{"id":113042,"date":"2024-05-20T17:05:21","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T15:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=113042"},"modified":"2024-05-20T09:06:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T07:06:18","slug":"26-05-97","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=113042","title":{"rendered":"Sinwar in Exchange for Rafah"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Sinwar in Exchange for Rafah<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

LEE SMITH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Why is the Biden administration dangling the Hamas chief in exchange for stopping the Gaza war? Because the terror group\u2019s survival is key to the administration\u2019s larger project in the Middle East.<\/strong>
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\nYahya Sinwar in Gaza City, 2017 \/ ALI JADALLAH\/ANADOLU AGENCY\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Biden team\u2019s offer to trade Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to be the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, for guarantees that the Israeli military stay out of Rafah points to two disturbing truths about the current conflict in the Middle East. The first is that the U.S. knows plenty about what the Hamas terror group is doing and has done. The second is that Washington has been keeping key information\u2014like the terror leader\u2019s whereabouts\u2014from the Israelis, thereby prolonging the war that it claims to decry.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The implications of the administration\u2019s offer, relayed in a recent\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>, has Israelis and U.S. pro-Israel activists livid. Israel\u2019s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for instance,\u00a0posted<\/a>\u00a0on X, \u201cI am shocked and sickened by reports that the U.S. is withholding from Israel vital information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. Is the administration still our ally?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Biden administration is making the offer because all its efforts to end Israel\u2019s war have failed and if Rafah falls, Hamas is likely to fall, too. It seems there\u2019s no other way to preserve a pillar of what the White House calls \u201cregional integration\u201d\u2014a euphemism for the U.S.-Iran alliance system that Barack Obama has tried to impose on the Middle East for the last decade.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Leaks that the Biden administration is withholding actionable intelligence on Hamas\u2019 paramount leader in Gaza confirm that, as Tablet\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the administration had a wealth of intelligence on the terror group and its plans. If U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that they know where Sinwar is squirreled away now, in the chaos of wartime, they also knew what he was doing in the lead-up to the massive attack.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Biden and his aides have formulated their scenario: Hamas \u2018technocrats\u2019 will constitute the Iranian-backed component in a unity government with the U.S.-backed faction that now rules the West Bank. Hamas is a pillar of the U.S.-Iran condominium.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The administration\u2019s efforts to disclaim any foreknowledge of the attack were always absurd. The U.S. has not only its own unrivaled collection of signals intelligence but also significant intelligence channels in Qatar, where Hamas leaders are based; in Lebanon, where Hamas fighters trained under the supervision of Iranian officials; and Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and allows Hamas to smuggle weapons through the terror group\u2019s extensive tunnel network. Further, detailed open-source reporting, especially in\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, months prior to the attack showed that top Iranian officials were visiting Lebanon to coordinate major operations with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet, according to reports shortly after Oct. 7, there was no evidence U.S. spy services shared with Jerusalem their intelligence on Hamas. The Biden administration rationalized its failures by claiming there was nothing exceptional about its findings, much of which was gathered in areas where the U.S. prevented or discouraged Israeli intelligence from operating. As one U.S. source\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the press, \u201cI think what happened is everyone saw these reports and were like, \u2018Yeah of course. But we know what this will look like.\u2019\u201d In other words, the Biden administration knew there was something big in the works; the only question is whether it had any indication of the full scope of the Oct. 7 operation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0article is best understood in connection with two recent\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0articles. The first\u00a0alleges<\/a>\u00a0to explain why Biden lost his patience with \u0399sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and turned against Israel\u2014because Rafah was a step too far. The piece describes a Feb. 11 phone call between an \u201cexasperated\u201d U.S. president and Bibi during which \u201cfor the first time, the president who had so strongly backed Israel\u2019s war against Hamas was essentially threatening to change course.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The narrative that the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0report means to push is false. There was no \u201cevolution\u201d of Biden\u2019s position. In reality, the administration has been trying to deter Israel from Day One. Less than 24 hours after the Oct. 7 attack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted his support for a cease-fire, before Israel even began its counterstrike.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What the article really shows is how the administration has become increasingly frustrated that its efforts to derail Israel have failed. Starting in the earliest days of the war, Biden helped resupply Hamas by requiring Israel to \u201csurge\u201d fuel, food, and other \u201caid\u201d into Gaza even while public reporting made it clear that much of the aid was going directly to Hamas, which shoots at Gazan civilians to protect its Biden-sponsored bounty.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As the Israelis prepared to move on Rafah in early February, the White House told Israel to present plans to protect civilians, allow Hamas to control aid convoys, and arrange for moving hundreds of thousands of Gazans out of harm\u2019s way\u2014measures designed to limit Israel\u2019s warfighting capacity while strengthening Hamas\u2019 will and ability to resist. But for Biden, changing the rules of war beyond those ever observed by the U.S. and other Western forces still wasn\u2019t enough. The administration joined Hamas\u2019 propaganda efforts by raising daily alarms about a nonexistent \u201cfamine\u201d in Gaza, citing the terror group\u2019s baldly falsified casualty numbers as fact, and threatening Israel with prosecution for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Acting as defense counsel and PR firm for an Islamist organization that massacred over 1,200 people and still holds U.S. citizens hostage is psychopathic\u2014or evil, if you prefer\u2014but it wasn\u2019t enough to satisfy the White House. The administration\u2019s latest demand, retailed by Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and other Biden aides, is that Israel must come up with plans for the \u201cDay After\u201d\u2014i.e., must be responsible for how its enemy will conduct its political arrangements after it\u2019s routed. This Biden demand appears to be a variation of Colin Powell\u2019s so-called \u201cPottery Barn\u201d rule\u2014if a military power breaks a society, it\u2019s obliged to own it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The most generous reading of Powell\u2019s rule is that the ex-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who served two combat tours in Vietnam, intended to make American policymakers think very hard about using military force. In practice, worrying about how to fix unfixable places cost thousands of American lives and trillions of U.S. dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By seeking to impose the same perverse strategy on Israel, the White House\u2019s intent is to hobble a traditional American ally fighting an existential war on its borders.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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U.S. policymakers who have proved repeatedly over the last half century that they are incapable of winning wars now insist that Israel must not win them. \u201cSometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talked about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,\u201d State Department official Kurt Campbell said recently. \u201cI don\u2019t think we believe that that is likely or possible.\u201d Nonetheless, despite all the administration\u2019s efforts to save Hamas, Israel is winning its war\u2014or else Biden aides and allies wouldn\u2019t be going all out to stop them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In further support of the Biden administration\u2019s program of deterrence,\u00a0Obama faction oligarchs<\/a>, like George Soros, Bill Gates, and the Pritzker family, spent millions of dollars funding pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout the United States. These rallies were designed in part to echo the anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel organized by Biden officials and allies, whose goal was first to topple the government and then, after war broke out, to end it leaving Hamas intact.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In America, the purpose of mass demonstrations, still ongoing after several months, is to indicate grassroots support for saving Hamas, and thus frame Biden support for Palestinian terrorists as a response to \u201cpublic pressure.\u201d If some of the youthful demonstrators appeared to be at odds with the White House\u2014\u201cGenocide Joe,\u201d the protesters chanted\u2014the fact is that their desired outcome was the same as the administration\u2019s. And compared to mobs of frenzied kids calling for spilling Jewish blood \u201cfrom the river to the sea,\u201d the White House\u2019s efforts to impose a cease-fire indeed seem measured and moderate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the propaganda campaign messaging that the dynamic and fearless pro-Palestine youngsters had turned America against the evil Zionists hit a wall with New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Angry to have his patriotism tested by demonstrators replacing the American flag with the banner of a terror enclave, the former policeman learned that outside forces, including foreign governments, were funding the protests. No NYC law enforcement official could afford to tolerate the disruption of the city\u2019s life for months by violent, antisemitic, flag-burning protesters seizing control of bridges, highways, commuter rail terminals, airports, and now universities.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When the NYPD started making arrests at the Columbia, NYU, and CUNY campuses, they found that half of the demonstrators were not students but paid agitators\u2014many of them in their 30s and 40s. In other words, while terrorizing a traditional Democratic Party constituency, middle-class Jews, the protests showed there was in fact no organic support for demanding Israel back off an \u0399ranian-backed terror group that killed 30 Americans and is holding another five hostage. In fact,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to an April Harvard\/Harris poll, support for Israel, which has been waning under a concerted publicity campaign led by the White House in concert with its activist allies, skyrocketed back up to 80% once Americans saw kaffiyeh-clad activists hoisting terror banners and calling for genocide.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Biden\u2019s last instrument of deterrence was to stop supplying arms to Israel, which would at last, presumably, bring Netanyahu to heel. Instead, the Israeli public rallied around the prime minister when he vowed to go into Rafah regardless and finish the job, even if Israelis had to fight with their fingernails.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With the White House all out of sticks, it had no other option but to offer Jerusalem a carrot, Sinwar. After all, Israeli officials swore that the war wouldn\u2019t be over until they had Sinwar in chains or had buried him. By handing over the top terrorist, Biden could end the war and keep the Israelis from going into Rafah.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The second\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>, published Sunday, sourced to U.S. officials and Hamas operatives, shows how Sinwar has become expendable. It presents him as a rogue at odds not only with the Palestinian public but even his own organization. According to the article, \u201cU.S. officials say that Mr. Sinwar has shown disdain for his colleagues outside Gaza, who were not informed about the precise plans for Hamas\u2019s attack on Oct. 7.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After Oct. 7, the administration was determined to distance Iran from any operational role in the attack. But now Biden officials are claiming that Hamas leaders based in Qatar, like Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal, were also in the dark. Accordingly, compared to Sinwar, Haniyeh and Meshaal are\u00a0moderates<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhile the outside leadership has at times been more willing to compromise,\u201d a Biden aide told the\u00a0Times<\/em>, \u201cMr. Sinwar is less ready to concede ground to the Israeli negotiators.\u201d Indeed, according to a colleague of Sinwar\u2019s, \u201cother leaders might not have instigated the Oct. 7 attack, preferring to focus on technocratic matters of governance.\u201d The Hamas man continued: \u201cIf someone else had been in his position, things might have gone in a calmer way.\u201d As it turns out, the\u00a0moderates<\/em>\u00a0in Hamas didn\u2019t even\u00a0know<\/em>\u00a0about Oct. 7\u2014and surely, they would have done things differently.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Israel\u2019s plans for the \u201cDay After\u201d are clearly irrelevant, since Biden and his aides have formulated their own scenario: Hamas \u201ctechnocrats\u201d\u2014i.e., the leadership in Doha\u2014will constitute the Iranian-backed component in a Palestinian unity government in tandem with the U.S.-backed faction that now rules the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hamas, therefore, is a pillar of the U.S.-Iran condominium in the Middle East. This includes Lebanon\u2014where Washington funds the army and intelligence services, which are run by Iran\u2019s asset, Hezbollah\u2014as well as Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces are deployed to protect Iranian allies and proxies from the regional Sunni majority.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If Israel finishes off Hamas, the Biden administration\u2019s efforts to complete Obama\u2019s Middle East security architecture will collapse. From that perspective, Team Biden prefers to sacrifice Sinwar and save Obama\u2019s most important strategic initiative, which aims to override the traditional U.S.-led order of the Middle East and give birth to a new and unholy anatomy, tying America to an anti-American terror-state that embodies Jew hatred.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The problem for Biden is that he is trying to realize a vision that is fundamentally unstable, not to mention insane. Iran is weak, and so are its proxies\u2014or else the White House wouldn\u2019t have to expend so much energy deterring Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It can hardly be lost on any careful reader of this recent White House information operation that the powers now being attributed to Sinwar belong rather to the American government. Sinwar, writes the\u00a0Times<\/em>, \u201chas emerged not only as a strong-willed commander but as a shrewd negotiator who has staved off an Israeli battlefield victory while engaging Israeli envoys at the negotiating table.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Sinwar hasn\u2019t been near any negotiating tables; he\u2019s been hiding in tunnels inside Gaza. Rather, it is the White House that has prevented an Israeli victory, and it is Biden aides who have thwarted Jerusalem with their diplomatic entreaties to formulate a plan for feeding Palestinians, moving them to safety, and ensuring their political rights with a plan for the \u201cDay After.\u201d Were it not for Biden\u2019s repeated interventions, Hamas might have been destroyed months ago\u2014and many lives on both sides might have been saved.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The most important takeaway from Biden\u2019s offer of Sinwar in exchange for Rafah is that Barack Obama\u2019s vision of a new Middle East, which the Biden administration has insisted on following, entails tying the U.S. not only to an obscurantist anti-American and Jew-hating terror regime but to a military force and its proxy armies that, like U.S. policymakers, can\u2019t win wars. Like his former boss, Biden is intent on saddling America with a deadly loser. Israel\u2019s decision then isn\u2019t just about whether to take Sinwar or forfeit Rafah, but whether to crash Obama\u2019s project, or to let Hamas survive along with the programmatically apocalyptic delusions of its superpower backer.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Lee Smith<\/strong> is the author of\u00a0The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President<\/a>\u00a0(2020).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sinwar in Exchange for Rafah LEE SMITH Why is the Biden administration dangling the Hamas chief in exchange for stopping the Gaza war? Because the terror group\u2019s survival is key to the administration\u2019s larger project in the Middle East. . Yahya Sinwar in Gaza City, 2017 \/ ALI JADALLAH\/ANADOLU AGENCY\/GETTY IMAGES The Biden team\u2019s offer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113042"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113051,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113042\/revisions\/113051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}