Advocates are calling for the ousting of a top Biden administration official who has acted as the “shadow president” on Middle East policy, directing much of the administration’s decisions in the region as the U.S. has enabled Israel to plunge it into chaos and destruction.
On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that Middle East adviser Brett McGurk “must go” after Politico reported that he’s been encouraging Israeli officials to escalate their fighting against Hezbollah and Lebanon.
“President Biden’s Middle East foreign policy has been a disaster, partly because he has surrounded himself with notoriously orientalist and consistently wrong advisers like Bush administration veteran Brett McGurk,” said Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director for CAIR.
“McGurk has acted as a shadow president on foreign policy for nearly four years, enabling President Biden’s worst instincts while pursuing a delusional vision of a Middle East permanently remade in McGurk’s orientalist image,” Mitchell went on. “McGurk needs to go.”
McGurk is relatively unknown to the public, but he has been instrumental to Biden’s policies on Israel and, broadly, the Middle East.
He has served in every presidential administration since George W. Bush, first as a director for Iraq and Afghanistan policy under Bush, and now as the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. HuffPost described him as “one of the most powerful people in U.S. national security,” who crafts options for the administration’s approach to the region in order to advance his grand vision of a Middle East molded to his interests, regardless of the wishes of the people and sovereign governments there.
McGurk has been heavily involved in the U.S.’s policy toward Israel, and earlier this year had been pushing a plan to allow wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia to reconstruct Gaza after the genocide. Progressives in Congress had tried to get a campaign to oust McGurk off the ground earlier this year, seeing him as a primary source of the U.S.’s fueling of unrest and tensions in the Middle East.
Advocates for Palestinian rights have called for the removal of several Biden administration officials as they’ve seemingly purposefully violated domestic and international law in order to enable Israel’s genocide.
Last week, calls for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to resign or be impeached reached a fever pitch after the publishing of a bombshell ProPublica report. The report revealed that he lied to Congress about internal administration findings that Israel had committed human rights violations and should thus face a partial or full arms embargo.
Among those who called for his resignation were CAIR and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), who said: “[Blinken] lied. People went hungry, and some died. He needs to resign now.”
This week, Veterans for Peace also called for consequences for Blinken’s role in Israel’s genocide. In a letter, the group called for the Department of Justice to assemble a grand jury to investigate and potentially indict Blinken and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew for violations of U.S. law regarding military assistance and for lying to Congress, citing the ProPublica report.