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How Joe Biden Helped Cause a Genocide In Gaza

An interview with reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed about his new book, Crossing the Red Line.

How Joe Biden Helped Cause a Genocide In Gaza

An interview with reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed about his new book, “Crossing the Red Line.”

Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House on July 25, 2024.

The Biden administration’s near-total support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a stain that can never be washed from Biden’s legacy—or from the legacy of the key figures who helped Biden fuel the genocide.

It is those figures—people like Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan; his Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk; and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken—who loom largest in Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, a damning new book by journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed. The book is a culmination of Ahmed’s years-long effort, first at HuffPost and now at The Washington Sun, to tell the story of how the genocide unfolded from deep within the bowels of official Washington. It tells a comprehensive, devastating story of the way that the Biden administration’s imperial hubris; disregard for both domestic and international law; insular, paranoid culture; emotional identification with Israel; and dehumanization of Palestinians combined to help commit one of the worst crimes of the 21st century.

I spoke to Ahmed on Wednesday. We talked about why understanding Biden’s approach to the genocide matters, why so few people within the administration spoke out against the government’s support for the genocide, the flagrant anti-Palestinian bias shown by Biden’s top aides, the media’s failure to accurately reflect what was happening inside the White House, and more.

Jack Mirkinson: We’re now almost two years into the Trump administration. Oftentimes over the past 18 months, you’ll see people going, “Why are people still talking about Joe Biden? Donald Trump’s in office now. Shouldn’t we be focusing on that?” What would your response be to people who say that?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: The reason why we need to look at the Biden administration’s atrocious policymaking on Gaza is exemplified by this week at the UN General Assembly.

The biggest event yesterday, Tuesday, was Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East coordinator, hosting a high-profile event with Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa for the Atlantic Council think tank—which shows you the architects of this policy are coming back to shape our era.

McGurk is someone who I’ve written about for years as, in the words of one official who spoke to me, “the prime example of a white man failing up.” This character has gone through Middle East policy in the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden eras, and, as I reveal in my book, tried to get a job in the second Trump presidency unsuccessfully.

We live in an elite foreign policy culture that, without a reckoning and without shining a light on decisions that enable atrocities, incivility, and chaos, is going to keep promoting and empowering the same people. And that’s alarming from a moral and small-d democratic standpoint of accountability.

It’s also relevant in the Trump era because so much of what has been normalized since October 7th and has gotten so much worse under Trump is rooted in decisions made by the Biden administration. And what I mean by that is policies like the US tolerance of a major and unprecedented Israeli blockade on any supplies going into Gaza. It was the Biden era that crafted those policies, not Trump. When we think about concerns like the potential permanent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the alarm bells were being rung in the Biden era. Nothing was done. Allowing a bipartisan veneer over these policies is part of what allows them to persist.

JM: You place the Biden administration not only within a continuum stretching back to the outbreak of the Iraq War and the so-called War on Terror but also to conflicts as far back as Vietnam.

ASH: I’m glad you take the conversation back pre-9/11. Ceding more and more power to the White House, and what in Washington is referred to as “giving policymakers the space”—which effectively translates to being optional about the application of US and international law—predates 9/11. So does this culture of empowering and putting on a pedestal people who are treated as foreign policy mandarins. You see some of the same people from the Reagan era and the Clinton era who are associated with really alarming policies being brought back again and again. So there’s a recycling of figures, and also figures who come from a tradition of real American hubris—not wanting to look at the toll of American policies abroad.

What changes after 9/11 is the fixation on Middle East power projection and the real staggering comfort level with implicating Americans themselves in massive civilian harm. You never have challenges from [either Republican or Democratic administrations] of the military budgets that have become normalized. You have the normalizing of torture and rendition [without] any specific US official being held accountable. That’s the world that these people are coming out of.

JM: I want to turn to the unfolding of the genocide. The picture that emerges from your book is that in a lot of ways Joe Biden was the worst possible person you would want to be in the Oval Office when something like October 7th happened—that everything about his politics, his own personality, the way that he ran his administration, was hyper-calibrated to lead to the kinds of decisions that he wound up taking.

ASH: Who Biden is and the administration and culture that he creates are really important because it’s a culture of hubris, but also intense insularity—especially towards the latter half of his presidency as his cognitive decline is getting greater. And that’s all amplified when it comes to Israel-Palestine because Biden feels uniquely qualified to handle it. He feels that he has known Netanyahu for........

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