pardon me sir but there's a goatherd in my soup

 

The commentator Mark Steyn remarked this week for the umpteenth time that "we" (by which he meant the American army) "cannot even win against goatherds with fertilizer."

I'd quibble with this.

After the Nine Eleven attacks on America, the American army defeated Al  Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and gave the Afghans twenty years of the most free, most civilised, society they had ever known.

In a decade long search the American army also hunted down Muslim porn addict and Nine Eleven perp Osama Bin Laden in his bolt hole in Pakistan and sent him home to Allah.

In 2003 the American army liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein's murderocracy, taking about five minutes to accomplish that job.

During the liberation of Iraq, the American army captured Saddam Hussein (soon after executed by the newly liberated Iraqis) and in the ensuing mopping up operation, killed Saddam's two putative successors his sons Uday and Qusay.

Saddam Hussein's army was according to some, the fourth largest in the world. It did not at any level consist of goatherds with fertiliser. (No offence to any goatherds with fertiliser who may be reading this.)

The American army then gave Iraq some years of genuine freedom, as with Afghanistan, making it for a short time the most free most civilised country its people had ever known.

I would contend that the American army's only defeat in these matters came when opportunistic politicians anxious to make a name for themselves on the homefront in the USA decided to betray our war time President George W Bush and the war effort itself, by claiming the wars were unnecessary and that the American commitment to a free Afghanistan and Iraq should end.

Barack Obama became a two term President of the United States, slandering President Bush and peddling withdrawal and appeasement regarding Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Obama's withdrawal of the American army from Iraq in 2011 constituted its only defeat there.

The American army could fight any other army on earth but they couldn't fight their own President.

The Iranians promptly hoovered up the abandoned Iraq.

We cannot blame the American army for that Mr Steyn.

To be quite clear, I am saying that it is objectively untrue of Mark Steyn to suggest the American army lost to goatherds with fertiliser in Iraq.

If they lost at all, they lost to Barack Obama.

There was more to come.

President Obama accompanied his Iraq surrender with the announcement of a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan meaning the  Jihadis knew they just had to outwait the American army. Not defeat them. Outwait them. Hardly the military's fault Mr Steyn.

And as with the Iraqis, it is deceptive to classify the Taliban as goatherds.

They are a modern army, succoured, trained, provisioned and maintained over many decades in Pakistan by the Pakistani secret service (known as the ISI) and by the Pakistanis' accomplices in international Jihad. (Known as the Muslim Brotherhood but including input from several significant State actors.)

The emergence of Donald Trump in 2015 as a political figure with  his hostile takeover of the Republican party and his successful accession to the Presidency of the United States a year later, similarly involved Mr Trump claiming like Obama, that President Bush had led America unnecessarily to war and that the American commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan should end.

Mr Trump was elected for one term and set a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

His successor President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party followed through on Trump's timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, brought the American army home, and thereby handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban who had waited patiently over the border in Pakistan for their moment to strike.

Mr Trump has now won a second term as President and will succeed Joe Biden in January.

Any victory won by the Taliban was not through defeats inflicted on the American army by goatherds with fertiliser. I maintain that victory for the Taliban was gifted to them cumulatively by Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama.

The American army therefore was defeated by three opportunistic and mediocre and ultimately utterly forgettable Presidents of the United States of America.

And, I hasten to add, by the corporate leftist appeasement oriented media groups of the Western World.

And, lest we forget, by Mark Steyn himself through his own willingness (like other former War On Terror cheerleaders Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity of Fox News) to turn Turk upon the American army and countenance Trump's venal opportunism in slandering President Bush and the war effort.