“The real choice was between leaving and escalating”

That is the essential point that the Blob has been lying about non-stop. Anybody who continues to oppose Biden’s decision to end America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan needs to have this undeniable fact thrown in their face again and again, even as they try to elude it.

And try to elude it they will. Check out this frantic editorializing under the guise of straight reporting:

President Joe Biden addressed the nation Tuesday and continued to defend his self-imposed deadline to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan — a day after the last troops left the country, bringing America’s longest war to a close — but only after a chaotic and deadly exit.

“Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history,” Biden began, going on to tout the historic evacuation numbers. “No nation, no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and will and ability to do it.”

“The real choice was between leaving or escalating,” he claimed.

The president’s prepared remarks from the State Dining Room of the White House come 24 hours after the last military plane cleared airspace above Afghanistan but without more than 100 Americans on board who still wanted to get out of the country.

“There is no deadline” for Americans who want to leave, he said, at the same time saying “90% of Americans who wanted to leave were able to leave,” adding the U.S. would continue efforts to help those who wanted to get out.

Biden said that when he made the decision in April to end the war and set the Aug. 31 deadline, “The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan national security forces that we had trained over the past two decades and equipped would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban.”

“That assumption, that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown, turned out not to be accurate,” Biden said.

His speech did not focus on the operational miscues that have marred the past week in Afghanistan but instead homed in on why the U.S. entered the war 20 years and why he didn’t want to pass the war on to another president.

“I was not going to extend this Forever War,” he said.

That’s ABC, but pretty much all the coverage is like that. The claim that a “chaotic” exit was “marred by operational miscues” is evidently based on the working assumption that evacuating more than 100,000 civilians from hostile territory in the middle of raging civil war in the wake of a functional military surrender should pretty much go like a typical weekend at O’Hare or LAX.

My disgust here isn’t even aimed at the Republicans, who are of course well past praying for, but at all the liberal internationalist types at the New Yorker, the Times etc., who remain eager to get yet more Americans killed in Afghanistan in perpetuity, without anything even vaguely resembling a coherent explanation as to why even more of their fellow citizens should continue to die in the pursuit of a hopeless venture.

Even if he had done nothing else, Biden’s willingness to pull the plug on this disaster in the face of the almost universal opposition from the Best and the Brightest is going to put him high up the list of American presidents.