By Michael McKenna
The Biden administration has mismanaged the economy, mismanaged our now-nonexistent southern border, mismanaged our withdrawal from Afghanistan, mismanaged the federal government, and pretty much mismanaged everything a presidential administration can mismanage.
So, it is with some relief and a bit of surprise — even if it is a dark and discouraging sort of surprise — to discover that the Keystone Kops have successfully managed to wind up on both sides of the war in the Middle East.
How is that? Well, although much of the legacy media ignored it, the White House announced last week that it was unlocking $10 billion in funds to Iran that had been frozen in an attempt to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
You can’t really blame the media for turning a blind eye to this bit of egregiousness. After all, when the administration shipped $6 billion to the mullahs last summer, most people thought that was too generous for a regime that had been directly responsible for the deaths of American troops on various battlefields over the years.
Probably better for all involved if that unpleasantness is left in the past, no?
Unfortunately, we can’t really leave it in the past. Hamas terrorists — the authors of the war crimes that occurred on and after Oct. 7 — are proxies and stooges of Iran. As a practical matter, the Biden administration’s release of cash to Iran almost certainly means that some of the $10 billion will find its way to Hamas and be used to kill Israelis and possibly Americans.
More embarrassingly, Mr. Biden detoured out of his way in his campaign speech he gave recently — I guess we have to call it the State of the Union address — to announce that the United States intends to build and operate a pier to supply the Gaza Strip. Only the profoundly childlike can imagine that all of those supplies will benefit the civilians of Gaza.
For the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party, which now apparently includes Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, all this is good news. They finally get what they seem to want, which is an American policy in the Middle East that favors the mullahs in Iran above Israel or the Saudis. For them, Israel will always be guilty of refusing to be killed wholesale by some of its neighbors, and the House of Saud can never be forgiven for being a sturdy U.S. ally for almost a century.
For the rest of us, though, the idea that an American president has bumbled into supporting both sides of a war — which was clearly started by one side and specifically started to disrupt the near-term recrudescence of normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia — leaves one with an uneasy feeling that the team in the White House isn’t capable of managing much.