The Culturalist: Afghanistan and Mr. Blame-Game

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Hello and welcome to the Culturalist, a part of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

The Culturalist is dedicated to the events and people past and present that have influenced the way we live and the things that we do.

Victor, the namesake of this show is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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The topic today is Afghanistan since we have a war going on.

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Welcome back.

And the topic today is a grim one since Afghanistan has sunk into war all so many times.

And actually we wanted to look at with you Victor today if we could the historical context of the current conflict, especially the problem that western and west westerners have had with Afghanistan from Alexander the Great to the British Empire in trying to control the region and have really essentially failed to do that.

Can you explain a little bit more about its historical context?

I mean, Alexander went in in the late 320s and he found immediately that while he could control the plains of Kabul and Kandahar, that the mountain people, in a cost-benefit analysis, they were unconquerable.

It didn't pay for the Macedonian phallics or the heavy cavalry to go up in the mountain pass.

And that didn't mean that they didn't find Afghanistan suitable.

You know, Afghanis today look, Afghans today look a lot like Macedonians in some sense.

So they were there for nearly 300 years, the successor kingdoms, but they passed on a tradition that in this wild part of the world, it was tribal and mountainous.

If a Westerner came in

to control the silk routes, Hindu Kush, entry into what was in India, then they had to control the plains.

And that's what the British Empire learned after, you know, in 1841, he was lower to Elphinstone, was wiped out.

A whole British and allied convoy, land convoy caravan was wiped out by tribesmen.

But after three Afghan wars, the British finally came to the conclusion they can control it in the sense of control of planes.

And they did not want Russia in there and they did not want people coming in behind them into India, which was you know, then Pakistan and India combined, the Punjab.

But there's a lot of of misconceptions about afghans they actually had the right to vote i think about 1964 before switzer did equal voting rights and then after world war one there was a monarchy that was pretty much stable and remember this was the great hippie stopping point from india to western europe route where you could go get high on hashish and live and let live.

So the hippies told us.

So it wasn't really till 1973 when the Soviets invaded and they learned the same lesson as the Macedonians and the British.

And I guess we're learning now that it doesn't pay to go into any rough ground in Afghanistan.

And it doesn't pay in a cost-benefit analysis usually to try to even control the planes.

You can do it, but at a cost that people feel it's not worth it.

And so we're left, I guess, with two schools of thought.

I would say about 55% of Americans think, you know what, we did 20 20 years in this damn place and we spent a trillion and a half dollars and we lost 2,500 dead Americans and probably three to four, 5,000 contractors and 50 to 60,000 of our Afghan allies.

And what did we get with it?

We got an enemy that dissipated within about five days.

And they just put their finger in the wind and they said, I'll take my chances with the pre-modern Taliban because they are likely, I'll have a better chance of not dying with them if I confess or turn informant or whatever it is or apologize than I will dying on the battlefield with the fickle Americans who are leaving in the dead of night from the background.

Then there's the other half, maybe 45% of Americans say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We have 150 installations worldwide.

Places we don't even know, North Africa, Somalia, Asia.

In Afghanistan, we haven't lost one soldier in 18 months.

And while we can't control the hills, these cities have been westernized.

And there's millions of people who are not wearing burkas and they're Western.

And if you haven't lost a soldier in 18 months, and you're controlling one of the biggest Arab bases in the Middle East, and you're doing it since Trump built down to 25,000, 3,000 troops.

You're doing it with air power largely and the protection of air power and contractors who are serving the air power of the Afghan national military.

why give it up?

Why give it up?

And I think that was a compelling argument.

And the Taliban could not take over the cities as long as we were willing to use air power in the way that we had bombed ISIS.

Well, Joe Biden came along and decided that he wasn't going to do that.

And he had very little empathy, by the way, for the Afghans.

So he said he was going to draw them out.

So everybody agrees on whichever side of the fence you were on, leave a small contingent or get out completely, that the withdrawal was a disaster.

Now, why was it a disaster?

One, you never, never take your military forces out before diplomatic and civilian forces.

And that's exactly what he did.

And in the middle of the night, we just pulled out a bag ramp.

Number two, why did we go in there in the first place?

It was not to rebuild Afghanistan to look like Haydasbury or the Upper West Side.

It was to stop it as a haven for terrorists.

And since we've been there, they have not used that to launch attacks on the United States.

Maybe it took us a while to find bin Laden, but nevertheless, that strategy worked.

That strategy is now inoperative.

There is no way in the world that we can stop Afghanistan from doing what they did prior to 9-11, and that is to offer themselves as a haven for every jihadist.

And we saw what happened in Syria when ISIS took over in their

briefly triumphant caliphate.

Every nut in Western Europe, every nut in Asia, every nut in Africa flocked into

and started a spiral of beheading and stoning and murder.

That's what's going to happen in Afghanistan.

And then, third, every army knows whether you're the Russians, the Russians left Russia, the Russians left Afghanistan in 1980 much better than we did.

They too lost, but when they got out, they got all their equipment, they got all their soldiers out, they got all their civilians out.

We did not yet.

And so we all know you don't leave sophisticated, we've left about 70 to 80 billion dollars, hundreds of thousands of automatic weapons, RPGs, Jeeps, Humvees, anti-aircraft, sophisticated airplanes, Apache helicopters, avionics, computers, drones.

So two things are going to happen.

One, that's going to be the international arms mark.

And so the Iranians, North Koreans, they're all going to come in, Russians, and look at this equipment.

And to the degree that it's not up to snuff, they're going to buy it and they're going to reverse engineer it.

And then secondly, they're going to sell this stuff all over Africa and Asia and Latin America to terrorists.

And third,

if you want to go to Afghanistan, just get on a ticket and go because they have enough weapons to equip you.

and equip you better than they ever have in their entire history.

And so that third reason was a reason why this was a botch thing.

And then fourth, this administration doesn't care about its own people.

It has said that when asked why are there somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000, I say somewhere because they don't know how many people.

They said, well, we announced that

they could get out,

but they chose not to get out.

I think Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Anthony Blinken, said that.

That was a bald-faced lie in the sense that when you told them that, you didn't tell them that within about a few days, days the whole country was going to collapse.

You told them just the opposite, as General Milley said, there is no evidence it's going to collapse.

And so that was so disingenuous.

It really showed that, you know, they don't have a lot of care for how the Americans are going to go.

Now it's everybody for themselves.

Do you think the administration deliberately let these things happen?

Because it seems to me any administration would want to get out their Americans and then the people that helped them first, especially after vietnam and those scenes on the helicopters

this administration is not empirical now what does that mean fancy word it means they do not look at facts and you can see it on the southern border people warned them they said if you tell everybody that you're ending catch and release if you tell everybody you're welcome to come if you tell everybody that you're going to get amnesty.

If you tell everybody you will be caught, released, but you won't be detained very long, then you're going to get a stampede.

They didn't believe that.

They thought, you know what, we'll get about 10,000 a month, and these will be future constituents.

And then when it started, some people within it said, wow, 2 million new voters in 10 years and they're kids.

So they didn't care.

They're incompetent and they're anti-empirical and they're callous.

So that same mentality, and we see it reflected the same thing with energy.

Let's cancel ANWAR.

Let's cancel the Keystone Pipeline.

Let's tell frackers that they'll be out of business in 10 years.

Let's demonize Saudi Arabia.

Oh, by the way, pent-up demand, lockdowns sorting to ease a bit, people driving.

We need oil.

Where did the 3 million barrels go?

What do we do?

Let's go beg Saudi Arabia that we just demonized to pump more oil for us that we can borrow money to buy.

That's how they think.

Yeah, so you're saying their policies don't have the interests of the people in mind and they're either delusional or they're they just simply

care about it an elite therapeutic left-wing view of the world.

And what I mean by that is they think, hmm, just as Barack Obama said he got everybody out of Iraq, parentheses, yeah, he did, but he created ISIS and he got a lot of people killed that had he left three or four or five thousand as Biden should have done, we wouldn't have had that whole mess.

But nevertheless, Joe Biden says, I'm going to be the guy who got everybody out of afghanistan if it goes bad i'm going to do what joe biden always does and he has it down pretty well you got to give him credit he gets this kind of grim look and he kind of has this senile screaming at the microphone and he says the bucks stops with me i take the credit and then he says hmm let's tick off the people i'm going to blame barack obama yeah i was vice president and i said you know what don't surge troops in afghanistan it's his fault and then he said hmm donald trump he de-escalated.

He doesn't tell you that when he came into office, there hadn't been anybody killed, as I said, in about a year at that time.

And we had more NATO troops, about 8,000 than we did Americans.

And it was stable.

But we'll blame Donald Trump.

Well, then, let's, that's not enough.

Let's just blame the Afghans, 65,000 dead.

And then they didn't fight.

They just, you know, they're not going to, they're never going to work.

It's never going to fight.

That was the saddest speech I ever saw a president give.

I couldn't believe it.

In my lifetime, I've listened to 13 of them, starting starting with JFK.

In fact, when I was six years old, I can remember watching Dwight Eisenhower.

That was the most pathetic speech.

He came in from vacation.

He was pissed off that he had to leave his vacation.

He gave it and he took no answers.

He yelled, he lied, and then they got so angry at him.

And by the way, CNN, MSNBC, the network news, PBS, NPR, they're thinking, hmm.

We created this illusion, this Frankenstinian monster, that Joe Biden was competent and compos mentes he's not the guy is totally crazy he's senile and now we're struck and people are blaming us so you know what we're going to do we're going to attack him and that's what they're doing and they're saying oh my gosh he doesn't care about poor afghans oh my gosh he's contradicted himself they ask him george stepanopoul said to him well why are people falling on planes well that was five days ago Well, what if it was a year ago?

They're still falling off planes.

They're dead, dead, dead.

In fact, it was two days ago.

He can't open his mouth without saying something that's not true.

And then the media who told us that Donald Trump's exaggerations were pathological lies says nothing.

Okay, so that's where we are.

And what's the future, as I said?

The immediate future,

I should say the long-term future, is a arms depot for the world's terrorists.

It's a haven for the world's terrorists.

It's greenlighting China.

North Korea, Iran, and Russia to say, you know what, if you've got a problem with the former Soviet Republic, if you've got a problem with Taiwan, if you've got a problem with Israel, you've got a problem with Japan or South Korea, you can take a few more risks because,

and I'm quoting an article almost verbatim today from a Chinese news source where they said to the Taiwanese, you better

be very careful because those Americans are going to leave you just like they did in Afghanistan.

So people are going to take risks they otherwise won't.

In the very short term, so Samia, what are we going to do?

We got 10.

Nobody knows how many Americans are there.

So he says, well, they get out on August 31st.

Tell me how they get out.

It just seems like everything that we saw with the Soviet Union after 10 years in Afghanistan in the 1980s and they pulled out.

But with the Soviets, they absolutely destroyed that country.

They basically blew it back to the Middle Ages.

The United States at least had engaged in some building

because we spent a lot more money.

We were there twice as long.

We tried tried to be humanitarian in the end with a much more humiliating lurch.

Yeah, and then

they said, screw you, we're done.

Bye.

Yeah, but the consequences were extraordinary for the Soviet Union because that was right at the break.

I mean, that was part of the breakup.

So I'm just curious.

I mean, we may be at some historical turning point here, don't you think?

Well, domestically, this is not an isolation.

This confirms the chaos and incompetence at the border.

2 million expected to cross illegally in the fiscal year.

It confirms the critical race woke madness.

It confirms the crazy energy problem where we warred on fossil fuels in seven months and went from being energy independent to a net importer again.

It confirms as well the whole AOC Green Deal madness.

It confirms the inflation.

It confirms the spike in crime.

So yes.

Yes, but it multiplies all that.

So it gives, if we looked at Joe Biden's, he's dropped seven to 10 points in the polls.

He's inert right now.

He's inert.

And there are people now calling for his impeachment in the Republican Party, and there is gossip and back talking in the Democratic Party.

As bad as Camilla Harris is, she's more presentable even with her cackles on TV than Joe Biden is because he's deteriorating at a geometric rate and he's going to take down every damn congressman in the midterm.

So if you're you're a Democratic congressman and about two-thirds are in districts that could be won by Republicans, what do you do today?

I really support our president.

No, you don't.

You distance yourself from him as much as you can.

And that's what they're doing now.

They're trying to recalibrate and

erase their Twitter accounts and say, I don't like what's going on.

And so he's in nerve.

He's lucky he got that infrastructure bill.

Now, stupid Republicans allowed that to happen, but had they just waited a week, they would have never got it through right now.

So I hate to ask this because maybe you won't be ready to say it yet.

So do you anticipate the Republicans taking back the House?

Yeah, I think they're going to take it back with 60 to 70 seats at least.

And then I think they have a 60-40 chance of winning the Senate by a couple of Senate seats if they're smart.

I think they will be.

And what is Joe Biden, though, getting back that question?

So he says, nobody's died, but now he's got 6,000, not 2,500.

Remember, 2,500 were there and he had airplanes and he had $60 billion of hundreds of thousands of weapons, hundreds of thousands.

And the Americans had them and they were servicing them and letting the Afghan army, as he said, 300,000.

He didn't have that now.

They have that.

And now to get back, we're going to have to triple almost.

the force that we had and we drove out our own allies.

The 8,000 Europeans are not there.

They're leaving too.

Why wouldn't you?

We're supposed to be the head of NATO, and we cut out in the night and leave them hanging.

They said, not us.

And this is Joe Biden, who was the great bridge builder.

We're back, America.

He said, we're back with NATO.

It's the whole thing is so depressing because it's based on just a whole structure of lies.

So now, what is he going to do?

People can't get to the airport.

Is he going to get a bunch of Marines and make a corridor?

I would, and say, you know what, along this road, you've got to back off, Taliban.

And what would happen if he said that?

Well, now, since he's lost deterrence, they would probably snipe and shoot Marines.

Then what would he do?

Would he go?

He should say, if you shoot a Marine, I'm going to take out all the supply lines from Pakistan to you.

I'm going to destroy all of your arms caravan.

I don't know if it'd do any good now that they have all of our arms.

But can I ask you?

He's not going to do that at all.

It's not going to escalate.

And he's

out.

So these people are going to do things that we can't believe.

Don't you think they are negotiating behind the scenes right now, though, with the Taliban?

Of course they are.

And the Taliban are saying to themselves, yes, yes, women have perfect rights.

And then they covered from head to toe.

Yes, yes, we would never stone.

They just stomped one to death on

YouTube today.

Yes, yes, it's wonderful.

We're going to negotiate with you.

And it's like saying to Hitler after he gobbled up Poland and Norway and Denmark and Belgium and France, we demand, Herr Hitler, that you respect the rights of minorities and women and Jews in all of Western Europe, or

we're going to drop more leaflets on you.

And that's kind of what we're doing.

You know, Wendy Sherman said, this is personal, Deputy Secretary, this is personal.

What does that mean, Wendy?

I'm for women.

This is personal.

Okay.

I'm sure that...

Mullah Omar's son and the person that we traded over to him to get that traitor Bo Bergdahl, right?

Remember when Susan Rice said, you served dutifully and bravely on the battlefield.

We gave the number two guy in Afghanistan, and lo and behold, he turns up on TV in the presidential palace.

I'm sure they're saying right now, hmm, gosh, we've got to be careful because Susan Rice told us, you know, she was pretty tough then.

Now she's replaced by the UN ambassador, that American woman, and that other Wendy Sherman woman, and that Jake Sullivan guy, and Anthony Bladen, and Ned Chance, and the State Department spokesman.

These are a rough and tumble bunch because all they do is lecture from impotence.

They've been militarily defeated.

They have zero leverage.

And now they're trying to beg and get these people out.

And what I'm getting at is the Afghans like hostages.

We learned that from Bergdahl.

So they're saying if we got our number two guy from them giving up a traitor, they're thinking to themselves, the guy was a traitor, we would have shot him.

But they made him into a hero when his father did that little mumbo jumbo talk you know in i don't know afghan and they all thought he was so cool and they brought him back and susan rice lied and lied and lied about him we got americans wounded trying to save him

back on they know that so they're thinking well why not take i don't know five ten twenty a thousand two thousand they can do that at their will and the only thing that would stop them is They might have some guy, you know, with a calculator who says, wait a minute, this is the money that we've already got from the Americans.

Let's just smile at him and have them give a few more billion dollars and we'll let them all go.

And then we'll just call it hostage taking.

And I think that's what will happen.

They'll put a price on everybody's head and say, okay, $10,000, maybe, I don't know, $10,000 per head, $10 billion.

Is that right?

That'd be fun.

Yeah,

this American policy is just a disaster, not just for Afghanistan, but it seems for the rest of the world.

Everywhere, and us psychologically, for Americans.

Because whatever your views of Afghanistan were, whether you thought that it was the nation building, if that's what you want to call it, was a disaster and the whole thing was ill-conceived and you're tired of Americans from Dayton, Ohio going over there and dying for what, or you felt, well, for all the disaster and misconceptions, we did control the cities and now we have an Air Force base that we can control and we can keep

10 million Afghans alive in the cities that never wanted the Afghans and 60,000 died because they didn't like the Taliban.

And we just, whatever your view, and we should have stayed there and controlled the airspace.

Whatever your views are, you're united that this is an absolute humiliation.

It's worse than, it is much worse than when Reagan pulled up everybody out of Lebanon after they blew up the Marines barracks.

It's much worse than the fall of the Shah and the humiliation of the hostages.

It's much worse than I remember when I was 23 and I was in college and I watched that horrific scene on the Saigon Embassy roof and these Americans were airlifting people out and people were hanging from the helicopter just like they did from that C-17.

And it was much more humiliating than that.

I can't think of anything more humiliating or dangerous because as I said,

this is now a shot of B-12 in the arm of every jihadist.

It's every arms merchant, every intelligence officer.

It's bad, bad, bad.

And so the administration lies about it.

It just, it irritates everybody so could i ask you then just one more question since we got to this so it seems like you know it's easy to critique ah we shouldn't be nation building or oh we shouldn't be isolationists what do you think would be a sound policy for an administration to have that's a question that

diplomacy yeah that has a question that can be interpreted two ways.

One is what should it have been from the beginning?

And what should it be at this late date, 20 years years later yeah so i'll take either answer yeah well i think from the beginning it was go in and decapitate the the taliban

and then make sure there's no al-qaeda terrorists kill bin laden if you can rid them of al-qaeda get about 5 000 troops occupy these bases and then cut deals with all the tribal leaders so that they keep the pashtun majority who were taliban out and we started to do that we did it very successfully for a year or two and then we decided and somebody came up with the idea, well,

why not get freedom of speech?

Why not give women the right to be equal in every way?

That's a natural inclination of an American.

Well, why not?

Why not?

Why not?

We ended up with a gay pride flag, which is nice.

I think that's great, right over Kabul University in a traditional pre-industrial, pre-modern society.

And so there was a lot of hubris there.

And then now, as I said earlier, since nobody that I know on the news is saying, get everybody out of Somalia, get everybody out of Kazakhstan, get everybody out of,

I don't know where they are, they're in Chad, they're everywhere all over the world, because they're not saying that because nobody's dying.

So if we have all that equipment and you built a billion dollar, billion dollar embassy, and you've got $70 billion of weaponry there, and all it takes is 25 to 3,000.

I say that because that's all it has has taken until Joe Biden came on the scene.

And nobody's died in 18 months.

Then why would you give all that up and get 10 million Afghans in danger that we're westernizing and get 10 to 12,000 Americans?

It makes no sense other than, as I said, their anti-empirical idol.

So it seems like you're saying that sound policy is to understand who our enemies are and deal with them to the extent we need to to serve national interests.

Yeah.

Other than that, stay out.

Well, I'm for women's rights and gay rights and all rights,

but I'm not going to yank some guy out of Bakersfield who's working on a tractor all day and say, hey, by the way, Jose, or some guy in Dayton, as I said earlier.

I don't know, Hillsdale, Michigan, and say in a warehouse and say, hey, bud, you guys get over to Afghanistan because they're treating women really bad over there.

You know, I just went to the store today and there were two women ahead of me.

I had no problem.

One had a halter top and you could argue that she had shorts on, but it seemed to me they were more like bikini bottoms.

And her boyfriend, there were two women and her boyfriend had no shirt on, covered with tattoos.

I wasn't offended, but I'm sure that traditional societies say, look at Americans.

They're half naked at stores.

We can't have that.

That encourages promiscuity and pornography.

So my point is within reasonable limits, we have to support human rights.

But when it gets to the point where we're going to Wendy Shermanize the world and say, this is personal with me, well, Wendy, what are you going to do?

Get an F-16, pilot Wendy Sherman, and go over there and do what?

Drop a bunch of napalm until they treat women right and they reinstitute gender studies at Kabul University or not, Wendy, and who else?

Anthony Blinken as her wingman and maybe Jake Sullivan in a tank below and they're all going to go in there and they're going to say, We're going to kill you unless you respect gay and women's rights.

It doesn't seem that's what they're saying.

They never say it that way, but that's what they're saying.

Final thing is, when you see Mark Milley and he says, I had no idea this was going on, and you see Austin, they ask him how many people are there.

Well, I don't know, really.

And they say, well, can we get them all out?

No, I don't think so.

We can't get them all out yet.

We don't have capability.

And you hear that they sent all these 6,000 troops and they're sleeping on the tarmac.

They only have this freeze-dried food.

And then you hear Joe Biden say, we had took every precaution.

And Anthony Blinkens said, we had been planned.

This is a complete lie.

So then the question is, what culture spawns these lives?

And I think the culture that spawns these lives is this New York, Washington, political, intelligence, industrial nexus.

And so we get these people above the rank of, I don't know, major or captain, and they go into the military at that point.

They stay in and they say, you know what, what, I'm going to get my PhD here, my MA here at Georgetown, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford.

And then I'm going to go serve in the Pentagon as a liaison to this, assistant deputy to that.

And then I'm going to do this and this.

And then I'm going to learn this culture.

And then I'm going to learn, you know what, just outwardly, you have to say, you know what, climate change.

Commander, that's what I'm for.

And then my resume doesn't say I put, you know, 100 out of 101 shells on the target, but it said I promoted X group and Y group.

And I had a new gender studies program in Germany when I was in our Chile command, all that stuff.

And then the demo, you go before Congress, if you're a one-star, two-star, you know, what if how many women are aircraft pilots?

And you tell them, you don't, they don't never ask the question, how many ties in your carrier group does it take to land the plane on the

flat top?

So, what I'm exaggerating and ranting, but my point is that we have created a culture where our top military officers, and planners, and diplomats, and CIA operatives are not being adjudicated on the actual job they do.

They're being adjudicated on their social woke credentials.

And they virtue signal.

And they do this because they want to be careerous, but more importantly, if you look where they come from, I haven't done it, but I've read about it.

If I were to look at the general, the Army Chief of Staff, the Marine Corps Commandant,

the Chief of Naval Operations, the members of the Joint Chiefs, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Secretary of Defense.

And I would say for the last 20 years, did any of them come out of the corporate boardroom and go right back in?

Yes.

And that means to me that while they're all bright people, you know, Northrop or Lockheed doesn't say to himself,

General Smith or Admiral Jones is just brilliant.

We've got to put him on this corporate board because he knows about what, no, they say General Smith or Admiral Jones knows the whole labyrinth of the Pentagon procurement system.

And he's got hundreds of people that look up for him.

So when they find him in the board and he makes a phone call, they're going to buy, you know, bomb X over Bomb Y.

And that's what they're doing.

And no one says a word.

And then when I look at James Clapper or John Brennan or any of these retired officers, and they go on CNN or MSNBC and they wink and nod and say, you know, I'm head of CIA, I was, and my sources, I can't disclose them, but I have confidential sources, meaning he he has a security clearance.

And this Russian hoax, this is not a hoax.

This is whistle, the walls are closing in.

There's another bombshell.

Or when they hunter laptops, hunter laptops, hunter laptop, that's what it was.

And they say, this is Russian disinformation.

Or Christopher Steele is a widely respected British intelligence officer.

And they lie.

And they lie for partisan.

ideological purposes and their network of friends.

And nobody says, you're not going to have a clearance.

Donald Trump said that to Brennan.

He should have stripped it from every single person that goes on there and mentions he has a security clearance.

It's retired.

Or when you say the Code of Mineral Uniform Code of Military Justice says that no active or no retired officer is currently under military pension, subject to recall in times of the national emergency, shall disparage the commander-in-chief, the vice president.

And these guys get on and say, Donald Trump canceled the subscription to the New York Times.

He's Mussolini.

Donald Trump built cages.

He didn't.

That was Obama.

He's just like the architects of Auschwitz.

Donald Trump, you know, he was the kind of guy that has Nazi tactics that we fought at D-Day.

He didn't.

He did not tell people to clear the grounds near the White House.

And he didn't have a photo op and he didn't use tear gas.

That's not me saying it's the inspector general of the interior department.

But all of these retired generals weigh in like that, dozens of them.

Admiral McRaven, you should be removed sooner than later.

We have election coming up, Admiral.

So they're all politicized and there's no consequences.

It's a joke.

That's illegal, apparently, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to do that, but nobody cares.

So I think we need to strip all of the security clearances.

We need to have a five-year cooling off period on corporate boards.

We need to enforce the tenets of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And then we need to tell people the military's business is to create deterrence and when attack, to retaliate and win a war.

And that's all it is.

And we don't go into the NBA and say, you know what, it doesn't look like America.

We don't do that because we want to watch the best athletes.

And we don't go into K-12 and say, there's not enough male teachers, women are overrepresented.

Or we don't go into the post office and say certain things, okay.

But so when you take this killing machine and you say, I'm going to design a suit for pregnancy, or I can tell you that women in frontline combat really don't need to lift weights at the same weight as their male counterparts.

Or, how dare you, you racist, sexist, to suggest that women in the green berets or special forces or rangers can't fight on the front lines just like anybody else.

So, that's got to end because our enemies, whether you like them or not, or you fear them or not, they don't do that.

And so, I think we're really destroying.

I'll just finish with this rant.

So, the number of people who were killed in Iraq by race, gender, class, if you look at the statistics, about 73 to 4% were white males of the middle class, and I think it was a little higher in Afghanistan.

Okay, so then you're General Milley and you're saying you're going to understand white rage and you're going to look out for out-right white people and then General Austin is going to put a hold on everything until he goes through all of the ranks.

And you're thinking, well, wait a minute, why would somebody do that?

Why would a family you know, in Tennessee of poor middle class or poor lower class white people who generation after generation after generation send their kids to the army or the marines, and they die inordinately because white males, after all, only make up 17, 16% of the population.

And they die, what, four times, five times of that number?

Why would they keep doing it if the army is blaming them for being racist and horrible people?

And more importantly, if you're going to go into proportional representation, And of course, General Milley and Secretary Austin can't open their mouths without saying, America's going to look like America.

Okay, well, do the dead look like America?

Is he going to say, you know what?

Guess what, Afghans?

We've got to hold back on the white male Marines.

And all you white males, just stand aside because we're going to get non-white males because they haven't died in sufficient percentages yet.

So when you white males, you're already hit your limit of 73%.

You're five times overrepresented.

Just as if the military hierarchy is overrepresented, the dead are overrepresented.

So we want a moratorium on white males in combat.

Step back and let Hispanics and Asians and Blacks get killed till they reach their numbers and the proportional numbers in the population and women too.

Is that what we want?

Because that's the logical insanity of what we're doing.

And so what I'm getting at is Afghanistan is not an outline or an artifact event.

It's a logical culmination and trajectory of where this politicized, careerless, monetized, military intelligence industrial complex would largely take us.

Until anybody has the guts to say that without being called a racist or a sexist or an alt-right or whatever terms of disparagement they use, we're never going to change it.

And so when I see General Milley up there and he lies and says,

I have to apologize to the American people for doing a foot-no, you don't.

Every single chairman of the Joint Chiefs does that.

And then another renowned general says, we don't want to militarize the military.

We're not going to serve Donald Trump's need to clear out the grounds near the White House.

I'm thinking, well, wait a minute, Colin Powell sent, what, 5,000 Marines to LA after the Rodney King and volunteered to use them?

And then after they tell you that, 30,000 of them go into Washington and bob wire because a bunch of idiots go in there and riot and desecrate the capitol, but they didn't kill anybody.

And yet we've turned Washington into a militarized camp by the very people who said you should never do that.

So this thing is corrupt from A to Z.

And we've got to really, all of us have to speak out against it and not worry when people call us names, because if we're going to lose a lot, we're not just going to lose these optional wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Lebanon.

We're going to lose big wars.

And I'm talking about China or North Korea.

And we're going to get tested pretty soon.

Yeah.

What is your estimate or what is your prediction of whether General Milley will be the fall guy or not?

Well, that's a good question because Joe Biden has already lied and said that none of his officers, that means the Joint Chiefs, advised him of the peril that they were in.

And then General Milley said he didn't see this coming.

That doesn't mean,

but

they are also leaking to the press.

It's a blame game, circular firing squad in Washington now.

The CIA and the generals are saying, we're not going to take the fall for this non-compost Mentes president.

And so they're leaking and say, yes, we did.

And they're leaking documents and statements.

And it's pretty clear they warned him, not when they should have, and they didn't resign when he didn't take their advice.

And they didn't argue with him.

But what I mean when they warned him, it would be sort of like me, Sammy, saying to you, say you want to go to the store right now.

and you're going to drive to the store and i say well you know i kind of think maybe a kind of sort of maybe there might be a a car jocker out there because I read about carjackers, but you know, it's up to you.

I don't know.

And then you get carjacked.

And I said, I told her she would be carjacked.

And she didn't listen to me.

That's the kind of post facto blame gaming they're doing.

And so all of them, because they're part of a culture.

And it's obscene to say, I want to win a war.

And I want to go in there and kill the most of the enemy to the extent that I can lose the fewest Americans and win our military objectives.

And I know know what those military objectives are and they're sound and logical.

And that's why we're going to do them.

They never say anything like that.

They talk in bureaucraties and gibberish.

We did this in World War II.

We said, we're going to bomb Europe with these 17s.

They're called the Flying Fortress.

We do not need fighter escort.

We do not need to go at night like the Brits.

We don't need to fly in twos and threes.

We're going to have a flying forces formation and we're going to end the war in 1942 or three.

We went over there in April and guess what?

40,000 Americans got killed.

And everybody who was telling us, whether it's Iri Eker or you name it, was wrong.

And then finally, we got other people in there.

And we got guys like Jimmy Doolittle with fighter escorts.

We got guys like Kurt LeMay.

Same thing in the B-29.

We're going to have the super fortress.

It's not like the B-17.

We're going to bomb.

Japan back in the Stone Age from India, from China, daylight, and we're going to go up from 30,000 feet.

It didn't work.

And then all of a sudden, they fired them all.

Usually they fired them in World War II.

And they said, Lloyd Friedenhall, go back and be a hero to America, but just get the hell out of the theater.

You screwed up the entire North Africa campaign.

You built a bunker.

You're a damn coward.

We should have never appointed you, but they said, Lloyd Friedenhall was a great commander.

He's going to go back and serve us equally well in the States.

And they got rid of him.

And then Patton came in.

And we know what happened when Patton came in.

So that's what we need to do.

So you really haven't answered my question, though, because you're, or you've answered it like this, that what I think is that there's going to be a fall guy.

I'm not really dead sure who it is.

And it may be Joe Biden himself.

It already is Joe Biden himself, because the more that he blames Barack Obama and Donald Trump and the Afghan army and his own intelligence officers, he creating.

a pretty big constituency that hates his damn guts because they don't feel that they were at fault.

They're all going to say, well, you can blame Trump, but when Trump left office, it was stable.

And he did de-escalate.

And there were fewer troops than when he started.

And it was stable.

And there were 8,000 NATO allies.

And you can blame Barack Obama for something that Biden said happened in 2009.

And people are going to say, hell, I can't even remember 2017.

What the hell happened in 2009?

And then you're going to blame the Afghans.

They're going to say, wait a minute, we got 60,000 dead.

How many did you lose?

So, and we didn't didn't like the Taliban, they took over our country, and we wanted to help you because we felt bad that they can say that if they want, I don't know if it's true or not, but that's what they can say logically.

So, he's blaming everybody, and they're all going to get together and say, You know what, you're senile.

And the media is going to say, You know what, we're sick of covering you.

Every time we cover for you and you lie for you, they take a hit.

And we've taken so many hits from your damn basement campaign and your stupid little asides and your

corn pop jokes and all of your racist comments and yelling at, hey, cokehead, hey, crackhead, hey, junkie, all that stuff, we're sick of.

We're not going to cover for you anymore.

And that's sort of, you know, the emperor has no clothes when that happens.

I think it's happening right now.

I think there's a 50-50 chance that Kamala Harris will be president within a year from now.

I find that quite frightening, but I think there's a 50-50 chance.

Yeah, so this Afghan war, the big historical change may be that it brings down a president, not just a general.

You know, when the Falklands war happened, and the British government, all of Thatcher's main advisors, foreign secretary, military, they came to her and said, you know, we know Argentina better than you do.

You just got here.

And there's no way in hell that the Argentines, A, would ever challenge the nuclear-powered British fleet.

And they have to have a fleet to get the hell over there.

And then they're a second-rate military power.

And so even though we don't have much out there, they would be stupid.

So don't worry about the Falcon.

And then they invaded.

And they not only invaded, they took over the island.

And they resigned.

Lord Carrington resigned.

He said, I gave advice.

It was wrong advice.

And it was influential advice.

And I'm responsible.

And so I would have a lot of admiration for General Austin and said, you know what?

You could say tomorrow, I know exactly why I'm going to resign.

I should have known exactly the number of Americans in Afghanistan.

I had no damn idea.

I should have had a plan just in case Joe Biden did not take my advice.

I should have had a contingency plan of how to get people out.

I didn't do that.

When we gave up Bagram Air Force Base, I should have sent in more troops.

And if I couldn't have done that, I should have resigned.

I didn't.

I'm sorry.

I'm resigning.

And General Milley and the whole Joint Chiefs should do the same.

And if there was any justice in the world, so would Jake Sullivan and Anthony Lincoln and just say the whole government is responsible for the worst humiliating and strategically consequential defeat in American history since, I guess, Pearl Harbor, or maybe it's hard to know when it's ever been the Hurricane Forest, maybe.

I don't know.

Bloodbath, the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, but somebody screwed up.

And we know who those somebodies are.

All they're doing now is virtue signaling.

Okay, Victor, I think we've better call this a day here.

I hate to stop you when you're on a roll, but I think we're at the end of our time.

I would like to remind people to come to victorhanson.com and see the new website to engage you on social media and that you have two other podcasts, one, the traditionalists, and the other one, the classicists, which you do with Jack Fowler.

I would just say in leaving that the reason I'm animated is I just can't get over the idea that there's 2,500 dead Americans and all those family members, their lives have been changed.

And there's another 20,000 wounded that were maimed and it all ended up like this and i'm not even talking about the afghans i've never heard of or never known but they some of them a lot of them really wanted to be free and it all ended like this and didn't have to maybe it was ill-conceived but as you know matthew ridgway said the only thing worse than an ill-conceived war is losing it losing it And that's what he said of Korea, and that's what's happened.

We didn't have to lose it like this.

We could have got out with dignity over a longer period of time and we had people there to keep stability.

And there's a lot of dead Americans that shouldn't be dead.

And after they died, we should have honored their memory and we had a duty to finish the mission that they started and they would have finished had they lived.

And so I think Joe Biden is a despicable person.

I really do.

I don't like somebody who not only made a terrible error that's going to cost thousands of lives, but lies about it and blames other people.

And with that, I promise in the next broadcast, I'll be more professional and sober and judicious.

And thank you very much, though, Victor.

I'm sure our listeners would love to thank you, too.

See you in the time, Sammy.

All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

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