"This entire administration is naifs, weaklings, idiots, and Marxists," I posted at Instapundit earlier this week about a different Middle East report, but today's news proves that my estimation was entirely too optimistic.
In an Atlantic piece headlined "The War That Would Not End," Franklin Foer takes readers on a deep dive "inside the year-long American effort to release the hostages, end the fighting in Gaza, and bring peace to the Middle East." It isn't that Foer's peace isn't well-sourced or lacking details — it's that he needed to go back much further than one year to tell the story.
(The article is paywalled, but I spend a bit of your VIP membership on subscriptions to sites like The Atlantic so you don't have to.)
The story begins almost as soon as Biden assumed (and I do mean assumed) office on Jan. 20, 2021. From my long-form Monday column:
Less than one month into his solitary, sad little term, Biden lifted former president Donald Trump’s restoration of U.N. sanctions on Iran. The White House and the State Steno Pool sold the move as something that "could help Washington move toward rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement aimed at reining in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program." Trump had withdrawn from Barack Obama's "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018, accusing Iran of serious violations."
"Trump had Iran broke and boxed in," I wrote. "Biden unleashed the Kraken."
In addition to that, Biden restored US funding to UNRWA (a virtual arm of Hamas) and removed the Houthis from the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist lists that Trump had finally put them on late in his term.
But perhaps the most bone-headed move was Biden's rejection of Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner's Abraham Accords, negotiated under Donald Trump's auspices between Israel and a growing number of Arab states.
And Another Thing: Speaking of me being right, I warned you more than three years ago that he had already "frittered away any chance for peace in the Middle East."
The genius of the Accords was twofold. The first is that the peace agreements were bilateral between Israel and each Arab nation — no U.S. security guarantees required. The Accords were meant to be self-sustaining as trade and cultural contacts grew between states that had been officially at war for decades.
The second is that the negotiations bypassed the Palestinians completely.
Every other peace effort was premised on something more impossible and only slightly less ridiculous than trying to ride a pogo stick to Mars: negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Arabs of Gaza/West Bank before negotiating a formal peace between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.
The Palestinians don't want peace. They want to murder Jews from the river to the sea — and then some. And yet every American president from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama insisted on pounding their skulls on the cement wall of Palestinian intransigence.
The Accords roadmap was to bring one Arab nation after another on board, culminating in Trump's second term with Saudi Arabia. With Iran broke and the Arabs at peace with Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah would have withered on the vine. Then, and only then, peace might be brokered between Israel and the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank.
Instead of carrying on, White House PressSec Jen Psaki breezily denounced the Abraham Accords in May of 2021 as having failed to do "anything constructive" because, as I wrote above, the "entire administration is naifs, weaklings, idiots, and Marxists." The Biden-Harris administration let the Accords wither while they empowered Iran and pursued an old-school peace plan starting with — surprise! — an Israeli/Palestinian peace made impossible because Biden had already empowered Iran.
So now the administration has spent the last year, described in dizzying detail by Foer, scrambling around trying to figure out how to put out the fires when they're the ones who poured the gasoline and lit the match.
Recommended: RFK Jr Wants to Get Into Your Pantries
P.S. Join the fight as one of PJ Media's VIP or VIP Gold members during our 50% off SAVEAMERICA promotion If you already have joined us, thank you so much for your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member