When you live in a country where the president is free to claim up is down, right is left, black is white, and men are women — and have a media willing to help him sell his delusions — it becomes more and more challenging to maintain any semblance of reality in the face of jaw-dropping lies.
William L. Shirer, whose book Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is quoted by scholars 60 years after publication, noted something similar during his time reporting from Nazi Germany. Shirer would occasionally be called to London for a few days or weeks. Upon returning to Berlin, he was shocked to discover the Nazi propaganda nonsense that otherwise intelligent, sophisticated Germans believed.
Fortunately, we have a lot more sources of information than Shirer. But the pathology of left-wing propaganda makes finding that alternative reality more challenging.
Joe Biden’s National Security Council led a review of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — a withdrawal that not only left thousands of Americans behind (after we were told they were out), billions of dollars in military equipment, and the sentence of death to an unknown number of Afghan citizens who helped the U.S. during the 20-year war.
A 12-page summary of the review was published on Thursday absolving the Biden administration and Biden himself of any mistakes or wrongdoing.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the White House summary states. It continued, “the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country.”
In a stinging editorial calling the report out for its glossing over Biden’s failures, the Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out that Trump wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan but didn’t trust the Taliban.
Mr. Trump did want to pull troops out, and he probably would have, but Mr. Biden didn’t run for President to affirm Mr. Trump’s policies. Mr. Biden ran on being the adult in the White House, and he was under no obligation to oblige the Taliban, who had failed to honor their side of the deal with Mr. Trump. Many of Mr. Biden’s advisers tried to tell him as much, including U.S. military general officers and European allies, who preferred a residual force of a few thousand allied troops.
The report does fault overly optimistic intelligence community assessments about the Afghan army’s willingness to fight, and says Biden followed military commanders’ recommendations for the pacing of the drawdown of U.S. forces.
One decision after another by Biden accelerated the Taliban’s takeover. It was astonishing only because it was entirely unnecessary. Biden was in the phase of his presidency where he wanted to show himself as the complete and total opposite of Trump. Hence, the president instituted border policies that resulted in massive numbers of illegal aliens crossing into the United States — until Biden reversed course and began reimplementing most of Trump’s border policies.
The White House apologia contends that “the speed with which the Taliban took over” showed a few thousand troops were insufficient, conveniently omitting Mr. Biden’s decisions that accelerated the country’s descent into chaos. Mr. Biden pulled the air support and maintenance contracting Afghan troops relied on to fight, and then chided them as unwilling to sacrifice. Political constraints on troop numbers pushed the U.S. military to shut down the air field at Bagram Air Base, a “strategic unforced error,” as a Senate report last year called it. Afghan allies literally woke up one morning at Bagram to find U.S. troops had gone.
The NSA report is useless as far as learning any lessons from the Afghan withdrawal. But it’s a first-class job of propaganda writing for which the White House is immensely pleased with itself.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member