#Biden blames Trump for Afghan pullout — then takes credit for it

President Biden stood before the American people on a Tuesday afternoon and angrily informed us all that he had no choice but to end things the way he did in Afghanistan. No choice! NO! CHOICE!

Hey, don’t blame him! Poor Joe Biden! Look what a mess he ­inherited!

You want to pin the chaos on somebody? According to Biden, Donald Trump’s your man. The former president made a deal with the Taliban that obliged America to pull out by May 1, so what could Biden do?

Well, he could have done nothing. Which is to say, he could have said Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban was no longer operative. And in a way, he did, since the May 1 deadline came and went and we were still there.

There are plenty of things Trump did that he’s stopped doing, plenty of Trump policies he’s reversed. In the end, this is one Trump policy — the Afghan bugout — he decided to honor.

You might think, therefore, that he would thank the former president for designing it. Instead, he wants people to blame Trump for a pullout Biden himself defends and for which he takes credit.

He suggested, as he has before, that the only reason the American military went without fatalities in Afghanistan between February 2020 and the terrorist assault on them last week was that Trump and the Taliban had agreed they wouldn’t attack us. Come on, man. Look at the American fatality numbers in Afghanistan before any such deal was struck.

There were nine in 2016. There were 14 in 2017 and 14 in 2018. There were 21 in 2019. We had the Taliban relatively contained.

Biden claimed the choice “was between leaving and escalating.” That claim does not hold water. In point of fact, we were providing support and air cover for Afghan forces and could have continued to do so.

He ended the war because he wanted to, not because he had to. He wanted to claim a moral victory over warfare itself, to be known as the bringer of peace. Hubris is every leader’s greatest temptation and his worst foe.

Biden’s hubris is a bet. He is betting on the Taliban being something other than what they are, and betting that the American people will watch what happens now without feeling he has made us all complicit in the results.

Every military casualty is a tragedy. As the president said, “There’s nothing low grade, low cost, or low risk for any war.” But every member of the US military is a volunteer, and that is doubly why they deserve to be celebrated for the choices they’ve made to serve their country by putting themselves in harm’s way.

That is not how Biden spoke of them yesterday.

In defending his own act of negating their efforts in Afghanistan by choosing to surrender the country to the Taliban, he actually seemed to pathologize their service — portraying veterans as uncommonly prone to suicide.

The shameful cultural portrayal of the Vietnam vet from the 1970s as a delusional psychopath (see movies like “Rolling Thunder”) has now given way to a portrait of the Afghan vet as a trauma victim carrying psychic scars that will never heal — a portrait drawn by the president of the United States.

They made America safer, and the world safer. Joe Biden has likely made America less safe, and the world less safe. At least their honor is secure. The angry old man who spent 20 minutes yesterday yelling at the country is secure in nothing.