https://thespectator.com/topic/john-kirby-clean-up-aisle-kabul-afghanistan/?utm_source=
I almost feel sorry for John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman tasked with tidying up after the icky messes deposited about the landscape by Joe Biden.
Let me emphasize the adverb “almost.” Kirby’s job is unenviable. Basically he has to lie and pretend that his boss and that excruciating, illiterate muppet of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, make sense. It’s always a horrible goulash that Kirby has to contend with. He has my sympathy for that.
But yesterday, when Kirby stood before the press to answer questions about the administration’s report on Ameirca’s humiliating flight from Afghanistan in August 2021, his performance was not just cringe-making. It was infuriating.
There was, said this wretched tool, “a lot to be proud of” in the way the administration handled the withdrawa- no, it wasn’t a “withdrawal.” It was a panicked flight from Bagram Air Base and Kabul. Why? Because our laughably named “intelligence services” once again bungled the job. The Taliban, they said, were making advances, but not to worry, it will take weeks if not months for them to take control of the capital.
Wrong. America’s flight from Afghanistan, after twenty years, trillions of your dollars, Dear Reader, and countless classes in “transgressive” modernist art for the natives, was the most spectacular military and public relations failure for the United States since our choppers took flight from our embassy in Saigon in 1975.
Where does the buck stop, Mr. Kirby? With Donald Trump, bien sûr. Kirby repeatedly echoed the party line: “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.” But does anybody, anybody believe that if Donald Trump were still president in 2021 that Afghanistan would have been consumed in the humiliating maelstrom that John Kirby now wants us all to forget?