On Oct. 7, 2001, we started bombing Afghanistan in the opening stage of Operation Enduring Freedom. That night, our intelligence located the convoy carrying Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar as he fled Kandahar. But the reconnaissance aircraft that was tailing Omar did not have permission to fire its antitank missiles at Omar. The CIA said it would violate our rules of engagement. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld heard about the incident, so enraged was he that he began kicking through glass doors at the Pentagon.

On that day, the very first day of the War on Terror, we lost the war.

It took another twenty years of posturing and face-saving by our entrenched bureaucrats to excuse away their incompetence. In the interim, we Americans were treated to quite a bit of finger-wagging about the "religion of peace," about America's own supposed culpability in fomenting terrorism against us, and about how the only path to victory is through winning the "hearts and minds" of the "Arab street."

But ultimately, the mindset that let Mullah Omar drive away on Oct. 7, 2001, was the same mindset that led to our unconditional surrender in Kabul on Aug. 30, 2021. It was inevitable. The scene of illiterate barbarians murdering our soldiers as we hightailed out of town was the perfect bookend to the war's beginning, i.e. a spilling of American blood, treasure, and credibility by Deep State parasites who care only about their career advancement.

A good chunk of the blame lies with our politicians, who almost always lack the moral clarity to see what's right and who almost always lack the moral courage to do what's right. The days immediately after 9/11 were perhaps our best and only chance to reset the post-Cold War order. We didn't, and the battle lines today illustrate that radical Islam has advanced remorselessly and virtually unopposed against the remaining bastions of Western civilization. Keep in mind that this is with no cease-fire, truce, or armistice in place with our enemies. Just because we've unilaterally chosen not to fight them doesn't mean they've reciprocated. Why would they?

To be sure, there have been scattered victories. The killings of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were bright reprieves from the crushing humiliation of our government's total placation of radical Islam. But even these victories shouldn't have taken trillions of dollars and years of intelligence work. The fact that our supposed "ally" Pakistan was protecting and hiding bin Laden doesn't appear to have opened the eyes it should have.

If you're an entrenched Deep State bureaucrat, it means never having to admit you're wrong. The cogs over at the State Department prefer diplomacy not because they value peace over war or victory over defeat but because they put too much stock into the effectiveness of their supposed powers of rhetoric and persuasion. Conferences, talks, consensus building, and accords are summits are the soft weapons of the sophisticated and tenured to bring about "change" in ways antithetical to the instincts and abilities of bloodthirsty combat troops.

If yet another round of talks fails to achieve a ceasefire, it's because some ground player, almost always the West, has chosen "escalation" and "bellicosity" and "intransigence" over peace. It can't possibly be because our prosaic lecturers aren't the Talleyrands and Metternichs they fancy themselves to be.

On the contrary, our enemies see all too clearly what our diplomats are and what they are not. And they play them like violins to the soothing tune of their own vanities. They willfully string us along, having achieved a "framework" here, a "basis for the next round of talks" there, all the while achieving nothing except the strengthening of the enemy at our expense.

Turn to Israel, a country the size of New Jersey and surrounded by fanatical zealots who are quite literally waging a campaign of genocide against it. The Oct. 7 attacks seem to have jolted Israelis more permanently out of complacency than the 9/11 attacks did for Americans. As a result, a year into the war, there is little talk in Israel about a "quagmire," about the "need for dialogue," or about how Israel sooner or later needs to come to an accommodation with Hamas.

Rather, they just capped a spectacular 10-day operation that virtually eliminated their most powerful regional enemy, Hezbollah, as an effective fighting force. The exploding pagers that neutered thousands of Hezbollah terrorists preceded a rapid sequence eliminating of nearly the entirety of Hezbollah's command hierarchy, ending with Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah himself.

Naturally, Western elites couldn't have been more upset about the demise of a sociopath responsible for the murders of Israelis, Americans, and French, not to mention how many untold Lebanese resisted his ascension.

The BBC decried the "massively escalatory action", which it alleged was instigated by "powerful forces" in the Israeli government. They bemoaned that Prime Minister Netanyahu has "made a habit of defying President Biden's wishes," as if President Biden's wishes should be the overreaching consideration for an Israeli prime minister. It didn't celebrate the fact that Nasrallah's killing probably saved thousands of Israeli and Lebanese lives but lamented the fact that it has rendered Western diplomates with a "sense of powerlessness." 

Way to keep your eye on the ball, boys.

Politico describes the terrorist group Hezbollah as a "militia" and not once mentions the fact that it was Hezbollah, again, that started this latest war with Israel. The Associated Press described the late Nasrallah as "charismatic and shrewd." You know who else was charismatic and shrewd? Ted Bundy.

The Pentagon took pains to immediately reassure Islamic terrorist that we had no part in the decision. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took a break from his hunt for white supremacists to inform the "Arab street" that we had no advance warning of the operation against Nasrallah. Nonetheless, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fired a barrage of missiles at U.S. warships off the coast of Yemen. Our response? Nothing.

So Israel no longer informs us about its operations because our own government leaks the information to our sworn enemies. So we then rush to reassure our enemies that we were not privy to the operations. Our enemies attack us anyway. And we let it happen with no consequence. Is there not a more clear-cut picture of the pathetic cravenness that has rotted the Pentagon from the inside out?

There are three reasons why our political class, particularly the entrenched bureaucracy, so despises any successes that Israel win in its own war on terror:

1. Good old-fashioned antisemitism.
2. Good old-fashioned anti-Westernism.
3. Israel's astounding victories have revealed our talking heads, our think tanks, our "experts," and our cocktail generals at the Pentagon as the absolute fools that they are.

Israel isn't winning of the "Arab street"; it's defeating it. Israel isn't interested in winning "hearts and minds"; it's interested in winning the war. Every Israeli victory holds up a mirror to American bureaucrats and generals, showing them the glaring reality of their own narcissistic failures.

I'm picking on the Pentagon here because it bears the brunt of the responsibility for the dismal results of 20 years of warfighting. If the Department of Energy screws up for 20 years straight, we lose a whole lot of taxpayer money, which the government will just print more of anyway. But if the Pentagon screws up for 20 years straight, we lose thousands of American lives. 

In this, those antisemitic college brats screaming about American financial aid to Israel inadvertently bring up a solid point. We flush billions in "aid" dollars down third-world toilets as an indication of our diplomatic acuity, with nary a peep of accountability. But Israel's military spends the money we give it pragmatically and competently.

To date in 2024, Israel has spent a little over $30 billion, almost all of it from America, in military expenditures in a literal battle for survival, which it is incontestably winning. In 2024, the Pentagon budget is just north of $841 billion. We spend almost 30 times more than the Israelis, and the result of our massive spending is a polar opposite of the result of their spending. They win wars and we lose them.

At this point, why not just give the Israelis that remaining $800 billion and let them use it? They possess the military acumen, competency, and willpower that our generals obviously don't. At the rate they're using our $30 billion to decimate Hamas and Hezbollah and to reduce the ayatollahs into hiding in undisclosed locations, they could have used that additional $800 billion to win the global war on terror a long time ago for our indolent Pentagon brass.

Alternatively, maybe our generals could just do the jobs they're getting paid to do. Possibly, but that ain't gonna happen under a Harris-Walz administration. If Donald Trump wins, he needs to rectify the biggest missed opportunity of his first term, i.e. purging the Deep State, and above all the Pentagon, of its dead weight. Any general with any honor whatsoever would have resigned in disgust after their 2021 Kabul debacle, but since they appear incapable of either honor or shame, they need to be shown the door forcefully.

Israel decapitated Hezbollah in ten days. Can you imagine a Pentagon with the ability to decapitate al-Qaeda or ISIS in ten days? Restoring this ability will not only save American lives but will also reverse the unrelenting advancement of Islamism. It will ensure that the phrase "American military deterrence" doesn't make the mullahs and ayatollahs spit their Turkish coffee all over their baba ganoush plate amid their peals of hysterical laughter.