Article: 500 Words on Joe Biden's Oval Office Address

(Image by Michael Galli) Details DMCA

At ten minutes and thirty seconds into his October 19 Oval Office address on the Israeli/Hamas war, President Biden shared the following statement with the world, "When I was in Israel yesterday, I said that when America experienced the hell of 9/11, we felt enraged as well, and while we sought and got justice, we made mistakes. So I caution the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage." This candid admission begs the question: What were the mistakes made by U.S. government's reaction to 9/11 and how might the Israelis be informed by these errors as they prosecute their own war?

1. The Taliban offered to negotiate the surrender Osama bin Laden to the United States and George W. Bush refused this offer. Prior to the U.S. bombing, the Afghani government said that before it would consider extraditing bin Laden it would like the U.S. government to submit evidence of his guilt. The President rejected the request. After a week of bombing the Afghani government stated if the U.S. stopped its air campaign and presented evidence for bin Laden's guilt, the government "would be ready to hand him over to a third country." The President responded, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty." After the second week of bombing the Afghanis dropped their request for proof and offered to hand bin Laden over to a third country if the U.S. bombing campaign ceased. Once again, the U.S. refused. After five months of bombing, the civilian death toll in Afghanistan matched that of 9/11.

While it took the word's superpower months to match a civilian death toll of 3,000 its enemy accomplished on 9/11, Israel, the superpower of the Middle East, racked up 1,400 civilian deaths in days. Three weeks into the war, an estimated 8,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed compared to 1,400 Israeli civilian deaths on the day of the Hamas attack.

2. The George W. Bush Administration "invented" the human status "enemy combatant" - since abandoned in favor of "international laws of war" - to circumvent US law and the Geneva Convention's rules of war so it could detain, torture, and kill suspected advisories, evidence free, at will.

In leu of bringing the leaders of Hamas to justice for their crimes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly vowed to kill every member of Hamas.

3. The United States illegally invaded the country of Iraq, a hideous war crime for which it has yet had to answer for, leading to the death of over 4,000 US troops and an estimated 300,000 Iraqi civilians.

Israel has attacked Lebanon and Syria in response to rockets launched by Hezbollah militants into its northern territory. It remains to be seen if Israel will attack Iran, a sponsor of Hamas.

4. The most costly US mistake due to its September 11 response has been more than 3,000,000 civilian deaths in post 9/11 war zones.

It is worth noting that of the 2,000,000 Palestinian souls clenched in the jaws of war, half are women and children.

(Article changed on Oct 31, 2023 at 9:18 AM EDT)