From Eli Lake, The Free Press,
Assad’s Fall Has Humiliated Washington
Everything that Biden claims is a legacy of his is a lie. History will not treat this crook kindly.
According to President Joe Biden, the end of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny in Syria was made possible by his administration’s foreign policy. Speaking from the White House on Sunday in a televised address, he said, “For years the main backers of Assad have been Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, but over the last week their support collapsed, all three of them, because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office.”
Try not to laugh.
Biden attributes the woes that have befallen this alleged “Axis of Resistance” to “the blows Ukraine [and] Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”
This isn’t just a deceptive telling of recent history. Biden has it backward. While it’s true that Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are weaker today than they were when Biden was inaugurated as president, it’s not because Biden had the foresight to unleash the Jewish state against America’s enemies in the Middle East. It’s because Israel defied Biden’s efforts to restrain it. Syria has toppled its tyrant in spite of the Biden administration, not because of it.
Lake goes on to explain how none of this could have happened if Israel had listened to Biden, and then traces all the failures of Biden’s foreign policy back to Obama doctrines that essentially were all about appeasing Iran and Russia, while sleighing Mideast allies, to secure a nuclear deal.
On the second day of 2020, Trump ordered the air strike that killed Qasem Suleimani, the Iranian general and architect of Iran’s strategy of building up regional proxies throughout the Middle East.
But after Biden won the 2020 election, the old Obama approach returned. One of the first priorities of Biden’s new administration was to restore the nuclear bargain that Trump tried to scuttle. And Iran’s proxies continued to become emboldened. No worries. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted last year, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” Oops—eight days after Sullivan made those remarks at the Atlantic Festival, Hamas launched its October 7 pogrom.
Excellent article, well worth a read.
Biden’s empty boast about Assad’s demise is a punch line. But his foreign policy was not an anomaly. He channeled the Obama-era conventional wisdom that captured a generation of Washington’s foreign policy elites. Their assumptions about Iran now lay bare and exposed for the world to see as the region realigns. And yet they remain in their perches on Congressional committees, at the best think tanks, and in the top op-ed pages. So it’s worth asking: What else might they be wrong about?
Photo: Anti-government rebels celebrate in Damascus, Syria, on December 8, 2024. (Louai Beshara via Getty Images)