Daily Archives: 18/08/2021

Have you noticed the convenient and universal scapegoating that’s going on over President Biden’s Afghanistan debacle? In normal times, a cock-up on this scale would indeed be seen both as a major scandal, but also as a complete aberration or (like the Vietnam withdrawal) as an historical inevitability. In living memory, presidents of greater or lesser competence have come and gone, with their errors usually well-covered, or in some cases (think, for example, of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco) seen as blots on otherwise decent records. To err, after all, is human.