OPINION:
It is difficult to question Israel’s need for a major military response to the horrific attack on Oct. 7 — the worst suffered by Israel and the Jewish people since the Holocaust. As with most military operations, the cost in terms of collateral damage has been high, largely because Hamas has used the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as human shields and has taken hostages.
Following Israel’s entry into Gaza, some 30,000 Palestinian lives have been lost, and a substantial part of the 2.1 million residents are close to starvation. The United States and other nations have called upon Israel to limit civilian casualties and, to the extent possible, provide essential aid to Gaza residents.
Israel’s efforts to provide needed food, water, fuel and medical supplies to Gaza have been an operational as well as public relations disaster. Medical workers recently reported 15 children dead of starvation there, and it is bound to get worse. In the information war, Israel has ceded the high ground for no good reason, with truck convoys from Egypt and Israel with aid delayed and the news all showing Israel to be at fault.
After months, President Biden — or at least the staff writing what he says — has decided to enter the fray. His plan, announced in his State of the Union address, was to call for a floating pier for Gaza aid. While this sound bite may have been intended to give Mr. Biden a boost in his sinking poll numbers, it is a recipe for disaster as an operational concept. There is no good idea as to how needed aid would actually reach the Palestinians, and it puts American lives in jeopardy in several ways.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder. a Defense Department spokesman, says that this operation will involve what is called a Joint Logistics-Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS — a large floating pier allowing supplies to be delivered without a fixed port in place, alleviating the need to have troops on the shore. Gaza has no real ports, so cargo ships need to use the pier and dock there.
Once again Mr. Biden began this concept with a lie — that “there will be no boots on the ground.” It is impossible to build a pier to the Gaza shore without having onshore U.S. personnel to anchor and maintain it. One expert thinks that it will take about 1,000 skilled personnel to do this, and no maritime professional thinks it is a good idea given the conditions in Gaza now. Neither the Israeli military nor Hamas has these skilled people, so it will be up to the U.S. to provide them.
To do this, the U.S. must put “boots on the ground,” and some will very likely come home dead. Apparently, no one briefed Mr. Biden before his speech on this, or no one who approved his speech had the slightest idea what they were talking about. Just another sound bite for “Old Yeller” from the West Wing staffers.
Unlike the floating piers used by U.S. forces in either World War II or Vietnam, the people ashore getting the aid need to be friendly. This is clearly not the case with Hamas. Even though the Palestinians would welcome more food and medicine, Hamas terrorists make sure this doesn’t happen and steal all they can in the process.
Hamas still sees the U.S. as the great Satan and would not hesitate to kill Americans. Indeed, Hamas may see this as an opportunity to draw the U.S. into the conflict. As Israel is decreasing its military presence in Gaza, it will be hard for the Israeli military to provide security for any U.S. forces that would have to be deployed.
Even if aid arrives ashore, there is no plan for moving it to the Palestinians who need it. Missing from this ill-conceived plan is a mythical fleet of trucks to move the aid. Would they be driven by Hamas operatives or others “approved” either by Hamas or the Israeli military? Here, the Pentagon’s Gen. Ryder had no answers.
Unfortunately, there is a long list of things that could go wrong. Hamas might attempt to seize some of the JLOTS vessels and capture all aboard. These are U.S. Army logistics people, not trained special forces. Hamas would have even more hostages as bargaining chips than before Mr. Biden put them in harm’s way.
Another scenario might be one where Hamas seizes a vessel, packs it with explosives, and then destroys it with as many U.S. personnel aboard so the world once again sees that these terrorists are serious.
So far, the U.S. Army has sent a single ship to Gaza, and it will take several weeks for the 37-year-old ship to make it from Virginia to the eastern Mediterranean — a boat that can’t even break 12 knots fully loaded.
What else could go wrong? For Mr. Biden, it could wind up being a repeat of his Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco just before the November elections. Like most Democratic projects, it will cost taxpayers millions and has little chance of getting much aid to the Palestinians. It will take months, not weeks, and there is no clear vision of what the end state will be.
This is a classic Democratic strategy — throwing money at a problem in the belief that it will be a solution, even though it has little or no chance that it will solve the problem. Often, this only makes matters worse in the long run.
The worst case is that it may become a catastrophe and a true October surprise. If such a disaster happens, it will most certainly contribute to the demise of the Biden-Harris ticket in November.
• Abraham Wagner has served in several national security positions, including the National Security Council staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He is the author of “Henry Kissinger: Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times,” published in 2019.
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