President Joe Biden’s pier project in Gaza is headed for the history books.
The $230 million waste of American taxpayer money — “plagued with problems since its inception,” as CNN put it on Tuesday — never came close to being even a temporary solution to the obstacles of delivering aid to civilians displaced by the war between Israel and Hamas.
But as a symbol of Biden’s feckless failures in foreign policy, it’s tough to beat — and Americans should be furious.
The president announced the pier project in his State of the Union address in March.
President Biden: “Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier on the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments…no U.S. boots will be on the ground.”#SOTU #SOTU2024 pic.twitter.com/oEcSzbOojQ
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 8, 2024
It was an obvious attempt to portray himself as the savior of Palestinians caught up in the fighting between the Israel Defense Forces and Islamic terrorists who launched the latest war in the Middle East with a brutal attack on Israel in October.
It was a Biden kind of move — full of bravado, poorly thought out and ultimately a dismal failure that put American service members’ lives at risk, squandered American taxpayer money and ended up making the world’s only superpower look foolish and incompetent at the same time.
Besides being inadequate for the weather and water conditions on the Mediterranean, the pier was supposed to function in the middle of a war zone amid chaotic conditions where the aid it did manage to carry ended up largely being looted before it reached its intended distribution points.
Was the Gaza pier a bad idea from the start?
On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported plans to permanently disassemble the pier, noting that it had been removed for repairs on June 28 but was expected to be back in operation Wednesday. Then it was to be used only long enough to deliver aid that had stockpiled on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
When that is done, within several days, according to the AP, “the Army will dismantle the pier and depart.”
Four officials confirmed the report, according to CNN.
The AP report described the pier’s failure with the kind of slant that’s typical from the establishment media when it comes to Israel-Hamas reporting:
“Officials had hoped the pier would provide a critical flow of aid to starving residents in Gaza as the nine-month-long war drags on. But while more than 19.4 million pounds (8.6 million kilograms) of food has gotten into Gaza via the pier, the project has been hampered by persistent heavy seas and stalled deliveries due to ongoing security threats as Israeli troops continue their offensive against Hamas in Gaza.”
So, the security threats are supposedly the fault of “Israeli troops continuing their offensive against Hamas.” They’re not the fault of a terrorist group deeply entwined in a civilian population and using women and children as human shields.
But not even establishment media bias can sugarcoat the failure of the president’s Gaza pier — another humiliation on the world stage at the hands of the Biden administration.
It’s not a debacle on the scale of the 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. It’s also not the ongoing nightmare of the nation’s southern border deliberately left defenseless as millions of “asylum seekers” treat American law like used toilet paper while American taxpayers pay for the privilege of their country being invaded.
But it’s a perfect symbol of the Biden approach to the presidency in a microcosm.
It wasted the money the government collects from Americans. It put the greatest military the world has ever seen into an embarrassing, unwinnable situation.
And it was done solely for political purposes — the Biden re-election team’s hopes of easing criticism from the pro-Hamas left in American politics that the president is helping Israel too much in its battle for existence against Islamist savagery.
And now, it’s officially a failure that will soon be gone.
As a symbol of the Biden White House, it’s tough to beat. Sane Americans can only hope that, come November, the Biden administration will follow it into history.
