Hold Him Accountable: ‘Abbey Gate’ Arrest at State of the Union Exposes Biden’s Disastrous Foreign Policy

Incompetence masked by dishonesty.

It’s difficult to choose the single worst portion of Thursday night’s State of the Union address — for sheer unmitigated awfulness, it was a target-rich environment. Personally, however, the lowest point came when Capitol Police arrested Steve Nikoui, the father of Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, one of 13 U.S. Marines, soldiers, and sailors killed by an ISIS-K bomb as they put their lives on their line to protect those being evacuated from the Kabul International Airport. The charge was obstructing an official congressional function — one wonders if similar charges might be levelled at the pro-Hamas demonstrators who delayed the State of the Union by almost 30 minutes by forcing President Joe Biden’s motorcade to the Capitol to take a detour. I suspect not.
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Neither Biden nor his high-level national security team has ever been properly held accountable for the sheer incompetence of the final withdrawal from Afghanistan. One can agree or disagree with the need to finally draw a line under our involvement. One can question what withdrawing every last U.S. soldier and contractor meant when we’d already drawn things down to the barest minimum necessary to enable the Afghan army to continue to fight, before abruptly pulling the logistical rug out from under it. 
One can insist that, one way or the other, 20 years had been enough. What one cannot do, except by indulging in the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty, is argue that Joe Biden didn’t preside directly, in the personal contravention of the best military advice, over a heartrending and unnecessarily catastrophic final chapter in our decades-long Afghanistan involvement. The Abbey Gate parents, for three years, have asked that Biden finally take ownership of his responsibility for the deaths of their children. This morning, they are still waiting. As we’ve seen throughout this administration, the buck never stops at Biden’s desk.
The Afghanistan withdrawal ...