Afghanistan War Cheerleaders Point Fingers after Disastrous Withdrawal

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we examine the media’s willingness to shift the blame on Afghanistan and condemn a distasteful attempt to politicize the tragedy unfolding there.

Media Plays the Blame Game on Biden’s Behalf

A collection of prominent columnists have asked the million dollar question about what went wrong in Afghanistan — who is to blame? — and returned a surprising answer: the American people.

Washington Post columnist Max Boot wrote in a column published Sunday that “all of us” are to blame for the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“If you ask me who is to blame, I would point not only to Biden but to former president Donald Trump — and to all of us, the people of America. By carrying out this pell-mell withdrawal from Afghanistan, our leaders, after all, were only giving us what we wanted,” he wrote.

Boot’s column followed an opening salvo in the genre from Tom Nichols, who proclaimed in the Atlantic that “Afghanistan Is Your Fault” and has recently declared his support for Biden’s decision to withdraw, despite having been alarmed at the prospect during the Trump administration.

Here, Boot deflects the blame away not only from Biden, but also from himself. While he blames “all of us” for the fall of Afghanistan, he does not take special care to note that he himself had been a longtime advocate of what he now criticizes as a “forever war.”

In October 2001, Boot took an entirely different tone when he wrote a cover story for the Weekly Standard called “The Case for American Empire,” in which he argued that “the September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition” and that “the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” He added that the solution included the “invasion and occupation” of Iraq. He went on to become a staunch advocate of the war, defending it as justified and necessary.

He also wrote at that time that the U.S. “cannot leave the Taliban in power” in Afghanistan.

“When we oust the Taliban, what comes next? Will we repeat our mistake of a decade ago and leave? What if no responsible government immediately emerges?” he wrote.

Boot argued then that the U.S. should temporarily occupy Afghanistan “to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, human, preferably democratic government takes over.”

Military writer Sebastien Roblin went further, blaming the recent ISIS-K attack outside of Kabul airport that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members, on former President Donald Trump.

Roblin argued in a recent essay for NBC News that it is “easy” to blame Biden but that the “architecture” of the botched withdrawal was formed by Trump.

“The rushed evacuation and its vulnerability to Thursday’s deplorable attack were inevitable outcomes of the rapid collapse of the Afghan government,” Roblin wrote.  “But while Biden does, indeed, hold his share of responsibility for that collapse, he wasn’t inaccurate when he pointed out in his news conference Thursday that the architecture of the hasty U.S. withdrawal and the inevitable deadly chaos that followed was constructed by the previous commander in chief.”

Trump’s plan was no doubt worthy of criticism, but it was the current occupant of the White House who chose to move forward with a full withdrawal and it is his — not Trump’s, and not your — plan for doing so that has been implemented on the ground.

Headline Fail of the Week

The Miami Herald wins the title this week for it’s misleading headline, “Florida COVID update: 901 added deaths, largest single-day increase in pandemic history.” While MSNBC staffers jumped at the opportunity to blame Florida governor Ron DeSantis for all the world’s evils, the headline fails to make clear that the 901 deaths did not happen in a single day but were instead added to the state’s database in a single day.

“Florida on Thursday reported 21,765 more COVID-19 cases and 901 deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to Miami Herald calculations of CDC data,” the story reads. “All but two of the newly reported deaths occurred after July 25, with about 78% of those people dying in the past two weeks, according to Herald calculations of data published by the CDC.”

DeSantis’s press secretary called the story “sensationalistic and dishonest.” Nonetheless, MSNBC primetime host Chris Hayes tweeted, “My god,” in response to the story. MSNBC producer Adam Weinstein wrote in a tweet, “Pardon me, but holy sh**.”

Still, Devoun Cetoute, the reporter who wrote the story, continued to defend the headline.

Media Misses

– Thirteen U.S. service members and at least 169 Afghans were killed in an ISIS-K attack outside the Kabul airport on Thursday, but given the opportunity to ask White House press secretary Jen Psaki a question hours after the attack, a CBS News reporter asked how Biden’s “mood” was. Ed O’Keefe lobbed a softball at Psaki, asking, “How is he, how is his mood, in dealing with all these — with the incoming information — how is he in asking the questions to military commanders?”

-Social media erupted after the New York Times published a Modern Love column on Friday that detailed how a woman allowed her 13-year-old daughter to “temporarily marry” the boy she liked in a mu’tah contract, a Muslim union that joins a couple for a fixed time period. In her most shocking sentence, the mother writes that her teen daughter’s “exuberant sexuality was evident at a young age — her delight in her own body was almost always channeled toward boys.”

-‘Republicans pounce’ will never die. A Politico headline proclaims that the “GOP faces hurdles in push to make Afghanistan matter in the midterms.” The subheading asserts that “Thursday’s bombings in Kabul come as Republicans push to turn the crisis into an albatross for the president. Yet several factors threaten to undermine that effort.”

-CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic argues that “the Supreme Court gave Trump leeway on executive actions. Biden wants the same treatment.” This assertion should surprise anyone who paid attention to the Court over the course of the Trump years. The Court ruled against the Trump administration on DACA, adjustments to the 2020 Census, and a host of other regulatory issues over the course of the last five years.

-The aforementioned Chris Hayes says that “A big tip off not to take an adult seriously is the use of term ‘bad guys.’”

But Hayes shouldn’t be written off for speaking plainly. There are plenty of better reasons to do that.