That’s the headline on (ex-acting CIA Deputy Director of Operations) Jack Devin’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Help Ukraine Defeat Russia, Then Make Friends

That might be useful on the international stage from a purely political perspective, but consider the cost.

What we’re seeing in the atrocities the Russian “soldiers” and “officers” are committing in Ukraine—bombing civilian bomb shelters carefully marked as civilian—and child—shelters, bombing or missile-attacking hospitals, raping women and children(!), torturing civilian men—these soldiers may be in the lower tiers of Russian society, but their officers are from the middle and upper tiers, and they’re all representative of Russian culture.

How is it possible to make friends with such a country is this?

In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Mr Serpico had some thoughts regarding Navy Public Affairs Officer Admiral (ret) John Kirby’s, occupying a seat at Biden’s table as National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, words on the Biden Afghanistan so-called withdrawal.

John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration. In essence, it was former President Trump’s fault (“Joe Biden Isn’t Sorry About Afghanistan,” Review & Outlook, April 7).
You rarely see such an act of unashamed temerity. The Biden administration had seven months to make any changes it wanted to avoid the debacle that followed.
Are we supposed to believe that Mr Trump recommended giving up Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night? Did Mr Trump recommend that backward sequence for the removal of our Afghan partners, equipment, and personnel? Did Mr Trump recommend not telling our NATO partners that we were leaving?
Remember, it was President Biden who disregarded his internal military advice about leaving behind a residual force in Afghanistan. All of this hearkens to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s warning that Mr Biden “has been wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

What Mr Serpico said.

To which I make a minor correction: “You rarely see such an act of unashamed lying.”

And to which I add:

John Kirby…said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration.

What constraints, exactly? What Trump had set up was a series of milestones that as the Taliban met each one, the next step of our drawdown would follow, but if a milestone was missed by the Taliban, the deal was off. And that set of milestones had a residual force, large enough to be effective, remaining.

Further, that deal was no treaty; it was a President’s Executive Agreement. Executive Agreements routinely are withdrawn—entirely legitimately in process and usually for good cause, as well—by subsequent Presidents. Biden was not bound by Trump’s EA; Biden easily could have altered or rescinded it, just as he did with all of the other Trumpian EAs and Executive Orders he rescinded in the last 10 days of January 2021. He chose to ignore this one.

Biden wasn’t bound by anything other than his panic-ridden wish to get out of Afghanistan, no matter the cost, in lives, in national honor, in messaging to enemies like Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

A passel (that’s the technical term) of classified documents purportedly concerning the barbarian’s war in Ukraine and a number of other items have been stolen from DoD, one or two perhaps altered, and then posted at various sites around the Internet.

The search is on for the leaker(s) and/or the security…weakness…in SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD and/or in CJCS General Mark Milley’s organization within DoD.

One discovery should ease that search, and shorten it, also, is this.

One of the most significant leaks of highly classified US documents in recent history began among a small group of posters on a messaging channel [the Discord messaging platform] that trafficked in memes, jokes, and racist talk.
Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about US allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.

That small number of individuals should make it much easier to locate who got the materials, and from that, how they penetrated DoD security, or in the alternative, from whom they got the materials.

Once that’s done, the security gap must be plugged promptly and the leaker(s), if there was one, must be publicly identified and metaphorically drawn and quartered.