Biden's Team Wanted War in the Middle East Without Owning It
Crossing the Red Line peels back the curtain on the bureaucratic machinery behind U.S. involvement in Gaza and beyond.
Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, W.W. Norton, 368 pages, $31.99
The U.S. government owns a share of what happened to Gaza. Through two administrations, Washington provided much of the money, weapons, and intelligence required to reconquer the Palestinian enclave, and U.S. troops were eventually deployed only a step removed from the front lines. Now the Trump administration has put its full diplomatic weight behind a "Board of Peace" aimed at reshaping Gaza forever, hoping to turn that board into a model for all global diplomacy.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed has been one of the most well-sourced journalists documenting this process. His book Crossing the Red Line presents itself as a comprehensive account of the United States' involvement in the war. But it falls short of its potential. Like many reporters immersed in a specific issue, Ahmed sometimes misses the forest for the trees.
Repeating his sources' accounts of "harrowing mismanagement," the author concludes that there was no "master plan," only a "disaster" that developed "choice by choice." But Ahmed's own reporting suggests that the Biden administration acted with deliberate intention. U.S. officials didn't just commit crimes of omission. They created elaborate schemes to keep the U.S. involved with the war while avoiding restraints, scapegoating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for their own decisions. At times, President Joe Biden and his advisers seemed to let slip that they believed Palestinian bystanders deserved to pay for the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023—and that the expansion of the war across the region could benefit U.S. interests.
A few weeks into the war, Biden told reporters that "innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war." When State Department officials held a briefing the following month about Palestinian civilians' dire situation, Ahmed reports, Secretary of State Antony Blinken "responded by emphasizing emotional trauma among Israelis over October 7." The implication is not hard to read. "This is awful, but they did it to themselves," one administration official told Ahmed, summarizing colleagues' attitudes. In a speech at the Israeli embassy on the first anniversary of October 7, with the region on the brink of a U.S.-Iranian war, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gushed about the "enduring strategic gains" of the past year.
Although Ahmed criticizes Biden for his "blindness" and "vagueness" about the human cost, the reporting in the book suggests the administration's commission may have been more intentional. State Department officials used all kinds of bureaucratic tricks and "mental gymnastics" (in the words of one official) to evade any accounting of how U.S. weapons were used. While Biden publicly expressed doubts about the casualty numbers published by the Gaza Health Ministry, Sullivan privately admitted that the data were accurate. Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, blocked embassy staff from sending cables describing conditions in Gaza, including human femurs scattered along a road.
At the beginning of the war, Ahmed reports, U.S. humanitarian envoy David Satterfield suggested moving the population of Gaza into Egypt. Satterfield denied this when asked, but the book strangely omits context from the time suggesting that someone in the administration (if not Satterfield himself) was considering this gambit. In the first week of the war, Blinken tried "to negotiate the safe passage of Palestinian civilians from Gaza to Egypt," only to pull back on the plan when Egyptian leaders said it sounded like a permanent expulsion, according to The Washington Post. Around the same time, the Israeli intelligence ministry circulated a paper that did propose a forcible, permanent expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt, and The Economist reported that diplomats of unnamed nationality were hoping to use promises of debt relief to get Egypt to take in Palestinians.
Then there was the issue of humanitarian aid, which was largely an artificial crisis. Israel banned private businesses from importing food to Gaza, and it even threatened to shoot Palestinian fishermen going out on their own. Satterfield's office then swooped in to establish and micromanage an international aid bureaucracy under Israeli control. Ahmed documents, blow by blow, how mismanagement and bureaucratic obstruction caused unnecessary suffering—presaging President Donald Trump's own humanitarian death traps in Gaza, where 2,600 people were killed while seeking food. When Israeli troops shot aid workers, Satterfield told Ahmed that his thoughts were with the "scared young" Israeli soldiers.
Biden and his advisers were not born yesterday. They got to where they are through decades of experience, often in the Middle East. The administration's hapless image in the media served as an alibi. Israel's methods were hard to square with liberal values—and Democratic voters were becoming increasingly sympathetic to Palestinians, even before the war. So Biden's advisers, who agreed with Netanyahu and disagreed with much of the president's base, had an incentive to play dumb.
Blinken privately told Israeli officials in November 2023 to "help us help you get more time," Ahmed reports, paraphrasing Blinken. At first, the administration took a ham-fisted and patronizing approach, blaming dissent on the "different identities on their team," in Ahmed's words. The administration held separate "listening sessions" for Muslim and Jewish staff, and Blinken's staff "repeatedly and without explanation" brought Deborah Lipstadt, the presidential envoy for combating antisemitism, into meetings about Palestinians' conditions. War planning was reduced to a caricature of a DEI exercise.
Early on, Ahmed reports, the State Department advised its human rights bureau not to bother with Gaza and to "try to make a positive impact elsewhere." At least as long as that "elsewhere" wasn't in the Middle East: Sullivan's aide Brett McGurk boasted to colleagues that Arab dictators would "take care of" domestic opposition to U.S. policy.
As it became clear that the wider American public was upset, the administration began a more sophisticated P.R. strategy. Biden began talking vaguely about limiting the war while ensuring that the U.S. funded it. His advisers whispered in the ear of journalists and Democratic operators that Biden really did care about Palestinian lives and was at odds with Netanyahu behind the scenes.
After Israeli drones killed an American aid worker in April 2024, Biden told Netanyahu to increase the amount of food allowed into Gaza. (Israeli Col. Nochi Mendel later told Australian media that he was "not sorry" for ordering that drone strike, blaming the aid organization.) Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) then announced that he was considering putting conditions on U.S. weapons shipments—and Biden scolded Coons on the phone. The president dissuaded Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) from forcing a vote on weapons by promising to sanction Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, then never followed up. Such incidents make it clear that the humanitarian kayfabe was meant to keep the U.S. involved in the violence.
Across the region, Biden followed the same pattern of "pushing back" against Netanyahu in order to buy time for U.S. involvement. Right after October 7, the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah started shooting into Israel from Lebanon. Biden talked Netanyahu's Cabinet down from a full invasion, but he also sent two aircraft carriers to the region, just in case. In April 2024, the Israeli army bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria. Claiming to have been caught off guard, the Biden administration promptly rushed U.S. troops to defend Israel from retaliation.
In July 2024, Israel assassinated chief Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh—whose team had already agreed to Biden's ceasefire terms—inside Iran. The Biden administration convinced Iranian leaders not to respond, by promising that a ceasefire in Gaza was around the corner. This detail was publicly confirmed by Biden but oddly didn't make it into Ahmed's book. When an October 2024 attack on Lebanon killed an Iranian general there, Iran bombed Israel directly for the second time ever, and Israel bombed Iran directly for the first time ever, with U.S. forces again rushing to defend Israel. At that point, Biden began joint planning with Israel for an offensive war against Iran, which Trump would implement twice.
A few weeks into Trump's second Iran war, Sullivan told The Daily Show that Netanyahu wants to "just break Iran, cause chaos" and that "there is a real divergence between Israel's ultimate aims and the United States' ultimate aims." Yet Sullivan was advising the late Trump confidante Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) on that war. "What we're trying to do is just get a few cities to fall in the next month…and just have almost irreversible momentum," Graham told Sullivan on the phone, in footage released after Crossing the Red Line was written. Sullivan was still playing the same double game out of office, publicly blaming "chaos" on Israel while privately helping plot more of it.
Even if there was no "master plan" from the beginning, the Biden administration had a direction of travel it was comfortable with, and an increasingly refined set of tactics that helped bring the U.S. along that path. In Ahmed's words, many Biden administration officials "sought absolution long afterward—usually by assuming the person they were talking to was comfortable with some level of death and disruption for innocent Palestinians."
