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President Joe Biden is facing criticism for seeming to take credit for the apparent end of the Bashar Assad dictatorship in Syria.

The lame-duck president addressed the collapse of the brutal regime from the White House on Sunday but critics feel his attempt to claim a win for his outgoing administration was simply “unseemly.”

“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Biden said after rebel forces toppled the regime that has ruled with an iron fist for half a century. “This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine, Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”

A senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy was among the many who called out the president for his victory speech.

“President Biden’s efforts to take credit for the fatal weakening of Iran and Hezbollah is, frankly speaking, unseemly,” John Hannah, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, told Fox News Digital.

“The harsh reality is that if Israel had succumbed to the Biden administration’s pressures and followed its advice over the past 14 months of war, Iran and Hezbollah would have been far stronger and Israel far weaker than they are today,” Hannah said.

“There’s no doubt that President Biden deserves a lot of credit for his unflagging support of Israel’s ability to defend itself against the multifront war that Iran and its proxies launched on Oct. 7, 2023,” Hannah, who also served in the Clinton administration, continued.

“But what he refused to do was provide that same unflagging support of Israel’s ability to actually win that war by inflicting a comprehensive defeat on its enemies, particularly Iran and Hezbollah, precisely the element that was required to make last week’s historic events in Syria possible,” he noted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that the “collapse of the Syrian regime is a direct result of the severe blows we inflicted on Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.”

“I would like to clarify: challenges are still expected in the campaign, and our hand is outstretched,” the Israeli leader told reporters.

Biden and Democrats essentially tried to tie Israel’s hands in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on the nation on Oct. 7, 2023, and have avoided launching counterstrikes against the Iranian regime.

A senior administration official echoed Biden’s self-congratulation, saying, “I think U.S. policy is a direct contributor to this for the reasons I laid out, and the president laid out, is significant, is important, has completely changed the equation in the Middle East, and you saw that play out here over the last week.”

But a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies pushed back on the narrative.

“Respectfully, it’s a bit odd to have an administration, which pulled punches against the Assad regime in Syria as well as its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran, try to take credit for the fall of the Assad regime,” Iran expert Behnam Ben Taleblu told Fox News.

“Less, not more, has defined Biden’s risk-averse approach to the region,” he added. “Over the past year, the administration has watched Israel box in the Iran-backed threat network in the region, and in so doing break taboos that have long hindered Washington’s regional policy.”

Meanwhile, the volatile situation in Syria has renewed fear of a revival of the Islamic State.

“ISIS is still present in the Syrian desert and has sleeper cells in northern and eastern Syria in addition to the prisons of ISIS fighters and the Al-Holl camp, all of which threaten our people while warning the current situation could whet ISIS’s appetite to become active again,” Sinam Sherkany Mohamad, the representative of the Syrian Democratic Council mission in the United States, told Fox News Digital.

Frieda Powers
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