Military strength deters. Period.
You don’t need to watch Ronald Reagan’s “There’s a bear in the woods…” campaign ad to get that point. The defenseless nation is very quickly no longer a nation. Furthermore, the more strength it projects, the less it has to use it, either in its own defense or the defense of its allies.
And yet, how quickly President Joe Biden has forgotten that first principle now that two American allies are now embroiled in war — and innocent lives are being lost along with those of combatants.
On Tuesday, several members of the nonprofit aid group World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, according to Fox News. The group has since paused their operations in the region and condemned the strike as “unforgivable.”
President Joe Biden agreed.
“I am outraged and heartbroken by the deaths of seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, including one American, in Gaza yesterday,” he said in a statement. “They were brave and selfless. Their deaths are a tragedy.
Israel has pledged to conduct a thorough investigation into why the aid workers’ vehicles were hit by airstrikes. “That investigation must be swift, it must bring accountability, and its findings must be made public,” Biden said.
“Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident,” he continued. “This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed. This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult — because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.”
In posting the statement to social media, Biden said that: “Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen.”
I am outraged and heartbroken by the deaths of seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, including one American, in Gaza yesterday.
Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen.
Here is my full statement. pic.twitter.com/Nl2jq8wqTt
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 3, 2024
No, they should not. And, while the subtext of Biden’s statement was placing the onus for it on the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the blame should fall directly at the feet of Biden and his administration.
The president’s approval ratings are pretty much as low as they can get without a Watergate-style scandal, so it might be hard to remember that Biden had an extended honeymoon period in the polls despite the fact he showed no aptitude for running the world’s biggest superpower either at home or abroad even then.
Things really took a dip, however, when the United States hastily pulled out from Afghanistan, thanks to Biden swapping out his predecessor’s conditions-based withdrawal plan with an unconditional withdrawal.
Scenes like these didn’t just begin to sour voters on our 46th president. It let all the bears in the woods know that the park ranger would let them rampage through whatever campgrounds they saw fit to overrun:
Two years ago today, the world watched in horror as this American military plane took off from Afghanistan during President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal, signifying one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning. pic.twitter.com/3j94f58e7R
— Rep. Barry Loudermilk (@RepLoudermilk) August 15, 2023
And remember, after 13 members of the U.S. Armed Forces and over a hundred Afghan civilians were killed in the Kabul airport bombing, the U.S. retaliated with an airstrike that killed an innocent father and aid worker — along with nine other civilians, including seven children — under the mistaken auspices that he was going to perpetrate another similar attack.
Is it fair to say that these innocent people’s blood is on Joe Biden’s hands?
Our investigation into that airstrike was not swift. It did not bring accountability. And, to the extent its findings were made public, they were done so in the haziest and most quiet of ways.
But then Biden talks big about Israeli accountability — when the fact is, this is what happens in war. And war is what happens when weakness is put on full display for the world to see. Former Trump-era State Department spokeswoman and current SiriusXM host Morgan Ortagus noted this along with footage of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby saying the obvious: There’s no evidence Israel deliberately targeted these aid workers.
War is a terrible thing. Errors happen that are deadly. Case in point: in our hasty and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, we tried to hit ISIS and instead hit an innocent man carrying water jugs home to his family. To date, there has been no public accountability to Biden’s… https://t.co/Ky3OhA9QiK
— Morgan Ortagus (@MorganOrtagus) April 2, 2024
She’s right: “War is a terrible thing. Errors happen that are deadly.” And if blame is to be meted out for them, it should be placed where it belongs.
It turns out that Hamas is one of those bears in the woods that Ronald Reagan was talking about in that ad. And not only that, it’s a bear that uses its own cubs — innocent Gazan civilians — as human shields.
This is barbarism of the highest sort, and it was kept at bay under the former administration. The same could be said for Vladimir Putin’s Russian military, despite leftist claims Trump was little more than a Muscovite puppet. How much you want to bet that Beijing goes next?
Yes, this airstrike was tragic. So are the roughly 1,400 Israelis who have been killed directly by Hamas, or the tens of thousands of Gazans who have been killed indirectly by Hamas because the terrorist group sees fit to view them not as life but as armor. If Joe Biden wants to apportion responsibility, he need merely glance in the mirror and stare into the eyes of the man whose spinelessness let this happen.
