By Noah Rothman
Monday, May 13, 2024
Jim Geraghty’s stirring Morning Jolt today examined from all angles the
incomprehensible political stupidity, moral vacuity, and strategic imbecility
associated with the Biden administration’s attempt to promulgate the notion
that it was withholding from Israel intelligence on high-ranking Hamas targets.
The goal of this approach, as reported by the Washington Post, is to
compel Israel to back away from an assault on Rafah in exchange for information
that would lead to the neutralization of terrorists who killed and captured not
only Israelis but Americans, too.
The claims retailed by at least “four people familiar
with the U.S. offers” represent such a brazen abdication of presidential
responsibility that it’s reasonable to question the Post’s
reporting. Is the president really holding back information that could
contribute to the decimation of a State Department–designated terrorist group?
According to Democratic representative Adam Smith (Wash.), the answer is no.
“The crucial thing about that story is that there’s no
evidence whatsoever that it’s true,” Smith said in an appearance on Fox News
Sunday. “I don’t see evidence of that.” That’s a risky position for the
former House Armed Services Committee chair to take as unequivocally as he did
if the congressman wasn’t certain of the facts.
But Smith might have been confused. After all, the
Democratic congressman also criticized Joe Biden for failing to be “as clear as
he should have been” regarding the withholding of certain ordnance from Israel
so as to punish Jerusalem for ordering the incursion into Rafah. Smith
emphasized that the administration is merely holding back 2,000-pound “dumb
bombs” that the president believes should not be introduced in Rafah, which is
partly true. It is, however, also “slow-walking” the disbursement of JDAM kits that transform
gravity bombs into guided munitions, which suggests that the administration is
as leery of indiscriminate bombing in Gaza as they are of the more
discriminating sort.
If Representative Smith is confused, he is in good
company. In a bizarrely self-contradictory display in two interviews on Sunday,
Secretary of State Antony Blinken rattled off a litany of grievances with the
Israeli government that, taken together, make little sense. He insisted that
the Israeli campaign in Gaza is a failure because “Hamas is coming back” in
areas previously cleared by the Israel Defense Forces. While he remains
ostensibly committed to a “shared objective to defeat Hamas,” he appeared to suggest
that goal was unachievable “no matter what they do in Rafah, or if they leave
and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do.”
Blinken confirmed Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment that,
despite Hamas’s best efforts to put human shields in harm’s way, vastly more
terrorist operatives have been neutralized in Israel’s operation in Gaza than
civilians. But he also stood by what he sheepishly emphasized was
only a preliminary State Department report establishing Israeli conduct that is
not “consistent with international humanitarian law.” He was not prepared to
draw any “definitive conclusions,” though. “Our assessments will be ongoing,”
Blinken added.
If you’re confused, imagine how it must feel to be a
member of this administration right now. But while our confusion comes to us
organically, theirs is the full flowering of a plan — convoluted though it may
be. In much the same way the Biden administration was so consumed by the fear
of escalation in Ukraine that its policy in support of Kyiv’s independence became internally contradictory, the White House cannot
stomach the prospect of an Israeli victory that it ostensibly supports.
On Israel, the administration speaks not in one voice but
in a cacophony of asynchronous soloists, all of whom likely have reason to
believe their policy preferences are shared by the president and his cabinet.
The result has been a muddle. Americans who support Israel today have every
reason to believe Joe Biden doesn’t share their objective. Likewise, the
minority who would prefer to see Israel lose the war imposed on it on October 7
have no reason to think the president has joined their cause. Both sides of the
conflict are possessed of a fierce urgency they do not see reflected in the
administration’s policy. In trying to please everyone, the Biden White House
has achieved the opposite.
Joe Biden never wanted to be a wartime president. It is
because he so desperately sought to mollify the world’s bad actors that he
projected a provocative weakness, contributing to the proliferation of hot
conflicts all the world over. This White House cannot envision victory, either
for America or its allies. It sees only the prospect of ambiguous outcomes, to
which it can muster the contribution of only half measures. And like all who
fear success, the administration has embarked on a campaign of self-sabotage.
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