The Obama-era functionary’s ire was piqued by a report in Politico.
Barack Obama’s former deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, is mad.
The Obama-era functionary’s ire was piqued by a report in Politico detailing the rage percolating in the Biden administration toward Israel following an inadvertent strike on humanitarian aid workers with the group World Central Kitchen. The Israeli government is conducting an investigation into the faulty intelligence that led to that strike, but Israeli officials still expressed their deep “regrets” over the “unintentional harm” caused by the errant airstrikes. Still, Biden is reportedly “angry.” His growing “consternation” is fueled by the fact that Israel is “not listening” to U.S. warnings.
And yet, all the administration’s frustrations mean nothing if the White House continues to materially support Israel’s objective of neutralizing Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Rhodes maintained.
“The U.S. government is still supplying two-thousand-pound bombs and ammunition to support Israel’s policy,” he complained. “Until there are substantive consequences, this outrage does nothing. Bibi obviously doesn’t care what the U.S. says, it’s about what the U.S. does.”
Those 2,000-pound bombs have vexed critics of Israel’s war for months. After all, 2,000 pounds is a lot of pounds. The ordnance leaves massive craters in the wake of their detonation. Not “since Vietnam” has so much heavy ordnance been used so often and in such a densely populated area as Gaza, one CNN analysis maintained. “It certainly appears that [Israel’s] tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than what we would accept as the U.S.,” said onetime State Department adviser Larry Lewis — an assessment that conflicts with national-security spokesman John Kirby’s.
The view expressed by Rhodes and other like-minded critics of Israel’s war is predicated on the assumption that 2,000-pound ordnance are so destructive that they serve no military utility other than to terrorize a civilian population. “In an area this densely populated and using these bombs, it’s inherently indiscriminate,” CNN reporter Nima Elbagir averred in December. That is simply false. As a comprehensive piece by David Adesnik and Mark Montgomery in the latest issue of Commentary explains, these weapons have profound battlefield utility. And depending on how they are used, they can even limit collateral damage.
Adesnik and Montgomery outline the best practices for the use of 2,000-pounders developed by the U.S. Air Force. They can “destroy only the upper floors of a building” to neutralize sniper positions, for example, or be deployed at a 30-45-degree angle to ensure the whole structure doesn’t collapse. “U.S. pilots employed the tactic often enough for it to acquire a nickname: ‘kneecapping,’” they write.
The authors add that even the Washington Post was forced to concede — albeit in a “caveat” that appears “exclusively in an appendix” of an article on these bombs — that the collateral damage they can produce is a function of how they are used. “Damage depends on nearby structures, building materials, the soil, whether a bomb has been set to explode above or below ground, and other factors,” the Post’s addendum read. “Experts also noted that even the largest munitions can be employed to ensure that nearby civilian infrastructure is not damaged or is minimally affected when they explode.”
That is particularly relevant in a campaign against an adversary that has developed an extensive network of underground tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure. Reaching those facilities requires a high yield, but detonation at or below ground level also minimizes the blast radius. “In fact, the U.S. and Israeli air forces can drop 2,000-pound bombs close to their own troops in battle without hurting them,” Adesnik and Montgomery recount.
No one — neither the American government nor their Israeli counterparts — has disputed the notion that the strike that killed seven WCK aid workers was anything other than a terrible tragedy. But Rhodes gives away the game when he uses that tragedy to indict Israel’s defensive war in total. After all, the bombs that vexed him were not used in that attack. Advocating the withdrawal of U.S. support for Israel’s war wouldn’t prevent future accidents like these. It would, however, make it less likely that Israel defeats Hamas in as timely and judicious manner as possible. Perhaps that is Rhodes’s true objective.