Afghanistan Blame Game
Congressional Republicans are reminding voters of a dark hour in the Biden presidency.
Tara Copp for AP (“Top former US generals say failures of Biden administration in planning drove chaotic fall of Kabul“):
The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation of Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 blamed the Biden administration for the chaotic departure, telling lawmakers Tuesday that it inadequately planned for the evacuation and did not order it in time.
The rare testimony by former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command retired Gen. Frank McKenzie publicly exposed for the first time the strain and differences the military leaders had with the Biden administration in the final days of the war. Two of those key differences included that the military had advised that the U.S. keep at least 2,500 service members in Afghanistan to maintain stability and a concern that the State Department was not moving fast enough to get an evacuation started.
The remarks also contrasted with an internal White House review of the administration’s decisions which found that President Joe Biden’s decisions had been “severely constrained” by previous withdrawal agreements negotiated by former President Donald Trump and blamed the military, saying top commanders said they had enough resources to handle the evacuation.
Thirteen U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in the final days of the war, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
Thousands of panicked Afghans and U.S. citizens desperately tried to get on U.S. military flights that were airlifting people out. In the end the military was able to rescue more than 130,000 civilians before the final U.S. military aircraft departed.
That chaos was the end result of the State Department failing to call for an evacuation of U.S. personnel until it was too late, Milley and McKenzie told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“On 14 August the non-combatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the U.S. military alerted, marshalled, mobilized and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do,” Milley said.
But the State Department’s decision came too late, Milley said.
“The fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw was the timing of the State Department,” Milley said. “That was too slow and too late.”
In a lengthy statement late Tuesday, the National Security Council took issue with the generals’ remarks, saying that Biden’s hard decision was the right thing to do and part of his commitment to get the U.S. out of America’s longest war.
The president “was not going to send another generation of troops to fight and die in a conflict that had no end in sight,” the NSC said. “We have also demonstrated that we do not need a permanent troop presence on the ground in harm’s way to remain vigilant against terrorism threats.”
Dan Lamothe, Abigail Hauslohner and Leigh Ann Caldwell for WaPo (“Republicans continue to hammer Biden for Afghan exit“):
The top two generals who oversaw the deadly evacuation of Afghanistan faced renewed scrutiny Tuesday as House Republicans escalated their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco and Democrats accused Donald Trump of setting the conditions for the Kabul government’s collapse.
Retired Gens. Mark A. Milley and Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, career military officers who served in senior roles under both presidents, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee as part of its oversight investigation of the United States’ calamitous exit, in August 2021, from a 20-year war.
McKenzie said that although the Pentagon had developed a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops, diplomats, citizens and at-risk Afghan partners months before the Taliban’s return to power, Biden instead decided to leave open the U.S. Embassy and withdraw all but a few hundred military personnel — ultimately leaving tens of thousands in harm’s way.
“I think the fundamental mistake — the fundamental flaw — was the timing of the State Department call” for evacuation, Milley said. “I think that was too slow and too late, and that then caused the series of events that result in the very last couple of days.”
The recurring political spotlight on the conflict’s closing days, marked by scenes of gruesome violence and desperation, has forced Democrats to confront a dark moment during Biden’s tenure as president while he campaigns against his predecessor for a second term as commander in chief.
Many Democratic lawmakers have joined their Republican colleagues in criticizing the administration’s handling of the withdrawal. But with the anticipated election rematch between Trump and Biden months away, they face pressure to defend his position that it was Trump in 2020 who boxed in Biden by accepting a deal with the Taliban that put few conditions on a U.S. departure the following year.
Throughout the hearing, both sides took turns trying to demonstrate their respect for the generals while prodding them to acknowledge the other party’s president as the person ultimately responsible for the evacuation fiasco.
Elsewhere:
- CNN, “Top generals who oversaw US withdrawal from Afghanistan slam State Department for delaying emergency evacuation”
- USA Today, “Afghanistan evacuation was ‘too slow and too late,’ ex-military officials tell Congress“
- BBC, “Ex-US generals who oversaw Afghan exit describe chaos and challenges of withdrawal“
My old friend Joshua Foust is angry about the coverage. He was particularly incensed by Lamothe’s framing in the WaPo lede:
A long time defense correspondent describing this as “House Republicans escalate their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco” is so dishonest it’s hard to know where to begin. Again, Dan Lamothe knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes this copy and he does not care.
I’ve read Lamothe for years and have never found him biased, but my lens is different. Rather than trying to harm Biden here, I suspect he’s simply reflecting the frustration and outrage so many on his beat felt at what was absolutely a fiasco. Indeed, that was my real-time reaction, as some post headlines from those days show:
- Biden Blamed for Afghan Fiasco (August 16, 2021)
- The Afghan Evacuation Horror Show Continues (August 20, 2021)
- Trump and Pompeo Set Afghanistan Fiasco in Motion (August 21, 2021)
- Defense Blames State for Afghan Fiasco (September 30, 2021)
I don’t know how you can see the immediate withdrawal otherwise. Or, for that matter, deny that the Biden team rallied rather quickly and salvaged the situation. And, even when the worst was unfolding, it was obvious that there was plenty of blame to go around for the waste of twenty years of failed nation-building.
Nor, incidentally, is this testimony from Milley and McKenzie new. They were saying the same thing in September 2021. And, as I noted at the time,
This deflection strikes me as semantic bullshit. It’s true that NEOs are authorized by State and carried out by DoD. But, as the “senior administration official” implies, had DoD pushed hard for one, State would almost certainly have acquiesced.
My strong sense, therefore, is that DoD leadership had an overly optimistic picture of how long they had to carry out operations before the Ghani government collapsed. From all accounts, nobody at the senior level of the US Government thought that it was going to collapse damn near instantaneously. If, however, State balked at ordering a NEO in the face of DoD demands, it was up to Austin, Milley, or the CENTCOM commander to go to the President and/or the NSC to press their case.
There is, therefore, no plausible scenario where State bears the bulk of the blame. Either all of the key players share equal blame for failing to anticipate the collapse of the Ghani government or President Biden himself overruled DoD in favor of State’s recommendation.
Still, even though he spent a year and a half in country as a Human Terrain Analyst and then devoted years researching and writing about as a blogger and think tanker, Foust is more worried about the consequences of this renewed attention rather than an autopsy of the Afghanistan exit:
It’s hard not to conclude that the DC-based press corps (reporters and pundits alike) simply wants to experience a national collapse because it would be fun to cover, and I don’t like thinking that nor do I know what any of us can do about it.
Biden faced down an openly hostile, warmongering press, defiant CIA stealing evacuation seats for its death squads, and a class of decadent viceroys to do the right thing and end our presence in Afghanistan. Will any future president ever end a war again? Don’t expect it if this is the outcome.
If the election had happened in August of 2021, it may well have cost Biden a second term. But I suspect half of American voters have forgotten we were ever in Afghanistan, much less have a strong opinion on the nature of the exit. American attention spans on foreign policy matters are notoriously short-lived.
And, apparently, it doesn’t sell many papers or generate many clicks, either. As best I can tell, neither the New York Times nor even the Murdock-owned Wall Street Journal covered the hearings at all, and I had to search the WaPo archives to find the above story even though I knew it existed. Of the major outlets I scanned this morning, only the AP featured the story prominently.
Congressional Republicans, not surprisingly, are trying to leverage a dark moment in the Biden presidency for political advantage. In the short term, at least, it’s not working.
The withdrawal was a fiasco for how it was done.
It was a human rights fiasco. Look how women are treated in Afghanistan today.
It is long-term fiasco because the country can be again used as a training area for terrorists.
Carry on.
@Bill Jempty:
A warzone is what’s a training and recruiting area for terrorists.
Obviously, Biden was ultimately responsible.
But it is also clear that a blame game is going on with the White House claiming that it relied on mistaken assumptions from the military and the military blaming the State Department for being “too late.”
But why believe the military over the White House?
Because top generals can’t be political or would never try to deflect blame to someone else?
That sounds… naive.
(And let’s face it, the issue with the Afghanistan evacuation is not really how it was handled, but that it was ordered in the first place, which renders a lot of the criticism on the “how” suspect, IMO.)
Entirely predictable tactic.
And this leads to my my follow-up questions for Republicans:
(1) Why do you want to sell out the Ukraine?
(2) Why do you want to appease Vladinir Putin?
Democrats need to turn this back on Republicans.
@Bill Jempty: just 20-30 more years and it would all be peachy in, “the graveyard of empires”, amirite?
@Thomm: Opponents of the Afghan withdrawal have settled on criticizing “how” to hide from their preference for needlessly extending the fruitless, endless Afghan war.
Fiasco? Okay, yeah, sure. And? What is the neat, tidy, organized, tied-up-with-a-bow way to end a war? This is real life, kids, not Hollywood. Fiasco is baked into the cake when the war itself has long since turned into a fiasco.
Good on Biden for having the bravery to put a stop to the madness, to consternation of the endless war lobby. (I can think of a specific thing or two that should have been done differently, because hindsight is 20/20. But note that the Monday morning quarterbacks here and elsewhere never offer such specifics.)
If Republicans were serious, they’d be casting these hearings as a lessons learned fact-finding mission, not an attempt to embarrass Biden. But if learning and growing was the priority, these hearings would’ve occurred last year. Instead the House GQP was obsessing over Hunter Biden’s dic pics.
Note also that the dearth of coverage of this important and newsworthy but not sexy or clickbaity topic is a choice. A choice that puts to lie the media pleading innocent re: coverage decisions on Biden’s age, Hillary’s emails, and Trump’s thuggery. The press shapes what the public cares about, they’re not innocent bystanders responding to public opinion.
It’s helpful to the Biden campaign that Republicans are choosing their lines of attack this far out.
That way, they can be countered or die out naturally before the election.
It looks like the congressional Republicans are desperately trying to find something that will work against Biden and failing every time.
@DK: @drj: I think it was and remains perfectly reasonable to blame the administration for not evacuating civilian personnel and Afghans who were closely affiliated with the US government before starting the troop withdrawal in earnest. The intel clearly got it wrong on the speed of the collapse but it just makes sense to do those things in that order. And both CJCS and CINC CENTCOM were advising that ahead of time.
@Cheryl Rofer: The House GOP should try doing some actual work: pass Ukraine aid and the bipartisan border bill. Instead of embarassing themselves with their Biden follies.
@DK: They are giving the Democratic Party plenty of ammunition for the campaign.
But yeah, I’m chatting on Bluesky with Justin Ling, who has just been to Ukraine and says the situation is desperate.
@Cheryl Rofer:
What else can they do? The GOPs have no positive accomplishments and no positive proposals. Last time around they didn’t even have a platform. They’ve got nothing but following Cleeks Law. They’re against whatever Biden is for today, updated daily. One would hope the supposedly liberal MSM would notice.
In 63 years of life I’ve never seen a General accept responsibility for anything. They were always going to be successful but the politicos didn’t give them what they needed.
Funny how the agreement brokered by God-King Trump with the Taliban regarding withdrawal from Afghanistan appears to be attempted to be memory-holed for pure inconvenience to this specific snipe hunt.
Our political/military has been making mistakes since WWII because we misunderstood what happened in Japan and Germany. Those countries were extremely hierarchical, with centuries of respect for and obedience to “the rules”. We decapitated the leadership and replaced it with new, and the countries more or less continued on in their rule based manner. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – those societies were nothing like that, and we paid the price.
And Vietnam is especially instructive – the Military was allowed to “do what it takes” for years and years, and supplied with endless troops and money, and in the end they still blamed the politicos for not giving them enough time, troops and money.
@MarkedMan: “They were always going to be successful but the politicos didn’t give them what they needed.”
Somewhere in a VA home, there are a bunch of retired generals screaming “We didn’t lose Viet Nam — the politicians sold us out!”
The key failure was vastly overestimating the resilience of the Afghan army, which leads me to question the military leadership that spent two decades telling us how fantastic they were.
@MarkedMan:
Everyone knows Germany lost the Great War the minute the Schlieffen Plan
wasn’t fully implemented.
Trump and Pompeo surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and left Biden to clean up the mess.
Now y’all want to yell that Biden didn’t clean up the mess well enough?
This is the problem with our politics in microcosm.
@James Joyner:
Sure, but if we are being honest we should have made a lot more preparation before the deal was signed That is on Trump and his worthless and amateur negotiations. You can blame Biden but don’t forget the guy who cut the deal as he was walking out the door.
@Gavin: @Daryl: @Rick DeMent: Note the above-linked “Trump and Pompeo Set Afghanistan Fiasco in Motion” post from August 21, 2021.
I doubt our Afghan evacuation will be remembered as a major event in history, but to the extent it is, it should be viewed like Apollo 13 or Dunkirk, as a successful failure. The bottom line is – we’re out. And we got over a hundred thousand people out in the face of a chaotic situation.
There was never any scenario in which Afghanistan didn’t end the way it did.
The US was literally the legs holding up the table of Afghan government, and the moment the legs were removed, the collapse was going to be chaotic and sudden.
@gVOR10:
This.
No one can mention a single positive thing the GOP stands for or is proposing.
Everything they have is just grievance-mongering and bile.
If the GOP wants back-in to Afghanistan, they can have another bite at the apple if Trump gets re-elected, but I am willing to bet a million dollars that I do not have that the GOP will be fine with the History books across the world (in the U.S. and everywhere else) noting that America “lost” the war in Afghanistan for the next 100 years if they get Trump back in the White House.
The jig is up for Trump, and even a good chunk of the GOP, but it is taking a while for that awareness to make its way to the head of the body (kind-of like when a snakes head is not aware that its body has been cut off from its head, so the mouth of the head is just going through reflexive movements as the reality of its demise finally sinks in).
Anyway, I was kind-of not kidding, if they insist that we can win the war if we just try again and actually “listen” to the experts, they just might have an opportunity for Trump to tell “his Generals” to get our boys back to the desert and win one for the Gipper.
@Bill Jempty: White Man’s Burden faux interest in Afghan women aside, the long term interest of Afghan people, of which women, is a government that is not a neo-colonial dependency but rooted in their actual population.
Such government is unlikely to please Westerners but it is an Afghan choice.
As the Americans were neither willing to go full out genocidal Stalinist transformation nor actually delegate to something really rooted in Afghanistan, instead insisting on engaging in fantasy, Biden merely stopped your nonsensical bleeding out.
nor was really Afghanistan a dark hour for Biden admin as no withdrawal under conditions Americans were actually willing to engage in was going to be effective (as compared with being more Soviet and engaging in actually secret arrangement with the Moujahidine).
@Chip Daniels: well no scenario under a non-Stalinist style occuption. The Soviets in Soviet Central Asia of 20s-40s (and the PRC in their own Central Asia) do show there is a template, but it involves genocidal measures and a crushing police state – not the naive transformation of the filthy foreigners into little Americans fantasies of either the Republicans or the Democrats (or the even more incoherent mix of the two that was US policy in Afghanistan).
@Stormy Dragon: No one actually claimed the Afghani gov military was fantastic.
Servicable yes, fantastic no.
Of course it was not even servicable.
@MarkedMan: while agreed that the US has spent post-WII mistaking the lessons of WWII re Germany and Japan as universal lessons, this is off.
The fundamental error is not that the listed societies are non-hierarchal or non-rules based as compared to Japan or German – (this is certainly wrong entirely about Vietnam in all aspects) rather it is the misunderstanding of the difference in the socio-political context post 1940s in the post-colonial political framing and notably difference between the defeat of two industrial and highly ethnically coherent nation states that were not in a colonial context, versus (a) decolonisation and (b) for Afghanistan and Iraq states with fragmented ethno-national identities and weak central state histories compounding (a).
Americans have literally no proper sense of these things and thus always bungle, whether Right or Left view driven…
(as personally of a family of imperial confettis métissée…)
I’m 100% in agreement with Drum WRT the Afghan Withdrawal:
For countries not like WWII era Germany and Japan, i.e. 97% of countries, I think that the George W Bush method (as opposed to that of his son, George HW Bush) was about all you can hope to accomplish – punish the trespass and then get the hell out. Post WWII we have had zero success at nation building in places we aren’t permanently occupying, and of course we were smart enough to never try it before WWII.
@wr: My brother is one of those guys, except for the Vet Home part. The prevailing message I’ve heard from the vets I’ve known echos what my brother said:
But yeah, people start getting senile and ranty at that age. Something on the order of 80% of all people who live to 80 start displaying some sort of dementia is the statistic I’ve heard. That statistic is based on people in retirement facilities, so it may be skewed some.
@Stormy Dragon: Ah! Maybe that’s the difference. All that time the military was telling us how capable the Afghan army was, I wasn’t believing them. 😉
@Chip Daniels:
This x 1,000.
Please, anyone, show me a complete Governmental collapse that has ever gone smoothly.
@MarkedMan: I’m not inclined to agree that it was “as much of a success as it possibly could have been,” but it was certainly as successful as it was likely to be, maybe more.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Here’s what the National Institute of Health says:
I think this belief that most people 80 or over are gaga is why people are so freaked out by Biden’s age. Previously, I’ve seen research that shows that the likelihood of dementia decreases by continuous mental stimulation, having people depend on you, and access to excellent health care. Given that, Biden is less likely than that average to suffer from dementia.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I think Drum would agree. If you read him over the long haul, he (and I) always felt that the government would start to collapse as soon as we said we were leaving, and so withdrawal should be judged in comparison to the total shit-show in Viet Nam, where the same thing happened.
Another useless Congressional hearing that avoided the relevant questions.
The fundamental problem with the withdrawal was the failure to anticipate, detect, and plan for the collapse of the Afghan army and government. That is a whole-of-government failure. A couple of points I’ve made before that should be answered and have lessons learned but won’t be, probably because everyone would be tarred:
– Even if you think – as the administration kept saying up until nearly the very end – that you expect the Afghans to hold for a few months or years so there will be time to do all the things, prudence requires that you have a contingency plan in case that does not happen. There appears to be no evidence that there were any such plans or planning beyond the NEO that every country has.
– During a time of transition we’d want to have our intelligence indications and warning (I&W) system configured to collect and assess the stability of the ANA and Afghan government and provide warning if it was going to collapse. Either the intelligence function was caught flat-footed or its warnings were ignored. Either way, it’s inexcusable because the open-source people monitoring Afghanistan saw the collapse coming at least a month out and saw the first signs 2-3 months out.
The NEO was successful in the end, even though many people – too many – got left behind. But it’s important to note that a big reason it was successful was because the Taliban cooperated. We were trapped on a largely indefensible airfield with the Taliban providing perimeter security and also holding most of the cards. We wanted to stay longer to get more people out, the Taliban said no. The Taliban facilitated some people getting to the Airport while hunting and murdering others.
What the Taliban could have done and didn’t do is attack. After all, we killed tens of thousands of their fighters and leaders over the previous two decades. I bet a lot of them really wanted the opportunity for some blood payback. Fortunately, they saw the big picture, realized they had already won, and that the fastest way to get us to leave was by playing nice.
It was never going to happen without problems. Everyone knew that and it is one of the reasons other presidents avoided pulling out. Trump set up things so that withdrawal would happen in his 2nd term or after he left to avoid it hurting his re-election. More likely he called it off to avoid looking bad.
So the big decision was to leave and make sure we didnt leave anyone behind. They would not have been able to accomplish much and served as targets. It was time to leave. Could it have gone better? Maybe, probably. My take is that the intel community was divided, but maybe Andy knows better. I do think most people were surprised it collapsed so quickly, after all we had reports for years about how well we had trained the Afghan military and how they were ready to perform independently, mostly just lacking in air support.
If the intel people failed (or were ignored), where is the military assessment of the readiness of the Afghan military in this replay of the past? Why were they telling us it was ready if they knew it wasn’t or did they know and were not telling us or, most likely IMO, did they overestimate how well they would function since they didnt want to admit they had failed?
Anyway, my stance has always been that things went much better than I anticipated. I expected a lot more deaths. In a war where a lot fo our deaths were due to IEDs and suicide bombings we were going to provide them with crowds of people looking to get on airplanes. Crowds of people on buses trying to get to airports.
Steve
@Andy:
Is that all? Hmm… What exactly is a contingency plan if the government is collapsing and there are tens of thousands of Taliban troops marching on the city? Send in 100K American troops? Stay another 20 years in hopes that a stable government will appear?
I just don’t think it is realistic to talk about contingency plans with the collapse of the government. We got our soldiers out, we got our contractors out and we got 100K Afghan civilians out. As for hanging in for longer so the government wouldn’t collapse, for 15 years our generals were saying “they are almost there”. Obviously, given how quickly they collapsed, they weren’t “almost” anywhere.
Biden did the right thing, even knowing it was going to be chaotic and he would get the blame.
@Andy:
Not functionally different than the Soviet withdrawal circumstances, re Afghanistan.
The shame is that Congressional Democrats are not similarly outraged. Apparently, a few dead soldiers pales in comparison to political advantage. Any wonder why our institutions have fallen so low in the public eye?
“Or, for that matter, deny that the Biden team rallied rather quickly and salvaged the situation.”
Aw, what the hell is a dozen or so needlessly dead through bald faced disregard of recommendations………let’s look at the positive!!
“And, even when the worst was unfolding, it was obvious that there was plenty of blame to go around for the waste of twenty years of failed nation-building.”
Ah, yes. The good old high school debating tactic. Let’s divert from the issue at hand. Everyone’s to blame!!
And we wonder why there is never any accountability. And why our institutions are in such ill repute. Rank, partisan apologists abound.
@Lounsbury:
On the contrary, functionally, it was very different. Many rebel groups were shooting them the whole way out.
And a huge difference is the Soviet puppet Najibullah government survived for several years and actually outlasted the USSR itself.
@MarkedMan:
Well, it’s actually very realistic, and that kind of planning is one of the US government’s core national security functions.
When the shit hit the fan, the actual operation that was used was one of the most basic and generic contingency plans called a NEO or “non-combatant evacuation operation.” There is one of these for every country on the planet, some with multiple scenarios, that are created and maintained jointly by the State Department and DoD. When there is an event that requires evacuating an embassy and American citizens, these are dusted off and used as the baseline for the actual operation. The most recent one I’m most familiar with is the one in Yemen in 2015 that came as a consequence of the deteriorating situation with the civil war there.
That the Afghan evacuation turned into a NEO is about all the evidence you need for lack of contingency planning in earlier phases of the withdrawal and a complete failure to assess the situation on the ground accurately and timely – which, I’ll say again, the open-source people were able to do.
I’m not arguing that we should have hung on longer. I’m the guy who realized way back about 2006-2007 that Afghanistan was a lost cause and argued with Democratic partisans on this blog that Obama’s surge plan was foolish and would fail.
What I’m saying is that the government should have seen the collapse coming and acted sooner to prepare for it. Instead, the government didn’t see it coming and kept acting like everything was normal until the Taliban were almost to Kabul. The argument isn’t about hanging on longer; it is actually the opposite—to move faster and do so in a way that our security and the security of Americans and allies were ensured by our actions and not by the grace of our enemies, trapped on an indefensible airport.
I don’t think most of you seem to realize how vulnerable we were there, especially at the beginning. It could have been a modern-day replay of Elphinstone’s 1842 retreat from Kabul. We are fortunate it turned out ok in the end, but the fact of the matter is that our mistakes put that decision in the hands of the Taliban more than our own.
@Andy:
Yes and no, the principal withdrawal actions occurred on the understanding with Massoud, through his territorial control, until KGB arguments foolishly led to Sovs strikes.
Functionally through operational withdrawal of Soviets operated with Afghan resistance forbearance, and Sov own actions, triggered by foolish ideas of proving up Najibullah, broke.
The Americans managed not to make that KGB driven error set in exit.
@Jack:
“The shame is that Congressional Republicans are not outraged about gun violence being the #1 killer of American kids. Apparently, dozens and dozens and dozens of dead schoolkids pales in comparison to helping the NRA’s corporate backers get rich selling as many firearms as possible.”
File that under things you’ll never hear said by the endless war lobby as they chickenhawk for their preferred route: an neverending parade of dead and injured US troops in Afghanistan. Or, as Trump called them, losers and suckers.
NRA ghouls also never admit the crime rate has been going steadily down for 40+ years now.. because not being afraid would decrease R votes&gun sales. And, presumably, people would work together to solve problems, which Republicans just can’t let happen.
@MarkedMan:
To be pedantic, HW was Poppy and W (Dubya) was the son.
@wr:
No, retired generals don’t live in VA homes broken and shattered veterans live in VA homes.