May 30, 2024

JIM GERAGHTY: 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, how’s Biden’s cancer-curing “moonshot” coming along?

UPDATE: Welcome Back Carter, Ace writes: “You Youngs may not remember Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to rescue his failing 1980 political campaign. At a late hour, he finally gave the greenlight for a special forces operation to rescue the hostages from Iranian Muslim fanatics. But the helicopters crashed in a dust-storm. It became emblematic of Carter’s ineffectual, feckless presidency. Now Biden’s got his own sandstorm. An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say. Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached.”

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll