National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recited a list of President Joe Biden’s supposed achievements in the Middle East at the White House briefing room on Monday but somehow failed to mention the withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago, which ended in Taliban history and American deaths.
“The Middle East Biden will be visiting is more stable than the one we inherited,” Sullivan claimed, ignoring Afghanistan, as well as Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon; the fact that Israelis and Palestinians had not experienced war for the four years of President Donald Trump’s term, until Biden took office; and that the Houthi rebels in Yemen had, until a recent cease-fire, accelerated their attacks on their local opponents and on Saudi Arabia after Biden de-listed them as terrorists.
Sullivan cited a three-month ceasefire in Yemen; pressure on ISIS in Iraq; and isolating Iran as Biden’s main achievements. He ignored the fact that the Biden administration has attempted, in vain, to bring Iran back into the failed nuclear deal — while complaining that Iran is arming Russia with drones. (One of the main complaints about the original Iran deal was that it failed to deal with Iran’s support for rogue states and terrorist groups throughout the region and around the world.)
In addition, Sullivan claimed falsely that Biden brought last May’s war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group to an end: the ceasefire was notably brokered by Egypt, not by the White House. And Sullivan boasted that Biden had restored hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding to the Palestinians — funding Trump withdrew because of Palestinian support for terror, and which Biden restored without obtaining any concessions in return, on terror or other issues.
But the most glaring omission was Afghanistan. Notably, the White House had not released a transcript of Sullivan’s remarks Monday as of this writing on Tuesday morning, an unusual lag or omission.
Sullivan was a major proponent of the “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory, falsely telling reporters and testifying to Congress that Trump and his aides had likely colluded with the Russian regime to win the 2016 presidential election.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.