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| New Taliban flight attendants in Afghanistan |
In politics, we should always pay careful attention to what
is NOT being peddled through the usual grapevines. Otto von Bismarck used to
say, “Never believe anything in politics, until it has been officially denied.”
And Bismarck, the realpolitiker who helped cobble together the German state,
should know.
Embracing Bismarck’s luminous proposition is not cynicism.
It is realpolitik, a sensible appreciation of the way politics has operated
everywhere in the real world from time immemorial.
Biden already has, and will in the future, be boasting that he has “ended the war in Afghanistan.” We may imagine, even now, his campaign operatives busily issuing to state Democrat Party disseminators campaign directives rarely seen by the public that will be shared with a credulous media and state and national Democrat campaign committees.
Few will bother to press the point that Biden had not ended
a war in Afghanistan. He ended a brittle twenty year peace in Afghanistan. And,
given the nature of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan – tribal,
warlike, and fiercely determined to re-establish an Islamic caliphate that,
during the high tide of Islam in 730 stretched from Medina to Spain – one may
reasonably expect hostilities to commence throughout the area sometime after
Biden’s August 31 deadline for the pullout of the peacemakers has passed.
There is little reason to believe that the murderous Taliban
in Afghanistan or Pakistan -- which for years had provided a safe harbor for
Osama bin Laden, before he was assassinated on orders from the
Obama-Biden-Clinton administration in 2011 – or their supporters in Iran, China
and Russia have the best interests of the United States in mind.
None of the long-term traditional enemies of the United
States, all reliant on brute force to keep them in power, are likely to be
derailed by sweet diplomatic entreaties. The lost war in Afghanistan – or the
lost peace, depending on one’s point of view – will soon be replaced, Biden
fantasists tell us, by a diplomatic assault on the victors. Now that the U.S.
military has vacated Afghanistan, leaving the country to the not so tender
mercies of the Taliban, they imagine a sustained diplomatic effort will be
quite enough to secure American objectives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and
the Middle East.
As Vice President in the Barack Obama administration for
eight years, Biden had concluded that Obama’s formulation – that the war in
Iraq was a war of choice, while the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity –
was wrong-headed. Biden has now ended -- with “mixed results,” friendly opinion
pages throughout the nation are bound to conclude -- Obama’s war of necessity. Biden
falsely imagines that diplomacy will fill the yawning gap left by a defeated
U.S.
military.
At the same time, we are expected to embrace with great hope
and energy the notion that the same chief executive who has made the U.S.
Mexican border semi-permeable and surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban will
be re-pursuing a successful diplomacy with the mullahs in Iran in an attempt to
turn the clock back to 2016.
It was in September of 2016 that the Obama administration acknowledged
having transferred $1.7 billion earlier in the year to Iran – in hard,
easily transferable currency.
CBS
News reported at the time, “An initial $400 million cash delivery
was sent Jan. 17, the same day Tehran agreed to release four American
prisoners.
“The Obama administration had claimed the events were
separate, but recently acknowledged the cash was used as leverage until the
Americans were allowed to leave Iran.”
The payments were bribes, and the money acquired by Iran was
used to ramp up terror against Israel by Iranian terrorists, a failed Middle
East policy that hung ominously over the meeting between Biden and Bennett.
In a recent meeting, Biden told Israel’s new Prime Minister,
Naftali Bennett, “We’re putting diplomacy [with Iran] first and seeing where
that takes us. But if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options.”
Short of friends after Biden’s abject surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban – the United
States’ new “partners”? – Bennett could not have been by cheered the prospect
of a resurgence of Obama’s failed Middle East policies. But, diplomatically, he
did not entirely bite his tongue.
According to an AP
report, “Bennett made clear his opposition to an Iran deal, arguing
that Tehran has already advanced in its uranium enrichment and that sanctions
relief would give Iran more resources to support Israel’s enemies in the
region.
“’These very days illustrate what the world would look like
if a radical Islamic regime acquired a nuclear weapon,’ Bennett said. ‘That
marriage would be a nuclear nightmare for the entire world.’”
Iran, some nuclear scientists report, is now only a few
weeks short of producing such a weapon.
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