Barone: Biden fiddles while Kabul falls
Historians aren't actually sure that Nero caused or neglected a fire that consumed much of ancient Rome. Historians, however much they'd like to, won't be able to deny that President Joe Biden bears full responsibility for America's humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and our neglect of the tens of thousands who aided us.
"The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way," Biden assured Americans on July 8. A Taliban takeover of Afghanistan "is not inevitable," he said, pledging to "continue to provide civilian and humanitarian assistance, including speaking out for the rights of women and girls."
Asked if there were parallels with the American abandonment of Saigon, he saw "zero."
"The Taliban is not the South - the North Vietnamese army," he said. "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy in the - of the United States from Afghanistan."
Events forced Biden to go on national television again and eat his words.
He insisted that his administration was "clear-eyed about the risks" and "planned for every contingency," but conceded, in fine understatement, that "this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
Partisans of the president say he's only doing what the public wanted, citing polls showing large majorities favoring withdrawal. But poll results depend on how questions are framed, and opinions can change sharply as events change.
Thus, in July, the conservative polling firm Echelon Insights found 47% favoring the U.S. "maintain a small military presence" and only 36% favoring "end" military presence "entirely."
A week ago, as news accounts showed Taliban advances and U.S. forces in flight, the Republican firm Trafalgar found 69% disapproval of Biden on Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is only one example of how Biden's predictions about his policies' effects have been belied by facts on the ground.
An "orderly" withdrawal has become a rout. The scene of desperate Vietnamese vainly seeking escape in Saigon in 1975 has been reprised by the pictures of desperate Afghans clinging to the wheels of American planes and then falling to their deaths in Kabul in 2021.
Similarly, though many news media are not showing much video, illegal border crossings in July hit nearly 213,000, a record number for this century, even though Biden predicted crossings would decline.
Homicide rates in major cities continue to rise at rates unprecedented since 1960, and after three months of 5% inflation, price increases are looking less "transitory" and more like galloping inflation.
We seem like we're headed back to the 1970s, the decade when Biden's national political career began.
Back then, he was part of large Democratic majorities in Congress that blocked attempts to stop North Vietnam's conquest of the South.
As helicopters lifted off the Saigon embassy, freshman Sen. Biden was unrepentant.
"The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001 South Vietnamese," he said at one point.
Like other Democrats, he complained that our allied government was corrupt and ineffective.
He struck the same note last week, blaming our Afghan allies for the collapse he failed to anticipate.
"We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force," he said. "We gave them every chance to determine their own future."
After Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, "the Taiwanese government probably is reevaluating whether it is futile to resist China's invasion," wrote China-born author Helen Raleigh, while New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote that "every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power," and "every ally - Taiwan, the Baltic States, Israel, Japan - will draw the lesson that it is on its own."
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