It’s after Christmas, and once again, we were treated to images of a President serving Holiday Meals to our Service Men and Women in harm’s way overseas.
Oh.
Wait a minute...
No we weren’t.
For the first time in 20 years, the United States does not have our military stationed on the front lines of the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We all know that Biden back in April decided to honor the Trump timeline for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by September of 2021. What followed next, as Josh Marshall succinctly notes, only reaffirmed to the still wavering that Biden’s decision was correct; the surprisingly rapid collapse of Afghanistan after 20 years and billions of dollars demonstrated the futility of the effort all along. A stable Afghanistan was all a charade, a Potemkin Village for our foreign policy establishment. The DC Press, now exposed on their nation building flank, escalated to peak screech -- how dare Biden take their forever war away from them!
The withdrawal from Afghanistan marked an inflection point in Beltway Media’s attitude towards President Biden. Negative stories increased, and poll numbers decreased. Because yes, a not insignificant number of democratic and democratic-leaning independent voters consume copious amounts of legacy media and form their opinions based on the attitudes of said media. The US then began the Kabul airlift, rescuing almost 130,000 people. It was a feat of logistics and stamina, and one of the largest airlifts in history. But the damage to President Biden’s poll numbers and standing with the establishment was done.
* * *
President Biden has a surprising number of accomplishments in his first year, considering the almost nonexistent majorities Democrats hold in both houses. From a memo sent to Axios, (plus adding in some of my own)
- 490 million vaccine dosages.
- Vaccination Rate up from < 1% to 71%
- Schools open up from 46% to > 99%
- 6 Million new jobs, the most of any President in the first year.
- Unemployment down from 6.3% to 4.2%
- Lowest unemployment claims since 1969
- Pass the American Rescue Plan (remember that one?)
- Pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan (it was finally infrastructure week)
- No other G7 country had reached pre-pandemic output by end of 3Q 2021
- 40 Federal Judges appointed by Biden (And 80% of those confirmed judges are women, with 53% being people of color)
But the memo from Axios, and the White House, often seem to leave a big one out…
How about also… ending the forever war?
* * *
Drone warfare was a major topic here during the Obama Administration. A whole cadre of antiwar leftists took to to the Internet to protest the Obama Administration’s use of drone warfare, which, for the record, I supported at the time. I remember visiting the University of Connecticut Campus in winter of 2013, to find a large snow mural of a drone and ‘OBOMBA’ written above it.
Forever War was a major issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. Here is Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Trump (maybe. it’s hard to tell with him) supported withdrawal as well, not because it was the right thing to do, but because it’s what Vladimir Putin and our enemies wanted. But public sentiment had turned against the War in Afghanistan long ago, and this led people (supposedly) on the left to do and say very stupid things.
* * *
The attractiveness of ending the forever war overwhelmed our journobro better collective judgment in the 2016 election.
Yes, Chris Hayes has not deleted that tweet. And of course, who can forget:
We even had a liberal case for Donald Trump published in Salon during the run up to the 2016. So ending the forever war was clearly very important to a lot of people.
* * *
Fast forward to April of 2021, and Biden agreed to adhere to the withdrawal timeline that Trump negotiated with the Taliban. A whopping 73% of Americans still agreed that the US should withdraw from Afghanistan. You can’t get 73% of Americans to agree on anything! 73% of Americans probably don’t even believe kittens are good. And the polling was consistent through the spring and summer. Even after the establishment media shifted into peak screech, a majority still supported the decision. And… no one is talking about it.
Mainstream left journalists have memory holed the cessation of the drone war. Ryan Cooper says that the Biden Administration should be talking more about it.
The silence from the mainstream media is understandable if indefensible, since talking about how Afghanistan folded so quickly after 20 years and $5.8 Trillion might force the media to reckon with their uncritical support for war dating back to the Bush Administration.
* * *
The most startling silence has been from the antiwar left. You know, the people who campaigned most fervently against ending the forever war? The people most vocal here in the Obama Administration about drones?
What of the Greenwalds, Glenn-derivatives, and the antiwar left? What of the Intercept? You would think these outlets would be hailing President Biden as a hero for achieving everything they claimed they wanted.
I wish I could have a plot of the stores, posts, and/or tweets about drones versus time, showing a precipitous dropoff once Obama left office, despite the increase in civilian deaths under the supposed antiwar Trump.
Sure there is mistrust of President Biden among antiwar activists, the feeling that he would start another war if necessary. But I suspect that what I’ve identified here as an antiwar left sentiment was really just overlapping anti-Americanism. Is President Biden really an anti-interventionist? I don’t know. But he is not anti-American.
* * *
Which brings me back to the overwhelming popularity of withdrawal. Politicians respond to popular sentiment. Sure, that sentiment can be corrupted and blunted by media and think tanks. Many times public opinion polling is highly misleading. Politicians may be swayed by what they feel is right even if it is unpopular. But withdrawal from Afghanistan was overwhelmingly popular, and had been, and events at the end reaffirm that it was the correct decision. If people truly believe in anti-interventionism, why would we not celebrate the single biggest strike against global interventionism in the post World War II Era? It seems like the best way not to dissuade the next politician from starting a needless war is to ignore when the current politician makes the difficult decision to end an unpopular one. President Biden made the difficult decision, took the hit in the polls, and … everyone who says they cared about ending wars went silent.