There’s the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs,” but the real war our leaders fight with any perspicacity is the “War on Truth,” second only to that even older, perhaps oldest, and most crucial of all: wars known colloquially as CYA.
The latter is fought to the bitter end and takes precedence.
We find this on display frequently in Washington, and Sept. 28 was no exception.
During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie both insisted, under oath, that they had advised against President Joe Biden’s precipitous and, to be as polite as humanly possible, ill-conceived exit plan from Afghanistan.
Milley said he urged Biden to leave 2,500 troops in place. That would have left enough military to guard the Bagram airbase and prevent it from becoming the staging area for the Chinese air force it likely will become.
They also would have been able to arrange for either the destruction or the recovering of the $80 billion-plus of U.S. weaponry, much of it high-tech, now in Taliban (and therefore Chinese, Russian, and Iranian) hands.
It goes without saying that, most importantly, an operable Bagram could have saved myriad lives, American and Afghan, and would continue to do so.
President Joe Biden denied hearing any of this. Or, more precisely, he didn’t recall hearing this.
The real question is, was he lying? Most likely, yes. From law school onward, he has plagiarized and lied multiple times. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, as they say.
But there are other possibilities.
One is that Biden’s cognitive issues are so severe that he couldn’t understand or actually allow himself to hear what the generals were advising. He had been so completely locked into an idée fixe of getting out of Afghanistan on whatever schedule he thought politically useful (Sept. 11?) that nothing permeated.
A yet more disturbing alternative is that he was counseled against the generals’ view by some of his own advisers. Normally, that would make little sense, considering the disaster that occurred, but many actions of the Biden administration can be read as being against the long-term interests of the United States, actually weakening it deliberately, and in favor of the globalists or the Chinese communists, assuming they are not, in reality, one and the same.
The recent indictments and leaks from the Durham investigation lend credence to this possibility. Many of the officials in the Biden administration, in the State Department and elsewhere, are holdovers from the Obama administration, just in different positions as if reseated in a game of musical chairs.
How many of these people really want a strong U.S. military in a position to be guardians of the free world as it has been for decades? Wouldn’t they prefer it to fall apart? It’s worth thinking about.
But enough “paranoid” speculation. What about the head man in this CYA fiesta, Gen. Milley?
When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). among others, asked Milley why he didn’t resign after the Afghanistan debacle, he replied as follows:
“Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing—it’s a political act—if I’m resigning in protest. My job is to provide advice—my statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president, and that’s my legal requirement.”
Perhaps the general has short-term memory loss.
No American general in this century has been more overtly “political” than he.
Has he forgotten that for some time he has been referred to as the “woke” general?
Nothing is more political than “woke.” Indeed, that is its intention, to turn everything in our lives into politics—the food we eat, the air we breathe, our educational system, our entertainment, our press, who gets a job, who gets promoted, who appears in a commercial, who goes to a restaurant, what we can say on social media, who’s skin color is best, who’s the biggest victim, what sex we declare ourselves to be, our pronouns and on and on.
He has, in effect, politicized the military that is supposed, for very good reason, including winning wars, to be neutral.
Also with good reason, we could dub him General “Woke.”
But now, all of a sudden, in Senate testimony, he self-righteously claims the military shouldn’t be politicized. He would never do such a thing.
Actually, his vision of politicization is, in itself, completely politicized. He wouldn’t resign from Biden, no matter what the issue, and the current one is unbelievably extreme, but could well have resigned from the Trump administration.
It wasn’t that long ago that he made a public apology for merely accompanying the then president to the torched St. John’s Church:
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Learn what exactly? That the chairman of the joint chiefs is a hypocrite? We certainly learned that.
During his questioning by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), we also learned Milley is a kind of creepy gossip who likes to make sure the likes of Bob Woodward know the general’s side of the story for the journalist’s forthcoming—is it fiction or nonfiction—bestseller. After all, General Woke’s legacy is in play.
I’m not going to go into the telephone calls to the Chinese general, interesting as that may be, because I suspect more facts will be coming out.
What I will say is that, as usual, “woke”—or in this case, General Woke—is the opposite of really woke. What business was it of his to supersede the commander-in-chief and telegraph our intentions to the enemy?
Milley seemed to think that was his job, that he was just being internationally “woke.” Many would disagree.
Yes, CYA trumped the War on Truth, as it almost always does, in Washington on Sept. 28.
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