You might read that headline and wonder how it was narrowed down to one? It is not her flip-flopping, because anyone with a modicum of common sense knows she doesn’t believe them. She told us so when she said her values have not changed. And it is not the terrible economic decisions with which she was intimately involved nor her/their failure to keep out millions of people who illegally entered our country. Those are all top drawer. No, it was the abrupt Afghanistan withdrawal leading to a cascade of foreign policy debacles.
No one really wanted to stay in Afghanistan at the time, but that doesn’t mean they wanted to withdraw. When the recent report from Congress was released, the Democrats’ main talking point for the withdrawal was about the long war and the many dead. That counts in regard to the history of Americans lost and immense costs but had nothing to do with the situation at the time. Not one American had died there in over a year. Yes, it costs to be there, but one had balance that to the cost of withdrawal – similar to staying in Japan and Germany.
We were in Afghanistan with 2,500 Americans of a force of 10,000 counting our allies. That is exactly how we should operate, with not everything on our broad shoulders. Everything about our withdrawal was a disaster, including not providing our allies with adequate notice of our plans.
There should be three key steps prior to a military withdrawal from a hostile country:
1. First withdraw every American and every local who worked with us whose lives would be in danger if we left them. Doing this first is mandatory for saving lives. Over 1,000 Americans were left, and untold amounts of Afghans chased an airplane down the tarmac. One of the worst images in our long history.
2. Remove all equipment and/or destroy it. Destroy all installations and airfields.
3. Then withdraw your military.
This is not genius stuff. Any intelligent 8th grader could produce this. Yet Biden failed on all fronts. God knows how many people were killed because we did not properly withdraw them beforehand. The Biden-Harris people will never account for that. We even left behind $57 million in cash. How stupid can we be?
They are too busy blaming you know who – Trump. Trump created a deal with the Taliban, who (no surprise) did not abide by it. Immediately upon taking office, Biden-Harris reversed nearly all of Trump’s action. It just so happens this was the one they could not. As the saying goes – “give me a break.”
Harris says she was the last one in the room after Biden made the withdrawal decision. The same room where, by all accounts, his advisors told Biden he was bonkers. She still describes this deplorable decision as “courageous and right.” This is a testament to her terrible judgment.
Ms. Harris talks about how her opponent doesn’t care about women, while she does because she is a true supporter of women controlling their bodies (abortion). Except when it comes to 21 million Afghan women. The abrupt withdrawal left those women under the control of a barbaric force. The women cannot drive, they cannot go to school, they must wear burkas in public. They virtually cannot do anything without approval of some male. The Taliban recently stated women cannot raise their voices or even look at a man other than their husband or relatives. The Taliban’s actions reversed over 20 years of advancement for these women. There was no concern for their rights. How many will be tossed off the side of a building for doing something deemed blasphemous? Some of us care about the advancement of women worldwide, not just in San Francisco or Berkeley.
Then there are the consequences of the Biden/Harris withdrawal. Six months later, a man who preys on weakness attacked Ukraine. Without that display of weakness many believe this would never have happened. The terrible judgment of the withdrawal and how it was handled has cost an estimated 131,000 Ukrainians their lives and the significant destruction of their country.
This has cost the American taxpayer upwards of $250 billion. It is interesting to hear the people who strongly favor this war arguing that the money is spent within our country making munitions and supplies. These are the same people who argue against our own defense budget.
Who do you think is going to get stuck with the bill for the rebuilding of Ukraine? The French and Germans will send their engineers and contractors to do the work with your tax dollars footing the bill.
All of the above is bad enough, but there is yet another foreign policy debacle. It all started with their sainted leader, Obama, which is the decision to trust and play along with Iran. Sane people do not understand what he was thinking. This strategy is only matched for horrific policy decisions in the last hundred years by Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 deal with Hitler.
Trump came in and squashed this terrible idea. When he left office, Iran was drained of funds having only $4 billion in currency reserves. That is paltry for a country of 88 million people. Then Biden-Harris came into office and reversed the Trump plan (like they did for everything except mysteriously Afghanistan). Iran now has an estimated $300 billion.
The funds are used to wreak havoc all over the Middle East and other parts of the world. They fund their surrogates in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen to destroy our friends and allies. It has shut down shipping through the Suez Canal and Harris/Biden cannot figure a way to stamp that out.
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the manifestation of this deadly and destructive decision. I remember vividly waking up to this horror on the morning of my 70th birthday. My family and friends were set to have a celebration that Saturday. Instead, it is forever remembered as the day our very closest allies were brutally attacked by a medieval group of people bent on their utter destruction.
While I sat for hours figuring out how to handle the rest of my day, I pledged to myself I would do everything in my power to stop these people from future power. Their judgment on foreign policy is dangerous and deadly.
Harris is a central part of this team. She deserves defeat on this one issue and sent back to a private life where she can no longer harm our country.