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August 2021

Who Will Trust Us after Afghanistan? By Bing West

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/who-will-trust-us-after-afghanistan/#slide-1

Our disaster in brief:

Following 9/11, a bit of wreckage from the Twin Towers was buried at the American embassy in Kabul, with the inscription: “Never Again.” Now Again has come. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban flag will fly over the abandoned American embassy and al-Qaeda will be operating inside Afghanistan. Fifty years from now, Americans will stare in sad disbelief at the photo of an American Marine plucking a baby to safety over barbed wire at Kabul airport. What a shameful, wretched way to quit a war.

The root cause was extreme partisanship in Congress. By default, this bequeathed to the presidency the powers of a medieval king. The Afghanistan tragedy unfolded in four phases, culminating in the whimsy of one man consigning millions to misery.

Phase One. 2001–2007. After 9/11, America unleashed a swift aerial blitzkrieg that shattered the Taliban forces. Inside three months, al-Qaeda’s core unit was trapped inside the Tora Bora caves in the snowbound Speen Ghar mountains. A force of American Marines and multinational special forces commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis (later secretary of defense) was poised to cut off the mountain passes and systematically destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander, sent in the undisciplined troops of Afghan warlords, who allowed al-Qaeda to escape into Pakistan. Thus was lost the golden opportunity to win a fast, decisive war and leave.

Acting upon his Evangelical beliefs, President George W. Bush then made the fateful decision to change the mission from killing terrorists to creating a democratic nation comprising 40 million mostly illiterate tribesmen. Nation-building was a White House decision made without gaining true congressional commitment. Worse, there was no strategy specifying the time horizon, resources, and security measures. This off-handed smugness was expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in 2002 when he remarked, “The Taliban is out of business, permanently.”

On the assumption that there was no threat, a scant 5,000 Afghan soldiers were trained each year. But the fractured Taliban could not be tracked down and defeated in detail because their sponsor, Pakistan, was sheltering them. Pakistan was also providing the U.S.–NATO supply line into landlocked Afghanistan, thus limiting our leverage to object to the sanctuary extended to the Taliban.

In 2003, the Bush administration, concerned about the threat of Saddam’s presumed weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq. This sparked a bitter insurgency, provoked by Islamist terrorists, that required heavy U.S. military resources. Iraq stabilized in 2007, but by that time the Taliban had regrouped inside Pakistan and were attacking in eastern Afghanistan, where the dominant tribe was Pashtun, their own.

Phase Two. 2008–2013. For years, the Democratic leadership had been battering the Republicans about the Iraq War, claiming that it was unnecessary. By default, Afghanistan became the “right war” for the Democrats. Once elected, President Obama, who said that Afghanistan was the war we could not afford to lose, had no way out. With manifest reluctance, in 2010 he ordered a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to 100,000 U.S. soldiers plus 30,000 allied soldiers. The goal was to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, yet Obama pledged to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, an impossibly short time frame.

Shame The long term consequences, not just of the Biden Administration’s complete failure in Afghanistan but their obsession with January 6 and imaginary “domestic terrorists” will be deadly. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/26/shame/

As of midafternoon on Thursday, several hours after the killing of innocents began, Joe Biden still had not addressed the nation to mourn the devastating loss of life—including at least 12 American troops—from terror attacks near the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

His lengthy absence on the deadliest day for the U.S. military in a decade was in sharp contrast to his conduct on January 6, 2021. Shortly after 4 p.m. that day, less than two hours after the start of the raucous protest, Biden gave a speech from his home in Delaware.

Fuming with rage, Biden spoke for more than eight minutes. “Our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Biden ranted. “This is not dissent, it’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition. It’s insurrection.” The words of a president, Biden said, can inspire. “They also can incite.” He demanded that President Trump “go on television now . . . and demand an end to this siege. Step up.”

“The world is watching,” Biden warned.

The world is watching now, too. The world has been watching as this fast-moving catastrophe reached its inevitable apex on Thursday when at least two suicide bombings took the lives of 11 Marines and one Navy corpsman, wounding at least a dozen more servicemembers. The situation undoubtedly will worsen while thousands of American troops remain in a country now run by terrorists ostensibly to defend a country now run by an incompetent, and largely AWOL, commander in chief. (Biden finally took the podium around 5:30 p.m.)

The difference between Biden’s MIA routine on Thursday versus his quick reaction on January 6 is representative of how his administration has handled the first eight months of his term. While legitimate terror threats fester overseas, Biden and his top military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials have fixated on the brief disturbance on Capitol Hill on January 6.

Instead of focusing on his job, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has played politics since before Inauguration Day. He issued a statement on January 13 signed by the head of each branch of the U.S. military to condemn the Capitol protest: 

The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process. We witnessed actions inside the Capitol building that were inconsistent with the rule of law. The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection. On January 20, 2021, in accordance with the Constitution, confirmed by the states and the courts, and certified by Congress, President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.

Attorney General Merrick Garland compared January 6 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people including more than a dozen children. He promised to make the Capitol breach probe his top priority as head of the U.S. Department of Justice. In June, Garland held a press conference to present the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” an assessment that Biden ordered on his first day in office. “President Biden directed his national security team to lead a 100-day comprehensive review of U.S. Government efforts to address domestic terrorism, which has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today,” the White House announced.

China Cancels Christmas for Americans by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17692/china-cancels-christmas

No, Madam Vice President, climate change has almost nothing to do with the ongoing [supply chain] disruptions. There are many factors, such as the long-term shift of manufacturing to East Asia. Moreover, there are short-term problems, the transport of empty containers being one of them.

Expect retail prices in America to go up. If you’re the shipping manager for Apple, you don’t really care because the additional costs for shipping, say, an iPhone are negligible. The added costs are not negligible, however, if you make larger items. “A 40-foot container can hold 20 sofas,” Jonathan Bass, CEO of home décor firm WhomHome, tells Gatestone. “The dramatic increase in rates — it can now cost $25,000 to ship a container across the Pacific to the East Coast — adds about $1,625 per sofa.” That increased cost puts this furniture item out-of-reach for most consumers.

Bass, a near-shoring advocate, has a fix: “Now, given shipping costs and other factors that are not temporary, it would be cheaper to makes sofas and other items in North America.”

Moving production would not only employ North Americans and bring prosperity back home, it would also mean that Americans would stop funding a hostile Chinese regime that, among other things, just labeled the U.S. an “enemy.”

Let us remember: Every single sofa that Americans buy from China gives its malicious regime the funds to grow biological weapons, dig missile silos, and develop even more means to kill Americans. So every sofa we build on this side of the Pacific helps defend the American republic.

Quick, someone call Santa. Christmas in America has been called off this year. Supply-chain disruptions in Asia mean no toys for the tots in December.

At least that’s what Vice President Kamala Harris suggested on her trip to Southeast Asia, and she is right. Shelves across America were bare earlier this year, and they will, in all probability, be bare again due to extraordinary supply-chain disruptions in China and throughout East Asia.

There is one solution that eliminates these disruptions and saves the planet. Harris did not mention it, and global elites just hate it.

COVID: The Surreal World of ‘Cases’ and Fear-Porn Distinguishing reality from fiction. Jack Kerwick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/covid-distinguishing-reality-fiction-jack-kerwick/

Since early on in 2020, particularly since March, the world has been incessantly besieged by politicians, career-bureaucrats, and media personalities who breathlessly frighten us with reports of, as President Trump would routinely refer to it, “the Plague”: SARS-CoV-2, a “novel” corona cold virus believed to be the cause of the disease, COVID-19. 

And, of course, because they just as breathlessly, and typically in the very same breath, have been going on about hospitalizations and deaths courtesy of this latest coronavirus, within the public imagination a COVID “case” has become synonymous with COVID sickness and death.

This is fiction.  It is fear-porn.  If only untold numbers of people who would probably know better in other areas of their lives would just slow down, catch a breath, and think, they just might be able to see this for themselves.

Perspective is sorely needed.  It is vitally needed to prevent the country we’ve known from being irretrievably lost to us.

About all of those damn, scary case numbers that we can’t escape hearing about:  

It first needs to be noted that in the pre-Virus era, for a person to constitute a case of X meant that the person was sick and required medical attention, namely, hospitalization, for it. 

When it comes to this single disease, however, that criteria goes out the window.  A COVID case need only be someone who is either presumed to have contracted the virus or who has tested positive for it. 

To repeat: A person is a COVID case even if he or she has zero symptoms, is not infectious, and is never tested.

The CDC informs us that there are three types of COVID cases: suspect, probable, and confirmed.  The CDC counts only those that are probable and confirmed.   There is no “confirmatory laboratory evidence” for a probable case.

Biden Tried to Send Pallets of Cash to the Taliban as Kabul Fell Creating a hostage situation is a great pretext for funding Islamic terrorists. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-tried-send-pallets-cash-taliban-kabul-fell-daniel-greenfield/\

On August 14, Secretary of State Blinken spoke with Afghanistan’s former president and promised that the Biden administration would provide a bulk shipment of dollars.

The next day Kabul fell.

On that same call, Afghanistan’s former leader had agreed to surrender power to the Taliban. 

The Biden administration had effectively agreed to provide a massive infusion of cash to the Taliban. But the final deal fell through, the Afghan government fled, and the Taliban took Kabul.

The bulk shipment of dollars never did arrive. 

Biden’s diplomats scrambled to evacuate from Kabul. Ajmal Ahmady, the governor of DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, already had a ticket and headed to the airport. He managed to get on a military plane.

Since then he’s tweeted that he was warned that the Taliban had come looking for him.

The Taliban were hoping to get their hands on Afghanistan’s money, but much of it is in the United States. The most tangible part of Afghanistan’s assets, $1.3 billion in gold, is sitting in downtown Manhattan, a little bit south of Ground Zero, in the vaults of the Federal Reserve.

If there were any justice, that money would be used to compensate the police officers, firefighters, and workers who died on that day or later on from ailments related to 9/11.

Meanwhile, all the Taliban have to do is fly into JFK, take an Uber to 33 Liberty Street, and ask to be taken down to the basement to see all the bars of gold. And even in Biden’s America and De Blasio’s New York City, they might have trouble walking away with over a billion in gold bars. 

Not unless they trade their camos and kameezes for Black Lives Matter t-shirts.

The United States did plenty of dumb things in Afghanistan, but it kept the gold locked up in the basement vaults and $3.1 billion of DAB’s assets went into U.S. Treasury bills and bonds.

Biden, Afghanistan and China Troubling links. Joseph Hippolito

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/how-bidens-decisions-afghanistan-benefit-china-joseph-hippolito/

No matter what else he might do, Joe Biden will be remembered forever for inciting the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, abandoning American civilians who remain trapped there and displaying utter contempt for American soldiers who have died there. Those soldiers include the ones killed in the barbaric suicide bombing in Kabul yesterday.

Those events raise a puzzling question: Why would a veteran of nearly five decades in Washington, a former Senator and vice president, risk destroying his own legacy?

Perhaps Americans need to consider that Biden’s decisions reflect his and his family’s previous dealings with China, which views the United States as its main competition for world dominance.

FrontPage Magazine explored China’s possible interference in November’s Presidential election in “Beijing Is Called For Biden,” China’s clandestine support for Black Lives Matter in “Beijing’s Lies Matter” and COVID-19’s role as a potential bioweapon in “China Virus, Indeed.”

China benefits tremendously as American influence evaporates in Afghanistan. Those benefits came not by accident but from deliberate foresight and preparation.

Afghanistan contains a range of minerals worth between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. The United States Geological Survey estimated that the country has 2.2 trillion tons of iron ore, 60 million metric tons of copper, and 1.4 million tons of rare earths, as well as gold, silver, platinum, uranium, aluminum and lithium.

Rare earths are indispensable for producing consumer and military electronics, especially guidance and communications systems. Rare earths also can provide the key for Afghanistan’s economic recovery.

“Afghanistan’s rich mineral resources, if exploited effectively, could prove to be the best substitutes for foreign aid and decrease the country’s dependence on donor countries and foreign support,” wrote Ahmad Shah Katawazai, a former diplomat who belonged to the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan. “Robust policies, strong institutional arrangements together with clear policy direction will pave the way for attracting both domestic and foreign investors.”

Enter China, which already owns a monopoly in processing rare earths.

In 2016, China signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of the now-deposed president, Ashraf Ghani. As part of that agreement, China sent $100 million in aid. That funding provided the seed money for China to become the largest investor in Afghan business, and to spend $62 billion on Afghan infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Projects include natural gas pipelines, electrical transmission, fiber optics networks, and massive highway and railway reconstruction. Two pivotal lines are the Five Nations Railway, which links China to Iran through Afghanistan, and a north-south route to Pakistan, a key Chinese ally.

By asserting itself economically in Afghanistan, China does more than enhance its presence as a major player in a volatile region. Access to increased mineral wealth strengthens China’s dominance in rare earths, making such developed countries as the United States more dependent on that nation.

The Chinese also can mine Afghan uranium, which they can use for their own nuclear weapons or send to Iran or Pakistan.

Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier is Leaving the Military After being removed from Space Force command for exposing Marxist-racist indoctrination. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/lt-col-matthew-lohmeier-leaving-military-lloyd-billingsley/

On September 1, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier will leave the U.S. military. As the former Space Force commander told The Epoch Times, “I believe I’m able to continue serving my country outside of the service and out of uniform, perhaps in a better way than I was able to, given the circumstances, in uniform at the moment.” The departure invites a review of Lohmeier’s experience, and another with startling similarities.

A 2006 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and a qualified F-15C  pilot, Lohmeier earned a master’s degree in military operational art and science and a master’s of philosophy in military strategy. In September of 2020, Lohmeier authored The Better Mind of Space, from Air University Press, views solely of the author but “cleared for public release and unlimited distribution.”

Lohmeier’s squadron operated the Defense Support Program and Space Based Infrared System satellites that detect launches and provide early warning. Lohmeier was representing the Space Force when President Trump held a video conference with military leaders, explaining that the Space Force is “very special to me, that new branch, because that was something that I felt was necessary.” For his part, Lt. Col. Lohmeier was also monitoring efforts to make the U.S. military weaker and more vulnerable.

The Space Force commander authored Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military, which posed questions such as: “Is systemic racism a reality, or is much of our talk about race merely a rhetorical tool used to divide Americans? Why has the Defense Department suddenly shifted to a focus on extremism within the ranks? Is there really a white supremacy or white nationalist problem within our armed forces? Are the many Diversity and Inclusion trainings that are being conducted in our federal agencies helping solve these problems, or are they creating conflict where none previously existed? What is Marxism, and what does it have to do with all of this?”

As Lohmeier told Military.com, he was apprised of the option to have the book reviewed by the Pentagon prior to release but told it was not required. Lohmeier discussed Irresistible Revolution on the “Information Operation” podcast with L. Todd Wood. The critical race theory pushed by Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Lohmeier said, “will divide us. It will not unify us.”

The Dream Palaces of the Americans Afghanistan belongs to the Taliban now, but the Washington elite still has Palestine as an object of its active fantasy life. Naftali Bennett would be wise to stick to the reality principle. By Lee Smith

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-dream-palaces-of-americans

When new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett meets with President Joe Biden and his minders at the White House today, a few things seem like sure bets. First, Bennett and his aides will lay out a scheme for keeping Iran from going nuclear, which the Americans will nod at and ignore. Second, the American side will solemnly raise the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel.

Instead of nodding, smiling, and pretending to share the dream of peaceful democratic Palestinian statehood, Bennett could show true friendship to America by pointing to the example of Afghanistan. It’s clear no one in the American political establishment has yet internalized the lesson.

For twenty years, official Washington, DC dared not describe Afghanistan as it truly is and would be after America’s exit. It would have been gauche to do so— worse, it would have shown that one lacked vision, high ideals. Anyone who didn’t believe there was a democratic polity just waiting to escape its despotic chains and unleash its liberal energies was guilty of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — that is, a racist. In this fun-house-mirror version of Afghanistan, America was building yet another city on a hill, a citadel whose government would promote Western gender theory’s latest findings, which would be enforced by elite special forces units trained by American officers and loyal to the central government in Kabul.

These elements of the Afghani dream-state were part of a bespoke tapestry spun out by and for the policy establishment and Beltway defense contractors, NGO workers, think tank experts, and the rest of the client state. So long as everyone was getting paid, the mirage never hurt anyone — unless your child happened to subscribe to the fiction and put his or her life in danger either in uniform or as an aid worker. But now, the dream palace has burned to the ground, and as the smoke clears no one can mistake the fact that authentic Afghanistan is in the hands of the Taliban.

Bennett knows it would be more polite to nod along meaningfully with his hosts and that he’d insult them by explaining Palestinian statehood is a hallucination on the level of Afghani democracy. Speaking up, however, would nonetheless help safeguard the interests of his own country, while winning the favor of an American public that has seen their elites throw away the lives of thousands of the country’s most high-spirited and honorable young men and women to satisfy their whimsy.

Someone has to say something or else someday soon, the world will wake up to find that the Americans are no longer rich, and no longer capable of writing checks to flatter the vanity of an establishment that can’t distinguish reality from fiction. And maybe Bennett will be the man to shake their senses by simply stating the obvious ­— like the two-decade long effort to stand up democracy in Afghanistan, throwing lives and money at a future Palestinian state is a fools’ errand.

Bennett wouldn’t be the first to make the connection between the Palestinians and Afghanistan. In 2013, former secretary of state John Kerry gave evidence that the US establishment saw the two deadly fantasies as linked. He invited Bennett’s predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu “on a secret visit to Afghanistan to see, in his words, how the US established a local military force that can stand up to terror on its own.” The message, Netanyahu said in a recent Facebook post, was clear: Kerry thought that the model the US employed for Afghanistan would work for the Palestinians, too.

What the polio vaccines can teach us about the COVID ones By Peter Skurkiss

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/what_the_polio_vaccines_can_teach_us_about_the_covid_ones.html

Prior to the 1950s, paralytic polio was a scourge. FDR was crippled from it in while in his 30s, the March of Dimes was started to combat it, and photos of rows and rows of children in iron lungs were common in the media. And from this situation, vaccines were developed to combat the disease.

Polio is caused by one of three types of poliovirus that can cause paralysis and death. In the 1950s, two vaccines were independently developed to combat it, one by Jonas Salk and the other Albert Sabin. Polio was eradicated, and today those vaccines are thought of as miracle drugs. But were they?

In the early 1950s, Salk was the first to come out with a vaccine. His was designed to treat all three polio viruses at once. His approach seemed basic enough. It was to grow polioviruses in the lab, kill them, and then inject healthy children with the dead viruses. The idea was that the dead viruses could not reproduce, so they could not harm the children. The children’s immune system, however, would detect the the injected viruses and produce effective antibodies against it, thus creating immunity against polio. .

Just prior to beginning mass inoculations, samples of the Salk vaccine were sent to to National Institutes of Health (NIH) for safety testing. 

There, when bacteriologist Dr. Bernice Eddy injected the vaccine into her monkeys, some of them fell down paralyzed. She concluded that the virus was not entirely dead as promised. Instead the virus was active and could reproduce in its host. Eddy sounded the alarm and presented her findings. A  debate ensured in the corridors of power. Advocates for caution were overruled. and the mass inoculation proceeded on schedule. 

The inoculation of children began in 1955. Within days, some injected children were coming down with polio. Some were even spreading the disease to family members. Subsequent investigations determined that the vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis, and ten dead. Alton Ochsner, a professor of surgery at Tulane Medical School, was such a strong proponent of proceeding with the inoculation program that he gave vaccine injections to his grandchildren to prove it was safe. Sadly, Ochsner’s grandson died from polio a few months later, and his granddaughter contracted polio but survived. 

This fiasco has become known as the Cutter incident.  It’s named after the manufacturer of the vaccine. The vaccine was recalled and retested for safety, but the damage had already been done in the mind of the public. Let’s continue onto the second version of the polio vaccine, the Sabin.  

Heads Up, Jew-Haters! Don’t Take This Medicine! By Joan Swirsky *****

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/heads_up_jewhaters_dont_take_this_medicine.html

Maybe I don’t frequent the right journals, internet sites, TV shows, or radio stations, because all I’ve seen and read and heard since the 1960s is that the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” — you know, those perpetual “victims” who have received literally billions — maybe trillions — in “aid” from America — have become famous for a few things only:

Building tunnels in which to store arms and bombs to kill Jews,
Launching balloons of fire into Israel to kill Jews,
Spreading lies and calumny through the craven mass and social media to vilify Jews,
Conducting “honor killings” of their teenage daughters,

What I’ve never seen or read or heard is that the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” have done one single solitary thing to benefit mankind.  Their singular obsession has been to annihilate the Big Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel.

Let’s Talk Numbers

Christianity and Islam are the two largest religions in the world, with 2.4 billion and 1.9 billion adherents, respectively — literally half the people on our Earth of about 7.8 billion.

In stark contrast, Judaism comprises 15 million people, about eight million in Israel, about six million in the United States, and about one million scattered throughout the world.