British Retired Officer Wants To Court-Martial Biden for Afghanistan Decision

In the aftermath of the collapse of the idea of “Global Britain,” it’s not surprising that there would be Brits joining the calls in Washington for Biden’s removal from office. Lt. Col. Richard Kemp (ret.), CBE, who once commanded British troops in Afghanistan, said in a Sunday TV interview that Biden should be court-martialed for “betraying the United States of America and the United States’ armed forces.” Kemp apparently doesn’t understand that under the American constitutional system, there is no military authority that can court-martial the President. Or perhaps he does and is actually calling for a military coup in the United States.

“I don’t say this lightly and I’ve never said it about anybody else—any other leader in this position. People have been talking about impeaching President Biden,” Kemp told Fox News host Mark Levin. “I don’t believe President Biden should be impeached. He’s the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces who’s just essentially surrendered to the Taliban: He shouldn’t be impeached. He should be court-martialed for betraying the United States of America and the United States armed forces.”

Kemp predicted China, which along with Russia “has all but recognized the Taliban” as the new government of Afghanistan, will join with neighboring Pakistan and Iran to further “enrich themselves by plundering” the war-torn country. China is also poised to use Afghanistan’s wealth of minerals and natural resources as a way to “hit against the West,” Kemp claimed.

“So the whole world just became vastly more dangerous. The U.S. government—President Biden humiliated the United States. He humiliated the United States Army,” Kemp argued. “I think the consequences of what’s just happened and what’s still happening are absolutely devastating for the whole of the Western world.”

Observer Commentator: Biden Has Left Global Britain ‘Impotent and Friendless’

Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of the Observer, writes in a commentary posted yesterday that Boris Johnson’s “Global Britain” has been exposed as “impotent and friendless” by Biden’s decision-making on Afghanistan. The Anglo-American special relationship was declared to be “warm and friendly” after Biden took office and made his first phone call to Boris Johnson, but “Now we know differently,” Rawnsley laments. “When it came to the calls that mattered over Afghanistan, Mr Johnson’s capacity to influence Mr Biden was less than that of the president’s dog,” he continues. “The withdrawal of what remained of the NATO presence in Afghanistan was dictated by abrupt and unilateral decisions made in Washington. Ministers privately admit that not only did they fail to see a resurgent Taliban coming, they have been reduced to second-guessing what the United States will do next.”

The reaction of Conservatives in the House of Commons was intense. “Where is Global Britain on the streets of Kabul?” Theresa May angrily demanded of Johnson in Parliament last week. “I have never heard so much fury so ferociously expressed by Conservative MPs about the behaviour of the U.S. Behind their hot anger was a cold fear: the foreboding sense of an impotent Britain friendless in a frightening world,” Rawnsley writes.

The future of “Global Britain” seems to be left hanging. “If we are entering an era of American disengagement, the questions are acute for a Britain that chose to estrange itself from the liberal democracies in its neighborhood at the same time as the U.S. was becoming a less dependable partner,” Rawnsley writes near the end. “Some plausibly conjecture that the future is a new world disorder in which the great powers jostle for predominance and norms of international conduct are trampled underfoot. This will be a rough place for a country in the north-east Atlantic with lots of vital interests around the globe, but not the means to safeguard them by itself and no one it can count on as an all-weather friend….”

“‘Very well, alone’ did good service for Winston Churchill as a wartime rallying cry in 1940. British impotence in Afghanistan demonstrates that it is an utterly hopeless strategy for survival in the 21st century,” he concludes.