RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-only-way-back-to-deterrence-is-firing-bidens-entire-national-security-team/

America needs experts who can reverse the damage Biden is doing to our national security and will stand up to future unsound and dangerous decisions.

The Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan — emboldened by President Joe Biden’s senseless decision to rush U.S troops out of the country without a plan — blindsided the Afghan government, the Afghan military, and America’s allies. This reckless decision has led to bipartisan criticism in the United States and from our global allies, and ridicule by America’s adversaries.

Biden’s attempts to blame everyone but himself for this fiasco, his refusal to take press questions for nearly a week (except from sycophantic George Stephanopoulos), and his decision to hide at Camp David while these events unfolded have only intensified criticism.

As commander-in-chief, Biden is at fault for this disaster. But his senior national security advisers also bear responsibility for implementing his irresponsible Afghanistan policies instead of resigning and reporting them to Congress.

It’s important to stress that Biden had bad instincts on national security when he was a younger man. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Now that Biden appears to be suffering from mental decline, he is making national security decisions that are irrational and dangerous. This extends beyond Afghanistan, to nuclear talks with Iran and failing to secure our southern border.

If Biden Can’t Be Replaced Now, Replace His Yes-Men

In a perfect world, Biden would immediately resign, be impeached, or be removed from office under the 25th Amendment for this unprecedented incompetence and dereliction of duty.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/22/the-drossy-touch-of-joe-biden/

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

The Afghan Catastrophe

 Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans. 

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance. 

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

Was Biden’s idea simply to get the United States “officially” out of Afghanistan and let the abandoned 10,000-plus Americans manage as they can? 

Was Biden angry over our 20-year presence and thinking the Afghans would deserve what followed? Was he so delusional that he really believed the NATO forces could easily deter the Taliban with sanctimonious lectures from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman? The latter is a former head of EMILY’s List and an architect of the Iran Deal, so were she and others especially scarifying to naughty theocrats when they warned they might lose their slot in the “rules-based world order”? Or did Biden believe the Taliban would be deterred by Sherman’s exclamations, such as her ominous warning, “This is personal for me!” 

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/the_war_with_radical_islam_is_ongoing.html

In the wake of Biden’s unmitigated catastrophe in Afghanistan, he has been attempting to assuage his incompetence by providing the public with the false choice between leaving and committing America to an endless war.

Even after we leave Afghanistan, we will still be engaged in an ongoing war, for the war with radical Islam does not take two parties. Radical Islam has been at continual war with the West since the hordes of Muslims emerged from the Arabian Peninsula and fought their way into Western Europe to be stopped in France by Charles Martel and centuries later by the Polish cavalry at the gates of Vienna.

Osama bin Laden demanded that Spain (Andalusia) be returned to Islam, for whatever is once Islam’s is always Islam’s, according to the terrorist who brought down the twin towers on September 11.

Even among Muslims who seek refuge in the West, there is a faction that seeks not to assimilate into Western culture but to replace Western democracy with a fundamentalist version of Islam. “To hell with your democracy,” reads signs that are held high by fundamentalist demonstrators on the streets of London.

Obviously, these people do not represent Islam in the West, but it only takes two or three radicalized people to foment a terrorist operation and cast a stain on an entire community.

Muslim communities, like all immigrant communities, are divided. The majority seek to go about their business and make a decent place for their families, but there is a segment that feels alienated from life in the old world and unable to surmount the cultural barriers to life in the new.  There is a reason that Muslim would-be terrorists are disproportionately not foreign but homegrown, many are American citizens.

As long as there are Muslim societies extolling the virtues of terrorism as Islamic virtues, there will be alienated Muslim youth in Western society that will heed the call. Therefore, beyond the strategic consequences of the fall of Afghanistan to the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghanistan will present a signal to those who are susceptible to mobilization by fundamentalist ideology. The Biden administration has been oblivious to both the obvious strategic consequences of its debacle in Afghanistan and the impact a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will have on mobilizing terrorists in the West.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/none_dare_call_it_conspiracy.html

Fifty years ago, journalist Gary Allen set out to write a book to prove conservative anti-communists wrong.  But while researching, he realized he had not seen the “hidden picture.”  There indeed was a conspiracy, shielded by a narrative advanced by liberal academia and the mainstream media, both actually in the service of an elite cabal that included Rockefeller, Ford, Morgan, Rothschild, Loeb, Kennedy, and Carnegie.  No longer willing to dismiss “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” he titled his book, published in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy.  It was a surprising bestseller: more than four million copies were sold during the 1972 presidential elections.  Many received it as gifts through an informal grassroots distribution system.

What Allen claimed to have discovered was that a plutocracy of 3% of the population covertly controlled the lives of the rest.  They had wrested control of the constitutional republic, with its separation of powers, limited government, and competitive free enterprise, and turned it into a system of centralized control by a few.  How was this achieved?  According to Allen, the conspiratorial clique was hidden and protected by a complicit media establishment they own and control.  Also, they are accomplished liars and farseeing planners.  Their subversive tour de force has been to advance the lies that a) communism is inevitable and b) communism is a movement of the downtrodden.  The first lie aims to destroy the will to fight, the second to gain support of the poor masses and justify the destruction of a vigorous, innovative middle class.

Allen offers an alternative, realistic definition of communism: an international conspiratorial drive for power on part of men in high places, who are willing to use any means for global conquest.  In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said a proletarian revolution would necessitate a temporary socialist dictatorship, which would give way to full-on communism if three things were achieved: a) the elimination of private property rights, b) the dissolution of the family, and c) the replacement of religion with Marxist ideology.  These, in fact, are exactly what academia and left-wing groups in America are pushing for, today and when Allen wrote the book.

But all that, as Allen claims, is an elaborate ruse.  Behind it are the super-rich.  We are blinded to this because we believe they stand to lose the most in a socialistic set-up.  Allen backs his counterintuitive conclusion with the fact that communist countries are in fact always ruled by an oligarchical group — the nomenklatura — that controls wealth, production, and the lives of the rest of the population.  Thus, socialism is a movement to consolidate wealth in the hands of a few, creating not a classless society, but one with just two classes: an elite and a proletariat, with no middle class.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/bidens-long-history-betrayals-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/

During the 2007 Dem primaries, Biden attacked Obama for adopting his position on Afghanistan.

The flailing Biden campaign put out a press release accusing Obama of being a “johnny-come-lately” who had belatedly adopted Biden’s push for “significantly increasing reconstruction assistance” and sending more American soldiers to Afghanistan.

While running for president, Biden had based his entire foreign policy around sending more troops to Afghanistan. He had memorized one line, “if we’re surging troops anywhere, it should be in Afghanistan”, and repeated it in the Senate, in interviews, and on the campaign trail.

Sending more troops to Afghanistan, he argued would give America “the moral high ground”.

“The next president of the United States will have to rally the American people and the world to fight them over there, unless we want to fight them over here. But the over there is not, as President Bush has falsely and repeatedly claimed, in Iraq, but it’s rather in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he insisted at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Biden attacked not only Democrat rivals like Obama, but also President Bush, for not wanting to send more troops to Afghanistan. “I asked the commander of British forces how long his people would allow him to stay in Afghanistan. And he said, ‘Senator, we Brits have an expression. As long as the big dog is in the pen, the small dogs will stay. When the big dog leaves, the small dogs leave as well.’ Well, guess what? The big dog left in 2002.”

He was only off by 19 years. Biden was preemptively accusing Bush of his own sins.

By the 2020 primaries, Biden had completely reinvented his entire history with Afghanistan.

“I’m the guy from the beginning who argued that it was a big, big mistake to surge forces to Afghanistan. Period. We should not have done it. And I argued against it constantly,” he falsely claimed.

Biden had gone from attacking Obama for ripping off his idea of surging forces to Afghanistan to being the guy who “from the beginning” had opposed the idea.

The idea that Biden opposed “from the beginning” was the one he originally claimed credit for.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/america-has-been-in-denial-about-the-taliban-from-the-start/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first

For 20 years, some of us have been countering that you can’t defeat the enemy without understanding that they are the enemy, and what they believe.

U nless your name happens to be Andrew Cuomo, you can’t be happy about the headline-grabbing attention the Taliban have gotten over the last ten days.

Since they emerged a quarter-century ago, the Taliban have commanded the attention of Americans incessantly. They’ve probably never had it quite like they have it now, though. Even after the essential role they played in the 9/11 atrocities, our sights were mainly fixed on al-Qaeda — fixed on the hands-on terrorists, not the knowing and willing terrorist hosts.

And that’s the main problem: Our government and the commentariat, even now, continue to speak as if there were a difference.

No matter how much they’ve told us who they are over the years, we see the Taliban of our hopeful imagination rather than the Taliban who, through remorseless word and deed, have always proved exactly who they are.

Oh, we’ve condemned the Taliban’s “extremism” — though it is verboten to say just what it is they are so extreme about. The cruel hudud penalties that they so enthusiastically execute have been undeniably established in sharia law for a millennium . . . which is why the Taliban are far from alone in enforcing and justifying them.

Still, in our well-meaning way, we’ve been as dogmatic as the Taliban.

President Obama insisted that violent jihadism is not reflective of any authentic construction of Islam. President Bush insisted that freedom is the longing of every human heart. Neither of these things is true in principle, and the Taliban are demonstrative proof of their falsity.

The Taliban are scholars and students of sharia (Islam’s ancient law and societal framework). They know much more about the subject than Obama. And while it is obvious that many people long for things other than freedom, it is even more obvious that the Taliban know what is in what passes for their own hearts, and those of other fundamentalist Muslims, better than Bush ever could. As it happens, the Taliban abominate the Western ideal of freedom. It contradicts their basic conceit that the good life calls for perfect submission to sharia — the opposite of freedom.

Now, being wrong about basic things would not be such a problem if Obama and Bush had been expressing mere opinions. Alas, for them and the governments they superintended, their delusions were articles of faith, on which they were as implacable as the Taliban are about their own articles of faith. The bigger problem is that Obama and Bush — and, indeed, every American administration from Clinton through Biden — based U.S. government policy on their delusions, in essence saying, “Never mind what the Taliban tell us about themselves. We know better.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/23/afghan-fallout-biden-has-just-destroyed-his-entire-case-for-being-president/

For most of the past week, in the fires of the worst foreign policy crisis of his young administration, the president who won the White House on a promise of competence and compassion has had trouble demonstrating much of either.”

That’s not us saying that. This is how the New York Times described the Afghanistan debacle, which is as sure a sign as any of how much trouble President Joe Biden is in right now.

But we’d go further than the Times. Biden’s backers – and Biden himself – didn’t just portray Joe as competent and empathetic. They said he was experienced, thoughtful, trustworthy, and had sound judgment. That he’d unite the country, and restore America’s standing in the world. That he was, unlike Donald Trump, presidential. It was the basis of Biden’s entire presidential campaign, in fact.

As a reminder, here’s what 70 so-called Republican national security officials said when endorsing Biden in August 2020: “We believe Joe Biden has the character, experience, and temperament to lead this nation. We believe he will restore the dignity of the presidency, bring Americans together, reassert America’s role as a global leader, and inspire our nation to live up to its ideals.”

Who can say any of that now with a straight face?

Biden’s utterly inept Afghanistan withdrawal, his bumbling lies and obfuscations, his callous disregard of those put in harm’s way, his refusal to take responsibility, and the devastation his stupidity has caused to America’s “role as a global leader” have undercut every premise of his presidency.

Let’s review.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/08/23/who_wants_biden_to_fail_146287.html

Oh, for the days when trolls were mythological creatures, living in Nordic caves. Today, they live online, poking us with bitter invective instead of intelligent arguments. That’s what some of President Biden’s defenders are doing, now that he is struggling. With only a weak defense to offer, most are in hiding. The few who venture out in public have turned to a last resort: trolling anyone who dares to criticize the president. Their favorite taunt is “Do you want the president to fail?”

The point here, apparently, is to try and inoculate Biden against any criticism by suggesting that to question his actions is tantamount to wanting the new president to fail and the country with him.

It’s an odd attack coming from the same people who began launching a four-year barrage of invective against Biden’s predecessor before he even took office. Odder still to see the patriotism card played by those who applauded athletes kneeling for our national anthem, endorsed a distorted “1619” history that denies our country was founded on aspirations for freedom, who declare America remains thoroughly racist, and who normally argue that our country is a malevolent force in the world.

I will ignore the trolls’ hypocrisy and bad faith, some of it directed at me, and answer the question anyway. I do not want the president to fail, but I do think some of his ill-conceived policies are bound to. A few deserve to. That’s on him, not me.

Like all decent people, I wish Joseph R. Biden Jr. good health. His job is arduous, and he is doing it for all of us, whether we voted for him or not, whether he is competent or not. Wishing him well is a simple act of human kindness.

Second, I do not want failures abroad. I want the U.S. to deter our principal adversaries — China, Russia, and Iran — from their malicious goals. I want policies and intelligence that prevent terrorists from attacking America and its friends. Who doesn’t? In all those areas, I want the Biden administration to succeed.

Do I think Biden is pursuing the best policies to accomplish those goals? No, and the unhappy results of his policies are starting to pile up. In my view, it is a grave error, for instance, to cut real military spending when we face a rising threat from China. Yet that is what Biden proposes. It was an unforced error to let Russia complete its natural gas pipeline to Germany, overturning President Trump’s tougher policy and weakening his sanctions on senior Russian officials. This energy project will make Germany more dependent on Russia and gives the Kremlin more money to pursue policies that harm America. In return, Biden got nothing more than a hearty handshake from departing German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cleaning-up-after-biden-on-al-qaeda-11629671400?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Cleaning up President Biden’s many false statements on Afghanistan is a difficult job, but someone in his Administration has to do it. On Sunday that task fell to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the matter of al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan.

“Look, let’s put this thing in perspective here. What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone?” Mr. Biden said on Friday at the White House. “We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as—as well as—getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.”

That wasn’t correct. A Pentagon spokesman acknowledged as much on Friday, and a recent United Nations report said al Qaeda was active in 15 of 34 Afghanistan provinces. On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace put the question to Mr. Blinken: “Is al Qaeda gone from Pakistan—from Afghanistan?”

Mr. Blinken: “Al Qaeda’s capacity to do what it did on 9/11—to attack us, to attack our partners or allies from Afghanistan—is vastly, vastly diminished.”

Mr. Wallace: “Is it gone?”

Mr. Blinken: “Are there al Qaeda members and remnants in Afghanistan? Yes. But what the President was referring to was its capacity to do what it did on 9/11. And that capacity has been very successfully diminished.”

This isn’t a game of gotcha with the President. Al Qaeda has been diminished in Afghanistan thanks to the U.S. presence in the country, CIA listening posts on the ground, and a friendly government. The question is whether, with its allies the Taliban now in control, al Qaeda and other terror groups will again have a sanctuary, be able to attract new recruits, and again plot against Americans.

Mr. Biden’s answers aren’t merely wrong. They misunderstand the continuing threat from Islamic terrorism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/taliban-withdrawal-biden-blinken-dictate-11629664446?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The ugly, chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan continues despite Biden Administration attempts to spin it as a triumph of logistics and planning. More Americans and Afghans are getting out. But some have been beaten by the Taliban, and the pace is too slow for confidence or safety as President Biden’s Aug. 31 evacuation deadline nears.

The worst humiliation continues to be President Biden’s deference to the Taliban on how and when U.S. citizens and allies can get to the airport. So far he won’t let the Pentagon create corridors into Kabul city where the State Department last week told people to shelter in place, and as far as we know won’t send the military beyond Kabul so Americans around the country can find refuge and escape.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, host Major Garrett asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken : “Someone in our audience might listen to you, Mr. Secretary, and say, ‘Oh, so we have to ask the Taliban for permission for American citizens to leave.’ True or not true?”

Mr. Blinken replied: “They are in control of Kabul. That is the reality. That’s the reality that we have to deal with.”

Yes, but this isn’t the reality the U.S. has to accept. The U.S. military has more than enough force to dictate better terms to the Taliban, but the other reality is that Mr. Biden is too risk-averse to do it. Instead, the U.S. evacuates on the Taliban’s terms. Over the weekend the Taliban put the Haqqani network in charge of security in Kabul. In 2012 the U.S. designated the Haqqani network as a “foreign terrorist organization” because of its attacks on U.S. personnel and close ties to al Qaeda.