Biden’s Admission About His Airstrikes on the Houthis Is Unbelievable – By Alexander Sammom (Slate) / Jan 19, 2024
The president’s baffling quote sums up the core problem of his Israel strategy.
“Well, when you say ‘working’—are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” —President Joe Biden, in response to the question “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”
Sometimes you see a quote attributed to a famous person and think, there’s simply no way that’s real. Abraham Lincoln talking about the internet, Albert Einstein extolling the virtues of compound interest—that sort of thing. Joe Biden is not known for pith in his public remarks; he is known for spiraling, ungrammatical sentence construction, digression, and avuncular nonsense. Looking at the president’s description of his administration’s weeklong, almost certainly unconstitutional, and even more certainly ineffectual bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, you’re thinking: Surely, there must be some uncharitable editing here, some nip-tuck with ellipses, some faulty attribution, or some contextual bait and switch.
No, he really said that.
Since Hamas’ deadly attack on Oct. 7, Biden’s Israel policy has been plainly disastrous. He continues to embrace the wildly unpopular, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throughout a military campaign that has resulted in the deaths of 23,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza; the purposeful obliteration of schools, government buildings, and hospitals; and the spread of hunger in the region. One hundred thirty-two Israeli hostages still languish amid the onslaught with no immediate hope of return, and their families have become an increasingly galvanizing force against the Israeli government. As if all that were not bad enough, Netanyahu is now publicly pledging that there will not be a Palestinian state, in direct opposition to the U.S. president’s oft-repeated postwar aim. There is almost no support globally for Israel’s campaign outside of Biden World; even in the United States, poll after poll shows the majority of Americans, and the vast majority of Democrats, want a cease-fire.
CONTINUE > https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/israel-joe-biden-yemen-houthi-gaza-war.html
