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Grasping the bigger scene
Author: Raine    Date: 09/16/2021 13:07:03

This week the Secretary of Defense of the United States has been testifying in both the House and Senate about the Afghanistan withdrawal. A lot of people from both sides of the aisle have asked about how the country fell so fast to the Taliban. I have watched a good portion of the hearings and even suffered thru some of the questionings from the party I reject, the GOP.

'How did it happen so fast?' everyone wants to know. A part of this 'how' I've noticed has been ignored by elected officials (for the most part) and the media almost completely. It seems to be a big reason. President Ghani fled the country. There was no one left. There was no one left of what little leadership there was. This seems to be a pretty big detail that very few journalists are presenting. Instead, they focus on the blood in the water -- the fall of Afghanistan and how the Biden Administration fucked up the optics.

A similar thing is happening with another bombshell that happened this week. A new book from Robert Costa and Bob Woodward alleges that Joint Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley placed a call to his counterpart in China. This is what is widely being reported from the except on almost all news outlets.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.

One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Donald Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.

(snip)

In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”

Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, according to the book, understood why. The chairman, 62 at the time and chosen by Trump in 2018, believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election, the authors write, a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a phone call on Jan. 8. He agreed with her evaluation that Trump was unstable, according to a call transcript obtained by the authors.
What's not being reported? It's paragraph I snipped from the article.

The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China.

This was not a blanket statement by the JCOS. it was a specific communication about a very unstable person with the nuclear codes. It seems to me that a bit of nuance would benefit the broader public. Instead, it's easier to point at the sharks in the bloody water. In this case, General Milley may have saved our constitution and republic.



&
Raine
 
 

7 comments (Latest Comment: 09/16/2021 17:12:31 by TriSec)
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