Whose Fault Is It?

 

It's August 31st, 2021.  The last USAF plane has left Kabul — that is, the last USAF plane that wasn't abandoned in our rush to be gone by Biden's deadline.  There also seems to have been a fair few American civilians left behind.  Whether they chose to remain behind or were simply unable to get to the airport in time is as yet insufficiently clear.  Also left behind, apparently, are a large number of Afghans who served as interpreters during the occupation, even though they are at serious risk of Taliban retaliation.

There are rumors that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unvetted refugees made it onto airplanes to be whisked away to centers of Afghan immigration like Wisconsin.  One YouTube video claims that the U.S. State Department emailed blank visas, presumably to vetted addressees, with instructions to "fill them out and bring them with you to the airport".  A blank form such as that can be replicated easily and filled out by others who (presumably) have not yet been vetted.  Beyond that, the roads leading to the airport were by then under the control of the Taliban, and it is not guaranteed that everyone who ought to have been admitted to the airport actually got close enough for that to happen.  It also appears that something like $83 billion (with a 'b') worth of planes, helicopters, armored vehicles, and other weapons (including over 350,000 M-16s and ammunition) were left behind at Bagram airbase.

Clearly, this pull-out was bungled in a way that has no immediately-comparable example in our experience.  Why?

People of all stripes are asking piercing questions like:  "What level of military expertise is required for a leader to understand that the order of evacuation has to be (a) civilians first, (b) expensive and/or militarily-sensitive equipment next, and (c) military last ?"  And if the leader doesn't have that kind of military expertise, isn't there someone close by who does have it?

FOX News and Republicans in general are blaming this incredible series of fuck-ups (sorry, there's just no pleasant way to say it) on Biden, and Democrats while CNN and MSNBC are pointing their fingers at Donald Trump.

Well, whose fault is it?

The Democrats shrug and say "that's the evacuation plan Trump left us with!" and expect everyone to shrug along with them.  But Biden, on his first half-day in office, signed 40 Executive Orders undoing many acts of the previous President.  Is it possible that in the seven months since, no one at the Pentagon pointed out the error in Trump's horrible plan?  No, it's not possible.  If that were Trump's plan, it would have been changed as easily as those 40 EOs.  Therefore, the plan we witnessed being executed in the last two weeks was not Trump's plan; it was Biden's plan, either because he changed Trump's plan or because he didn't.

This was Biden's fault.  The buck stops there.

 

How To Drain A Swamp

 

There has been considerable blather since... oh, around mid-2016 or so... about when Donald Trump announced he was interested in becoming President of the United States... about how he would 'drain the swamp'.  That didn't happen to anything like the extent most of his supporters expected it would, and it might be instructive to ask why those exalted expectations never seemed to come to pass.

 

A new President coming into office typically receives the resignations of all political appointees of the prior administration.  Often, this includes the Directors of FBI, NSA, and CIA, but not always.  A newly-elected President who really wants to drain the DC swamp will signal that resolve by immediately accepting those proffered resignations — and summarily dismissing any who do not resign — and then cancelling the security clearances for all those persons.  Given the atrocious condition of the military currently, several high-ranking flag officers should likewise be relieved of command and separated from the service.

All such persons, military and civilian, should be relieved of their passports.  Why their passports?  Because a President, the head of the Executive Branch, also heads the Justice Department that would be potentially prosecuting other heads-of-departments (possibly including the DoJ itself), and it is necessary that those high-ranking (and therefore wealthy) defendants not be able to flee the jurisdiction.  The President also heads the Department of State that owns those passports.  The President is thus entitled to recover State Department property. 

That's insufficient, unfortunately.  The next three (at least) management levels below those Directors need to be furloughed.  They may not be able to be fired outright if they are 'civil service', but they can be placed on administrative leave, minus their security clearances, pending an investigation to determine if they are safe to have in sensitive positions.  The personnel remaining will be charged with operating their functions without the encumbrance of the upper echelons.  It strains credulity to wonder if those organizations cannot function effectively when run by the people who actually run them day-to-day.

Such actions following hot on the heels of Inauguration would send tremors through the halls of Congress.  There are — I have not the slightest doubt — many Congressional staffers who, seeing U.S.Marshals and State Department functionaries stripping the highest ranks of DC Officialdom of their badges of office, would begin to consider 'turning state's evidence' before it was too late.  A President truly set on draining the DC swamp would only need one or two such turncoats, and even the New York Times could not decline to publish the news of the forthcoming indictments.

All that is needed is a President who doesn't care that somebody who hasn't yet been sufficiently neutralized is going to leak pictures 'in bed with a dead girl or a live boy', as one unfortunately forgotten wag once predicted.

Does such a person exist?