RUTHFULLY YOURS

The last American president with actual combat experience, in a conflict where the United States proved victorious, was George H.W. Bush. During World War II, Bush served as a pilot with Torpedo Squadron 51 (VT-51) and on his 58th mission he was shot down by the Japanese and rescued by a U.S. submarine.

Joe Biden never served in the military but from 2008-2016 he was vice president to the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. The former Barry Soetoro never served, and for the Obama-Biden team, the role of the U.S. military was not to defeat America’s enemies.

“Troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to ‘defeat’ those trying to kill them,” former Secretary of State Robert Gates explained in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of State at War. But when Gen. Stanley McChrystal announced a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, Obama national security advisor Tom Donilon “bridled,” and blasted the U.S. military as “in revolt” and “insubordinate.”  As it happens, Donilon was an advisor to Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988, and in 2012 Donilon orchestrated the move to put Biden at the head of China policy.

The previous year, Obama ordered SEAL Team Six to take out al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden. Vice president Biden opposed the raid on bin Laden, and his boss did not always take a hard line on terrorists.

Back in 2009 in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl deserted his outpost and wound up in custody of the Taliban. In 2014, the composite character president traded Bergdahl for five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay. They included Mohammed Fazi, who massacred minority Shiites; Khairullah Khairkhwa, close to Taliban founder Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden; and Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s deputy intelligence minister and close confidant of Mullah Omar.

Once freed, they joined the Taliban’s political office in Qatar. In effect, the Obama-Biden team traded Pvt. Slovik for the German high command. Also worth recalling is the Obama-Biden response to terrorist attacks on American soil.

On November 5, 2009 at Ford Hood, Texas, U.S Army Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who pleaded for the life of her unborn child. Maj. Hasan, a psychiatrist and self-described “Soldier of Allah,” wounded more than 30 others, yelling “Allahu akbar” as he fired.

For the composite character president, this was not Islamic terrorism or mass murder. The president called it “workplace violence,” not even gun violence. The victims included African Americans such as Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who took seven bullets from Hasan, but the president never decried the attack as racism.

Hasan got better medical treatment that his victims, and in 2014 the composite character president refused to meet with Lunsford. If any American soldier thought the composite character president was unfit to serve as commander-in-chief it would be hard to blame them.

For vice president Joe Biden the terrorist mass murder at Ford Hood was a “senseless tragedy” and the Delaware Democrat hailed “the brave soldiers who fell.” No word of how, exactly, the soldiers “fell,” nor any hint that the terrorist mass murder could easily have been prevented.

As Lessons from Fort Hood explains, Hasan’s radical Islam was on full display during his training at Walter Reed Medical Center. The FBI was aware of Hasan’s communications with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki about killing Americans. The Washington office of the FBI called off the surveillance and took no action against Hasan before his mass murder of American soldiers. As they might wonder, who gave the order? Robert Mueller was FBI boss at the time. What did the president know, and when did he know it?

According to A Promised Land, released by the composite character in November, 2020, “Disaster struck our military, this time closer to home.” So it wasn’t Muslim terrorist Nidal Hasan who struck the 13 American soldiers. Only “disaster” struck, and only “closer to home,” an odd description for a military base in an American state.

There were “early indications” that the Department of Defense the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force had all been alerted, in one way or another, to Hasan’s “possible drift toward radicalism.” So maybe the “soldier of Allah” wasn’t a radical Islamic terrorist after all, and “insurgency-information sharing systems had failed to connect the dots in a way that might have headed off the tragedy.”

So it was “systems” that failed, not actual people in command, and the systems “might” have headed off what was only a “tragedy,” not a terrorist mass murder. These classic lies and distortions, likely the work of “Obama’s narrator” David Axelrod, betoken a dynamic already in place at the time.

Shortly after the Fort Hood massacre, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey proclaimed, “As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.” In a February 2010 interview, Casey said “our diversity—not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength.”

By all indications, diversity includes Islamic jihadists plotting to kill American soldiers. Such jihadists must be left alone, lest diversity should suffer. As it happens, kindness to Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors continues under Joe Biden.

In 2016, four Iranian gunboats captured 10 U.S. Navy sailors, who “surrendered rather than opening fire.” Vice president Joe Biden told CBS News, “there was no looking for any apology. This was just standard nautical practice.” It wasn’t “standard practice” to send planeloads of cash to Iran’s “death to America” regime, but Biden had no problem with it. Biden also criticized President Trump for taking out Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani, and the Delaware Democrat also has a soft spot for China’s Communist dictatorship.

According to Biden, the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks,” and Biden criticized President Trump for taking out Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani. The task of the military is now to enforce “wokeness,” so Biden touts “body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits, updating requirements for their hairstyles.”

Joe Biden, did not explain how these moves improve the ability of the U.S. military to defeat America’s enemies. As George Will put it, going into combat with less than your very best is like playing poker with the second-best hand. You have two choices: bluff or fold.

In a showdown with China or Iran, Biden’s handlers would doubtless urge him to fold. On the home front, the murder of 13 American soldiers by an Islamic jihadist would be nothing more than a tragedy, and a threat to diversity.

In 2020, Joe Biden called female college student a “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” told African Americans “you ain’t black” if they failed to support him, and was often unsure of his own location. American soldiers, who put their lives on the line, might find it hard to think of anyone less fit to serve as their commander-in-chief. For Americans and their allies, the struggle against white flag supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.