Lawfare Daily: ‘Crossing the Red Line’ in Gaza with Akbar Shahid Ahmed

[Intro]

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: On their watch, Israel repeatedly escalated versus Iran, first in Damascus, targeting an Iranian embassy complex, then in Tehran. And yes, the U.S. did defend Israel in response to what were then unprecedented Iranian attacks back on Israel. But the red lines that were crossed of Israel-Iran confrontation were done with the Biden administration’s help and backing.

Tyler McBrien: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, with Akbar Shahid Ahmed, the diplomatic correspondent at The Washington Sun.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: This pleading of ignorance or the sense of we were too in the heat of the moment, nothing came up the chain, that’s deeply insufficient, and it is misleading.

Tyler McBrien: Today we’re talking about Akbar’s new book, “Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisers, and Israel’s War in Gaza,” an in-depth account on the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, which Akbar calls, quote, “A result of harrowing mismanagement and willful blindness, dominated by timidity, ambition, callousness, and staggering hubris.” We also discussed how this moral and strategic disaster, and its heavy civilian death toll, will make the next bloodbath that much easier to normalize.

[Main podcast]

So, Akbar, welcome back to the podcast. Last time you were here, or at least last time we spoke on the podcast, was October 27th, 2023. It’s safe to say a lot has changed since then.

So, I think a good place to start is, in a way, where you start the book, which is a bit of an accounting of Gaza today. What is the end product or the current state that’s a result of everything you reported in the book? We’ll start there, and then I think we’ll work backwards.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah. Thank you for having me back, Tyler.

Gaza today, over three years of conflict initiated by Hamas and Palestinian fighters, but then really deepened by the U.S. and Israel, it’s inconceivable. I mean, it’s more than 92% of homes are destroyed. Nearly all hospitals have been targeted, nearly all schools. And important to remember that even now, only 35% of Gaza is inhabited by the actual two million Palestinians who live there.

The rest is controlled by Israeli forces in a policy that, while the U.S. has said it doesn’t want to see, going right back to the Biden administration, they’ve... There’s been a U.S. narrative of, we don’t want to see Israeli occupation of Gaza. That just hasn’t changed. In fact, Israeli control of territory has increased.

Almost all Palestinians are now living in tents and refugee camps. That’s upward of 1.5 million people around. And then you still have a severe nutritional crisis. While the amount of aid going in has gone up and down, you still have people in severe need. You now have an endemic public health crisis.

Gaza is also home to the highest number of child amputees per capita of any conflict in the world. And it’s a place where any of the fundamentals of life, right? So, if we think about agriculture, universities, businesses, none of that is working. And if we think about what’s been normalized over this period, the U.S. has permitted Israel to sustain not only severe restrictions on food, water, other supplies, but a cutoff of electricity, which formerly Gaza relied on from Israel, fuel, and a lot of the basics of daily life.

What I quote in the book, one Palestinian woman who was displaced many times, like, like most Palestinians have been since October 7th, 2023 in Gaza, and she returns to her home in Gaza City, and which was the initial site of the Israeli onslaught post October 7th, and she says, it’s like a nuclear bomb has dropped.

You know, and people I’ve talked to from the ground, I was able to do some reporting there in 2019. I’m glad I was able to see it before it was decimated. People I’ve talked to have described not being able to see, you know, neighborhoods that they spent 20, 30, 50 years going up and down those streets just because of the level of decimation, even in residential areas

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, thank you for that.

And I learned from your book that you were actually the first Pakistani national to be granted access to Gaza as a journalist if I’m not mistaken, back in 2019 for that trip. I think that’s a great place to start because it’s I hope, self-evident based on what you’ve said, the statistics, the imagery of the devastation, why this is an issue of great interest to, to any reporter.

I think any person it would be self-evident. But why write a book? What were you hoping to do with the book-length project that you could not or did not yet achieve with your excellent reporting throughout the conflict? Why take a step back and write this?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Thank you for the kind words about my reporting.

I’ll answer this question in two ways. You know, I think about my own trajectory reporting in D.C. as a correspondent from Obama through Trump 1, Biden, now Trump 2. And I felt that this kind of book, this kind of historical record for posterity was important because so many of the patterns and players responsible for devastation kept not being questioned and in fact elevated when it comes to those individuals, right?

Getting the same jobs or being entrusted to, as many of my sources describe, you know, address the same problems they helped create. I think here about someone, you know, I know we’ll talk about, Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East advisor, held responsible by many of his peers for helping fuel the creation of ISIS in Iraq through U.S. policy choices there, then brought back to be the counter-ISIS envoy.

I wanted to create this record, especially talking to people inside the U.S. government who witnessed this firsthand, to enable us to have a more fulsome discussion of personal responsibility and accountability in a way that hasn’t happened, because so often we see the repeat of tendencies and patterns, particularly post 9/11, in part because there’s not that kind of moment of looking in the mirror and seeing what do these officials do?

I’m struck by how in Washington we still have a culture of, a little bit of go along to get along, you know, and get along to go along, a sort of idea of these are my friends, these are my peers. You know, Samantha Power, for instance, a cabinet-level official in the Biden administration, and I will note one of the few who was willing to go on the record with me for the book.

I spoke with nearly all of them. But even Power, when I pressed her on her peers, people like Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, said, I’m not going to criticize my fellow officials for their specific decisions and policies. And I think we have to break a little away from this idea of not questioning your fellow officials.

I also was motivated to do this in part just I think there was a general sense of, frankly, gaslighting that a lot of us in the media felt, a lot of people in the public felt from the Biden administration in particular. I think about reporting I did in February of 2024. I was able to speak with some of the tiny handful of Palestinians who were evacuated from Gaza because they had life-threatening injuries or needed advanced specialized care.

And one, a woman called Watfa, a 30-year-old mother, had been brought out with her son severely injured in an Israeli airstrike. And she said to me, this was on the day when President Biden, folks might remember, was licking an ice cream cone in New York and saying, we’re working tirelessly to create a ceasefire.

And what Watfa, this mother, said to me was, it’s like he’s mocking us, you know? And I think that sense among Palestinians in Gaza, but frankly among Americans and a lot of observers worldwide, that sense that the U.S. government was so far removed in its policy choices from what it said it wanted to do, bring home civilians, move towards Israeli-Palestinian peace, limit the death toll, that it’s really staggering and again, deserves to be recorded for posterity.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I’m glad you bring up the, the ice cream photo op. There were so many moments like that in the book that I had forgotten, frankly, given the relentless pace of news coming out of the war and the genocide. So, I think maybe another good place to steer us now is to take us back to October 7th in the White House, what you heard from officials, both in your reporting at the time and now since, how that news was received what the immediate conversations and options presented to and by Biden were.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: So, I conducted nearly 175 interviews with officials for “Crossing the Red Line,” which is part of why I think it’s kind of that important historical record going forward. And this was a moment a lot of them did highlight of were there options on and immediately after October 7th that Biden and his inner circle of advisors, some of the men I’ve referenced already, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, but also Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, Jon Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor, and some others who played a, a slightly smaller role, people like Bill Burns, director of the CIA at the time.

Tyler McBrien: Ambassador Jack Lew who I do wanna talk about a bit…

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah.

 Tyler McBrien: ... a bit later.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: But who wasn’t confirmed at that time. He was confirmed a little later. So he, you know, in-

Tyler McBrien: Right ...

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: -that immediate aftermath, he wasn’t so crucial, but becomes really important later. In that immediate aftermath also who’s having an important role in decisions are the president’s domestic political brain trust, people like Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, people who have been around Biden for decades and have a really solid view of how they think Israel works in American politics, which is if you question Israel, you are DOA.

It’s not worth doing. You’ll lose voters. You’ll lose the donor class. Simply don’t do this. And of course, Biden was a president looking at a re-election bid that he was very stubborn and very determined about, despite other factors like his cognitive decline. So, on October 7th, officials at the very highest level, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, are tracking it from within a couple of hours, and with, before actually Netanyahu acknowledges what’s happening to the Israeli public.

And what’s staggering to me, Tyler, is that those officials know. They know that this moment has been a kind of revelation about Israel’s own direction and drift. So, it’s a moment of deep trauma, right? It’s the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust. It’s also a moment where, as one senior State Department official put it to me, it was shocking to U.S. counterparts to realize how much Israel’s intelligence defense capabilities had not been thinking about the fact that Gaza was on their border, had been, as experts had been saying for more than a decade at that point, becoming an open air prison.

And as I reveal in the book, as U.S. officials had been saying, Hamas in its rule over Gaza was getting antsy, was getting sort of ready to maybe fuel violence, to break out of that cycle, right? So, officials have this awareness that Israel is, has not been tracking Gaza or tracking Hamas the way we trusted them to do.

Officials also noted to me that the U.S. had essentially outsourced its intelligence gathering on Israel-Palestine to the Israelis, which means that when there’s a, you know, there’s a weakening on the other side, you’re affected. And officials were deeply aware of who Benjamin Netanyahu was, right? This is a moment that comes after Netanyahu has formed the most far right government in Israeli history, after Biden himself has said Netanyahu is weakening Israel’s democratic credentials with the judicial overhaul he was attempting All of that, I argue, should really have been a factor in what these high-level discussions are in the first two to three days up to, I’d say, around October 10th, October 11th.

The options that are raised include ideas like focusing on specialized intelligence-driven raids to bring home the two hundred and fifty-one hostages, among them American citizens, rather than a full-scale ground offensive. There’s a discussion of do we get Netanyahu to give us a battle plan before he goes into this with a clearly defined goal rather than have, as what you later see, is this really amorphous, broad goal of destroy Hamas?

What does that mean, right? And there are discussions, particularly among lawyers and of course, I think this might be interesting to your audience, really important discussions of how the legal infrastructure around U.S. military support for Israel is going to work. So, officials immediately are directed from the White House to rush to Israel whatever it wants, and Israeli counterparts come to them with wish lists of what they’d like.

What lawyers flagged for me from within the administration was, the administration did not ask Israel for assurances on how those weapons would be used, which would be quite normal in arming any other partner. That’s concerning to those lawyers, both from the point of view of is the U.S. re-emphasizing, hey, these are our weapons. We pay for them. We expect this.

And also, it opens up a question of aiding and abetting and legal liability for U.S. officials, because what those assurances often do in other instances is say, we told them not to commit these violations of international law or war crimes. That didn’t happen. Instead, a decision was really made, again by Biden, Sullivan, McGurk, Biden’s domestic advisers, by October 10th or so, to make it a no daylight policy. Of essentially, we will not publicly criticize Israel even though we have deep doubts about what they may be doing, and though we have already warning signs from within our administration and externally about the shape of this campaign.

Tyler McBrien: I have so many questions. There are so many directions we could go here. Maybe we could stick with the legal discussion for now. That, you know, as the war progresses, how did these legal discussions evolve or not? When it became clearer and clearer, at least to many observers, that war crimes were potentially being committed with American weapons, how did these conversations of further weapons sales and their legality and the potential non-application of U.S. laws toward Israel and these sales and aid evolve?

And then also this question of potential liability for aiding and abetting.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah. Yeah, you mentioned Jack Lew, so it’s a good place to start with him. He was confirmed by the end of October as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. This is a former Treasury secretary, so he has the status, the stature of a cabinet level advisor, even though he’s not there, right?

And that matters for how much he looms in Biden’s thinking and for how much other officials are willing to question him. Lew takes on a real bear hug for Israel approach and is really wary of anyone inside the system questioning Israel. So, I was told by officials, for instance, that they had trouble getting reports of the humanitarian situation through his embassy.

But to this question of the arms sales, really early on, an official flagged for me that the assessments that the U.S. government is required to do around any weapons transfer that were taking place, particularly under Lew who had a big role in this as the ambassador inside the State Department machinery, this official said, these assessments were so pro forma, we could have literally just swapped in the name of the weapon, in that it wasn’t a fulsome discussion.

Right? We weren’t thinking about is this a cluster munition? Is this a 2,000-pound bomb? You know, is this appropriate to use in this kind of campaign? And senior officials were already, by October and November, starting to have discussions about are our weapons being used in violations of international, American law?

Because, as one senior State Department official put it to me, there’s simply no way in a context like Gaza, 85% urbanization prior to October 7th, to use a 2,000-pound bomb in a way that is going to be discriminate and proportionate, right? Those discussions and how they occurred are really important. I reveal in the book that there were, I would really say, perversions of the process based on my reporting that really heightened the concern among those familiar.

So, to outline a few of them, for instance, there were, especially by the middle end of 2024, really fulsome discussions among what’s called the Interagency Lawyers Group, bringing together lawyers from the Pentagon, intelligence community, State Department, NSC under White House legal chief Joshua Geltzer at the time.

Those discussions were heated. Very often people came very close to confirming a war crime had happened or the mood in the room would be that 80%, 85%, 90% of the lawyers there would say, we really think we have to find a violation here. What would come out of that, however, would be a briefing that went around in government saying, this incident was discussed.

One sentence or two sentence summary, right? That people present in those meetings felt was not an actual depiction of the level of alarm, concern, and evidence that, that was there. There was also a real sense that the top tiers, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, did not want to get a firm conclusion of a violation of U.S. or international law because that would force their hand.

And of course, this is part of the endemic kind of Washington patterns that I really hope the book will force us to consider. Lawyers, officials very often talk about leaving space for the policymaker, you know, just giving them the room to choose among their options. But in some instances, it’s just clear, right?

And it’s again, a perversion of the process to pretend that’s not happening. Also, the way intelligence was used to inform these discussions, that was really concerning to officials I spoke with. So specifically, a bar was created by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, led by Avril Haines, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, by the way, very much positioning herself for future administrations.

A new directive on Gaza was set separate from how intelligence was treated for Sudan and Ukraine, saying, if you want to get access to how much we as U.S. government have, you need cabinet level approval. That made it, again, a lot harder for officials to access what might have empowered them in these war crimes discussions.

And there was also a sort of sense of, is that intelligence really accessible to everyone, and how is it being treated? You have, officials told me a sense of self-censorship sometimes among the intelligence analysts feeding things up the chain. And Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, two of the most senior advisors, actively went into the process, interfering often with what was going on further down the chain before it would go up to the White House level.

I don’t have specifics in my reporting on, you know, what exactly they did, just that they were doing it, and of course, these are figures who are very pro-Israel. An added theme to that, that again drew concern from nonpartisan career professionals, from people who are dealing with a wide range of issues, not just Israel-Palestine, was the credulousness that was extended to the Israelis in these discussions.

And by that I mean, one, for instance, noted to me that in one of the discussions in the State Department in what was called the CHRG channel, the Civilian Harm Response Guidelines channel, this was a new process established, in fact, by the Biden administration to minimize civilian casualties in U.S. conflicts.

Officials would argue things like, well, maybe that building didn’t collapse because of the airstrike. Maybe there was another reason. You know, I mean, it it’s just all almost ludicrous, right? To start kind of think about would the building just fall on its own? And this idea of giving Israel far more time and credence than would be provided elsewhere, sort of saying, as one put it to me, they’re good guys with good processes.

That, regardless of your position on the wisdom of the Israeli campaign, just flies in the face of decades of evidence of how Israel’s own investigative authorities treat violations against Palestinians and misconduct, right, by their own soldiers. It’s a little goldfish. It’s a little sort of head in the sand, and it’s...

That’s very much a pattern that continues all the way up to those legal discussions again, led by Geltzer. I raised, for instance to one of the people quite involved in those, those discussions, the pager attack, widely described by international law experts as almost certainly in violation because the Israelis didn’t know who was carrying the pagers and the beepers at the time they set them off.

And also, booby traps are, you know, illegal under, under various statutes. Many concerns there. I raised this to someone quite senior involved in those discussions, and what they said to me was, we didn’t focus on the pager attack so much because, number one, it wasn’t an American weapon, and number two, you know, we felt we had to look at so many other things, and was this really the place to focus?

But I would really argue, and people I talk to argue, what does that show about the pattern, the willingness to cause an, you know, civilian harm and to risk, in this instance, Lebanese, but also to risk Palestinians? The kind of now what we’re seeing from testimony from Israeli soldiers, films like NAZA, saying there was a higher tolerance of civilian casualties, and that the Israeli military kind of made that happen.

Also noting, as officials told me, the Israelis were not willing to share their sources, methods of intelligence, and their strike calculus and discussions with the Americans, which also made it possible for people to remain in the gray zone. We’re waiting to hear from the Israelis. We’ll see what the Israelis tell us.

Maybe he didn’t mean this. But the longer you’re in a gray zone and your policy is continuing to lead to further violations it’s what’s called, one person described to me as process constipation, right? Essentially, then you’ll never reach a confirmation on any of these investigations because you’re always going to give the Israelis more time and more credence.

Tyler McBrien: That’s where I wanted to go next, which is from what you heard, how the Biden administration officials, both internally and externally, justified this exceptionalism for the Israelis, or, you mentioned it was, there was a perversion of process, but the, the process itself for Israelis had long been exceptional and, like, shortcuts and non-application of things like the Leahy Laws.

So, I wanna hear actually, you know, later on your reflections on, what the real motivations and real reasons after your reporting, whether it’s anti-Palestinian bias or other factors. But at least for now, what were the conversations of how to justify that? Especially, you know, as images kept streaming out of Gaza that seemed to contradict this insistence from the Biden administration that they couldn’t come to any conclusion yet.

They were still looking at it. When they had come to much faster conclusions in other conflicts, like in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Right. I’ll answer this by thinking about one of the weird processes that came up in this period, and they were weird, even by officials who are… The NSM-20 process, something invented by the Biden administration, this period, also bizarre and surreal when there is a normal process for investigating what they said it would.

But this is a process created by Ambassador Lu, who we discussed, and David Satterfield, a former ambassador who was Biden’s head of the humanitarian assistance sort of program. He was a special envoy. Lu and Satterfield created their own channel with the Israelis, I reveal in the book, to discuss incidents like the killing of Hind Rajab, attacks on hospitals, attacks on aid convoys. What’s so concerning about that is the lack of transparency, right?

The fact that no one outside, essentially they’re saying, it’s our relationship with the Israelis. We’ll raise it, and we’ll tell you when it’s addressed. And literally the cables would say, dealt with, resolved, addressed, without ever going through the normal processes at the State Department, at the Defense Department, over whether a violation of international and U.S. law has happened, just through Satterfield, Lu, and their team.

It also raises the question of these officials in particular being so close to the Israelis. And to your question about how would they justify it, Satterfield, who was willing to talk to me on the record, said to me essentially, given the extremely challenging political circumstances in Washington and Tel Aviv, we did the best we could, which is illuminating.

It tells you about how, while they were, they being the Biden administration, were often saying, you know, this is so frustrating dealing with the Netanyahu government. It’s so far right. We can’t get them to move. They’re enabling that pattern, right? By essentially saying, well, we can’t push you more because your political context is such that you’ll lash out at us.

And of course, the domestic political context of Biden’s re-election is part of that too. There’s also a real affinity and humanization that happens of Israelis that doesn’t happen of Palestinians. It comes up throughout my reporting. And so, there’s a sense, as I mentioned, this idea of the Israelis are good guys with good processes.

Secretary Blinken repeatedly, as we’ve now seen him publicly do when challenged on this policy, would say to officials who are coming to him with technical evidence, right? They’re just saying, as a bombs expert, I can tell you this bomb shouldn’t be used here. As a whatever, DRL official, this is what I’m saying to you about the statute.

And Secretary Blinken’s response would be, you don’t understand how traumatized the Israelis are. That’s not addressing the substance of the matter, right? But it’s showing you how that emotion, that prism of we need to be in solidarity with the Israelis is persistent and really corrosive.

Tyler McBrien: I wanna make sure we have time to address something that we spoke about back in 2023, which was the subject of a lot of your reporting at the time, which was the tumult and upheaval which led to some resignations in the State Department, and I believe USAID as well, as a result of some of the policies and the, the end runs of, you know, forcing through more arm sales and arms transfers.

Looking back, what do you make of that, that period now of, of upheaval? I mean, I feel like there, there were some arguing that at the time when your reporting was coming out that, that it... this was overstated. There weren’t that many people resigning. There weren’t that many high-level people resigning.

There was a lot of smoke, maybe not much fire there. Looking back now on that chapter of that reporting of all these resignations from Josh Paul and others, how did, how do you reflect on that?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I think the scale of the discontent is so much broader than the resignations. You know, the people who resigned sacrificing their careers to take a public stand, that, that of course is a really principled and brave thing to do.

A lot of people couldn’t do that or wouldn’t do that, either because they didn’t want to be marked forever as people who resigned over Gaza, which tells us a lot about our political culture, right? Of the fear of being punished as being principled over this policy. Did people quit or leave early, quietly?

Absolutely, without making that kind of noise. I’d also say that the broad degradation and disregard of expertise in the Biden era of humanitarian officials, of intelligence officials, to me is inseparable from then how easy it is for the Trump administration to take that wrecking ball to USAID and to these broader networks.

‘Cause essentially what you have, while, yes, people are not necessarily quitting, they are raising up the chain dissent memos. They are creating files. I spoke with multiple USAID officials who said, we were, you know, in hopes that what might one day might be investigated, we were saying the pier, for instance, is a terrible idea. It’s malpractice. We were seeing how things were violated by our superiors.

That level of discomfort with the policy is really broad. And so, I think we don’t just have to look at the high level resignations. And again, it’s whe— I think about the end of the Biden era, when you see Jake Sullivan appear with Mike Waltz at an event at the U.S. Institute for Peace, right?

And sort of say we are sagely handing over, you know, a, a bipartisan blessing to our successors. And of course, the Trump administration targets the U.S. Institute of Peace almost immediately after that, among other agencies. So, I think the Biden people were, in some ways, by disregarding these folks who were dissenting, making it easier to then say, well, we don’t even need your expertise.

And if you look at where the Gaza policy is now, it is an outgrowth of Biden-era patterns of insularity, of repeating the same tactics again and again, which experts would tell you, political, humanitarian, intelligence, legal would tell you, don’t do that. You’re not going to get the results you want. So, I note that on resignations.

I also will say that, you know, people like Samantha Power, John Finer, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was a, an ambassador to the UN, did come close to resigning, repeatedly told people they had considered it, decided not to, and their argument was, of course, we are in here being internal critics of the policy. We’re influencing it to some way.

I would say that doesn’t fully absolve them of responsibility, because those high-level resignations, as you say, could have sent that message that is much bigger than a Josh Paul leaving, right? And we’ve seen Finer say now in interviews, if I resign, it was a, it would be a one-day story.

He would tell friends, well, no one will care. I do think we would’ve cared if the U.S. deputy national security advisor had resigned and said, this policy is a failure and dishonest. And so, we have to think about those counterfactuals and the fact that people who stayed in, despite being deeply uncomfortable with the policy, feeling it was wrong, how they enabled it to persist.

Tyler McBrien: I wanna stay on this idea of the, the careerist factors that influence people’s decisions. I think there’s one version of this period that could be reduced to a lot of people wanting to, just keeping an eye on their next job and wanting to save their livelihood. I think there is a growing realization, especially over the past couple years, of the government is made up of people who have jobs and families.

They wanna keep their jobs. They wanna get the next job. They’re ambitious. They wanna climb the ladder. Is it overstating it to say that this really motivated a lot of the decisions that were made, especially at the higher levels, of people who had a promising, potentially promising, Kamala Harris or, you know, next Biden administration position?

I wanna... I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m opening it up to your other reflections on the, the factors that motivated people’s decisions, careerism and otherwise.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah, I think that, I think it’s inseparable, these decisions and again, people choosing not to resign or having faith. I think people...

There were lots of people who had genuine good faith in the Biden administration after the point at which I would really argue that’s probably at, at, just an analytically poor position to take. But if you look at, for instance, the NSM-20 process which we referenced, a lot of the experts and officials who were really unhappy October to February of 2024 by that point said, oh, by writing this report on Israeli conduct, maybe this time they’ll take it seriously, right?

So, people stayed in thinking the policy will shift. So, there’s that careerism and that sense of we can put our trust back. Of course, sending out a 720 report as Senator Chris Van Hollen, who helped craft it, said, was fundamentally essentially dishonest. But officials continue to feel that someone like Jake Sullivan, you know, Rhodes scholar, secretary of state in waiting for decades, they must have good judgment somewhere, right?

It’s striking to think how many of the people I talked to after they— as they slammed Sullivan and noted concerns with his judgment on various things would repeatedly say to me, but you have to realize he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. And I don’t think that should be the only metric, right?

I think that just being smart or being able to internalize various aid processes doesn’t mean your judgment is so great. So, careerism in terms of not angering people who might decide their future positions, absolutely. For various others, it became— I mean, there, there’s a deep again Israel affinity among some of the key players here.

Jack Lew I would put in that category. Jake Sullivan, you see that in some ways. I mean, on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, speaking at the Israeli embassy, he teared up. This is not a man we are used to seeing emotional in public, right? I would also say just real ego and legacy, and this is where maybe we can talk about McGurk.

So, Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East advisor, who will be out with his own book shortly, has a piece out in The Atlantic that’s an excerpt from that book saying how we prevented a war in Iran. And for McGurk, despite the evidence from the ground of his policy, his determination to say, to not only deflect criticism, but to say, actually, this is an amazing policy.

That’s really a strong instinct. And you see that in the fact that McGurk continues to resurrect that really dubious idea of a U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal, really with short shrift for the Palestinians, that was dominant for the Biden administration pre-October 7th, that Biden himself said likely motivated October 7th to a degree because of the, again, the Palestinian frustration, the sense from Hamas, we need to prevent this from happening.

But then the Biden administration doubles down, and they say we want, we’re going to have this deal. Then they become the people who say we want that deal when the Saudis are screaming from the rooftops, we’re not giving it to you. The Israelis really care about it a lot less. But for someone like McGurk, that kind of murky achievement is really important regardless of its implications, right?

Is it wise to court that level of Palestinian frustration? Is it wise to tie the U.S. so closely to Saudi Arabia given its judgment? It’s part of how it has a bipartisan venture that for all that folks will say we want to break with the past, that’s building on the Trump era Abraham Accords, also widely criticized.

And as I revealed in the book, just that careerism point, McGurk was trying to get a job in the Trump presidency to finish the job he felt he’d done in the Biden era. When we look at what, how Brett McGurk is now shaping his book and shaping his legacy, saying we helped prevent a war with Iran, the careers aspects of these officials extends to a real disrespect for what we can all see with our own eyes and an encouraging of the public to have a distorted view of reality.

The Biden administration enabled the war with Iran. It did not prevent one. On their watch, Israel repeatedly escalated versus Iran, first in Damascus, targeting an Iranian embassy complex, then in Tehran. And yes, the U.S. did defend Israel in response to what were then unprecedented Iranian attacks back on Israel.

But the red lines that were crossed of Israel-Iran confrontation were done with the Biden administration’s help and backing. So, to now try to distance themselves from that legacy, it’s really perverse.

Tyler McBrien: I wonder if you have reflections now after this reporting on why it seems that U.S. foreign policy as an issue area is especially immune to forms of accountability, and the foreign policy elites, so to speak, seem to have remar- remarkable staying power beyond scandal vis-a-vis other issue areas.

You know, there are many explanations that I’ve heard. Politics stops at the water’s edge. The Americans don’t care about foreign policy, generally speaking, so there’s less scrutiny there. None seem to be so satisfactory. So, I’m, even, a bit of a meta question for you of why does the blob persist?

Why do we have- ... so many officials seemingly administration after administration, changing of parties even, who seem to stay despite several marks against their record?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah, these, these devastating policy patterns. I think there’s so many aspects to this. I’ll start with officials themselves not looking at the mismatch between even their own stated lessons and their own stated priorities and the effect of their choices.

I think about someone like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in the period that I cover. He was a veteran of the U.S. war on terror, came out of it going to the Pentagon saying, we’re going to work more on civilian harm reduction. I don’t want us to be doing these large-scale deployments abroad. You know, where— And broadly, the Biden administration had a narrative of we’re moving beyond the forever wars that are so unpopular.

I reveal in my book that while Lloyd Austin was someone who, in talking to the Israelis, often emphasized civilian harm mitigation efforts, very early on in one of those calls with Yoav Gallant, his Israeli counterpart, Austin concludes after going through the talking points with, happy hunting. And that statement officials who were familiar with that, that line said to me, really undercuts a lot of whatever else is said, right?

But even from an Austin’s perspective, this is someone who then, two months later, says publicly of the Israelis, in this kind of conflict, when you’re losing civilians, you’re losing the war. How can you not see that mismatch? Why can’t you act on it, right? And I think that’s a willful blindness from officials, and many of them who now try to cover their record.

I’d also say that Congress has helped blunt its own ability to hold administrations to account. I chart several aspects in the book, several ways in which the Biden administration undercut congressional efforts to limit its campaign on Israel. And you— Lawmakers, to an extent, kicked up a fuss, but nowhere near the degree of fuss you then see in the Trump era, right?

Where you have, like, 40 Democratic senators vote against weapons for Israel. I reveal in the book, for instance, that Bernie Sanders withdrew a vote on a weapon sale to Israel because Biden promised him to sanction an extremist Israeli minister. Biden never made good on that promise. Bernie Sanders has never publicly talked about that.

So, there is a sort of abandonment of responsibility, saying this is the executive branch’s problem. I detail, for instance, how even in a symbolic rebuke of this campaign, the Israeli campaign, the Biden administration runs down the numbers of Democratic lawmakers who are voting to block some weapons, would never have blocked a single munition for Israel.

But that, but lawmakers are suddenly persuaded by arguments that, you know, you can’t do that. Just trust us as the executive branch. So, it’s the imperial presidency problem is a big part of it. And then the blob persists, I mean, because there’s still a real willingness to tolerate inconceivable pain among communities abroad and to imagine that doesn’t reach back to the U.S., right?

And that Americans will not relate to it. And I’ve heard many times, even on this book tour, the idea of, well, things won’t change because Americans will— the— a foreign policy will always be a 10 or 15 issue for Americans relative to the economy, gas prices, whatever else. But when it matters, it really matters, right?

You’ve seen that in really unexpected primary wins. You’ve seen it in Zohran Mamdani’s win. You’ve seen it energizing people around Abdul el-Sayed. You’ve seen it in other Western democracies where the British government, in part, in large part, fell over their Gaza policy recently. And, it’s a sort of disdain for the voter, right?

To, the ability to say, well, you’re not going to care about this. This won’t matter. We’ve seen how the videos out of Gaza, the footage of pregnant mothers being unable to give birth safely or, you know, have any basic care, or just of massacred children, that does matter. It is in American homes. So, it’s a real it’s a real disrespect, too, for, again, the awareness of the American public.

Just because, again, it’s not a top 10 consistent voting issue doesn’t mean that there’s a comfort level or a buy-in with these policies. And I do think that changes both because of the immediacy of these images and how much evidence there is, and because it’s just a more diverse country than it was in, say, 2001 before the wars post-9/11.

Tyler McBrien: It is funny that it does seem to be the... Many of the people who argue that Americans don’t care about foreign policy or it doesn’t enter their minds when they go to the voting booth, they themselves are the same ones who every election seem to argue that this will be the foreign policy election. In every election in recent memory, that seems to be an op-ed, or at least one that I’ve read.

But in keeping with this idea of reputation laundering the persistence and sort of the, the next phase of the where are they now of a lot of the admin officials, we’ve touched on this in parts throughout the conversation, but I’m curious for you to address it head-on. When someone like Jake Sullivan says on Morning Joe, as he did recently, quote, “I wish we could have ended the war sooner, and I wish we had done more to end the war sooner.”

So, these, these sorts of statements like that, like what you referenced earlier, that this was a very, this is a pressure cooker situation. We did the best we could with the information we had. Why are those types of explanations and statements unsatisfactory, or even worse, misleading or outright lies?

What did you unearth from your reporting that, that could explain to people why that’s unsatisfactory to say that to the public?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Those statements are offensive to the public and to the press because they disregard what, not just me, but other reporters were being told at the time from officials was happening in the discussions.

There was an awareness, right up to the Sullivan level, that the choice to, for instance, tie the entire humanitarian aid process to the attempted hostage diplomacy and negotiations on the U.S.-Saudi Israel deal, that wasn’t gonna work, that wasn’t producing the results they wanted. Warnings were going up the chain.

So, the idea that we could have ended the war sooner, you know, and brought more aid in and saved more lives, they could have been saving more lives right in that moment through, for instance, forcing the Israelis to open more land crossings. The Biden administration patted itself on the back repeatedly saying we’re the reason the Israelis opened Rafah and then Kerem Shalom after saying they would have a full blockade of Gaza.

And I took Biden and Sullivan personally doing that. If you know you can do that, why are you not applying that pressure more, right? That’s what I think is offensive about those statements, that the evidence was there for them already. Already we knew, for instance, that on October, I believe it was the 10th, the Israelis attempted to launch a continuous military operation into Lebanon against Hezbollah, which had begun striking Israel on October 8th.

The Biden administration persuaded them to stop, and in part, Netanyahu, as one official said to me, took the branch that the Biden administration was offering to say, step back a little from the edge. Don’t just be so military first. So again, they knew their leverage in the moment. This is where the title of my book is Crossing the Red Line, because I find that Rafah red line moment where the administration explicitly lays out what Israel has to do relative to the town of Rafah in the south of Gaza.

And after doing that, you have the World Central Kitchen aid worker killings in April, after which the administration makes explicit demands of the Israelis, and they see results. All of that falls apart when the red line is finally crossed by Israel with no consequences, and that’s the moment I hope people really take from that, which, as several officials described to me, was the evidence that officials like Sullivan, McGurk, others who now say in the cold light of day, we could have done things differently, it was the evidence on their watch, and almost a year before they left office, that their use of American leverage could get results from the Israelis in terms of humanitarian gains for Palestinians.

And of course, they had evidence throughout that, again, their stated goals of Israeli-Palestinian peace, of bringing home the hostages, those were not being met by Israel’s campaign continuously of escalating its attacks. When you see officials make these claims of, we should’ve belie- we should’ve realized sooner, I was told by many that It took until the spring of 2024 to stop buying the Israeli narrative of, we just need two we- two more weeks to wipe out Hamas.

But then that realization did set in really broadly, and that was part of the discussion. I reveal in the book that officials were using ethnic cleansing as a shorthand internally, and when the general’s plan, one of the most devastating Israeli proposals, was implemented in northern Gaza, Biden administration staff knew that was happening, were discussing it.

So again, this, this pleading of ignorance or this sense of we were too in the heat of the moment, nothing came up the chain, that’s deeply insufficient, and it is misleading.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I think one thing the book does so well, or one thing that really jumped out at me, are these moments like... these moments in which the Biden administration did apply leverage after World Central Kitchen killings, for example, really brought into stark relief the, other messaging about how this was sort of this inevitable tragedy, and our role was to just mitigate the inevitable destruction, almost like a natural disaster or something like that.

But these moments of applied pressure showed that this, and what your book shows really well, is that the situation was the result of a series of choices and actions, much of them made by the Biden administration. So, I... This was a long wind-up of asking, you know, as you were writing the book and things kept happening, Gaza is still happening, the genocide is ongoing, what moments that you saw happening in the news really seemed like the result of Biden administration choices?

What, you know, what... How did it, the Biden administration set the stage for what we’re seeing right now, even beyond Israel and Gaza?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I think about covering the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was this U.S.-backed and Israeli-backed plan to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza in the summer of 2025.

The Trump administration put a lot of capital into it, and the consequence of it was, as I was told by one doctor, Mark Brauner, who treated people around these GHF aid distribution sites, the result of it was precisely what people would predicted would happen. You had people shot through the head. You had children shot in their limbs.

You had thousands of Palestinians killed at or around those distribution centers. And I should note, GHF denies responsibility for those killings. Israeli forces were guarding those points. Covering that policy under Trump for me was just, it was just such a sickening sense of deja vu because we had seen in the Biden administration their choice to take over the aid operation repeatedly.

So, for instance, with the ill-fated pier, which delivered nowhere near the amount of aid that it was promised to, and around which there was a, there were instances of people dying, being killed, military operations, and a lot of concern around it. The airdrops from the sky, which again dropped into the sea, some of them killed people.

You had the so-called flour massacre, where the U.S. helped organize the distribution, and then there was just a stampede and immense shooting around it. So those echoes of divergence from normal humanitarian practice leading to a huge human toll and undercutting what the administration is saying it, it wants, that was consistent.

I think, too, about the, the eventual launching of yet another Israeli offensive into Lebanon, and this was something the Biden administration brought up repeatedly, that they prevented a war in Lebanon. They were going to do it. They were you know, able to hold back the Israelis and negotiate with Hezbollah, it through indirect sources.

And then you saw the Trump administration, just like the Biden administration, say, we don’t want to see another war in Lebanon. We want to see Hezbollah weakened. And then what you have is the U.S. backing of a devastating offensive that’s not going to achieve its goal of uprooting Hezbollah, right, and is only going to entrench a really horrific Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and further leave this crucial country, where Iran comes into the picture, the Saudis, it’s so central to a lot of the concerns of hostility, making that even more fragile.

I see it, too, in the echoes of repeated lack of accountability. So, I, you know, at the end of the Biden administration, for instance, there were lying on Secretary Blinken’s desk recommendations that even Ambassador Lu at Embassy Jerusalem could not block because the evidentiary standard was so high.

Recommendations saying Israel’s treatment of Palestinian detainees from Gaza at the Sde Teiman base has violated U.S. and international law. We need to apply Leahy sanctions. Those sat on Blinken’s desk right until the end, and he didn’t apply them. And then in the Trump era, we saw Israel itself drop its charges against the soldiers accused of those atrocities at Sde Teiman.

So, it’s a continuation of U.S.-enabled impunity that, again, is undermining just at the base level what President Biden and President Trump have both said they want: future Israeli-Palestinian peace, progress, stability. So, it was surreal often covering these. It was even more surreal, of course, to see Brett McGurk be on CNN all the time encouraging the idea of a war on Iran when, as Biden’s Middle East advisor, his argument was, we’re preventing a huge regional war.

So those echoes are just they’re very loud, and being in Washington is a weird experience.

Tyler McBrien: Akbar, we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I’ve been impressed about the number of interviews you’ve been able to do. So, I, as we near the end here I wanted to end with just one, one conversation that you had, one moment from the book that really stays with you and that maybe you hope that readers will take away as well.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah. Does it have to be an optimistic one? Sadly, it’ll be a not very optimistic one.

Tyler McBrien: No. Whatever comes to mind.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I think about one of the senior-most White House officials who many of us saw on TV, on the press, and in our phones on Signal defending the administration’s policy, asking me towards the end of my reporting process for the book, if I am in this book, how will I be portrayed?

And that framing contains so much in it of the assumption that Washington has of friendly coverage, particularly on foreign policy. The kind of surreal deflection of responsibility. How can you not be mentioned in this book? I would be insane not to mention you in this book. And then the kind of audacity of even just asking that question

That stays with me, right? Because people will now... it’s really been staggering. Several people who were anonymous in the book have now gone to influential figures and said, you know, I was quite, quite a big source for the book, or have said, you know, I’m very supportive of this mission. To which I’ve retorted to many of them, well, put your name on it. That helps my credibility.

And there’s just still not a willingness to do that. Some of them, you know, spoke on the record to The New Yorker over the summer. People may have seen that story, and it’s just weird. It’s weird and it’s disappointing as someone just on a personal level, as an immigrant who came to this country respecting the culture of the press, and of holding power to account.

The belief among the powerful that they can avoid that is really hard to overstate.

Tyler McBrien: Well, Akbar, thank you so much. The book is called “Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza.” It’s out now. I know the... I’m sure a question you get all the time is, you know, what’s new in, in a book that’s covering contemporary news that you’ve reported so deeply already.

I assure listeners there’s a lot of new reporting in it. There’s revelations and it’s a great book, so I encourage everyone to go read it. Akbar, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the Lawfare podcast.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Tyler, thank you so much for having me.

[Outro]

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