As American citizens confront a foreign policy disaster of this magnitude, we must begin with an inventory of injured parties.

First, unquestionably, are the American men and women in our armed forces who have been killed and injured in this grievous failure. Very much like the Vietnam War, it is the grunts as we called them, who always pay the price for the Ivy League ‘best and the brightest’ who haunt the U.S. State Department and to an increasing degree, the U.S. Department of Defense.

There is nothing like a visit to a military cemetery, such as the one pictured above, to get a sense of the human cost.

It is difficult to feel sufficient empathy for the families who are dealing with the loss or long-term disability of their sons and daughters, when the effort for which such a dire price was paid now seems so meaningless. But we must try. What they must be going through is truly awful and painful without end. They deserve our profound respect and sympathy. It did not have to be this way.

Right behind them are the American civilians abandoned by the Commander-in-Chief.  U.S. civilians have been left behind before in conflicts such as  the Philippines in the early days of WWII after Japan’s rout of U.S. forces after Pearl Harbor. But that was because we did not have the means to save them. The Afghanistan debacle is so different. This is a self-inflicted defeat and humiliation of the United States, a country that had the means to get all of its American citizens out of country. Our leaders pulled out the means (its military assets) first and deliberately abandoned Americans. I cannot think of any act of cowardice and treachery in American history that compares with this.

The Afghanis will suffer greatly, women in particular but also many men who helped the U.S. cause. They are not just cruelly killing their opponents. They are doing so in a way to humiliate the United States. These are the people with whom the Biden Administration has entrusted the survival of our men and women left behind.

The network of alliances from NATO to SEATO will suffer because Biden and his advisors did not consult adequately with them, even though they had more troops in theatre than did the U.S..

The special relationship with Great Britain has been critically damaged as we have seen the unprecedented step of the British Parliament  condemning an American President.

The policy blunders coupled with clear and progressive signs of President Biden’s cognitive decline will embolden our enemies and give pause to all of our friends from Israel to Taiwan and around the globe. Perhaps worse than the senility of one man, is the utter stupidity of Biden’s coterie of advisors. What is their excuse? At least Biden might blame an aneurysm or senile dementia.

President Trump brought several Arab states, Israel and the U.S. closer together with the Abraham accords and other initiatives. This progress may well be reversed or lost if they believe the U.S. is a fickle and undependable partner.  Gee, I wonder where they might get that idea.

This is a terrible setback in the War on Terror.  We have demonstrated that we don’t understand radical Islam and how to deal with it longer term. Likely it will spread even more with training bases and support well beyond the geography of Afghanistan. With this disgusting failure of our President and his circle, militant Islam has shown it can defeat and humiliate the West. This will embolden them to attack us and our allies in the future. The Arab street respects power and Biden has shown the U.S. is currently run by incompetent weaklings and cowards.

There is a school of thought that says our reaction to radical Islam is what has made it metastasize. We have always found this school of thought wanting, as Mr. Qtub of Muslim Brotherhood founding fame was documenting and broadcasting his hate about the West based on his experience with American infidels during the innocent period of the late 1940s in rural Colorado. We can only imagine what he would think of modern day California and New York.

The American people will suffer for all of this. This will be unjust but the world will not care. A fair number of our countrymen would rather vote for a doddering old fool and a bunch of warmed over Marxist ideas than a strong-willed man who came from outside of the political club and sent far too many offensive tweets.

Say what you will about President Trump. At least he was in charge of his White House rather than the White House being in charge of him. He did not run from reporters but in fact engaged them, argued with them, belittled them, and yes, denigrated them. But he did not run and he faced his critics. For this combat, a sizable chunk of the public thought he was at fault for aggravating the press.

Well, now with the benefit of hindsight, we wonder how many voters would like to go back and change their ballots?

Who will suffer and who should suffer are, of course, two different groups.

Likely who will not suffer are the Democrat operatives who pull the strings behind Joe Biden, the puppet president. As one observer accurately put it, they put the man up to win, not to govern. The  machinery of the Democrat Party has a great deal to answer for. This includes this latest foreign policy disaster, the uncontrolled illegal alien invasion on the southern border, inflation, budget madness, declining race relations, soaring crime, turning the national security apparatus on political opponents, and the contradictory and idiotic policies related to Covid.

This is an unparalleled list of serious offenses for a President in the first seven months of his first year of governance.

Our fervent hope is that voters will see these offenses for what they are and give them such an electoral thrashing in 2022 that today’s radical Marxist Democrats become a footnote in history.

Then there is the main stream media who hid the incompetence of this man from the American public and viciously and intentionally distorted the views and record of his opponent. They deserve professional and economic destruction.

Where do these poorly informed and prepared advisers to this demented President come from? Where do the sycophants in the media come from?

This is a dangerous failure of America’s ruling class and its foot soldiers that largely comes out of our colleges and universities and then burrows into our increasingly ineffective institutions.

We now have a working list of who has been hurt by this botched job. Now we need to complete a list of who should be held responsible for this tragedy. We need to start with the Democrat Party and not stop until they are swept from the White House to the mayors’ mansions in every blue city. Then, we need to get to work and reform our universities and the many institutions that have been so damaged by the graduates of the failed public school system and higher education system in America.