Saturday, August 28, 2021

Michael Barone: A Tale of Two Airlifts

"This is now on track," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday, "to be the largest airlift in U.S. history." On the process of bringing American citizens, Afghan partners and allies out, she continued, "I would not say that is anything but a success."

Psaki was careful not to use the word "all" in identifying the categories of people being evacuated from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But, perhaps due to a Generation Xer's insufficient grounding in history, she was unwise in using the word "airlift."

The word brings to mind the Berlin airlift of 1948-49, which was quite a different enterprise from what we are witnessing today. The Kabul airlift is an operation removing Americans and allies from a country we are, by President Joe Biden's order, abandoning. As Psaki's non-use of "all" suggests, it is unlikely to be completely successful.

The Berlin airlift was the opposite. It was an American effort to avoid abandoning West Berlin at the behest of Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. And it was triumphantly successful. 

One thing both airlifts have in common is that they were the products of the personal decisions of American presidents made against much expert advice. Biden says he was bound, in this one case, to carry out a decision of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Despite indications that the very limited troop deployment in Afghanistan was sustainable, he ordered it ended within a short deadline.

Former President Harry Truman's decision was made in almost the opposite circumstances. In June 1948, the Soviet Union cut off all motor, rail and barge traffic from the U.S. and British occupation zones to West Berlin, which was landlocked deep in the Soviet zone. The city's 2.5 million people had only 36 days' supply of food and 45 days' supply of coal. Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by Red Army units. The Berlin blockade looked impossible to break.

Truman's top military and diplomatic advisers, men of great ability, doubted that Berlin could be supplied solely by air. But Truman ended a key meeting in July 1948 by starkly declaring, "We're not leaving Berlin."

Air Force Gen. William Tunner, who had supervised the Burma-to-China "hump" airlift during World War II, organized logistics until airplanes landed at Berlin's Tempelhof airport every 30 seconds and were unloaded within 30 minutes. Berlin was supplied with food and coal over the winter, and in May 1949, the Soviets called off the blockade. 

I've long argued that Truman's steadfast support of the Berlin airlift was one reason he, at age 64, won the 1948 election after trailing for months in the polls, and led his party to an unanticipated down-the-line victory. And it's beginning to look like Biden's role in this very different airlift may have something of the opposite effect in the 2022 midterm elections, and also in 2024 if Biden seeks a second term at age 82.

The Berlin airlift, together with Truman's steadfast resistance to Soviet advances in Europe, appeared to supply a sense of order in what had been a dangerously disorderly postwar world.

The Kabul evacuation, and its apparent failure to leave no one behind, is only one instance of how events seem to be spinning out of control. That's apparent also at the southern border, with the most illegal border crossings in 21 years in one major city after another; with homicides rising more than in any year since 1960; with supposedly "transitory" inflation wiping out wage increases. 

Meanwhile, polls suggest minimal appeal for the Biden Democrats' proposals to vastly increase federal spending, including reinstituting the old welfare-without-work-requirements that were renounced back in the (Bill) Clinton years. Some Democrats took cheer from the Census Bureau's report that fewer Americans classified themselves as "white alone" than in 2010. But as my colleague Tim Carney pointed out, that's largely because of a reworded question that resulted in 14 million fewer Hispanics classifying themselves as "white alone." 

A more significant development, sociologist Richard Alba argues in his book "The Great Demographic Illusion", is that Hispanics, like earlier ethnics, are tending over generations to intermarry and assimilate into the larger population. That's evident in their unanticipated 2020 increase in Trump support.

In any case, attitudes can change more rapidly than demographics. Biden's job approval has plunged into Trump territory -- under 50%. The generic congressional vote, which usually tilts Democratic, is now tied. And the left-wing pollster Civiqs shows negative Biden job approval in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- states with key 2022 Senate races. 

So just as Truman's airlift blocking totalitarian advance strengthened the president and his party in 1948, Biden's airlift accommodating totalitarian advance is, at least temporarily, weakening the president and his party in 2021. 

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM


13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dead on

Anonymous said...

Congratulations Mr. President, you have brought America to our lowest point in history.

Don Drane said...

Bye Felicia, and Joe. Meanwhile the rest of us will attempt to pick up the pieces and salvage this country. It won't be an easy turn-around, but true Americans do have a way of persevering, don't they?

Joe...on the other hand, a year from now, will not know a bit of it as he will be secluded in a special wing of Walter Reed with immediate family coming in on Sundays bringing fried chicken and balloons.

Bill Dees said...

I would suggest that airlifting people out of a hostile venue, under threat (and actuality) of violent terrorists' bombs, with a need to thoroughly vet many of them in advance, is in no way comparable to loading food and coal onto aircraft in a peaceful, secure location and transporting it to an airfield that is not threatened by a hostile force. No doubt both airlifts involved many aircraft and personal effort, but that's as far as a legitimate comparison goes.

Anonymous said...

Getting out of a 300mm a day non sensical war.

Well done.

Do your best.

God bless America

Anonymous said...

In the long run, withdrawal is the obvious right thing to do. It's not simple but it's probably inevitable. But that does not mean a nation with our military resources and plenty of time to plan and execute a competent operation should lose lives, property, trust, and everything else because
some jive-ass politician is motivated by politics and not the grave concern for his country's soldiers and allies. Same on our border. Jive-ass politics.

Krusatyr said...

Joey has a pocket mouse he's been instructed to pet when he feels confused, or sleepy. He would think it an honor if Kabul is renamed Kaboom al Bidenistan, not realizing the whole world thinks he blew up 20 years of Allied sacrifice.

Bill Dees said...

I want people to think about this for a minute:
Pentagon: U.S. can get up to a throughput of 30 C-17 evacuation flights out of Afghanistan each day.
16,000 people evacuated in the last 24 hours, about 11,000 of those on military flights.
Have you ever seen a C-17? I know most of my fellow aviation nuts have, but for my friends/family who have not, that is a HUGE aircraft. Absolutely immense. And the USAF is cranking out a full C-17 flight from Kabul every 45 minutes, using a SINGLE runway in enemy-controlled territory, non stop, 24 hours a day right now. This has literally never been done before in the entire history of aviation... the USAF is literally making history. They evacuated more than twice as many people YESTERDAY as we did in the entirety of the Saigon evacuation in 1975.
Anyone who wants to pop off about this being a failure needs to shut their piehole unless it's to commend the incredibly hard working men and women of the US Air Force, and the ground forces supporting their mission. It started rough, no denying that, but in less than a week, the situation has been stabilized and the mission exponentially increased to a tempo never before seen, not even during WW2. The part that gets me is the logistics of supporting this mission - the ground crews are going full throttle right now, bringing in fuel, oil, fluids and servicing the aircraft as best and as fast as they can. What they are achieving right now is nothing short of incredible.

Krusatyr said...

@1:54pm
"Failure" in the context of recent events in Afghan pullout have universally referred to Biden, his State Department, his administration, never toward American troops.

No amount of subsequent heroism can overcome Biden's vacuous, demented "imbecilic" (per Tony Blair) lack of planning, judgment and unwillingness to accept professional military advice which resulted in nearly 200 dead (including 13 American troops) and hundreds more wounded.

To add mayhem and madness to misery, Biden gave Bagram Airbase and $83B in military armaments to Islamic terrorists.

Our troops were not allowed to leave strategically thanks to Biden.

Anonymous said...

The Government Accounting Office states the US left behind:
22,174 Humvees
634 M1117s
155 MxxPro mine proof vehicles
169 M113 Armoured personnel carriers
42,000+ pickup trucks and SUVs
64,363 machine guns
33 Mi-17 helicopters
33 HH-60 Blackhawks
43 MDS30 helicopters
16,035 night vision googles
358,530 assault rifles (Biden says you can buy them, but we should give them to terrorists).
126,295 pistols
176 artillery pieces
162,043 radios
8,000+ trucks

And the list is not complete.
Yes, no matter how much lipstick you paint on this pig, this is a complete failure.

How many lives will Biden's incompetence costs the world?

Anonymous said...

Well I guess that's a wrap, 2:38 has blown any excuses for the idiocy of the Biden Afghanidisaster out of the water past present and future, and 2:58 has nailed the coffin shut. Y'all turn out the lights on your way out.

Anonymous said...

2:38 & 2:58 have done a fine job assessing the situation. Politicians pissing away American lives and tax money. I saw a great T-shirt over the weekend: "Defund Politicians". Has a nice ring to it...

Anonymous said...

Bill Dees - they wouldn't have to be running those wonderful C-17s at that pace if they had planned this operation better. and they wouldn't have to be doing it out of that 'limited' airport you use as a basis for measuring the success of this idiocy if they had not abandoned Bagrahm AFB prior to having everybody and everything evacuated.

Yes, a C17 is a monster of a plane, and we have been jamming people into them like cargo --- because this administration moved the small remaining military out of the country before it bothered to get the appropriate non-military people out; those people that have been part and parcearl of our military for the past 20 years.

And yes, they have moved a hell of a lot of people out in the last week. BUT, they haven't moved and won't have moved them all out before Biden shuts it down. The rest will be left to -- well, just left.

OK to say it was time to get out of Afghanastan, but to try to blame on Trunp the disaster of the execution is ridiculous. I don't give a damn if you credit Trump for deciding to get out, or credit Biden for deciding to get out -frankly we haven't been fighting a military war in that country for a few years (we are still in Korea, now for four times as long as we have been in Afghanastan, but yet try to claim that this was America's longest "war" just because Korea was a 'police action' is just more crap, but I digress). Getting out is not the issue.

Its how we got out. And who and what we didn't get out due to the incompetence of the operation.


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