Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster. Joe Biden is down hard in the polls as a result and the media are turning decisively against him. Even CNN ran a lengthy segment Wednesday after Biden’s much-delayed speech in which a Democrat congressman flat out said that the August 31 deadline is arbitrary and there’s no way the evacuations will be done by then.
That could sound like spin to get ahead of them actually finishing the evacuation and then claiming, “Wow, Joe! I didn’t think you could do it but you did!” But he went on to say that meeting the deadline definitely means Afghans who risked their lives helping the United States will be left behind and they will be killed.
Streiff notes on our sister site RedState that the spin cycle is already getting into gear among Biden bitter-ender diehards. They are trying to turn the Afghanistan disaster into the new Berlin Airlift, which was a historic American success and demonstration of resolve. You can’t make this stuff up.
One of the most famous airlifts in history was post WWII Berlin. We got 48,000 out over almost a year and a half. We’ll surpass that figure in the next day or two. Little doubt this will end up as the most successful post war airlift in history.
— Joel Cawley (@jcawley01) August 23, 2021
Lockhart is a Clintonista. He was one of Bill Clinton’s Jen Psaki spinmeisters, and he often bombed almost as hard as she has this past week. Clinton had several skilled spinners during his eight years in the White House. Lockhart wasn’t one of them.
The Berlin Airlift comparison runs headlong into a very serious problem: It was the opposite of what’s happening now.
The Berlin Airlift happened because the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin in order to drive the allies out, in 1948. The Allies — the United States, Britain, and France — occupied West Berlin, which was inside the Soviet sphere of East Germany, which was then divided among the victorious WWII powers. The Soviets, led by the heinous communist Joseph Stalin, had blockaded to try and drive the Allies out. But leading the West, President Harry Truman decided that no blockade would ever drive the Allies out, because that would lead to a communist takeover of first West Berlin and then perhaps the rest of Germany itself.
So the United States under President Truman resolved to stay in West Berlin no matter the cost or difficulty. Not leave, as Biden is doing now, but stay. The Allied powers faced the difficulty of keeping the people of West Berlin fed both to keep them alive and to keep them from siding with the Soviets. That’s what the Berlin Airlift did. It wasn’t a chaotic evacuation spawned by terrible decision-making. It fed people the United States was resolved to lead the free world in standing with. Truman knew it was both a strategic issue and a test of wills with the Soviets, and unlike Biden, who has backed down to the Taliban on the arbitrary withdrawal date he unilaterally set, Truman was determined to win. By 1949, the Berlin Airlift had succeeded. The Allies stayed. The Soviet blockade had utterly failed.
Hopefully you see the difference between that and what Biden is doing. Biden has turned on our allies and is abandoning Afghanistan to our enemies. His actions are the opposite of what Truman did in every way. Additionally, he has played zero role as far as anyone knows in the logistics of the operation. The U.S. military may be woke now, but it hasn’t lost its edge in making big moves of people from one place to another. The military can move great numbers of people and supplies to any point to or from anywhere better than any other organization on the planet. Biden hasn’t managed to ruin that yet, despite giving them the impossible mission that he has created by his own pathetic decisions.
Joe Biden will abandon our allies and probably even some Americans next week. That’s coming. It’s already in the spin when he and Psaki say they’re resolved to get all “Americans who want to leave” out. When Americans are left behind because he refused to allow the military to rescue them, he and Psaki will say they didn’t want to leave.
The media cameras will mostly leave the scene by the end of next week. Whatever happens to those Americans and allies who are left behind will be awful. Joe Biden’s handlers are counting on people not caring once it’s off the TV and front pages.
The Berlin Airlift analogy is a cynical lie and it depends on Americans and the media not knowing anything about history. For that reason, it stands a decent chance of fooling enough people for them to get away with it or at least pull enough wavering Democrats in Congress and Dem voters back into the fold.