Friday, July 12, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
The New York Times reports about the White House spin on dismantling the pier:
“The real issue right now is not about getting aid into Gaza,” [Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser] said. “It’s about getting aid around Gaza effectively. But there are a lot of things that we need to work through, including lawlessness and armed gangs. In some cases, Hamas itself is trying to disrupt and derail the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”
Who could have anticipated that?
Everyone. The New York Times reported in March when the pier was announced.
The new facility could provide another way to get truckloads of aid into the region. But it would not solve a central problem of distributing aid inside Gaza while intense fighting and Israeli bombing continues in the south, and as lawlessness in the north has grown so bad that aid groups suspended operations there.Even according to the NYT, the pier was built without any way of solving the "central problem" of aid distribution.
Why did the US spend $230 million on this JLOTS plan that does not even address the the major obstacle to getting aid to Gazans who need it?
The main reason is that the Biden administration wanted to make it look like it was doing something. The UN falsely said that Gaza was on the brink of famine, Biden was under pressure from the progressive wing of his party to not be complicit in "genocide," and he wanted to make a dramatic announcement in his State of the Union address.
It was all optics. Helping Gazans was never the major goal.
Besides that, the point of the pier was to have a major US presence in the region to deter Israel from invading Rafah, which it announced it intended to do the previous month. Israel ignored the pressure not to attack the last major area of organized Hamas military and the US didn't succeed in that goal.
Even so, the implementation was stunningly bad. There is no way that US military engineers couldn't anticipate the roughness of the Mediterranean Sea. That is more proof that helping Gazans was only a secondary goal of this debacle.
In the end, only 1% of the aid entering Gaza came from the pier - 438 trucks of aid out of 39,000 total. That is over half a million dollars for each truck in overhead. It seems that this was even less efficient than the airdrops are.
Joe Biden dragged the military into wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people in manpower to do something that was poorly planned and doomed from the start, all seemingly to make him look better in an election year. This is not how a commander in chief should act.
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