US party leaders in Washington have wasted no time in turning the Middle East conflict into a domestic political dispute, with senior Republicans accusing both the Biden administration and each other of having triggered the violence.
The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, charged top Republicans with exploiting the crisis for their own political ends after several Republican presidential hopefuls accused the Biden administration of effectively causing the conflagration. “It’s deeply unfortunate that some are playing politics when so many lives have been lost and Israel remains under attack,” Blinken told CNN’s State of the Union.
The reported presence of US citizens among the dead and captured from the Hamas attack on Israel is likely to inflame the partisan mud-slinging between Republican leaders and the White House. Several presidential candidates accused Joe Biden of being partly responsible for the crisis, blaming him for appeasing Iran through the recent deal involving the return of five detained Americans in exchange for the release of $6bn in frozen Iranian funds for humanitarian use.
Blinken insisted on Sunday that none of the $6bn had yet been liquidated. “Not a single dollar has been spent from that account. The account is closely regulated by the US treasury department, so it can only be used for things like food, medicine, medical equipment – that’s what this is about,” he told CNN.
Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is vying for his party’s presidential nomination, went so far as to accuse Biden personally of being “complicit” in the Hamas attack. “Biden’s weakness invited the attack, Biden’s negotiation funded the attack,” he said on social media.
Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador and another 2024 White House hopeful, also turned on the US president, saying that Blinken’s assurance that the $6bn had not yet been released was duplicitous. “Hamas knows, and Iran knows, they’re moving money around as we speak, because they know $6bn is going to be released. That’s the reality,” she said.
The sniping was not limited to cross-party wrangling. Top Republicans also attacked each other over the Israeli crisis.
The former vice-president and presidential hopeful Mike Pence seized the opportunity to take a pot shot at his former running mate Trump as well as two other rivals in the Republican presidential contest.
Pence told CNN’s State of the Union that the Middle East violence was partly catalysed by their calls for America to withdraw from the world stage. He pointed his finger specifically at the former US president, the entrepreneur and the Florida governor respectively who have raised doubts about US funding to support Ukraine.
“This is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America’s role as leader of the free world. What happened in Ukraine was an unprovoked invasion by Russia, what happened this weekend was an unprovoked invasion by Hamas into Israel,” he said.
Top Republicans also lambasted their party peers for the vacuum in leadership in the House of Representatives at such a critical moment. Last week Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House by the hard-right flank of the party, and a replacement has yet to be found.
Another presidential hopeful, the former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, said that the outbreak of fighting in the Middle East had made a bad business on Capitol Hill worse. “The actions taken by some members of my party were wholly irresponsible without this going on, they’re now putting an even brighter light on the irresponsibility of not having someone in place,” he told ABC’s This Week.
Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House foreign affairs committee, also lamented the absence of leadership. “It wasn’t my idea to oust the speaker,” he told CNN.
“I thought it was dangerous. What kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we are dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a speaker of the House. That’s a terrible message.”
