Last Monday marked the first anniversary of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in the wake of the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Kyle Orton takes stock, and examines the false choice presented to Americans by the Biden administration and its defenders:

[T]he choice was not to withdraw or “escalate” in Afghanistan: President Biden could simply have done nothing and sustained the situation as it had been for nearly a decade. The war, in any serious sense, had been over since 2014, with U.S. troop levels at or below 15,000 since then, and U.S. killed-in-action totals never above 30 annually, fewer fatalities than the U.S. Army suffers in training accidents. The reality is that Biden came into office with an ideological fixation on “ending” the “forever war” in Afghanistan.

The problem is that the enemy gets a vote. If you withdraw while the enemy still has the will to fight, this is called “defeat.”

The Afghan army sacrificed 66,000 lives to defend its country, 5,000 of them in the last few weeks, which is remarkable since, by that time, Biden had sapped its morale with his April confirmation that the U.S. was abandoning the country, and then crippled the Afghan military—withdrawing direct U.S. air support and contractor services so Afghanistan’s own jets and helicopters no longer worked, and ceasing intelligence provision and logistics.

The most disgraceful thing Biden did during last year’s fiasco was to blame the Afghans for what he had done to them, lambasting the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani for refusing to stay to be murdered in his capital city after Biden had opened the gates to the jihadists, and denigrating the Afghan army as “not willing to fight for themselves.”

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.