On Saturday June 8, pro-Palestinian protestors in red clothing and carrying red banners surrounded the White House, proclaiming themselves the symbolic red line for Gaza that President Biden drew then ignored. The White House Press Corps has also become obsessed with the red line question. Where exactly is the red line? Has Israel crossed it? Can we know if they have? By what metric? Does the red line even exist, or has the President walked it back as the protestors allege? Questions like this have become red meat for reporters.
Another similar example of this Washington parlor game was the reinforcements issue during the Vietnam War.
Biden drew the red line on March 9 when MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked, “What is your red line with Prime Minister Netanyahu? … For instance, would invasion of Rafah, would you have urged him not to do? Would that be a red line?”
“It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel,” the president answered. He stressed that “the defense of Israel is still critical” so it did not mean the U.S. would cut all aid, “but there’s red lines that if he crosses …” and then the president’s answer became vague. In a later interview Biden clarified that going into Rafah was the red line foul. (READ MORE from James S. Robbins: The Myth of Student Protest)
However, when Israel in fact started going into Rafah on May 6, the White House was forced to clarify. So, whether taking the Rafah crossing, moving slowly into Rafah neighborhoods, taking control of the Gaza border with Egypt, or even sending tanks in the center of Rafah itself — none of these actions crossed the red line.
The matter became acute when an Israeli airstrike on Hamas targets killed scores of Palestinian civilians. Horrific video from the scene showed charred corpses and a decapitated child. Surely this crossed the line? No, according to NSC spokesman John Kirby, because Israel is “not moving into a major ground operation in population centers in the center of Rafah.” The White House even took credit for Israel having listened to their concerns and moderated their tactics, something Israel denied. But drawing the red line at “major ground operations” is the kind of subjective definition which will mean many more such questions will be coming from journalists no matter what Israel does.
This is not the first time a president has been left red-faced over red lines. In August 2012, President Obama said he had been “very clear” to Syria’s leader Bashar Assad “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” He reiterated the point several times. Even then-Vice President Joe Biden said, “we’ve set a clear red line against the use or the transfer of” Syria’s chemical weapons.
None of this redlining would have been all that controversial except that Assad actually did use chemical weapons. Then the White House tried to deny that a red line had ever been set, or that the president didn’t really mean it, or that he meant using a lot of chemical weapons instead of just a few, or that “the world” set the red line, not Obama.
Drawing a red line is a dramatic rhetorical gesture. And once drawn, they become irresistible story lines for the press. The issue is not whether red lines should exist, or if they are good policy; but rather a question of credibility when they are not enforced, or are explained away after the fact.
Another similar example of this Washington parlor game was the reinforcements issue during the Vietnam War. When major U.S. ground forces were deployed, President Johnson decided that for political reasons U.S. force commitments had to be limited. In 1965 he publicly authorized a maximum 125,000 troop deployment to Vietnam, but this number immediately began to creep upward based on military necessity. Every time the number changed, it became a story, eroding White House credibility. The troop ceiling finally leveled off at 525,000 in the summer of 1967, and this was a line Johnson was determined not to cross. For the rest of that year, U.S. forces in-country stayed slightly below this self-imposed limit.
But the following spring, after the Tet Offensive devastated North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, military leaders saw an opportunity to escalate the war and finish the job. A heated debate raged between administration factions over whether to hold the arbitrary limit sacrosanct. The on March 9, the New York Times published internal Pentagon documents on the debate leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, fueling public controversy over whether the U.S. was actually winning the war as the administration claimed. The troop increase request was taken as evidence of panic. Had there been no troop limit in the first place this story would not have landed as hard; as it was, the media storm that resulted frightened officials into abandoning the reinforcements, and the rest is history. (READ MORE: Progressives Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza. Biden’s Struggling to Give It to Them.)
So for the Biden White House the red line row is a self-inflicted wound, an artificial, irrelevant issue over something the president never should have said in the first place. It puts the administration in a permanent defensive posture, in which every move by Israel will be measured against this hypothetical limit resulting in continued questioning and skepticism. Like the temporary floating pier that broke apart and beached, the Gaza red line has become another symbol of weakness for an administration that has lost control of both events and the narrative.
James S. Robbins is the Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive.
