“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams tried to give a “defense” of President Joe Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal but ended up indicting the entire woke military brass running the operations in Kabul.
In an episode of “Real Coffee with Scott Adams” titled “Disgraced President Biden’s Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal and Lots More,” Adams explained that he is a “president supporter” who wants whoever is in office to do a good job.
“This defense will only make sense to people who have experience in big organizations. If you’ve ever been in a big organization, and you’re the head of the organization and you ordered something to happen that was unpopular with the people who had to execute it, what happened? Did the people who needed to execute this unpopular order give you all the options accurately? Because the people at the lower levels are going to try to manage the boss,” Adams explained. “It’s a normal phenomenon that if people think the boss is making the wrong decision, they will resist in a passive way that you can’t quite determine if they’re really cooperating, or are they intentionally killing something by doing it poorly.”
This concept, Adams said, applies to the top U.S. military generals who profit off of bad decisions that keep bad operations going.
“Do you think the military wanted to remove everybody from Afghanistan on the timeline that either Trump or Biden wanted? Either Trump or Biden, doesn’t matter which timeline you pick, do you think the generals who are looking for jobs in the manufacturing industry, who make military stuff after they leave Afghanistan and they’ve got other bosses to please — don’t they have their current boss, which is the president, but then they also have their five-years-from-now boss or sooner that is making weapons?” Adams said. “And if you’ve got a war, you can sell more weapons, and you can make an argument that it’s in the interest of the United States to stay — keep fighting those ISIS guys and Al Qaeda.”
Biden made it clear he wanted to leave Afghanistan, so Adams said the generals gave him “sh-tty options” and parsed out possible threats or embarrassments to shoo the president away from making good decisions.
“They start botching it. They slow roll — and you ever heard that term, slow roll? — that’s what people do in a corporation when they don’t like what the boss told them to do. Oh, they do it, but they slow roll it. … What do you do? Fire everybody? That’s one way to go. Fire everybody. OK, but what will the next people do? Probably slow roll, and again, I’m not even sure that would work, and it would take a while and it would be disruptive and all that stuff.”
Another option, Adams said, is to lean into what the generals are saying.
“They tell you the whole world will fall apart if you order us to do this, but you know, they’re f-cking with you. They’re slow-rolling you. Here’s what you do. You tell them to do it anyway by that date, and you tell them that if there are heads on the ground, it is their f-cking fault. Then you’ll fire them. Do it anyway. If you f-ck up, then I’ll fire you. … If you incompetent motherf-ckers who are trying to make this happen, if you won’t even give me a good option to get out of Afghanistan, you’re going to take the bad f-cking option. And you’re gonna get out of Afghanistan because let me tell you the thing that’s not gonna change: the decision. We’re getting out of f-cking Afghanistan. You can do it right or you can do it f-cking wrong, but we’re getting out of Afghanistan.”
Adams ended the segment by claiming, “That’s leadership.”
“If you said to me, what would leadership look like? It would look like this. It will look like a botched, disgraced move. And we might find out someday that his generals were the problem. And we might find out that he overrode the generals and said, ‘Look, this is a leadership decision. A sh-t ton of people are going to die.’ … You can’t avoid that part. So you might as well do what’s good for the United States,” Adams said. “You know what that is? Get the f-ck out of Afghanistan. Messy, if it’s the only option you’re gonna give me f-cking generals. If you generals will only give me bad options, I’m gonna take the bad f-cking option.”
