I was nearly nine months old on September 11th, 2001. This war is about as old as I am, if you could consider it a war anymore. The news over the last two or three weeks has been especially upsetting. I was forced to hear about the deaths of twelve US Marines of similar age to me at the hands of ISIS suicide bombers a week after watching people my age clinging to planes in hope that they could somehow escape the hell that this president has created. The issues started a generation before me are now the cause of death for my generation. How could that have happened?
My opinions on Joe Biden are quite clear. He is a bumbling idiot who has coasted his way through life in a cushy, safe senate seat in Delaware. He hasn’t worked a day in his life and had the presidency handed to him by a different bumbling idiot who quite rightly lost in a personality contest (not that I think Biden is any better personally either). I knew that the entire world wouldn’t take us seriously and I knew damn well there would be a large scale foreign policy disaster in store for him before Kamala inevitably takes over. Did I think such a disaster like the evacuation of Saigon would occur in the first few months let alone the entire term happen? No.
I never thought full withdrawal was the right policy action either. Clearly the war part was over. The nation building part had failed, but terrorism on a global scale had largely been relegated just to the region. The mission was a success in a sense. Any withdrawal talk always seemed to come from the populist right or socialist left who thought we had no business there in the first place. The same people who encourage isolationism and restraint in all capacities wanted this to happen. This whole ordeal was an attempt for Biden to appeal to the “average” voter who hadn’t a clue about what Afghanistan was about. Trump did the same thing. The full withdrawal idea was always about winning voters.
The Biden Admin. seems to exclusively care about public relations and not about doing their jobs. They are easily swayed by the progressive position of the day rather than what got them elected in the first place. But they were never going to do that. Thirteen marines, many of them my own age, returned home yesterday, not as promised. For that, I will never forgive the incompetence of our military and diplomatic leaders. I just hope others see it the same way.