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Murphy
Carthago delenda est
[Carthage must be destroyed] – Cato the Elder
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy always has been a stalwart soldier
in President Joe Biden’s army of progressive polemicists. But Biden‘s recent
withholding of arms for Israel is, even for a practiced polemicist, an attempt
to square a political circle. It is perfectly plain to all that Israel will
never be safe from terrorist molestations unless Hamas and other Iran supported
terrorists groups are militarily defeated.
Biden’s recent decision to deny offensive arms to Israel is
an attempt – some would say for political reasons – to put some distance
between himself and Israel’s war Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If at the
beginning of the war between Hamas and Israel, Biden had claimed that the
United States “has Israel’s back,” his imprudent decision to deny military aid
and U.S. Congressional appropriated funds to Israel at war can only represent a
step back from Israel’s exposed back.
Following the October 7, 2023 murderous assault of
Iran-backed Hamas on Israeli citizens, Biden unflinchingly supported Israel’s
war on Hamas, both the government of Gaza and Iran’s chief instrument of terror
in the Middle East. Hamas replaced The Palestine Liberation Organization in
June, 2007 in a violence scarred election. It has refused ever since to hold
public elections. For terrorist minded governments – cf. Hitler’s and Russia’s
Stalinist regimes – one democratic election unfixed is one too many.
Far from punishing Iran for its support of the separate
terrorist groups in the Middle East – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen
– Biden suspended economic sanctions on Iran, spurring a new wave of terrorist
support that is pledged to “push Israel into the sea.” Like Iran, the Houthis –
known as Ansar Allah, “supporters of God,” are Shia. Saudi Arabia, bordered by
Yemen, is Sunni, as is much of Arabia.
Iran’s commitment to its terrorist groups is far more
resolute than Biden’s commitment to Israel.
This writer noted at the beginning of the Biden
administration that it would not be long before Netanyahu – Israel’s Churchill
– would feel in his back the prick of the knives firmly held in the hands of
Israel’s on-again-off-again U.S friends in the Biden administration.
Israel withdrew both troops and settlements from Gaza in
2005. A short two years later in 2007, Hamas, a militant organization whose
professed intentions towards Israel were murderous, took control of the Gaza
Strip. And Gaza, under the direction of Hamas, was left unguarded to pursue
peace and prosperity. But economic flowers did not bloom in Gaza under Hamas’
hand. Instead, Gaza became a Trojan Horse within besieged Israel pledged to its
destruction.
Now then, Connecticut’s three term U.S. Senator Chris Murphy
knows all this. He is intimately familiar with the decades long struggle
between Israel, surrounded by Middle East enemies, and the friends of Iran, among whom we
must now number President Biden, committed to a “two state” solution, a
demonstrable failure.
Here is Murphy fielding some questions from CNN’s “State of
the Union” host Dana Bash on May 12, 2024. Bash should be congratulated for
presenting a Biden apologist with other than soft ball questions, Murphy’s
usual fare among the Northeast’s timid interrogators.
BASH: Do you support
what President Biden told Erin Burnett, that he is blocking some military aid
to Israel and won't support them, will block more if in fact Israel goes into
Rafah more aggressively?
MURPHY: I do support
President Biden's decision. And let me tell you why. President Biden is
learning the mistakes of U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. What
we learned in both of those efforts was that you cannot defeat a terrorist
ideology, you cannot defeat a terrorist movement with military force alone.
Indeed, Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was,
most everyone but Biden will agree, a disaster of monumental proportions. The
clever evasion in Murphy’s answer is introduced by the word “alone.” Israel is
fighting both an ideology and a terrorist group. The terrorist group may be
defeated by a sustained and serious offensive military attack. Something in
Biden does not like offensive military measures. The defense of Ukraine is
tolerable just so long as Ukraine’s military refrains from serious and
sustained offensive measures. What
Murphy is not saying is that Shia ideology cannot be defeated by pointless
negotiations. Peace negotiations are successful after – not before – wars have
been concluded by decisive military victories. That lesson can be learned by
both Biden and Murphy from a cursory review of history, which is very clear on
the point.
Murphy continued his answer: “In Afghanistan, we spent 20 years there. And, ultimately, we were so
cavalier about civilian casualties that we made the Taliban stronger. And we
ultimately lost that engagement to the Taliban.”
Actually, the Taliban was made stronger only after a United
States-Afghani capitulation to the Taliban, and Murphy’s reference to “cavalier
civilian casualties” is bitterly ironic, considering the casualties of American
troops in Afghanistan caused by Biden’s ill-starred withdrawal. The United
States has had a presence in Korea since the end of the Korean engagement,
which has not yet ended. Following the imposition of a demarcation line,
western ideology turned South Korea into a flowering enterprise, while North
Korea remains poor and subject to the whimsy of godlike tyrants.
Murphy’s argument, rigorously applied, should call for the
withdrawal of all American troops everywhere in the world.
Good luck with that.
Murphy continued: “And
so, in Israel, what Joe Biden is telling the Israelis is, we will be partners
with you, but you have to understand that the pace of civilian casualties, the
amount of humanitarian disaster there is in the long run going to make Hamas
stronger, is going to make it more likely that Israel will be attacked again,
and is going to make other terrorist organizations that have designs to attack
the United States stronger. So we will be partners in this fight, but in the
situation of Rafah [the last stronghold of militant Hamas] we cannot have a military invasion of
Rafah that ends up in tens of thousands of additional civilians dying. That
would be bad for Israel from a moral and a strategic standpoint.”
Sorry, but it is the pursuit of a unicorn, an impossible and
fanciful creature – the so called “two state solution” – that has
exposed Israel’s civilian population to constant, withering military attack.
What Murphy is saying, in a circuitous way, is that any military victory by Israel over its enemies is immoral and
strategically unwise, and further, that any military victory in any ideologically driven war is an
immoral and strategic failure if victory involves the death of civilians, often
used by the enemies of Israel as ideological shields to fend off an Israeli
victory. That attempt apparently has succeeded as an effective piece of
reckless anti-Semitic propaganda now rattling administrative spines on
university campuses across the United States, urged by morally superior pro-Hamas
students and military geniuses such as populate ivy league universities and politically
subservient foggy-bottom experts in Washington DC.
Bash asked Murphy if a critic was right in supposing “that what the president said is actually
kind of doing the opposite of what you just warned of and that actually is
helping Hamas?”
Murphy’s answer, though according to script, was obtuse
morally and strategically. So, we have no
obligation to write a blank check of military support to any of our allies. We
have a right, as a sovereign nation with our own independent security concerns,
to make sure that, when we are partnering with an ally, that we are partnering
with a winning strategy.
“Winning for whom?” Israel might ask.
Civilian losses in war are always to be deplored, but some
perspective is necessary. The Israeli attack on Hamas battalions in Rafah is
necessary, but Rafah will not be Dresden.
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