President Biden’s latest “real man of genius” idea is to set up a humanitarian pier in Gaza. The Pentagon has said the construction effort will take up to two months and will involve at least 1,000 U.S. troops. This pier is meant to distribute international food and other aid to help Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, who are supposedly facing a “looming famine.”
Not that we really know that the Palestinians are really facing a famine – Hamas, the terror group that rules that area, is known for its flagrant dishonesty – and even if Hamas is telling the truth, the fact that Palestinian Arabs are facing this famine is because Hamas itself is currently intercepting the current international humanitarian shipments, and preventing them from reaching the ordinary Palestinians, a fact which is not going to change when the pier is set up.
Building and manning this pier represents a huge danger for American troops and personnel. The pier is close to an active war zone in Gaza, where several of the participants are designated foreign terror groups – see Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – who already have American blood on their hands. And both of these terror groups are funded by the Islamic Regime in Tehran, which also has a history of killing Americans.
Basically, the danger here mirrors what happened when the U.S. got involved in humanitarian work in Lebanon during the 80’s. At that time, the PLO – the Palestinian Liberation Organization, another Palestinian terror group – had turned Lebanon, which had sheltered Palestinian Arabs, into a civil war hellhole. The Israelis invaded after multiple PLO attacks on Israel. To end the fighting, the international community persuaded the U.S. and other Western nations to provide forces to keep the peace. But, on April 18, 1983, the U.S. embassy in West Beirut was bombed, killing 63 people, with an Iranian-sponsored suicide terrorist driving a van packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives crashed into the embassy lobby. And on October 23, 1983, Iranian-sponsored suicide bombers working for the terror organization that became Hezbollah drove two truck bombs loaded with the equivalent of six tons of TNT into the U.S. and French barracks in two simultaneous attacks, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers. So, on February 7, 1984, U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the end of U.S. participation in the peacekeeping force, and on February 26, the last U.S. Marines left Beirut. This retreat inspired Osama bin Laden to make his own attack on the U.S., as he viewed the United States as a “paper tiger” because of its rapid withdrawal of peacekeeping forces.
When describing the Gaza pier plan, the Biden administration likes to make the argument that there will be “no U.S. boots (troops) on the ground” in Gaza. Which is technically true; the pier will be just off the dry land. But it is also a very meaningless distinction, as an errant missile or mortar fire could easily strike and kill or injure the troops/personnel while they are building or manning the pier.
Is there a good national security reason to get involved in this conflict? None of these interests strongly argues for an intervention here. Now, perhaps doing a humanitarian mission will help U.S. popularity in parts of the world where the Palestinian cause is popular and Israel is hated. But it is unlikely to be much of a boost since the Israel haters want the U.S. to enforce a full ceasefire in the territory and protect Hamas, and this would not come anywhere close to doing that.
The real reason the U.S. is getting involved in this situation is because Joe Biden has an electoral concern. He has to be seen as “doing something” to help the Palestinian Arabs and to interfere with Israel’s efforts to defend itself from Hamas terrorists. This is because his Democrat Party base includes loads of voters who hate Israel and support Hamas.
So, despite having served in office in the U.S. Senate during the 80’s, and having witnessed the deadly results of the earlier humanitarian mission to Lebanon, Joe Biden still wants to do something similarly foolish — despite the huge danger of doing so. Which matches up well with what we know about him from the earlier criticism by former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served with him under both Presidents Bush and Obama. As Gates memorably said, Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Now it appears that Joe Biden wants to extend his record of foreign policy wrongness into a fifth decade.
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Adam Turner is a national security and political professional, with over two decades of experience on the campaign trail, and on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
