Vice President Kamala Harris is not viewed as qualified to be president by a majority of people, but they still expect her to replace President Joe Biden before his term ends.
In the latest survey charting her fall in popularity, Rasmussen Reports said that just 43% believe that she’s qualified to run the nation versus 55% who do not believe that she is qualified. Of that, 47% of likely voters said she is “not at all qualified.”
The unmitigated disaster, and tragedy, that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan has turned into will likely soon fade out of the news cycle. But the consequences of the disaster are likely to be long reaching, and spell trouble for Canada. An increasingly unreliable and inward looking America is a dangerous reality we need to quickly adjust to.
The U.S. and the West are experiencing two unfolding intelligence disasters. Oxford Languages succinctly defines the two possible meanings of the word “intelligence:” (1) the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, or (2) the collection of information of military or political value. What we are experiencing today is not chiefly a failure to collect information, but the ever more tangible inability of our leaders to apply the information they have acquired.
The two debacles began to unfold around the turn of the millennium, within twelve months of each other. We are now seeing the fruits of the first failure play out 24/7 before our very eyes: the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan despite twenty years of sacrifice and investment. The second, the failure to understand and counter the growing threat posed by China, is set soon to prove itself just as disastrous as the first. In responding to each of these two challenges, our leadership has demonstrated a profound lack of insight and skill: a true failure of intelligence.
Biden’s speech on Afghanistan was a craven attempt to put a positive spin on moral cowardice.
If you want to see how hollowed-out America has become in the 21st century, you could do worse than listen to the speech Joe Biden made about Afghanistan yesterday. This will surely be viewed by future generations as one of the key documents of America’s modern malaise, as a blistering if unwitting insight into America’s retreat into the cults of safeyism, isolationism and fear. It was an extraordinary speech, though not for the reasons its naive cheerleaders in the anti-war movement claim. It was not a principled statement of America’s intention to wind down its regime-change wars, as they fantasise. Rather, it was a declaration of moral retreat, even of moral cowardice, cynically disguised as a clever act of political pragmatism.
After the fall of Saigon, the Soviet Union began five years of aggressive subversion around the world, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. Henry Kissinger and the elites in the US and Europe all predicted a Russian victory in the Cold War. The fall of Kabul is worse: In Vietnam, we faced a well-trained and equipped North Vietnamese Army; we were humiliated by 75,000 rag-tag irregulars in Afghanistan.
“We intend to hold them to that commitment,” national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters amid a barrage of questions about the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
SULLIVAN: “The Taliban have informed us that they are prepared to provide the safe passage of civilians to the airport, and we intend to hold them to that commitment.”
“…We are talking to them about what the exact timetable is for how this will all play out.” pic.twitter.com/RhUtHbgwgr
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 17, 2021
Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them.
The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable.
“…Our generals (when not playing on Twitter or studying CRT) now present ludicrous theories to us that a few teams of SEALs grabbing a guy and some drones flying around are the same as a division of troops deployed in a town. Yet, we somehow never pacified much of Afghanistan or Iraq after two decades. Is the argument that the German SS troops were not as motivated to fight a guerilla war as Al Qaeda has been (spoiler alert: they planned to do it)? Perhaps, like the SS, Al Qaeda would have realized when 10,000 troops and materiel were in every little town, that resistance was futile? If we deployed in Europe as we did in Iraq and had just a brigade covering all of Bavaria, would the SS simply have surrendered?”
I witnessed firsthand how U.S. actions that favored one group inevitably angered another, which is why the war is an endless game of whack-a-mole.
In 2003, George W. Bush famously declared victory in Iraq, just as the war was about to turn into a deadly and chaotic quagmire. Eighteen years later, an estimated half a million Iraqis and 6,840 U.S troops have perished in the conflict.
Today, the U.S. has 2,500 troops in Iraq, down from a peak of 168,000 in 2007. In July, the government claimed that American troops will no longer engage in combat; instead, they’ll only train and assist Iraqi security forces in their fight against ISIS.
Unlike Britain, the US will always be polarised
You might have thought that a global pandemic would produce a sense of unity in a nation state. In theory, there is little that is more unifying than the sense that a country is battling together to try to get through a crisis that is not of its own making.
Lisa Sanders, director of science and technology for Special Operations Forces, acquisition, technology & logistics (SOF AT&L), told the outlet that SOCOM has completed pre-clinical safety and “dosing studies in anticipation of follow-on performance testing” of the drug, which has the potential to “delay aging” and “prevent onset of injury.”
h/t Marvin
Navy Admiral Charles Richard, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons, on Thursday gave a dire warning about China’s rapidly increasing military capability.
“We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China. The explosive growth and modernization of its nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I describe as breathtaking,” Richard said. “Business as usual will not work.
Joe and Hunter will handle this no problem.
The Iranian regime has ratcheted up its assaults at sea while the Biden administration and the European Union continue pressing to revive the disastrous Obama nuclear deal and lift sanctions against the ruling mullahs.
On July 30, 2021, the oil tanker MV Mercer Street was attacked by an armed drone 280km from the port of Al-Daqam in the Sea of Oman. Two crew members, one British and one Romanian, were killed in the attack. The ship is Japanese-owned and Liberian-flagged, and is managed by Zodiac Maritime, a British company that is one of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s businesses.
