now installed in Kabul, and armed with what US President Joe Biden said were “all the tools… and equipment of any modern military. We provided advanced weaponry,” which the Taliban has captured from the disintegrating Afghan National Army.

President Biden has, in fact, bestowed “advanced weaponry,” courtesy of US taxpayers, not only on the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but also on Russia, China and Iran, who will doubtless now reverse-engineer the abandoned materiel.

The Afghans have good reasons to flee their own country by the millions. Iran is their typical first stop.

Once in Iran, they are given easy and safe passage to Turkey — that is Iran’s gift to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey is already home to nearly five million migrants. The arrival, over years, of another five million would paralyze Turkey, its economy, politics and relative safety. But Afghan migrants will not be only Turkey’s problem.

In 2020, Erdoğan threatened to flood EU countries with millions of Syrians…. The real number was just a couple of thousand. Erdoğan’s bluff had failed. Since then, he has not tried another Turkish government-sponsored migrant dump onto Greek territory.

If the Greek and EU border agencies do not want to relive the 2015 migrant crisis, they should review their blueprints to protect Greek territory from migrants and get ready for another inflow this year.

Locals in Istanbul were recently shocked to see hordes of young Afghan men in worn out uniforms, strolling aimlessly down neighborhoods that were already home to thousands of Syrian refugees. Later, Turkish police detained and expelled nine of the men. Hundreds of others are communicating with their relatives and friends in Afghanistan and Iran and most likely updating them on the illegal migration routes into Turkey — Afghans would typically pay smugglers $1,000 for the trip from Kabul to Van in eastern Turkey. With the victory of the Taliban and the collapse of the Afghan government, hundreds of thousands may be crossing via Iran into eastern Turkey, finally seeking the least dangerous (and least costly) route into European Union soil.

How China and Russia Spy on Us By Matthew Brazil

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/01/how-china-and-russia-spy-on-us/#slide-1

With differing capabilities and tactics, both infiltrate American institutions

Do China and Russia share a common set of opponents in world affairs? One might immediately think, yes, they do: the United States, the United King­dom, and their allies.

But an even more persistent danger for the world’s great authoritarians is the free flow of ideas. In their ambition to seize the territories of unwilling neighbors formerly governed without harsh restrictions on information, and in their gradual but relentless drive to control expression and religion, Beijing and Moscow show that they have little tolerance for criticism and no room to allow uncontrolled debate. These are the threats to state power that most trouble Zhongnanhai and the Kremlin.

Beijing and Moscow depend on controlling their own domestic narratives to maintain what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls “harmony.” This is why China’s Propaganda Department disciplines print media and why its National Radio and Television Administration controls broadcast outlets. With news on the Chinese mainland under strict control, Hong Kong is the penultimate frontier (the last major one being Taiwan) in Beijing’s drive to exert dominance over Chinese minds.

In Hong Kong, a territory once known for its free press, the CCP wages a continuing campaign against independent voices, such as the now-defunct Apple Daily. Its next targets may be the establishmentarian but stubbornly independent South China Morning Post and the scrappy Hong Kong Free Press — read them while you can.

Contrast this depressing picture with Russia’s. Vladimir Putin exerts direct and personal control over newspapers and broadcasters, as he “appoints editors and general directors, either officially or unofficially,” as the journalist Nataliya Rostova put it in 2015.

Both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin enjoy a measure of approval (the former more than the latter) but lean on the crutch of media control to present a one-sided picture to their domestic audiences, pursuing different means to the same end: maximum control of ideas in society. This variance is reflected in how they conceive and execute interference and influence operations abroad.

Border Patrol Chief: Suspected Terrorists Crossing U.S. Border At Levels ‘Never Seen Before’ By Gabe Kaminsky

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/16/border-patrol-chief-suspected-terrorists-are-crossing-u-s-border-at-levels-never-seen-before/

Amid a massive surge of migrants at the United States-Mexico border, the outgoing Border Patrol chief told his 19,000 agents prior to retiring over the weekend that known or suspected terrorists are coming into America “at a level we have never seen before.”

“Over and over again, I see other people talk about our mission, your mission, and the context of it being immigration or the current crisis today being an immigration crisis,” Rodney Scott, who retired Saturday, said in a video to employees.

“I firmly believe that it is a national security crisis. Immigration is just a subcomponent of it, and right, now it’s just a cover for massive amounts of smuggling going across the southwest border — to include TSDBs at a level we have never seen before. That’s a real threat,” he said.

The term “TSDB” is a reference to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Terrorist Screening Center Database. The database is used by government agencies and launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Scott’s comments come days after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data from July showed a 20-year record in arrests, more than 212,000, and a 13 percent increase from June. Due to migrants coming into the U.S. from Central America, the Biden administration has yanked over 40 percent of federal agents to assist in processing, custody care, and transport needs.

Our Military Is A Woke Joke Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/08/16/our-military-is-a-woke-joke-n2594151

Ignore those pictures of the Afghan army that our military senior leader geniuses spent 20 years and zillions of dollars on disintegrating in the face of a pack of glorified mountain banditos from the Seventh Century – the real story is that, finally, America’s fighting men and women are fully aware of the urgency of accepting and validating the trans experience. And it’s even better if said trans people are BIPOC. Plus differently abled. 

Our broke, woke armed forces would be a hysterically funny punchline if the joke wasn’t, “The greatest military in human history walks into a bar, puts down trillions of dollars and buckets of American blood, and asks the bartender, ‘So, what would it look like if all the generals and admirals sucked-up to the garbage establishment that has totally failed the people of the USA?’”

Yes, it is a joke, a sick one. Fire all the generals. Invite a few back, maybe a dozen. Clean out the Pentagon. Can all the “Diversity Consultants,” “Equal Opportunity Officers,” “Climate Change Mitigation Specialists,” and every other strap-hanging oxygen thief who doesn’t contribute to the only thing the military should be focusing on right now – putting Chi Coms in graves.

Yeah, there’s been a strategic failure of epic proportions by our civilian establishment. We need to fix that at the ballot box by tossing out every Democrat and every Liz Cheney-esque combat tourist who delights in sending our young people overseas to get ground up in idiotic wars designed to enrich their cronies. Hardest hit at the end of Afghanistan: Haliburton, Raytheon, KBR, and a hundred other contractors you never heard of. Oh, and the Afghan people, but they never really figured into this calculus except in the abstract idea that we were going to convert a nation of savages into Lil’ Vermonters living the Norman Rockwell dream of community democracy.

Twenty years of failure. Twenty years. How far and fast we fell. I was there thirty years ago, in VII Corps main, contributing my car washing skills, when the greatest military force in human history annihilated a country’s entire army in 100 hours and barely broke a sweat doing it. Amazingly, we did it without giving a single thought to our alleged privilege – to the extent cracking over reeking half-barrels in wooden outhouses in the middle of the desert constituted privilege. 

Look at us now. Look at the generals, in their stupid throwback uniforms from the Forties that are supposed to make the gender studies seminar we call the US Army think it’s the same force that broke Hitler. It’s not. A serious organization does not alternate its designation of America’s most serious threat between the weather, “racism,” and other Americans who dissent from the generals’ bosses’ political priorities.