JON GABRIEL: We landed on the moon. Now we can’t even keep the Gaza aid pier afloat.
More recently, we fled a hard-won victory in Iraq and were chased out of Afghanistan by tribesmen sporting small arms. Today we can’t seem to stop the Russians in Ukraine and mostly ignore China’s increasing threats against Taiwan.
We can’t even keep a small pier afloat off Gaza.
Remember the pier? In his March State of the Union address, President Joe Biden announced its deployment to “enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.”
* * * * * * * *
During its brief deployment, an estimated 8,000 metric tons of aid were delivered via the pier. That’s the equivalent of about 600 trucks worth — the number humanitarian agencies claim need to enter Gaza every day.
Meanwhile, the war continues.
At this point, few Americans expect another “giant leap for mankind.” But “one small step” would be nice.
In their 1989 book Apollo, Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox wrote about JFK’s role in birthing the American moon landing program:
At 1:07 Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday morning, April 12, 1961, U. S. radar recorded the launch of an R-7 rocket from the Baikonur Space Center on the steppes of Kazakhstan in the south-central part of the U.S.S.R. Wiesner called Salinger at 1:30 to report the launch and again at 5:30 to tell him that Moscow had announced a successful recovery of the spacecraft, Vostok I. Its passenger, cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, had completed one full orbit of the earth and was said to be feeling fine.
As four years earlier, when the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit, the nation looked at the skies and saw calamity. Perhaps Shepard would have beaten the Russians into space, were it not for a few minor technical delays. No matter. Appearances could have a reality of their own, the Washington Post editorialized in its Thursday edition: “In these matters, what people believe is as important as the actual facts, and many persons will of course take this event as new evidence of Soviet superiority.” An influential congressman from New York announced that he was ready to call for a full-scale congressional investigation—the American people must be properly alerted to the need for wartime mobilization. Abroad, an independent newspaper in Manila reported that the people in its part of the world “see in all this the supposed superiority of the Communist way of life, economic system, and materialistic philosophy.” Egyptian president Gamel Nasser had “no doubt that the launching of man into space will turn upside down not only many scientific views, but also many political and military trends.”
Overnight, a gap in Soviet and American rocket technology that had been years in the making became Kennedy’s personal failure. As a writer for the New York Times pointed out, such events would inevitably be compared with the President’s efforts to present himself as a “young, active, and vigorous leader of a strong and advancing nation.” As if to underscore how the youthful image could backfire, a political cartoon the day after Gagarin’s flight showed a gleeful Nikita Khrushchev bouncing a rock-sized spacecraft off the head of a confused and boyish John Kennedy.
* * * * * * * *
Vostok I was not the only crisis on Kennedy’s mind that day. Even as he met with his advisers to talk about space, a brigade of soldiers composed of refugees from Castro’s Cuba was assembling at jumping-off points in Guatemala, awaiting Kennedy’s final approval for a landing at the Bay of Pigs. Two days later, at the last go/no-go decision point at noon on Sunday, he authorized the expedition to proceed to the beaches.
The Cuban brigade landed in the pre-dawn darkness of Monday morning, beginning what Pierre Salinger would remember as the three grimmest days of the Kennedy presidency. From the first hours, Castro’s army responded to the invasion with unexpected efficiency. By the evening of the first day, the invasion forces were far behind schedule. By Tuesday morning, they were stalled and trying to hang on. By Tuesday afternoon, they were encircled by 20,000 Cuban army troops and the White House Situation Room began a deathwatch. At a midnight meeting that didn’t break up until two o’clock Wednesday morning, the President rejected last-minute proposals for U.S. intervention and accepted the inevitability of defeat. It was just a week to the hour since the flight of Vostok I.
On that disastrous Wednesday, as the world learned of the full extent of the Cuban debacle, President Kennedy called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to the Oval Office. The topic of the meeting was the space program. They conferred alone for about half an hour. The next day, Johnson received a memorandum from the President. “In accordance with our conversation,” Kennedy wrote, Johnson was to bring him answers to five questions. Number one on the list was, “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Kennedy wanted answers “at the earliest possible moment.”
The next day, Kennedy held another press conference. This time when he was asked about space, his tone from the week before had shifted dramatically. Now he said, “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.”
Compare that (which I heavily truncated from a much lengthier description in Cox and Murray’s book to Jim Geraghty’s take back in May on Biden willed the Gaza Pier into creation: Busted Gaza Pier Has All the Markings of a Joe Biden Op.
Our Phil Klein fumes, “The Gaza pier is every bit the disaster we all expected it would be when Biden made the ridiculous proposal in his State of the Union address back in March. . . . This debacle was not only predictable, it was predicted by many.”
Now, the Pentagon’s JLOTS [Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore] guys aren’t stupid. They knew the likelihood that weather conditions would require operations to halt at least temporarily, and the potential risk to equipment and personnel. This is why you’re seeing speculation that the Pentagon prioritized the president’s orders over a reasonable assessment of the risk.
We don’t know who, precisely, came up with the idea to build a pier. Perhaps on some future date, we’ll hear that it was the proposal of national-security adviser Jake Sullivan or Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or someone else. The buck stops with the president, anyway; he’s the one who authorized the mission.
But . . . come on. The plan was to build a pier on the front door of a war zone, in the absolute minimally acceptable environmental conditions, and hope for the best? That has Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over it.
Biden’s foreign-policy ideas always have this, “Guys, it’s so easy” simplicity to them.
By the way, since we’re discussing the first manned moon landing, as I asked back then, how’s Biden’s cancer-curing “moonshot” coming along?
