From the Liveblog of
Thursday, May 9, 2024
‘We’ll help you get Sinwar,’ Biden recalls telling Netanyahu shortly after October 7
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
US President Joe Biden says he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortly after October 7, “We’ll help you get Sinwar.”
“We will help you focus on getting the bad guys,” Biden recalls having told Netanyahu during his visit to Israel less than two-weeks after Hamas’s terror onslaught.
Biden then repeats the rest of the message he gave to Israeli leaders, which he shared publicly several times in the months since.
“When I went over [to Israel] immediately after that happened, I said to Bibi, ‘Don’t make the same mistake we made in America [after 9/11],” Biden tells CNN.
He says it “made sense” for the US to go into Afghanistan to pursue Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, but “it made no sense to try to unify Afghanistan.”
“It made no sense in my view to engage in thinking that in Iraq they had a nuclear weapon,” adds Biden, who voted in favor of the 2003 invasion before later turning against the war.
The Times of Israel Community.