On Israel, the administration speaks not in one voice but in a cacophony of asynchronous soloists.
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.