By Noah Rothman
Monday,
March 11, 2024
For the
better part of a month, Joe Biden’s anxious Democratic allies had indulged the fantasy that the president could shore up
his ailing support among what should be his base voters if only he did more
interviews. The president took their advice over the weekend. But in sitting
down with Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, even
for the tightly edited ten-minute interview NBC News released,
Biden demonstrated why he is better off sticking with the teleprompter.
Rich delved into the president’s self-abasing effort
to walk back the strongest moment of his State of the Union address — an ad lib
in which he displayed a small measure of the passion shared by the
millions of Americans for whom the migrant crisis over which Biden has presided
has become intolerable. And Phil identified the incoherence in Biden’s attempt to
placate the unappeasable rabble for whom the exercise of Israel’s right to
self-defense is anathema. But it’s also worth pointing out that in trying to
reconcile his desire to see Hamas defeated with his desire for Israel to stand
down before that objective is achieved, Biden descended into a historical
revisionism that serves only to indict the country that made him president.
In
his insistence that Israel’s effort to neutralize Hamas has gone too far, Biden
has presented himself as the Jewish state’s best friend — devoted only to
dispensing “tough love” to America’s wayward ally. In his interview
with Capehart, Biden noted that his advice is a product of America’s experience
in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
“Don’t
make the mistake America made,” Biden began. “We went after Bin Laden until we
got him, but we shouldn’t have gone into Ukraine – I mean, we shouldn’t have
gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t necessary. It
wasn’t necessary. It just caused more problems than it erased — than it cured.”
The
revisionism in which Biden engaged might appear to his fellow revisionists like
a glimmer of insight piercing the president’s otherwise impenetrable brain fog.
But a cursory analysis of the analogy he is trying to draw discredits the
president’s potted history. If Israel’s post-10/7 experience is akin to what
America undertook after 9/11, Israel’s actions become more not less explicable.
Nearly
one month elapsed before U.S. forces embarked on Operation Enduring Freedom in
Afghanistan, a mission for which most of the country was anxious and of
which nine out of every ten Americans approved. No president
could resist the public pressure to fulfill the mission necessitated by the
9/11 attacks. Nor would they, if bringing justice to the masterminds of those
attacks was a national objective. Likewise, the actions of Israel’s wartime
unity government are reflective of the overwhelming Israeli consensus in favor
of seeing the war in Gaza through to victory. Israel cannot stop short of
taking Hamas’s final redoubt in Rafah just as NATO forces could not allow the
Taliban a refuge in Kunduz province.
Biden
seeks to take credit for the killing of al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden,
despite famously having objected to the raid that brought American justice down
on bin Laden and his coterie. But as Biden surely knows, the intelligence coup
that contributed to that raid was a multi-year project that synthesized the
information gleaned from interrogations of suspects taken off Afghan
battlefields with the information provided by “intelligence sources in Afghanistan.” There is no “over the
horizon” strategy that contributes to the cultivation of information like this.
Nor would the neutralization of bin Laden have been anything other than a
cosmetic reprisal if the Taliban had not been routed. Given Biden’s own contributions
to the Taliban’s restoration to power, it’s understandable that he would
attempt to downplay the threat to global security that regime represents. But
it seems unlikely that posterity will let him get away with it.
As the Daily Beast reported over the weekend,
the Islamic State terrorist outfit “has been allowed to re-group and re-tool in
Afghanistan where thousands of fighters are training and plotting attacks,
despite Taliban claims that they are trying to clamp down on them.” Sources
close to the Afghan security forces maintain that it is a matter of time before
“an expanded ISIS would start to plan attacks on targets across the world if
the Taliban continues to effectively allow them to set up a new haven.” The
assessment is backed up by former U.S. intelligence officials who called into
question the notion that obscure inter-terrorist politics have compelled the
Taliban to crack down on the organizations whose goals it supports.
The
wrongheadedness of America’s mission to oust Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq
represents another article of faith for those in the Biden school of
geopolitics. They maintain that Iraq was a manageable threat to U.S. security
before 9/11 — the ongoing, costly, often dangerous policing of its two no-fly
zones, punctuated by dozens of periodic airstrikes on Hussein regime
targets in 1991 and 2003, notwithstanding. They argue that the 2003 invasion
was unjustified despite the international consensus around Hussein’s material
support for terrorism and the presumption that he was unbound by civilized conventions.
After all, as Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, said in a
restatement of the prevailing view, Hussein “will use those weapons of mass
destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.”
But
although the war and the counterinsurgency campaign were costly and,
eventually, unpopular, the outcome they produced is vastly preferable to the
fate to which Afghanistan has been consigned. “Maybe it’s not saying all that
much,” I wrote on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, “but with six free
parliamentary elections under its belt, Iraq arguably represents the most
successful exercise in American-led democracy promotion since the Second World
War.” Iraq is no longer an exporter of terrorism. It doesn’t provide pensions
to the families of Palestinians whose children blow themselves up in Israeli
cafes. It has not become an Iranian satrap, as many feared it would. And
despite a brief interlude under Barack Obama — one that he himself abandoned
under pressure — the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq presents Americans with
ample opportunity to target terrorist enterprises abroad (you’ll forgive the
dirty word) preemptively.
In
October 2001, over 70 percent of Americans told Princeton pollsters that they
expected another foreign-led terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the coming
months. Few believed the threat could be mitigated. Nor is it likely that an
alternative to George W. Bush’s leadership would have tolerated Hussein’s
regime in the post-9/11 environment — not given that administration’s reliance
on its Democratic predecessor’s approach to containing the Iraqi threat.
When
he issues perfunctory denunciations of his country’s conduct, Biden relies on
narratives that have calcified around both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to
fill in the blanks. That’s distasteful enough, but he manages to reach new
heights of cynicism when he cites America’s bitter experience to shame Israel
out of its mission in Gaza. Hopefully, when the Israelis look to America’s
actual history, not the revisionism preferred by its current commander in
chief, that will suffice to summon enough resolve to keep going.
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