On Afghanistan, Biden says Buck stops with me, blame everyone

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The responsibility ends with me, President Joe Biden said in a speech to the nation on Monday after blaming his presidential predecessors for continuing a long war in Afghanistan.

Biden delivered the speech in response to criticism of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. After a weekend in which the Taliban effectively took control of much of the country, Biden finally addressed the country.

“I strongly support my decision,” Biden said in his televised address. “After 20 years, I have learned the hard way that there is never a good time to withdraw American forces.

While Biden spent a lot of time in his speech defending his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, he did little to explain why the operation was such a mess and was eager to blame it. on others. Even many in the mainstream left-wing press, like CNN’s Jake Tapper, have noticed.

Jake Tapper tears himself apart in Joe Biden’s speech:

“The president said the male stopped with him but, in fact, this speech was full of blame and blame.” pic.twitter.com/8brFlByA7S

– The first (@TheFirstonTV) August 16, 2021

The footage from Afghanistan as the Taliban seizes power has been both poignant and disturbing. A crowd of terrified people were seen in videos rushing down the runway at Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport on Sunday amid rumors the Taliban were advancing rapidly on the capital.

People were desperately clinging to an Air Force C-17 plane as it took off, and several videos emerged of these people falling from the plane after it climbed into the sky.

It wasn’t meant to be that way.

In July, Biden spoke at a press conference assuring the country that the withdrawal to Afghanistan was conducted in a safe and orderly manner, prioritizing the safety of our troops when they depart.

Biden said there were more than 300,000 members of the Afghan National Security Force that allies of the United States and NATO have trained to defend the country. He said the presence of this military force meant that a takeover of the country by the Taliban would not be inevitable.

On Monday, he criticized Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for convincing him that the Afghan army would hold out and fight.

In July, when asked about intelligence services that warned the country would fall into Taliban hands, Biden denied that was the case.

And when asked about comparisons between the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Biden vehemently insisted that we would not see a repeat of helicopters firing. hordes of people outside the American embassy.

The Taliban are not the southern North Vietnamese military, Biden said. They are not comparable in terms of capacity. There will be no circumstance where you will see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.

After the events of the weekend, one can rightly wonder if what we are currently seeing in Afghanistan is in fact worse than the fall of Saigon. Was the Bidens press conference in July the least precise and clearly and quickly debunked press conference in US presidential history?

This rolling catastrophe should hardly inspire confidence in an administration which prided itself on the one which would bring the adults back into the room, the one which would rebuild better.

Instead, it’s one of the self-taught and blame-shifting disasters.

We were also assured that the border was secure and that the increase in illegal immigration after Biden took office was seasonal. In July, typically a time when border crossings are down due to the heat, we had the highest numbers in over 20 years.

In a statement on Saturday, Biden cited the fact that the haphazard nature of withdrawals from Afghanistan was the result of commitments made by the previous administration, despite the fact that he had already changed the withdrawal schedule.

He simply repeated that line in Monday’s speech.

The excuse is beyond belief as Biden eagerly reversed Trump’s other policies as soon as he took office. While the Garden of American Heroes was worth canceling almost immediately after taking office, the conduct of a complex and dangerous military operation launched under a predecessor certainly deserved to be adjusted as circumstances changed.

Political scientist and foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead wrote that the Biden administration will now face the most mismanaged foreign policy crisis since the Bay of Pigs and the most devastating blow to American prestige since the fall of Saigon.

At least President John F. Kennedy took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster rather than blaming his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower.

At this stage, the best that we can hope for from the administration is to control the damage of his blunder as well as possible. Biden’s refusal to accept responsibility is not the response of an adult in the play, and he hardly supports confidence in an administration struggling on multiple fronts.

On the contrary, he asserts the weakness of a faltering regime unable to cope with the crises that beset the nation and unwilling to admit that it does not have the answers.

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