Mark Steyn observes that the astonishingly rapid victory of the Taliban may be the Imperial USA’s Suez moment and that the scale of the global humiliation is almost off the charts.
The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians …as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).
On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.
But don’t for a moment think this is just some rushed, bungled, memo-incinerating abandonment of the US embassy. State Department diplomats have been preparing this move all summer, under cover of a highly sophisticated deflection operation on their Kabul Twitter feed:
The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society. We remain committed to supporting civil rights of minorities, including LGBTI persons. #Pride2021 #PrideMonth
I do hope they’ve managed to evacuate the embassy’s LGBTQWERTY flag before the sacking commences.
America is not “too big to fail”: It’s failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we’re Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?
In other words, is this not merely a humiliation but America’s Suez moment? In my bestseller After America, I recalled a long-ago conversation with the Countess of Avon (Clarissa Churchill, Winston’s niece, widow of the then prime minister Anthony Eden – and still with us at the splendid age of 101). Somewhere along the way, Lady Avon observed ruefully that the eight days of the Suez crisis in late 1956 marked the great divide between the words “British Empire” being still taken seriously and their being a sneering punchline.
The last eight days may well do the same for the term “global superpower”.
Steyn alludes to, but avoids stating, what is entirely obvious to any historically literate observer. This catastrophic defeat was the neoclowns’ war. This was not America’s failure, it was the failure of the self-styled “national security right” who flattered themselves into believing that they dictated reality with their words. Afghanistan is the neocons’ failure. It is AIPAC’s failure. Genuine Americans never wanted, supported, or endorsed the concept of an empire in the Middle East.
To quote one veteran who served in it: “My friends died for nothing. My soldiers died for nothing. I served for nothing. And the communists took over at home.”
Adolf Hitler erroneously blamed the Jews for the German defeat in WWI. He was wrong to do so because Germany never had any chance of winning that two-front war even before the USA got involved. But anyone in the future who wants to blame those whom Steyn euphemistically labels “the national security right” for the US defeats in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan will be absolutely correct. This was Bill Kristol’s war. This was Max Boot’s war. This was Michael Ledeen’s war. This was Jennifer Rubin’s war. This was Ben Shapiro’s war.
Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.
– Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 11, 2005
And no American should ever forget that. These second- and third-generation immigrants have systematically labored to destroy what was once, briefly, the greatest nation on Earth. Now, imagine how much worse the situation would be today if they had gotten their way and US troops were also trapped in Iran and Syria and Pakistan and Ukraine.
But their time is passing. Their failure is inevitable. Those who corrode and corrupt their way to influence and power will never be able to hold on to their positions, because with power comes responsibility and neither corrosion nor corruption are capable of serving as a foundation for building anything but chaos and Hell on Earth.