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Perhaps the oddest aspect of Biden’s indictment of Trump is that he treated Trump’s deal with the Taliban as immutable. Yet, as Pompeo noted, just as Trump abandoned Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, so Biden was free to walk away from Trump’s deal with the Taliban. Biden’s protestations regarding the deal were particularly ridiculous given that in his seven months in office, Biden has taken a cleaver to nearly all of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. Biden didn’t remove U.S. forces from Afghanistan because he had to keep Trump’s deal. He removed them because he wanted to. 

This brings us to Biden’s devastating critique of the Afghan military, which he claimed was unwilling to defend the country. Over the past 20 years, 2,448 U.S. servicemen and women were killed in Afghanistan. Over the same period, 69,000 Afghan forces died defending their country from the Taliban. His statement amounted to malicious slander.

"One of the main functions of the U.S. forces and contractors Biden removed was to serve as military air traffic controllers for Afghan forces. Their departure meant the Afghan military lost its close air support. And since the U.S. built the Afghan military as its mini-me, like the U.S. forces, Afghan forces were dependent on close air support to conduct land operations.

In other words, Biden is more responsible than anyone else for the Afghans’ post-American collapse. If he expected them to fight, he shouldn’t have left them dependent on U.S. traffic controllers which he withdrew without coordination or warning of any kind.

It is entirely reasonable for Americans to demand the return of their forces from Afghanistan. But Monday, Biden presented the American people with a choice between fighting a major war against the Taliban which would see untold numbers of servicemen killed, or bring the boys home in total defeat, as he opted to do.

Biden’s presentation was a gross distortion of the facts. The U.S. suffered no losses over the past 18 months. The choice was between more of that and squandering everything U.S. forces in Afghanistan accomplished over the past twenty years. 

This brings us to the intelligence community. Since April, Biden, his advisors and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley have been insisting, presumably based on intelligence reports, that there was little reason to be concerned that a U.S. pullout would precipitate a Taliban takeover of the country. As provincial capitals fell like dominoes to the Taliban, Biden and his advisors insisted it would take a long time for the Taliban to arrive in Kabul. And on Monday, after the Taliban and taken Kabul and the Afghan President and the U.S. Ambassador had fled the city, Biden claimed that the Taliban’s takeover, “did unfold more quickly than we had expected.”

But here too, Biden did not tell the truth.  ABC News reported Monday that U.S. intelligence officials insist they provided Biden clear and detailed reports over the past several months which made clear that if he withdrew U.S. forces as he intended, the Afghan army and government would collapse and the Taliban would quickly retake control of the country. The regional military commanders similarly warned this would happen.

Taken as a whole then, the most notable aspect of the fiasco in Afghanistan is that to a large degree, Biden is its sole author. He was warned of the consequence. He chose to disregard the warnings. His party didn’t demand the pullout. The Washington establishment opposed it. Biden took his own counsel. This was his policy.  

If Biden had been right, he would rightly be the toast of the town right now. But reality is a harsh judge. The facts were never on his side. Reason was never on his side. His judgement was never reasoned or fact based. And as was eminently predictable, Biden was catastrophically wrong.

While  dooming tens of thousands of Afghans to death and millions more to utter misery, Biden’s misjudgment is quickly multiplying the threats the U.S. faces. The Taliban have seized U.S. aircraft abandoned at Bagram air base.  Milley acknowledged that the terror threat to the U.S. has grown since the U.S. pullout. And thanks to Biden, the U.S. southern border with Mexico remains open to all. Forces of jihad worldwide have received an unprecedented backwind from the U.S. defeat. Hamas, Iran and others hurried to embrace the Taliban.

Biden’s policy also emboldened U.S. superpower rivals China and Russia. They responded to America’s humiliation by bringing Iran into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

U.S. allies are furious and alarmed as they see the collapse of U.S. credibility and strategic rationality.

And this brings us to Bennett’s meeting with Biden next Thursday.

Biden’s decision to stick to his guns on Afghanistan shows that once he has made up his mind about something, Biden is unwilling to listen to counterargument. And the only other major position that Biden has held consistently over the years is his position on Iran.

Whereas for 15 years Biden was an outspoken critic of the war in Afghanistan and demanded a swift U.S. withdrawal, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Biden has been among the regime’s most stalwart supporters in Washington.  Biden’s policy towards the ayatollahs in Tehran has been appeasement for the past 42 years, even when he stood alone on the issue.

For instance,  as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in 2001, Biden responded to the September 11 attacks on the U.S. by calling for the Bush administration to give Iran $100 million in foreign aid.

This week it was reported that ahead of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s visit with Biden next Thursday, government officials are hoping to convince him that given the failure of the nuclear talks in Vienna, the time has come for the U.S. and Israel to jointly attack Iran’s nuclear installations. If Biden weren’t impermeable to reason, Israel’s argument might have had a shot. After all, in 1983, Ronald Reagan responded to the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut by invading Grenada.

But as Biden showed on Monday,

and in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Wednesday, he will not rethink his choices or positions, even after they failed.  As Biden rejects all criticism of his personal failure in Afghanistan, there is effectively zero chance he will reconsider his policy of 42 years on Iran. Moreover, unlike his policy on Afghanistan, his Iran policy is now shared by the U.S. intelligence community and military, the Washington establishment and the Democrat Party.

Whether Bennett would be better off postponing the trip until the smoke begins to settle remains to be seen. But what is clear enough is that with Iran sprinting towards the nuclear finish line, and U.S. credibility in a state of unprecedented collapse, if Israel wants to prevent Iran from acquiring military nuclear capabilities, Biden is not man to see."

Originally published in Israel Hayom.