Lucas: Biden needs to answer for mistakes in Afghanistan

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

That is what anti-Vietnam War veteran John F. Kerry asked President Richard Nixon in 1971 at a Washington hearing on the gut-wrenching Vietnam War.

Maybe now, in the wake of the disaster in Afghanistan, Kerry could pose the same question to his friend President Joe Biden.

He could ask, “Joe, how did you ask 13 young men and women to die at the Kabul airport for your mistake?”

Biden needs to answer. He has willingly committed one of the biggest blunders in U.S. foreign policy history.

And while Kerry has the bonafides to ask, he won’t. He is not only a former secretary of state, who is now Biden’s climate change czar, but a former Democrat-endorsed candidate for president.

As a U.S senator, he served with Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and succeeded Biden as chairman when Biden became vice president. He is part of the Biden team

So, it will be up to a reporter or a Congressman to ask.

The questions raised by Kerry at that long ago hearing are as relevant today as they were back then.

In fact, Biden should have been asked that question 13 times by the parents and loved ones of those fallen troops when their caskets holding their remains arrived at Dover Air Force base in Delaware on Sunday.

All of them were killed as a result of of Biden’s incompetence and what almost amounts to criminal negligence. They did not need to die.

What is galling is that Biden and his generals, cabinet officials and advisers continue to twist and bend the truth in an attempt, through doublespeak, to talk their way out of accountability for the ill-planned, precipitous and deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

For instance, an ordinary American G.I., assigned a weapon, would be brought up in charges if he somehow lost it.

A president and his generals can lose control of a country, let loose thousands of ISIS terrorists, hand over billions in U.S weapons to Taliban terrorists, funnel U.S. troops into a kill zone, suffer 13 soldiers unnecessary killed, abandon stranded Americans and no one is held responsible — not the president, nor any of his generals and top advisers. No one.

And they are all complicit in the death and disaster at Kabul. And it was all done to fulfill an arbitrary, politically motivated evacuation deadline that easily could have been extended

There is so much doubletalk common out of Biden and these people that the American people to begin with cannot even find out who is responsible for abandoning the Bagram air base in the middle of the night, which led to the release of 5,000 terrorists from prison.

Here is what else Kerry said that applies today: “We are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?”

“Where are they now that we, the men they sent of to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war.”

Not only did Biden and his generals fail the troops, they failed hundreds of Americans left behind to become hostages of the Taliban if they are not first killed by ISIS terrorists.

This does not take into account the thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. who Biden and his generals also abandoned.

Kerry was praised as a hero back then for going after Nixon, a Republican president, even though the Vietnam War began under President John Kennedy and was greatly accelerated by Lyndon B. Johnson, both Democrats.

And while the speech resonated back then, Kerry would not dare make it now, even though it applies. He and his Democrat colleagues are in charge of the country.

Forget the politicians, most of whom are hollow vessels anyway. It is up to the parents, wives, brothers and sisters of those slain soldiers, as well as all the veterans who served with honor, to hold Biden and his generals and advisers responsible.

If Biden had an ounce of the courage shown by those dead troopers he would admit his mistake and ask forgiveness.

Mr. President, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/38oxSQQ