Sunday, August 22, 2021

Anthony Blinken is at the Center of the Biden Administration's Failure in Afghanistan

There is no bigger Biden sycophant in the administration 
and he needs to be the first to go.



When Afghanistan appeared to be on the verge of falling to the Taliban seven days ago, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was sent out on Sunday Shows to be the Biden Administrations’ first spear catcher on the abject failure of Biden’s decision to withdraw combat forces without a plan for what comes next.

A bit of background about Blinken before we turn to his performance in this farce.

Blinken is, without question, at the top of the list of “Biden Loyalists” rewarded by Joe Biden’s improbable ascent to the White House. He epitomizes the reality that members of the “C” and “D” teams of administration personnel advance to prominent positions in the final years of a two-term Presidency.

Blinkin was a staffer in the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration. During the Bush Administration, he remained on the White House staff until 2002 when he moved to the Senate and became Chief of Staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Joe Biden was the Chairman of the Committee at that time, and he selected Blinken for the job.

Blinken worked to help Biden formulate one of his most idiotic foreign policy proposals, the partitioning of Iraq into three separate regions along ethnic lines — “Sunnistan”, “Shiastan”, and “Iraqi Kurdistan.” Other than the fact that it was rejected by the US military, the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Turkey, it was a fabulous idea.

The ultimate indictment of Blinken as unsuited to serve as Secretary of State comes stems from the fact that while the 2008 Democrat Presidential Primaries involved Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Tom Vilsack, among others, Blinken chose to work in the “Biden for President” campaign. Apparently, he never recognized in his years of working for Joe Biden that Biden was a moron.

When Obama and Biden were elected, Blinken became National Security Advisor to the Vice President. He served Biden in that capacity for four years.

At the beginning of Obama’s second term, Blinken was named Deputy National Security Advisor — a position that did not require Senate confirmation. You might wonder why — given that Blinken was a former Chief of Staff of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, and was the National Security Advisor to the Vice-President for four years — would there be concerns about being able to be confirmed by the Senate?

It had a lot to do with what Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in his 2014 book about Vice President Joe Biden: "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

It’s hard to be the closest foreign policy advisor for the guy who has been wrong about everything and not have played a significant role in that unmatched track record of failure.

This concern about Blinken’s reputation became reality after the 2014 midterm elections when Obama announced he would nominate Blinken to be Deputy Secretary of State for the final two years of his Administration. As I noted above, the 7th and 8th years of a two-term presidency is the time when the “A” and “B” team players have moved on to rich rewards in private industry, and the top administration positions begin to be filled by the “hangers-on” who stuck around for the purpose of getting that long-hoped-for resume entry. But Blinken’s reward would have to be fought for.

Just watch the first minute of this speech by John McCain on the floor of the Senate opposing Blinken’s nomination.

Madam President I rise to discuss my opposition to the pending vote concerning Mr. Anthony Blinken who is not only unqualified but in fact, in my view, is one of the worst selections that – of a very bad lot – that this President has chosen…. In this case, this individual has actually been dangerous to America, and to the young men and women who are fighting and serving it.

Here is a different one minute clip of McCain from the same floor speech:



Blinken has been a Joe Biden sycophant for two decades and has now ridden his loyalty to the dumbest President in history to become Secretary of State. Now, just 8 months into the job, Blinken sits atop the biggest foreign policy debacle in more than 40 years.

So, let’s now examine his performance over the past seven days.

Last Sunday Blinken made the horrific blunder of stating a categorical and unequivocal prediction about future events in a fluid and rapidly evolving environment:


As ABC News’ Jonathan Karl made clear in his questioning, that comment wasn’t true based on the images coming out of Kabul and the fact that the State Department personnel were at that time evacuating the Embassy just as had happened in Saigon.

To the degree it might have been somewhat true at that precise moment only because the Taliban hadn’t yet taken over Kabul, the shelf life of that statement was less than 24 hours.

But Blinken’s manifest unfitness to be Secretary of State came in other forms as well. As reported by Breitbart, one of Blinken’s first calls to a foreign counterpart in seeking assistance for U.S. citizens trapped in Afghanistan was to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The Breitbart story’s author relies on the reports about the conversation from Chinese state-run news organizations but notes that the characterizations of the Chinese sources were not denied by the State Department or White House.

The Communist Party of China, which shares a border with Afghanistan, has hosted talks with the Taliban and has expressed optimism at the return of the radical jihadists to the helm of the nation.

“It’s a sunny day in Kabul,” a profile of the city following the Taliban’s return in the Global Times on Monday began.

The Global Times reported that Blinken requested the discussion with Wang and that Wang used it to condemn the Biden administration for planning to withdraw all military forces from Afghanistan by August 31….

The propaganda outlet detailed that Wang warned Blinken that he should not reach out to Beijing for help if Washington attempts “to contain and suppress China” and that Blinken should “follow a rational and pragmatic policy toward China.”

Wang allegedly urged Blinken to direct the Biden administration to “play a constructive role in helping Afghanistan maintain stability, prevent chaos and rebuild peacefully.” He also allegedly said he hoped to see the Taliban establish “an open and inclusive political framework in accordance with its own national situations,” reflecting the Taliban’s own propaganda on its conquest….

The Global Times claimed that Blinken responded to Wang’s lecture by thanking China for its growing involvement in Afghanistan and stating he “hopes that China will play an important part in the issue.”

The State Department has not publicly challenged the Global Times‘ depiction of the conversation at press time.

This conversation took place last Sunday.

While Blinken chose to go first on his knees to beg China for help, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could not get his call returned by anyone in the United States government for 36 hours.

President Joe Biden ignored British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s attempts to contact him for approximately 36 hours as the Taliban cemented its control over Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Unfortunately, the Daily Telegraph story is behind their paywall so I can’t include more detail. But as summarized elsewhere, Johnson first attempted to contact Biden at 5:00 am Washington time on Monday but did not receive a call back until 5:00 pm on Tuesday.

Next came the reports that the State Department had canceled a program created during the Trump Administration to assist United States citizens trapped abroad in a time of crisis — the “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau.”

The CCR bureau was established late last year by then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo. In a notification sent to Congress in October and also obtained by the Free Beacon, the Trump administration said the new bureau would provide "aviation, logistics, and medical support capabilities for the Department's operational bureaus, thereby enhancing the secretary's ability to protect American citizens overseas in connection with overseas evacuations in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster."

The State Department memo canceling the program was dated in June, two months after Biden announced his plan to carry through on the agreement made by President Trump to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan. How it is that no one in the State Department considered the possible need for such services as part of the execution of the Afghan abandonment policy is further evidence that Blinken’s stewardship of the Department has been a trainwreck.

Finally — at least for this article — is that when Biden sat down with George Stephanopolous on Wednesday, Blinken and other members of the Biden Administration national security team left Biden so misinformed that he claimed no one predicted the speed with which the Afghan government would fall and the Taliban would take over control of the country, including Kabul.


That claim didn’t last 24 hours. It took CNN only that long to get its hands on a confidential State Department cable from July — a “Dissent Memo” — signed by 22 of 24 diplomats working various duties in Afghanistan predicting an imminent collapse of the Afghan government upon withdrawal of US military forces.



The memorandum warned Blinken that an immediate collapse of the Afghan government was likely and that the State Department needed to do more — back in July — to arrange for the evacuation of US citizens and Afghan nationals ahead of that collapse.

John McCain didn’t live long enough to see himself and his views of Blinken vindicated. It has long been said that McCain and Biden were close friends in the Senate. Cindy McCain, his widow, endorsed Biden and has now received an ambassadorship from him.

But I believe John McCain’s views on Anthony Blinken would not have changed. Unfortunately, he probably would have been unable to convince the 28 Republicans who voted to confirm Blinken of their folly.

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