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So much for all of the fatuous demands from the Biden foreign-policy team for Israel to declare an end to the war. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made remarks yesterday cheering the death of Yahya Sinwar in Rafah, a city that both had warned Israel not to enter at all for most of the winter and spring. Both proclaimed this a great time to declare the conflict over, as did the State Department — and all aimed at getting Benjamin Netanyahu to stand down:
As both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated Sinwar’s death, they also expressed hope that the moment would enable Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare victory in Gaza and bring Israeli operations there to a close, finally clearing the way to a hostage deal and easing the daily drumbeat of grim headlines: civilian casualties in Gaza, ongoing Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a looming Israeli strike against Iran.
Biden’s statement made even less sense than Harris’, which at least sounded coherent. I clipped this strange remark from Biden in the Final Word post last night, but it’s worth considering here as well:
“This is a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world,” Biden said in a statement.
“To my Israeli friends, this is no doubt a day of relief and reminiscence, similar to the scenes witnessed throughout the United States after President Obama ordered the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011.”
Ahem. Did the death of Osama bin Laden end the war waged by al-Qaeda against the US? No, it didn’t, and neither did Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2012, ahead of the election. We ended up redeploying to fight the AQ-linked ISIS in Iraq and Syria two years later, a group that started out as «al-Qaeda in Iraq.» We’re still in Syria fighting the remnants of that group ten years later, in fact, because a decision by one party to stop fighting doesn’t end a war unless the other warring party agrees to cease hostilities.
Besides, Biden advised against hitting bin Laden before that strike.
