RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the better part of a month, Joe Biden’s anxious Democratic allies had indulged the fantasy that the president could shore up his ailing support among what should be his base voters if only he did more interviews. The president took their advice over the weekend. But in sitting down with Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, even for the tightly edited ten-minute interview NBC News released, Biden demonstrated why he is better off sticking with the teleprompter.

Rich delved into the president’s self-abasing effort to walk back the strongest moment of his State of the Union address — an ad lib in which he displayed a small measure of the passion shared by the millions of Americans for whom the migrant crisis over which Biden has presided has become intolerable. And Phil identified the incoherence in Biden’s attempt to placate the unappeasable rabble for whom the exercise of Israel’s right to self-defense is anathema. But it’s also worth pointing out that in trying to reconcile his desire to see Hamas defeated with his desire for Israel to stand down before that objective is achieved, Biden descended into a historical revisionism that serves only to indict the country that made him president.

In his insistence that Israel’s effort to neutralize Hamas has gone too far, Biden has presented himself as the Jewish state’s best friend — devoted only to dispensing “tough love” to America’s wayward ally. In his interview with Capehart, Biden noted that his advice is a product of America’s experience in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

“Don’t make the mistake America made,” Biden began. “We went after Bin Laden until we got him, but we shouldn’t have gone into Ukraine – I mean, we shouldn’t have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary. It just caused more problems than it erased — than it cured.”

The revisionism in which Biden engaged might appear to his fellow revisionists like a glimmer of insight piercing the president’s otherwise impenetrable brain fog. But a cursory analysis of the analogy he is trying to draw discredits the president’s potted history. If Israel’s post-10/7 experience is akin to what America undertook after 9/11, Israel’s actions become more not less explicable.

Nearly one month elapsed before U.S. forces embarked on Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, a mission for which most of the country was anxious and of which nine out of every ten Americans approved. No president could resist the public pressure to fulfill the mission necessitated by the 9/11 attacks. Nor would they, if bringing justice to the masterminds of those attacks was a national objective. Likewise, the actions of Israel’s wartime unity government are reflective of the overwhelming Israeli consensus in favor of seeing the war in Gaza through to victory. Israel cannot stop short of taking Hamas’s final redoubt in Rafah just as NATO forces could not allow the Taliban a refuge in Kunduz province.

Biden seeks to take credit for the killing of al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden, despite famously having objected to the raid that brought American justice down on bin Laden and his coterie. But as Biden surely knows, the intelligence coup that contributed to that raid was a multi-year project that synthesized the information gleaned from interrogations of suspects taken off Afghan battlefields with the information provided by “intelligence sources in Afghanistan.” There is no “over the horizon” strategy that contributes to the cultivation of information like this. Nor would the neutralization of bin Laden have been anything other than a cosmetic reprisal if the Taliban had not been routed. Given Biden’s own contributions to the Taliban’s restoration to power, it’s understandable that he would attempt to downplay the threat to global security that regime represents. But it seems unlikely that posterity will let him get away with it.

As the Daily Beast reported over the weekend, the Islamic State terrorist outfit “has been allowed to re-group and re-tool in Afghanistan where thousands of fighters are training and plotting attacks, despite Taliban claims that they are trying to clamp down on them.” Sources close to the Afghan security forces maintain that it is a matter of time before “an expanded ISIS would start to plan attacks on targets across the world if the Taliban continues to effectively allow them to set up a new haven.” The assessment is backed up by former U.S. intelligence officials who called into question the notion that obscure inter-terrorist politics have compelled the Taliban to crack down on the organizations whose goals it supports.

The wrongheadedness of America’s mission to oust Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq represents another article of faith for those in the Biden school of geopolitics. They maintain that Iraq was a manageable threat to U.S. security before 9/11 — the ongoing, costly, often dangerous policing of its two no-fly zones, punctuated by dozens of periodic airstrikes on Hussein regime targets in 1991 and 2003, notwithstanding. They argue that the 2003 invasion was unjustified despite the international consensus around Hussein’s material support for terrorism and the presumption that he was unbound by civilized conventions. After all, as Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, said in a restatement of the prevailing view, Hussein “will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.”

But although the war and the counterinsurgency campaign were costly and, eventually, unpopular, the outcome they produced is vastly preferable to the fate to which Afghanistan has been consigned. “Maybe it’s not saying all that much,” I wrote on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, “but with six free parliamentary elections under its belt, Iraq arguably represents the most successful exercise in American-led democracy promotion since the Second World War.” Iraq is no longer an exporter of terrorism. It doesn’t provide pensions to the families of Palestinians whose children blow themselves up in Israeli cafes. It has not become an Iranian satrap, as many feared it would. And despite a brief interlude under Barack Obama — one that he himself abandoned under pressure — the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq presents Americans with ample opportunity to target terrorist enterprises abroad (you’ll forgive the dirty word) preemptively.

In October 2001, over 70 percent of Americans told Princeton pollsters that they expected another foreign-led terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the coming months. Few believed the threat could be mitigated. Nor is it likely that an alternative to George W. Bush’s leadership would have tolerated Hussein’s regime in the post-9/11 environment — not given that administration’s reliance on its Democratic predecessor’s approach to containing the Iraqi threat.

When he issues perfunctory denunciations of his country’s conduct, Biden relies on narratives that have calcified around both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to fill in the blanks. That’s distasteful enough, but he manages to reach new heights of cynicism when he cites America’s bitter experience to shame Israel out of its mission in Gaza. Hopefully, when the Israelis look to America’s actual history, not the revisionism preferred by its current commander in chief, that will suffice to summon enough resolve to keep going.