QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Roger Kimball: What’s Left of Biden Admin’s Foreign Policy?
“We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred,” the X-post ran. “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”
“All sides”?
The post quickly disappeared in the face of widespread ridicule and outrage.
Then there was speculation about where the weapons came from.
A Hamas spokesman gave thanks to Iran for its support of the attack: perhaps the rockets, the cash, the guns.
Iran does seem flush these days.
How did that happen?
On Sept. 11 of this year, President Biden celebrated his new-found friendship with Iran by releasing $6 billion in frozen funds.
That can buy a lot of guns and ammunition.
President Biden went on to condemn the attack by Hamas.
And then they twisted the knife in the body of the story.
“’The Biden Administration denounces the terrible atrocities being committed with the six billion dollars President Biden gave Hamas [via Iran],’ said Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. ‘We are deeply saddened by the deaths caused by every missile purchased with money from the Biden administration.’”
Ouch.
Donald Trump was of the same mind, though characteristically he phrased his outrage more directly.
“Can you believe that Crooked Joe Biden is giving $6 Billion to the terrorist regime in Iran?” he wrote when the deal was announced.
“That money [will] be used for terrorism all over the Middle East, and, indeed, the World. … To pay for hostages will lead to kidnapping, ransom, and blackmail against Americans across the globe. I freed many dozens of our people from various unfriendly countries and never paid a dime!”
The situation in Israel is obviously fluid, and many questions remain.
High on the list of questions concerns the gigantic intelligence failure, in the United States as well as in Israel, that allowed such a large, coordinated attack to be planned and deployed without getting picked up.
Meanwhile, Mark Hemingway writes: The Specter Of Barack Obama’s Deeply Held Anti-Israel Ideology Hovers Over Israeli Attacks. “I hardly believe Obama is such a monster he secretly roots for atrocities in Israel, even if it seems he’s never met an antisemite he would willingly disown. Regardless, there’s no doubt that these horrifying nationwide terror attacks in Israel are Obama’s legacy, a result of his arrogant anti-American ideology put into practice. But after the weekend, even Democratic partisans are scrambling to distance themselves from the Biden and Obama administrations’ ill-advised cozying up to Iran. Now we need to follow through and make sure the Obama-Biden foreign policy legacy, and the dangerous ideology that motivated it, is rejected and held up for the failure that it is.”