Book Exposes Biden Aides' Gaza 'Bearhug' Role — SkimNews
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- Akbar Shahid Ahmed's 300-page book "Crossing the Red Line" portrays Biden's national security inner circle as fecklessly enabling Israel's Gaza campaign, identifying Blinken, Sullivan, Finer, and McGurk as the real decision makers behind the "bearhug" approach.
- Brett McGurk, described as the book's "central villain," worked in every administration since George W. Bush and pursued a grand bargain tying an end to Gaza operations to Palestinian statehood, Saudi-Israel normalization, and a US-Saudi mutual defense agreement.
- Jake Sullivan privately cast doubt on whether images of starving children in Gaza were real even as international monitors documented spreading famine, according to Ahmed; a Sullivan spokesperson denied the characterization to the author.
- USAID Administrator Samantha Power and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield were boxed out of Gaza meetings by Sullivan after raising internal objections in December 2023, a White House official told Ahmed.
- After Kamala Harris's election loss, the administration convened emergency meetings to evaluate whether intelligence sharing with the IDF created legal jeopardy, but Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines distanced herself from staffers pressing for an inquiry, and no formal briefing was produced.
- Jon Finer argued this month that resigning would have been "self-serving," while Sullivan continues to insist the Biden team's "relentless work" had real impact on Israeli policy—neither has publicly renounced the Gaza approach.
Why it matters: The book indicts not just Biden but the entire national-security apparatus that served him, yet those officials have not publicly reckoned with their own role—McGurk, Sullivan, and Finer remain influential in Democratic foreign-policy circles, and their private blame-shifting leaves the party's accountability gap unresolved heading into the 2028 presidential cycle.
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