YOU CAN’T TEACH AN OLD TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! NEW TRICKS: Roger Kimball (“With an assist from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and H. G. Wells”) Proffers A Lesson for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden apparently thinks, or says he thinks, the Taliban will make nice because it is in their interest to do so.
No wonder the Taliban are busy trolling the Biden Administration, posing with ice-cream cones, re-enacting the iconic flag-raising at Iwo Jima in American uniforms but with a Taliban flag, vowing to battle “climate change” and ensure women’s rights “under Islamic law.” Ha ha ha. That’s the playful side of an ideology whose dark purpose was summed up by an Islamic radical in the aftermath of 9/11. “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something,” he said. “We are fighting to eliminate you.”
Accordingly, the proper response to this ideology is not to offer it partnerships in the hope that you can make a mutually satisfying deal that caters to everyone’s “self-interest.” On the contrary, the proper response is to understand, as Benjamin Netanyahu put it, that we are dealing here with “a war to reverse the triumph of the West.”
Our leaders, from a mentally compromised president through the puffed-up woke triumvirate of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd “stand down” Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark “white-rage–I-read-Karl-Marx” Milley, are constitutionally incapable of taking that reality on board. They are figures fit to lead the Eloi, not patriotic Americans.
As Kurt Schlicter wrote on Friday: Resign. “If you didn’t suck, you’d have quit. When President Durwood told you to ditch Bagram Air Base, you joint chiefs should have got together, realized this was going to get a bunch of the guys that America entrusted to you killed, and decided to resign. You can’t disobey, but you can take a stand. Well, you did take a kind of stand. You just stood there. As one sergeant major told me today, the newest second lieutenant would identify this op as a disaster in the making. Now, far be it from me to contradict an E9, but I expect he would agree that even the greenest Girl Scout recruit would ask, ‘What the unholy hell are you idiots thinking, pulling the military out and giving up our secure airbase before you’ve completed your noncombatant evacuation operation?’”