Biden’s Aid Pier SNAFU washes away in Indictment of US unwillingness to Pressure Israel to stop the Starvation
Juan Cole 05/26/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The US military has given us many acronyms. Most are forgettable alphabet salads only beloved by bureaucrats. But SNAFU is one of the greats, allegedly originating during WW II. The polite phrase is “situation normal, all fouled up.” But we know that the GIs actually used the F word. Quite a lot, in my experience.
The Biden administration’s pitiful attempt at theatrics in an attempt to cover for the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza was its $360 million boondoggle, a Gaza aid pier, which I described as a Potemkin Village because of its lack of substantial substance.
On Saturday, three small navy support vessels for the pier were swept away by high seas, and two of them were driven onto shore, becoming beached. That’s the kind of thing that gets a captain busted down to the ranks. A third ship was also washed away, but it was attached to a section of the pier and so they both went spinning off. The pier section seems to be heading for the Israeli port of Ashdod. I don’t know where the third ship is, to which it had been attached. No naval personnel are said to have been injured, except for their pride.
Anadolu Video: “Waves sweep away US-built pier in Gaza ”
Speaking of Ashdod, that port city already has a harbor and the US could have delivered aid there to be trucked down to Gaza much more efficiently. But let me guess.
The Israelis won’t let us? The Israelis won’t let us.
The US donates $4 billion a year of your tax dollars to Israel, not to mention billions more in sweetheart deals, and we get for that money an insistence that we put naval personnel in danger at a rickety pier?
Palestinian-American activist Huwaida Arraf at “X,” quoted retired US Army Colonel Ann Wright: ““Having been in the US military for 29 years, we’ve seen some pretty stupid things happen and this is one of the stupidest”
It is no fault of the military personnel. Biden was warned that high seas made his aid pier impractical, and with the arrogance of Washington, he ignored the warnings. He was trying to do a favor for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom an arrest warrant has been requested by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor. Netanyahu’s government will fall if the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis in the cabinet withdraw, and they say they will withdraw unless Netanyahu starves all the people of Gaza to death. Of course, 2.2 million emaciated dead bodies would be rather an embarrassment, as well, putting Netanyahu in striking distance of Cambodian genocidaire Pol Pot’s record. So Biden is trying to get the aid in by sea and to have the US take the blame for there still being any Palestinians.
Although CENTCOM maintains that what remains of the pier is still functional, I don’t know if that is really true. If this kind of thing happened within a week of its inauguration, can you really call that functional?
The pier is mainly a PR stunt. It is an incredibly expensive and risky way to get food and medicine on the ground in Gaza. And the US isn’t distributing that aid. It is handing it over to NGOs on the ground like the World Central Kitchen, seven of whose workers Netanyahu’s troops murdered. For WCK aid workers to have to get that food and medicine from the pier to the population centers is very dangerous and inefficient.
h/t Al Jazeera
In the week the pier has been operational, CENTCOM says that the World Central Kitchen has only taken possession of 96 aid trucks. Gaza required 500 trucks a day, not the 13 a day that the Biden administration apparently has managed. I guess there were no deliveries Saturday, and who knows when there will be more? Nor do we know if WCK has actually been able to get the aid to people who need it, as Israel has expelled 900,000 refugees again during its aggressive invasion of Rafah, the former supposed safe zone.
SNAFU.