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Originally Posted by Jim in CT
Pete i looked up Graham’s comments on the withdrawal. i didn’t see anything to indicate he thinks we should stay forever. he just thinks we should
have had a better plan to withdraw. that’s what almost everyone is saying. The withdrawal was the right idea, but it was poorly executed.
You suggested that a meaningful republican force wishes we stayed. i honestly don’t know a single person who has ever said that, for sure that’s not what any meaningful
number of conservatives are saying.
You claimed we were saying that. You lied.
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toe the party line
Mr. Trump came into office having reversed his party’s long-held position on foreign interventions and called for an immediate removal of American troops stationed overseas. In February 2020, he announced a peace treaty with the Taliban, negotiated by Mr. Pompeo, that called for ending the American presence by May 1, 2021.
After his defeat last November, Republicans clung to Mr. Trump’s America-first line. They urged Mr. Biden to stick to the May 1 deadline, and publicly groused when Mr. Biden extended the date for a withdrawal until Aug. 31. “That kind of thinking has kept us in Afghanistan nearly 20 years,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona complained at the time.
But as the Americans’ final days in Afghanistan devolved last month into a frantic race to get more than 125,000 people out — during which 13 service members were killed in a bombing attack outside the Kabul airport — Republican lawmakers and candidates who had embraced Mr. Trump’s agreement with the Taliban abruptly changed their tune. They savaged Mr. Biden for negotiating with the Taliban and denounced his avowed eagerness to wind down the American presence in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, calling it a sign of weakness.
“I would not allow the Taliban to dictate the date that Americans leave,” Mr. McCarthy said at a news conference on Friday. “But this president did, and I don’t believe any other president would, Republican or Democrat, outside of Joe Biden.”
Once defined by its hawkishness, the G.O.P. since Mr. Trump’s 2016 election has ruptured into camps of traditional interventionists like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who never quite warmed to Mr. Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy, and backers of Mr. Trump’s America-first approach, who shared his impatience in extricating the nation from intractable conflicts abroad.
Last year, Mr. McConnell, then the majority leader, took to the Senate floor to decry Mr. Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, warning that a premature exit would be “reminiscent of the humiliating American departure from Saigon.”
But hitting Mr. Biden unites them all.
The Republican calls for Mr. Biden’s resignation, impeachment or removal from office under the 25th Amendment are also a reminder of how much more polarized the country’s politics have become since the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when Democrats and Republicans alike united behind President George W. Bush.
No Republican has turned faster on the Afghanistan withdrawal than Mr. Trump himself, who after years of espousing a return to isolationism has spent the last two weeks attacking Mr. Biden for carrying out the very withdrawal he had demanded and then negotiated.
As late as April 18, Mr. Trump exhorted Mr. Biden to accelerate the timetable for withdrawal: “I planned to withdraw on May 1st,” he said. “We should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”
Once things appeared to go haywire, however, the former president began to speak out against the withdrawal.
On Aug. 24, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Biden of forcing the military to “run off the battlefield,” leaving “thousands” of Americans as “hostages.” And he suggested that Mr. Biden should have kept at least some troop presence in Afghanistan.
“We had Afghanistan and Kabul in perfect control with just 2,500 soldiers and he destroyed it when it was demanded that they flee!” Mr. Trump said.
Other Republicans fell in behind Mr. Trump in attacking the president: Mr. McCarthy urged his lawmakers in a letter this week to make the case that Mr. Biden was single-handedly responsible for “the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation.”